Mere Christian - Sermons, etc., from Barry Vaughn

Beating up on Harvard

2012-01-03T11:28:00.003-06:00

In his column today, David Brooks (whom I usually like) said that that "the country doesn't want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law." Brooks' column took a very favorable view of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. I have never liked Santorum, because it seems that he can't open his mouth without saying something offensive about gay people or blacks or some other group.

Brooks' point was that people are looking for a candidate who embodies some of Santorum's more admirable qualities, e.g., someone who has triumphed over adversity and worked his way up from a humble background. However, Brooks implied that people are NOT looking to elect the kind of "bloodless technocrat" that he implied that Harvard and similar universities produce.

I beg to differ.

I don't want to go into this in great detail, but I do want to say that for many of us Harvard was not only the gateway to a great intellectual adventure, it was also a place of great spiritual vitality. I hasten to add that the late, great Peter Gomes had a lot to do with Harvard's spiritual vitality when I was there, but Peter was not the only reason that Harvard was and is a spiritually vital place. In one of the last talks I heard Peter give he said that Harvard's spiritual diversity was one of the reasons for its spiritual health. He said that a Christian student who encountered a Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu student who practiced her faith and had a strong spiritual life would be encouraged to practice his Christian faith.

There were other Harvard faculty and administrators who were good examples of healthy spirituality. William Hutchinson, master of Winthrop House, was a practicing Quaker, and Master Kiely of Adams House was a practicing Roman Catholic. Several faculty members regularly attended the 8.30 am Morning Prayer service at Memorial Church.

What was true of Harvard was also true of Yale. While doing my M.Div. at Yale, I got to know several faculty members who were members of the Battell Chapel congregation. And I'm sure that the rest of the Ivy League universities have vital spiritual communities.

So, Mr. Brooks, spiritually, at least, a presidential campaign of "Harvard versus Harvard" might not be a bad thing at all.

9/11 and Costly Forgiveness

2011-09-11T19:39:00.007-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Hoover, AL. Sept. 11, 2011.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “That of which one cannot speak, one must be silent.” I am tempted to think that it might be better for me to be silent about the events of Sept 11, 2001. I am certain that it would safer for me to say nothing about them. But I also believe that it is a pastor or priest’s responsibility to hold up the world to the light of eternity, to try to look at the world from God’s perspective, to see how the Bible might inform our understanding of these events.

Karl Barth said that a pastor should preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. Depending on your political perspective, you can substitute The Wall Street Journal for the New York Times but the point still stands.

One of the worst things about terror and violence of the magnitude of 9/11 is that the big picture obscures the small picture. The Soviet dictator Stalin believed that he could get away with mass murder because, as he said, “the death of one person is a tragedy but the death of a thousand is a statistic.” But we must not allow the dead of 9/11 to become statistics. In the months after 9/11, the New York Times published a series of obituaries of the victims on the back page of the first section of their paper. Each brief obituary was carefully researched and beautifully written and was usually accompanied by a photo of the victim. I often found myself reading those obituaries compulsively, usually with tears in my eyes. In most cases, the obituaries included facts that turned “statistics” into “tragedies”.

For a woman named Anna, the Times noted that she loved to laugh and dance the salsa. Her family had planned a surprise party for her birthday, “but will gather instead at a small Pentecostal church she attended. ''She was so kind and generous,'' a brother, Freddy, said. ''We will pray for her soul.''
Of an Indian American named Sankara, the paper said that “he loved company and good conversation, but also studied Hindu scriptures, attended temple and meditated at home.”
Or a stockbroker named Sean who loved to travel the world “but no matter where in the world he was, like clockwork, he would call home to check in with mom and dad. On Sept. 11, he never got a chance to.”

One of the questions that was in the forefront of people’s minds then and now was “Where was God when the towers fell?” or “How could God let this happen to us?” For fundamentalist leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell that was a question with an easy and terrible answer. The attacks were God’s judgment on our wickedness.

But at the memorial service at the National Cathedral President Bush showed himself a much more capable and profound theologian than the Reverends Falwell and Robertson: “God's signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that His purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral are known and heard and understood.”

For some 9/11 was a sign that God was absent, non-existent, a terrible or perhaps comforting lie. A college friend told me that he lost his faith because of 9/11, although I believe he had been drifting away from church for some time. But why, I wonder, should anyone blame God for the actions of evil men, even if they claimed to be acting in the name of God? My friend Rabbi Jonathan Miller called them “theological hoodlums.” I understand why someone would blame God for earthquakes and hurricanes and AIDS and cancer, but not for the 9/11 hijackers.

The most persuasive theological comment about 9/11 was the observation that the only good answer to the question where was God was that God was in the people who were helping others – the fire fighters and police officers and the many other so-called “first responders.”

The man who could have saved himself but instead remained behind to help a friend confined to a wheelchair – that was where God was.
A security officer helped knocked out the windows in a ground floor day care center in the World Trade Center so that the children could be rescued. That’s where God was.
Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who was a chaplain to the New York City fire department, rushed into the midst of the destruction to pray with and give absolution to the victims when he was killed by falling debris. God was there, too.

One of the things that struck me after the terrorist attacks ten years ago was that, in the weeks after, the lectionary readings seemed so appropriate. The readings for weeks seemed to be full of ruined cities, towers falling, and destruction coming from the heavens. But perhaps that was less because of what was actually in the Bible readings and more because of the way my reading had been shaped by 9/11.

Today’s readings also speak to the tragedy of 9/11. From Exodus we hear of the angel that took the form of a pillar of cloud and who stood watch between the Israelites and the Egyptians. One of the most moving tributes to the victims of 9/11 are the twin pillars of light that are projected upward from “ground zero” every year on the anniversary of 9/11. The pillars of light remind me of God’s power to take even the greatest tragedy and redeem it.

But it is today’s gospel reading that speaks to me most eloquently. “Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

I often find it difficult to forgive, and I have to admit that there is a part of me that does not want to forgive the people responsible for 9/11. But I believe that Jesus tells me to forgive them. Notice, however, that Peter asks Jesus how often he should forgive “another member of the church” who has sinned against him. Does this let us off the hook? Are we only commanded to forgive other Christians who have sinned against us? I don’t think so. A Christian who sins against another Christian has committed an especially heinous offence, because the Christian who sins has heard the teachings of Jesus, she has been baptized and received God’s forgiveness. But a non-Christian who sins may be guilty of the lesser offence, because he does not know the teachings of Christ and has not been baptized, so I think non-Christians may have an even greater claim to forgiveness.

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer contrasted grace that was “cheap” with grace that was “free but costly”. Similarly, I think there is a difference between forgiveness that is “free but costly” and forgiveness that is “cheap.” Costly forgiveness comes only after the offended party has recognized the full extent to which they have been harmed and has decided to forgive the offender anyway. Costly forgiveness comes only after the offender has made a “serious moral and spiritual inventory” and acknowledged the harm they have done and asked for forgiveness. Needless to say, I think costly forgiveness is quite rare.

We are told to forgive and forget, and that is entirely appropriate when the offense is small and unintentional. But should an abused spouse or abused child forgive and forget? Forgiveness may be therapeutic but to forget what the perpetrator has done may be to invite another attack against yourself or someone else. What may be more difficult is to forgive and remember.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that it is the hard task of a Christian leader to administer justice in a fallen and sinful world. I believe that our task in a post-9/11 world is to seek both justice and forgiveness and that one cannot exist without the other.

Several years ago I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to stand at the podium in the chamber of the United States’ Senate and deliver the invocation. I want to conclude with that prayer and offer it for our country on this solemn day.

God of our fathers and mothers, God of our children and grandchildren, yours alike are the Rockies' proud peaks and Shenandoah's green tranquility; yours are the span of the Golden Gate and the slums of Watts and Harlem.

Hear us as we pray for this land between the shining seas, this home of the pilgrims' pride, these United States of America.

We praise you for America's diverse quilt; for pilgrims from Europe and Africa, from Asia and Latin America, for Creek and Choctaw and Sioux and all our native peoples. Bind our ethnic strands together in a pattern of harmony, peace, and understanding.

Grant the women and men who lead us keenness and openness of mind; where vision is bound to personal gain or partisan good, liberate it. Stay their minds upon justice and their hearts upon compassion; may their ears be open to the voices of the voiceless and their eyes to the problems of the present and the possibilities of the future.

Grant that all the people of the United States may employ their hands and hearts and minds and bodies in work that satisfies and delights.

May peace unfold in freedom and justice, and may conflict issue in creative reconciliation.

And grant that in all things we raise our hearts and voices in gratitude to you, O Judge of nations and peoples, for in your wisdom you have set us upon a strong and high place, given us peace and prosperity, and called us to walk confidently into the future. Amen.

July 2011 travel posts - July 14

2011-07-14T10:18:00.002-05:00

Well, the last post wasn't quite the last. We met this afternoon with His Excellency, Dr. Manuel Diaz, the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Dr. Diaz is a Cuban American with a PhD in theology from the University of Notre Dame. He was appointed ambassador to the Holy See (ie, Vatican) because of his strong support for Barack Obama's campaign for president. Dr. Diaz taught at St. John's University in Collegeville, MN, where my friend Columba Stewart also teaches.

Ambassador Diaz spoke of the significance of having an ambassador to the Holy See because of the Vatican's many contacts around the world in places where U.S. influence is negative or negligible. Diaz has convened meetings of religious leaders in Rome to deal with topics such as climate change and conflict resolution. He spoke warmly of the Archbishop of Canterbury's understanding of his favorite theologian, Karl Rahner. I would love to be a fly on the wall listening to a conversation among Diaz, Benedict XVI and Archbishop Williams.

On the other hand, even the ambassador to the Vatican and his wife and four children are heavily protected by the Italian secret service and are taken from place to place in an armored SUV. What a world we live in...

See the photo of Dr. Diaz and my group on my Facebook page.

July 2011 travel posts - July 13 addendum

2011-07-13T15:29:00.002-05:00

My group went out tonight for dinner at a trattoria just 2 or 3 blocks from our hotel. After dinner, I walked a few blocks further to mail a couple of postcards in St. Peter's Sq. The moon is full, and I have to say that I prefer St. Peter's by moonlight. The conjunction of religion and power that the great church represents troubles me, but moonlight softens the edges and cools the fire a little. By moonlight Roman Catholicism seems more the religion of Italians with an appreciation for and tolerance for human frailty and less the faith of German cardinals who insist on doctrinal exactitude.

On the way back to the hotel I got some gelato (which I ordered in Italian without using a single English word) and after I threw away the cup, I rinsed my hands in a stone fountain bearing the papal arms that was located by the side of the road. Just up the road, in front of another trattoria, a lone accordionist played "Somewhere over the rainbow," and I reflected on how Italians have mastered the art of living.

2011 travel posting - July 13

2011-07-13T01:58:00.004-05:00

Sunday morning in Rome begins with a riot of bells from the hundreds of churches in this ancient capital. All of my colleagues except me (including Rabbi Miller) set out for St. Peter's, but I went to St. Paul's Within the Walls, an American Episcopal church built for Americans traveling abroad by J.P. Morgan. It's a beautiful church. In the apse is a mosaic showing Christ in glory seated upon his throne from which flows water. Separating the upper panel from the lower panel is an inscription in Greek and Hebrew of the first sentence of Genesis ("In the beginning, God created..."). In the lower panel are St. Paul surrounded by the saints of the Old Testament on his right and the saints of the New Testament on his left.

The service was not well-attended but afterward I was told that everyone who can leaves Rome in July and August. However, there was a visiting choir from Church of the Redeemer, Bryn Mawr, PA (a Philadelphia suburb) that was wonderful. They sang Bruckner's "Ave Maria" before the service, a Brahms' piece at the offertory, and Elgar's "The Spirit of the Lord" during communion. The choir was large and there were almost as many in the choir as in the congregation.

Late in the afternoon we toured the Jewish quarter, including the stunningly beautiful Great Synagogue. The history of Jews in Europe is a history of suffering. Jews came to Rome about 160 BCE and lived there freely until a pope set up the Jewish ghetto about a thousand years ago. After the establishment of the ghetto, Jewish worship was restricted to a single synagogue which included sections for the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German Jews. Jews were required to wear distinctive clothing that identified them as Jews. In 1870 Victor Emanuel II, the first king of a united Italy, abolished the ghetto, but the Nazis re-established it in 1943. Then in October, 1943, more than 2000 Roman Jews were sent to Auschwitz and only 16 survived. The chief rabbi of Rome appealed to Pope Pius XII to speak out, but even though Pius was from an old Roman family that knew the Jews of Rome, he said and did nothing publicly. The Jews were taken in trucks past the gates of the Vatican, but still the pope was silent. I know that Pius XII's role in the Holocaust is still debated, but he should have done more for the Jews of Rome. He was quite vocal about the church's property during the era of fascism; surely he could have done more for the Jews.

Monday was one of our best days. We started out with a visit to the Very Rev. Canon David Richardson, director of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury's personal representative to the Holy See. I met David a few weeks ago in Birmingham and thought we would enjoy visiting him, and we did. He was quite frank about the way Anglican\Roman Catholic relations have cooled under the papacy of Benedict XVI. He was particularly critical of the Vatican's efforts to woo disaffected Anglicans with the promise that they can continue to use a version of the Book of Common Prayer (an initiative that was undertaken without any consultation or advance warning given to Anglican leaders).

On Mon afternoon we toured the basilica of St. Clement, a late 1rst century bishop of Rome. Excavations beneath the church have uncovered a first century Roman street that included a temple of Mithras and a Christian church.

After that we visited the Lay Center, a place for Roman Catholic laymen and women, as well as those of other faiths, who are studying at the several pontifical universities in Rome. We had a wonderful time with the director, Dr. Donna Orsuto, an American and the first lay women (not a nun) to receive a degree from a pontifical university. She and the others we met there give me great hope for the Roman Catholic church.

The day ended with evening prayer at the Church of Santa Maria Trastavere where the Community of St. Egidio gathers daily. They are a Roman Catholic lay community somewhat similar to the Taize community in France.

Tue began with a stunning tour of the Vatican museum led by our friend Magdalena (who also led our tour of ancient Rome). I've been through the Vatican museum on two previous occasions but this was by far the best. The art of the museum simply came alive because of her detailed introductions and descriptions.

Other than the Sistine Chapel, my favorite works in the museum are Raphael's two frescoes for the papal apartments - "The school of Athens" and "The dispute of the holy sacrament." To me, they represent earthly and heavenly wisdom. But for sheer drama the Last Judgment that Michelangelo painted for the east wall of the Sistine Chapel cannot be surpassed.

Tuesday evening we met with Richard Donahoo, a former Episcopalian who is now a Roman Catholic priest. Fr Donahoo is studying the problem that Canon Richardson discussed with us, namely, the reception of disaffected Anglicans by the RC Church. I pressed him hard and questioned him assertively and frankly. At dinner, he said, "I imagine that Anglicans are unhappy with this" and gave me a sidelong glance. I said, "You are correct. We are very unhappy." But he took my questions and comments in a gracious and intelligent way. However, I have to say that I regard the setting up of a special effort to bring Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church as a form of religous imperialism.

Tomorrow is our last day in Rome and this will be my last post until I get home and wrap everything up. It's been wonderful but I'm ready to head for home.

2011 travel posting - July 10

2011-07-10T01:35:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the long delay since my last post. We've had several very busy days.

We left Jerusalem by van in the wee hours of July 7. Tel Aviv is only 34 mi from Jerusalem and there was no traffic on the road, so it didn't take long. After a short flight we landed in Athens and spent a busy day seeing the Parthenon and agora (ancient market where Socrates taught Plato and other students).

I thought Athens was a beautiful city. There are hills on one side and water on the other. It was clean and had a wonderful, convenient, easy to understand, and reasonably fast subway that took us from the airport to the historical sites and back again. I'd love to go back.

After another short flight in the evening, we landed in Rome. We are staying at the Domus Carmelitana, a guest house for pilgrims run by the Carmelites, a religious order for men and women. It is only a few short blocks from St. Peter's Square. "A guest house for pilgrims" may sounds a little grim. Actually, this is a very nice hotel. The rooms, beds, bathrooms, and especially the showers are on the small side but it's extremely clean and they have a nice breakfast in the morning.

On our first day here we met with Dr. Yann Redalie, the dean of the Waldensian seminary in room. The Waldensians are a small Protestant group that broke away from Rome before the 16th c. Reformation. They spread from Switzerland to America, Britain, eastern Europe, South America, and Italy, but today they are mainly in Italy, and there are only about 30,000 of them left. They have joined with the Methodistl churches of Italy.

The most interesting part of Dr. Redalie's talk was about how they are dealing with the great influx of Protestants from Africa. As I noted, there are only about 30,000 Waldensians in Italy, but Italy is receiving about 30,000 immigrants annually from Africa, and many of these are Methodists or from similar Protestant churches. He said that in some Waldensian churches there will be 9 African children and only one Italian child. Although, as he said, the Waldensians are committed to being "church together" with African Christians, merging the 2 cultures is difficult. Of course, this is exactly the situation that we Anglicans are now dealing with, too.

We went from the Waldensian seminary to the Vatican's Council for Christian Unity and Jewish Relations where we met with Archbishop Brian Farrell, an Irish bishop who is the council's undersecretary. Abp Farrell told us about the council's beginnings in Vatican II and described the upcoming meeting of the world's religions in Assissi on the 25th anniversary of the first such meeting convened by Pope John Paul II. For me the most interesting part of the archbishop's talk was about Anglicans. He cautiously spoke about the frustrations of dealing with my church which has made the decision to ordain women to the offices of priest and bishop and has begun to open all its offices to gay and lesbian Christians, too. After meeting with Abp Farrell I walked down the hall and identified 2 former archbishops of Canterbury photographed in meetings with Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II.

In the afternoon, a Polish art historian gave us a wonderful tour of ancient Rome. We saw the Colosseum, Forum, and Circus Maximus (an ancient horsetrack that was used in the film "Ben Hur").

Yesterday was Assissi day. We were taken to Assissi in a van and given a great tour by a friend of Archbishop Joseph Marino (who was our host in Bangladesh last summer). I had forgotten how beautiful Assissi is. It is on a high hill overlooking the Umbrian countryside. In the distance you can see another Italian city, Perugia, that was the great enemy of Assissi in the Middle Ages. It was after a war with Perugia that Francesco Bernardone, heard the voice of God speak to him from a crucifix in the church of San Damiano, saying, "Rebuild my church." In response, he abandoned his wealth and founded the group we know as the Franciscans.

There are 2 great churches in Assissi, and the first one we saw was the basilica of St. Clare, a woman who joined Francis and is thought to be as great a saint as he is. We ended the day with a visit to the other great church of Assissi - the basilica of St. Francis. It is unusual in being two churches, one on top of the other. The lower church in particular is remarkable for the great series of frescoes depicting the life of St. Francis painted by Giotto and Cimabue. The frescoes are the greatest early examples of the use of perspective in painting.

2011 travel posting - July 6

2011-07-06T00:48:00.002-05:00

We spent most of yesterday in the Palestinian Authority. The last time I was here (1994) the PA had not yet been established, and all of the West Bank was still administered by Israel. It seems to me that the establishment of the PA has had both good and bad consequences.

First, we went to Hebron. Hebron is traditionally where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their wives are buried. (Gen. 49.31) The irony is that God promised Abraham land but when he died, the only land that he owned was his burial place. In all likelihood, Hebron is not where the patriarchs are buried, but it is where they are remembered. Nevertheless, the patriarchs are holy to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, so like so much in this holy land, Hebron is a place of conflict.

Until 1948, Jews and Muslims could both come and pray at the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron. After the establishment of Israel, Hebron was in Jordan, and Jews were barred from praying there. Then when Israel took the West Bank in 1967, both Jews and Muslims could again pray there, but there was a great deal of tension. Then in February, 1994, an Israel settler, fired on Muslims praying at the tombs of the patriarchs, killing 29 of them. Since then, the Israeli government has rigidly separated the places where Jews and Muslims pray.

Complicating matters further, a few hundred Israelis have moved into Hebron, forcing the Israeli government to sent in troops to protect them and to build streets on which they alone can travel.

Yesterday, we went to both the Jewish and Muslim sides of the tomb of the patriarchs. I have to say that the Muslim side felt more welcoming. It is open and spacious, covered in beautiful carpets. Out of respect for Muslim tradition, we removed our shoes. A group of Muslim school girls were there, giggling and being silly the way every little girl of that age behaves. They wanted us to take their picture, and we obliged. They tried out their English and we tried out our 2 or 3 Arabic words.

After the tomb of the patriarchs, we walked through the market or suq. Sadly, many shops are closed. One shopkeeper told us that the Palestinian Authority pays them $300 a month just to keep the stores open. We walked up a steep stairway to the roof of a building. The family that lives there told us that Jewish settlers had tried to buy their house, but they refused, and subsequently have been harrassed.

We happily left Hebron and drove to Bethlehem where we met with Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran pastor, who is building an impressive school and social service center. He was very pessimistic about the future but said that he had hope. He cited the famous story about Martin Luther. Luther said that if he knew that the world would end tomorrow, he would plant a tree today. That's the kind of hope that Pastor Raheb has. His school teaches music, visual arts, and even filmmaking. He has sports teams for girls on which Muslim and Christian girls play together.

Raheb said that he has an alternative version of the 2 state solution: put Shas (an Israeli right wing party) and Hamas (the Palestinian extremist party) in one state and all the moderate Israelis and Palestinians in the other state. We thought that was a great idea.

Jonathan, however, was critical of the way Raheb described the situation. Raheb said that the Israelis had walked out of negotiations and were establishing a kind of apartheid. Jonathan said that was not true, and I have to agree with him. On the other hand, I do believe that whatever Netanyahu believes in his heart, the ultra conservatives in his coalition will not let allow the Palestinians to establish a state.

Finally, we went to Ramallah, the "capital" of the Palestinian Authority. We saw the tomb of Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian parliament building. Our impression of Ramallah was very positive. It seems reasonably affluent and full of life. The streets were crowded with people and cars. There were many women whose heads were covered, but just as many whose heads were uncovered. So far, Ramallah looks like a modern secular Arab city. May it remain so.

2011 travel posting - July 4

2011-07-04T08:49:00.002-05:00

Sunday morning we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (more accurately called the Church of the Resurrection or (in Greek) the Anastasis) around 8 am. There was a little Coptic service going on in the chapel behind the actual sepulchre. I listened to the beautiful chanting for a while and enjoyed the enormous clouds of incense that the thurifer generated. A little later the Greek Orthodox began their service in a much larger chapel on the other side of the sepulchre. It was a little amusing to watch the Greeks. A group of acolytes or priests unrolled a red carpet on which the patriarch (or some lesser bishop) walked into the chapel. Once inside, he began chanting to a virtually empty room. Nearby is the chapel in which it is believed that the actual crucifixion of Jesus took place. It was quiet and prayerful at that hour of the morning and a few people sat or stood in intense meditation.

Afterward we walked to the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College where Reform rabbis from all over the world go for at least part of their education. David Marmur, a British Jew, is their academic dean, and he talked with us for a while about perceiving God. Using texts from Exodus, 1 Corinthians 13 ("through a glass darkly"), the medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides, and the 20th c. scholar Abraham Heschel, he led us in a wonderful discussion about whether and how different religions perceive God. According to the Old Testament, only Moses actually saw God; other prophets (and by extension, other faiths, perhaps) only caught a glimpse of God.

One of my conclusions from Rabbi Marmur's talk (and our other conversations) is that we can only approach God through our own traditions. The more deeply we delve into our own faith, the more points of contact we find with other faiths. But if we try to start with spirituality in general (if there is such a thing), the less likely we are to find God, or at least to have a deep experience of God.

After visiting with Rabbi Marmur, we returned to the Scottish Guest House and talked with an American rabbi, Arye Ben David. After teaching in an Orthodox religious school (yeshiva) for many years, he became troubled by how difficult it is for many Jews to talk about their own experience of God. Consequently, he developed a course that helps Jews go more deeply into their own spiritual lives and experiences of God. I suggested that perhaps he was really giving Jews a way to talk about experiences they were already having but for which they did not yet have the right words.

In the evening, we visited with David and Ariel Morrison. David is an old friend of mine from Birmingham. He was married to my close friend, Jo Ann Hess, who died after they moved to Jerusalem. David is a very fine Jewish historian and Ariel does Jewish education.

Today we began with a visit from Rabbi Kinneret Shiryon, a classmate of Jonathan's and the first woman rabbi in Israel. After 3 trips to the Israeli Supreme Court she won the right to be recognized as a rabbi and for her congregation to receive financial support from the Israeli government (as all other synagogues in Israel do). She was absolutely delightful. She talked about how she prays while she swims every morning and how important music is to her spiritual life. She also shared about how she has helped develop Jewish liturgies that incorporate feminine as well as masculine images of God.

After our visit with Kinneret, we had a walk through Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's ultra Orthodox neighborhood.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

2011 travel posting - July 2

2011-07-01T23:24:00.003-05:00

The UK's border security and passport control officers were going to be on strike from 6 pm on June 29, so Mark hastily took me to the train in Coventry. I figured that I'd better get a hotel near Heathrow in the event that there were delays getting out of the country. However, everything ran smoothly. My plane took off on time and arrived about 20-30 mins late because the plane had to avoid Greek airspace.

The last time I was in Israel was 1994, and I was amazed at how beautiful Ben Gurion airport is now. However, I have to say that I miss the way Israel used to look. There was something more appealing to me about Israel when it looked like a frontier, when it was struggling to grow up and become prosperous.

I met Bob Hurst (a member of my group) just outside the airport and we shared a "sherut" (shared taxi) into Jerusalem. We were the next to last people to make it to our destination, and it deposited us outside the Scottish Church and Guest House about 90 mins later. And, as it turns out, only Jonathan Miller had made it there ahead of us.

Bob went off to eat with friends and I walked down Emek Refa'im into a neighborhood known as the German Colony. There were a number of restaurants offering pizza, hamburgers, and even waffles. I finally found one that seemed a little more Middle Eastern and ate there.

When I returned to the guest house, Jonathan was up and about, and soon after that Steve Jones and Ed Hurley arrived from their side trip to Egypt.

The next morning we were on our way by 8.30 or 9. Our first visit was to a Syrian Orthodox Church where the priest - Fr. Simon - claimed that it was the site of the Last Supper and the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. I was there on my first visit to Israel in 1985. During my 1985 trip I heard the priest read an account of the Last Supper in Aramaic on Maundy Thur. It gave me chills to hear the story of the Last Supper read in the language that Jesus would have spoken in a location that was at least somewhat close to where the Last Supper would have taken place.

Excavations beneath the Syrian church show that a 1rst c. house stood on the same location. So perhaps it was where Jesus and the disciples shared bread and wine.

After the Syrian church we visited the Copts. A Coptic Christian told us about the persecution of the Coptic Church in Egypt which has increased since the revolution. The Mubarak regime (in spite of its many faults) protected the Copts, but now they are facing increased violence.

We finished the day with a visit to Tantur Ecumenical Institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, just on the Israeli side of the security fence, where we chatted with the directory, Timothy Lowe, an Orthodox priest. Fr Timothy is worth a visit all by himself. He grew up as an evangelical Protestant in Nebraska, then came to this part of the world when he was 19 to convert Jews and Muslims. He stayed on the learn Hebrew and Arabic and got interested in the early church. That interest led him to Eastern Orthodoxy. We talked about whether or not different religions are perceiving the same divine reality or different realities in spite of how wildly different they appear. Fr Timothy emphatically believes that there is only one transcendent reality. He said that it only gets complex when we speak. It's simpler if we just remain silent. True, I think. Reminds me what Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

It's now Saturday afternoon about 4.45 pm, the waning hours of the Sabbath. Jonathan took us to the morning service at the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem. There appeared to be several different sects of Orthodox Jews there this morning. I tried to read along in Jonathan's Torah during the reading of the Torah and afterward in his prayer book, but I could only catch a few words and phrases here and there. It's been far too long since I studied Hebrew and the readings and prayers went much too quickly.

After the service we went to the Israel Museum for lunch and to see the exhibits.

2011 travel posting - June 29

2011-06-29T05:52:00.003-05:00

Monday, June 27, was another long day of travel. I took the train from Leuchars (near St. Andrews) to Berkswell, Coventry, to visit my friends the Rev. Mark and Emma Bratton and their children, Theo (9) and Katy (12). It involved 3 changes of trains, but it was a lovely day to travel. Although they say they've been having a heat wave in Britain, it feels wonderful after our 30 plus days of temps over 90 F in Alabama. Most of Monday was sunny and mild with just a few clouds in the sky.

Mark and I met at St. George's College and Cathedral in Jerusalem in 1993. My mother and I were visiting there and Mark was studying there while he was a student at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, one of the Church of England's theological colleges (i.e., a seminary). The next summer I invited Mark to come to the US and work with me for the summer at St. Stephen's in Eutaw, AL. Mark did a great job and everyone loved him. He was subsequently ordained in the Diocese of London and served a parish there. Then he was the Anglican chaplain at Warwick University and is now the rector of St. John the Baptist in Berkswell.

Mark's parish has 3 services on Sunday - 2 in the morning, plus evening prayer - and about 200 attend his services each week. The church building was built in the 11th and 12th centuries and has both Romanesque and Gothic elements. Beneath the church is a crypt which may have been part of an even older Anglo-Saxon church on the same site.

Mark and Emma live in the rectory which is less than 50 yards from the church. They have about 3 acres and raise sheep, pigs, and chickens for their own consumption. Last night I had some pork that they raised and it was delicious.

Katy is studying flute and ballet and in the fall she will attend what we would call "middle school" in Coventry (about 6 miles away). Theo loves math, football, and piano. In the UK they have a national, graded piano curriculum. Theo is about to take his first year piano exam and should do very well. I worked with him for a while yesterday and was very impressed.

This evening I will take the train down to London because I have to fly to Tel Aviv at 8.30 am tomorrow. I will catch up with the other members of my clergy group in Jerusalem where we will spend 6 days before going on to Rome for the final 6 days of our study tour.

See my Facebook page for pictures of the trip.

2011 Travel Postings - June 26

2011-06-26T13:18:00.003-05:00

Thursday, June 23, I left for a three week trip. Tom Merrill, one of my parishioners, drove me to the Birmingham airport where I got the ground shuttle for a trip to the Atlanta airport. From Atlanta I flew to London Heathrow. From Heathrow I took the British Rail link to Paddington station, and from there I took the Tube to King's Cross. By running I barely made the 1 pm train to Edinburgh which was absolutely packed. I jumped into a first class car and dragged my suitcase 2 or 3 cars forward until I found 2nd class. There were no seats at all in the first 2 or 3 2nd class cars I went through. Finally, I found a seat at one of the tables. Dripping with sweat I sat down next to the windows. I'm sure I was not a pleasant travel companion for the other 3 guys at the table. I got to Edinburgh around 6 pm, just in time to jump on a train for Leuchars. From Leuchars I took a taxi several miles to St. Andrews. All in all, it took about 26 hours of constant travel to get from my home in Birmingham to St. Andrews.

I'm in St. Andrews for a reunion, of sorts. It's the 600th anniversary of the university, but it's not an official reunion year for people who received their degrees in 1990 as I did. But because I could piggy back on my clergy group's trip to Israel and Italy, I decided to go.

Actually, in 1411, Bishop Wardlaw of St. Andrews authorized the formation of the university, but it wasn't official until 1413 when Pope Boniface XIII gave it his imprimatur. But then Boniface was an Avignon pope, so I'm not sure his imprimatur counts! The reason for the foundation of St. Andrews is that the Scots supported the Avignon popes, but the English supported the Roman papacy. So the English prevented the Scots from sending their young men to study for the priesthood in France, and the Scots had to found their own university. "How these Christians love each other..."

They housed those of us going to the reunion in David Russell Hall which is about a 15 minute walk from the center of town. The accommodations are pretty good, though. The first night I thought I'd walk into town, and even took a shower and changed clothes, but by then I was just too tired to move and went to bed.

The next morning I heard the principal of the university, Louise Richardson, chair and address a meeting. She's quite impressive. Interestingly, Dr. Richardson was previously head of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Her predecessor at the institute was Drew Faust, who is now president of Harvard. That appears to be the route to power for women in academia.

Friday night there was a very nice dinner for returning graduates in Lower College Hall. At the end of the dinner, the Madras College Pipe Band "beat the retreat" on the quad outside. As they played "Scotland the Brave" and the setting sun sent long shafts of light down the lawn, I misted up a little. Then a lone piper led most of the grads to the reunion ball, but I went home to bed.

At dinner I had a nice conversation with Roz who sat next to me. She got a degree in history in 1991, I believe. Then she went to Manchester University to become a dentist. She's an elder in her Church of Scotland parish in Peebles. The reformation in Scotland went in a different direction from the reformation in England. The Church of England retained bishops, but the Church of Scotland got rid of them and became a presbyterian church, that is, a church governed by presbyters.

This morning there was a service in St. Salvator's, the university chapel, to commemorate the university's 600th reunion. I worshiped there when I was here and was glad to be back in the chapel. The chapel was begun in 1450 and consecrated about ten years later. One of the first martyrs of the Scottish Reformation - Patrick Hamilton - was burned at the stake just outside the chapel entrance. See previous comment about Christians loving each other...

St. Salvator's has a marvelous organ and the choir was as good as ever. They sang two 16th-17th century anthems - one in English and one in Latin. The hymns were also first rate - "Praise, my soul, the King of heaven," "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," "Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord," "Now thank we all our God," and one that was new to me but I liked a lot - "Loving Spirit."

The preacher was N.T. Wright, formerly Bishop of Durham (Church of England) and one of the world's great New Testament scholars. He joined the faculty at St. Andrews in 2010. I had heard him preach while I was in Oxford (where he taught before becoming a bishop) and was looking forward to hearing him. He was terrific. The title of his sermon was "The Great Story" and he wove the history of the university into the story of Christianity. One of his points was that western civilization seemed to believe that by giving up religious faith we would become happier and better, but it's quite obvious that that has not been the case. So the task of schools of theology is to keep doing what they do to prepare for the day when the West turns back to faith. St. Andrews is much more than a school of theology. I believe the principal said that only about 3% of this year's grads studied divinity. However, St. Mary's College (the official name of the faculty of theology at St. Andrews) is the oldest school of theology in Scotland.

Two Baptism Sermons

2011-06-12T16:34:00.002-05:00

The Baptism of Sydney and Grayson. May 22, 2011. St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Hoover, AL.

Dear Sydney and Grayson,

This letter is from the priest who baptized you. I look forward to watching you grow up, but I am 55 years older than you, so some of the most interesting parts of your life will happen long after I am gone. That’s OK, though, because what the people of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church and I are doing today will help you establish a sturdy foundation on which you can build a strong and healthy spiritual life.

First, I want to congratulate you on your choice of families. Sydney, you were born on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I remember because your dad, Kevin, was supposed to acolyte that day and he didn’t show up. I knew that something important had happened because Kevin is such a faithful acolyte. The first time I saw you, your mother Krystal was holding you and I could see that she loved you a lot. So I know that you will be well cared for.

Grayson, I don’t know your mom and dad, but I do know your great grandparents, Bill and Gerri Blythe, and they are outstanding people. Bill is very smart and thoughtful and reads a lot. Gerri helped start our Daughters of the King chapter at St. Alban’s. The Daughters of the King is an organization for women that encourages prayer and service. Gerri and the Daughters have made blankets for shut ins and prayer beads for me to take to the sick. But the most important thing about your great grandparents is that they are almost always in church. Anyway, both of you are lucky to have such wonderful families.

Second, remember I said that today is the day of your baptism. By the time that you are able to read this I know that you will know what baptism is. I know that because your parents promised me that they would take you to Sunday School and church and help you to become a good Christian. I also said that the people of St. Alban’s and I were baptizing you. That’s kind of a funny way to say it because it sounds like everyone in the church picked you up and held you over the font and poured the water over your head. Actually, I was the one who held you and poured the water. But in the Episcopal Church we almost always baptize people as part of the Sunday service. We do that because baptism makes you part of God’s family and the church is God’s family. In baptism the church says that you are one of us, a part of our family.

Baptism means that you are now a Christian. Right now, you are a baby Christian, just like you are a baby girl or boy. Your responsibility as a baby Christian and as a baby girl or boy is the same: you are supposed to grow. Right now, you don’t have to do anything special to grow; it just happens. But in a few years you will begin to take some responsibility for your growth. You will need to eat healthy and nourishing food, to exercise, and to get enough rest and sleep. You will also have to take responsibility for your spiritual growth. You will have to pray, to read the Bible, to come to church, and to participate in the sacraments. But spiritual growth is just as natural as physical growth. It is God who makes us grow both spiritually and physically. We can choose to work with God in fostering our growth or to work against God. I hope you will choose to work with God.

One of the scripture readings for today talks about our spiritual growth. In 1 Peter, chapter 2, verse 2, it says, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Infants need milk, both spiritually and physically. It is just as natural for you to desire spiritual milk as it is for you to desire physical milk. However, you are going to grow up in a world that will do everything in its power to make you forget that you are spiritual beings. The world will try to make you believe that you can be fulfilled and complete without seeking God’s spiritual milk. The world will try to make you believe that life is only about professional success and making money and having more and better things. But if you are quiet and look within and listen very carefully, God will remind you that you cannot be truly happy without him. God will remind you that love is more important than success, that forgiveness is better than anger, that hope is stronger than despair.

But I don’t want to mislead you. Another of today’s readings is about St. Stephen, the first martyr, the first of Jesus’ followers who was put to death for his faith in Jesus. Life is difficult. Following Jesus does not mean that life will be easy, but it does mean that God will give you the strength to overcome the difficulties you will encounter.

Finally, in today’s reading from John’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…” That doesn’t necessarily mean that if you follow Jesus you will multiply loaves and fishes and walk on water, but it does mean that you can do things that are just as miraculous: you can pray for and forgive your enemies, you can return kindness for anger, you can be courageous and cheerful in the face of adversity.

Today we are giving you four gifts: The first is a candle that we will light from the paschal candle. The paschal candle is a large candle marked with a cross that is next to the baptismal font. Burn this candle every year on the anniversary of your baptism to remind yourself that the light of Christ shines inside you. Second, we are giving you a t shirt. In the early church, people who baptized on the night before Easter and for the next fifty days they wore a special white baptismal garment. The t shirt represents that garment. On one said it says “Christian,” “Disciple,” “Child of God,” “Heir of the kingdom of God”, because that is what you are. On the other side, it says “St. Alban’s Episcopal Church” because we never pass up an opportunity for free advertising! The third gift is a small container that holds some of the water from the baptismal font. There’s a story about the great German Reformer, Martin Luther, that says that the devil appeared to him and said, “Luther, who do you think you are? You’re nobody and you’ll never amount to anything!” Luther threw a bottle of ink at the devil, and said, “Be gone, devil! I am baptized!” When you are tempted to believe that you are nobody and will never amount to anything, remember that you, too, are baptized. Finally, we are giving you a cross.

A little girl was lost in a big city, and a policeman saw her crying, and asked why she was crying. She explained that she was lost and couldn’t find her way home, so he took her around the neighborhood in his police car, and suddenly she said, “You can let me out here. I know this is my church because of the cross on top. I can find my way home from here.” When you feel lost and alone, look for the cross because it will help you find your way home.

The Baptism of Victoria and Caleigh. June 5, 2011. St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Hoover, AL.

Victoria and Caleigh, today we are going to baptize you. One of you told me that you don’t want me to get too much water on your head. I don’t blame you. You both look so pretty today, and I don’t want to mess up your outfits, so I will be as careful as I can be.

But baptism is a bath. When you take your bath at night or in the morning, you do it to wash off the dust and dirt that we all encounter during the day. That’s also why we are baptized.

As we go through life all kinds of things stick to us – anger, fear, greed, and so on. We have a name for those things. We call them “sins.” Neither of you have encountered very many sins yet, but you will. When you do, remember that you were baptized. Remember that God wants to wash those things off you.

But baptism has another meaning. Do you like the way the warm water in the bath tub surrounds you and sort of embraces you? I like that feeling a lot. In baptism, God doesn’t just wash away our sins, God also embraces us like the water in the bath. God embraces us completely, embraces all of us. God embraces our hopes and fears, our strengths and weaknesses, and tells us that we are good, that we are his daughters and sons. In baptism God tells us that he loves us and that we are a part of his family.

I imagine that at this point in your life there aren’t that many things that you worry about, but adults worry a lot. We probably worry more than we should. Some day you may worry, too. You may not feel as close to God as you do now. When you do, remember that you were baptized. That God embraced you, hugged you, held you close and said that he loved you and that you belong to him.

Now, I want to say something to the members of St. Alban’s. Remember that baptism is not just something that I do. It’s something that all of us do. We are all taking responsibility for Victoria and Caleigh today. We are taking the responsibility for raising them in the Christian faith. We are taking the responsibility for supporting them and loving them. It’s not something we can do by ourselves. God will help us. But we have to do our part.

We have to make sure that we have a Sunday school program for Victoria and Caleigh and the other young people who come here so that they can learn about the Bible and the Christian faith. We have to make sure that they are included and given ways to participate in the things we do, given responsibilities appropriate to their ages, and so on.

Many years ago a great man named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that he wanted his children to live in a world in which they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That’s what baptism is about. Baptism says that’s what’s on our inside is more important than what’s on our outside.

It doesn’t matter what the color of our skin is or our hair or our eyes. These are good things. Be grateful for them. They are God’s good gifts. But they are not the most important things about it. The most important things are inside us: our faith, our hope, our love, our joy…

Baptism makes us one. Baptism says that whether we are young or old, men or women, black or white, we are one in Christ.

Welcome to St. Alban’s, Caleigh and Victoria. Welcome to God’s family.

The Age of Anxiety

2011-02-27T06:53:00.001-06:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church. Birmingham, AL. Feb. 28, 2011.

Historian Johan Huizinga in his study of the late Middle Ages wrote, “We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.” Huizinga’s point is that these are all things that we take for granted: a warm coat, a fire in the fireplace (or for most of us, central heat and air), a glass of wine – in our time these things are the rule, not the exception. We take them for granted. But it was not so for most people throughout most of history, nor is it so for a good two fifths or more of the people in our world today. A warm coat, a warm and dry place to live, enough to eat, much less a glass of wine are the exception, not the rule.

Throughout most of history and in much of the world Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading have a special resonance: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” Worrying about having anything to eat and anything to wear is the norm, much less worrying about having a glass of wine or a fur coat.

We enjoy riches and conveniences undreamed of by the richest and most powerful people of human history. On a trip to Israel years ago I wandered through the ruins of one of Herod the Great’s palaces. He had several. The one I was wandering through was just east of the line of hills that divides Israel and Palestine from north to south and just west of Jericho. What was so remarkable about this palace is that it contained several baths. One bath was for hot water; one for lukewarm water; and one for cool or cold water. In first century Palestine, only the smallest handful of the rich and powerful could enjoy such luxury. Today only the smallest handful of people in this country do not enjoy such luxury.

So we would think that the vast expansion of wealth that has taken place over the last few hundred years and especially in the last century would have brought with it a corresponding expansion of happiness and contentment. But we know that it has not.

The poet W.H. Auden called the 20^th century the “age of anxiety.” It was supposed to be anything but an age of anxiety. Increasing prosperity was supposed to bring increasing contentment and happiness. We were supposed to be the most contented and least anxious people in the history of the human race. But that has not happened.

We live not only in the age of anxiety but in the age of Prozac and Paxil and psychotherapy. Probably even more than a first century peasant we need to hear the words of Jesus: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” because we worry about these and similar things constantly.

Jesus’ words are echoed by other great spiritual teachers throughout history. Five hundred years before the time of Jesus, the great Indian religious leader, Prince Siddhartha, whom we know today as the Buddha, the enlightened or awakened one, told his followers that the central problem of human life is suffering and that suffering is caused by being attached to things that are transitory.

Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The odd thing about serving wealth is that it can be very rewarding. Those who throw themselves heart and soul into the acquisition of wealth very often amass great fortunes. But wealth is a harsh mistress. No matter how much people acquire, they rarely seem to have enough. The person who sets her mind to acquire a million dollars in her bank account by the time she is thirty often succeeds, but then she is likely to decide to acquire another million or two by the time she is forty. Furthermore, the service of wealth often leaves very little time for the things that genuinely make life worthwhile: friends and family, work that matters, the enjoyment of art, beauty, and nature, to say nothing of the service of God.

I wonder if you have seen Social Network, the film about the creation of FaceBook that is up for the Academy award for Best Picture. I have no idea how accurate the film is but the story it tells is as old as the human race. The founder of FaceBook is presented as a deeply insecure college student. Rejected by a young woman he has been dating, he throws himself into the creation of an internet-based program that will allow people to connect with each other and so FaceBook is born. The irony of the film, though, is that while the purpose of FaceBook is to connect people with each other, a purpose it fulfills admirably, the founder of FaceBook is presented as a profoundly lonely young man, and by the end of the film he is fabulously wealth but is alienated from every single person in his life. “You cannot serve two masters, for you will hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.”

Jesus’ words sound hopelessly idealistic: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”

OK, Jesus, that’s all very well and good, but you didn’t have a monthly credit card bill or mortgage payment, you didn’t have to pay college tuition or medical bills. If we don’t take some thought for what we eat or what we wear, where we sleep or how we’re going to get to work, then pretty soon we’ll have nothing to do but daydream about the lilies of the field and birds of the air.

But the irony, of course, is that if all we do is think about what we’re going to wear or eat, or where we’re going to live, then that drains life of all its meaning. So how do we do both? How do we take some thought for our food and clothing and at the same time trust God? Is it possibly to be both responsible and idealistic? I think it is.

Another insight from the Buddhist faith helps me. Buddhism teaches its adherents that they must live neither in the past nor the future but in the present. The present is all that is real. Taken to an extreme, that would be ridiculous. Of course, we must take some thought for tomorrow and be cognizant of the lessons of the past. But what we must not do is let the past empty today of its meaning. And we must not be so caught up in what might happen tomorrow, that we let the glory of this moment slip away.

The story is told of an order of monks so strict that they not only did not speak to women, they did not even look at women. Two monks from the community were sent on a mission to another monastic community nearby. They came to the edge of river, but it was in the spring and the rains had swollen the river, making it almost impossible to cross. Trying to cross the river was a woman with a new born child, but the river was too deep and fast for her to cross. However, one of the monks, violating the rule of his community, carried the woman and her child across on his back. For the rest of the day, the other monk was so angry at his brother for having violated their rule about women, that he would not speak to him. Finally, at the end of the day, the monk who had carried the woman across the river said to his brother, “Brother, you are angry at me for having carried that woman and her child across the river, but I only carried them across the river. You have carried them around with you all day.”

We carry things around with us all the time that we need to leave behind: our anxiety about money, about work, about the state of the world. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. …Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? …do not worry, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear?' …your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

A short history of the Episcopal Church in Alabama

2011-02-17T13:04:00.001-06:00

I don't know who (if anyone) reads my blog anymore, but I thought you might be interested in something I wrote for the profile created by the committee searching for the 11th Bishop of Alabama. This is a VERY short version of the book I hope to complete soon.

THE EPISCOPAL DIOCESE OF ALABAMA (1830-2010)
A BRIEF HISTORY

In February, 1828, with no apparent coordination, two Episcopal congregations were organized in Alabama. Christ Church, Tuscaloosa, was the first, and then, only two weeks later, Christ Church, Mobile, was launched. (It should be noted, however, that the congregation of the Mobile church had been worshiping as part of a Protestant “union” church with Methodists and Presbyterians since 1822.) The men and women who organized these churches were some of Alabama’s most prominent citizens. Although the Episcopal Church in Alabama has never exceeded 1% of the state’s population, it has consistently been over-represented at the highest levels of the state’s leadership by a factor of 8 to 10 (or even more). Among the prominent early 19th century Alabamians who affiliated with the Episcopal Church were Gov. John Gayle, Congressman William Lowndes Yancey, author Octavia Walton LeVert, and lawyer and newspaper editor John Withers Clay. Although a Baptist, Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his Episcopalian wife, Varina, regularly worshiped at St. John’s, Montgomery. In the 20th century, prominent Alabama Episcopalians have included actress Tallulah Bankhead and novelist Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Just in the 20th century Episcopalian governors served Alabama for 16 years.

The Diocese of Alabama was organized and admitted to the Episcopal Church in January, 1830, when Thomas Brownell, Bishop of Connecticut, presided over the first diocesan convention at Mobile. For the next fourteen years, the diocese would be led by a series of provisional bishops: Brownell, Jackson Kemper (Missionary Bishop of the Northwest), Leonidas Polk (Missionary Bishop of the Southwest), and James H. Otey (Bishop of Tennessee).

Nicholas Hamner Cobbs was elected Alabama’s first bishop at St. Paul’s, Greensboro, in 1844. A Virginian, Cobbs had served several parishes in Virginia before going to serve as rector of St. Paul’s, Cincinnati, Ohio. However, less than a year after going to Ohio, he was elected Bishop of Alabama. Cobbs was industrious to a fault and acquired a reputation for saintliness. At the time of his death in 1861, the diocese had grown to include 39 parishes and almost 1700 communicants. The population of the state increased by 78%, but the communicant strength of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama increased by 164%, a rate of growth never subsequently equaled, much less exceeded.

Cobbs died at a moment of high crisis. On the very day of his death, the state of Alabama voted to secede from the Union. Just a few weeks later the bishops of the Confederate states met in Montgomery to organize the Episcopal Church in the Confederacy. One of the issues before them was the episcopal vacancy in Alabama. In the fall of 1861, Richard Hooker Wilmer, offspring of a family prominent in the evangelical wing of the Episcopal Church (his father had been instrumental in founding Virginia Theological Seminary), was elected the second Bishop of Alabama and led the diocese until his death in 1900. Wilmer was the only bishop elected and consecrated in the Confederate Episcopal Church.

To care for Confederate widows and orphans, Wilmer founded an order of deaconesses that would last until the early 20th century. Wilmer had little sympathy for the North and was an ardent Southern nationalist. When the war ended and Alabama was put under military jurisdiction, Wilmer ordered his clergy not to pray for the President of the United States, and Alabama’s military governor closed all the Episcopal churches in Alabama for a year until President Andrew Johnson rescinded his order.

In the 1870s Wilmer observed that the churches of Alabama’s fertile “black belt” (roughly the region between Tuscaloosa and Montgomery) were declining in membership, and the churches in Alabama’s “mineral region” were growing. This was the beginning of one of Alabama’s most profound socio-economic shifts as the industrial cities of Birmingham and Anniston sprang into being practically over night. When the Elyton Land Company laid out Birmingham, they set aside lots for several churches, including a prime location for an Episcopal Church. On that lot, the Church of the Advent was founded in 1871. In only a year’s time, it went from being a mission to a parish and quickly became the largest parish in the diocese (and today one of the largest in the entire ECUSA).

When Wilmer died in 1900 he was the longest serving bishop in the Episcopal Church. Toward the end of his episcopacy he was briefly assisted by Henry Melville Jackson, another Virginia priest who was elected to serve as what was then known as “assistant bishop.” Jackson, however, did not have the strength of character to be an effective bishop and was asked to step down. After Wilmer’s death, the Diocese of Alabama elected their first “native son” to serve as bishop – Robert Barnwell of St. Paul’s, Selma. Barnwell, however, died of a ruptured appendix after serving only two years as bishop.

Following Barnwell’s death in 1902, the diocese chose as their new bishop Charles Minnigerode Beckwith, the General Missioner of the Diocese of Texas. Beckwith was a “muscular Christian” of the Teddy Roosevelt school and an avid outdoorsman. He built a hunting lodge near Fairhope, which subsequently became Beckwith Lodge, the retreat center of the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. Beckwith, however, had an abrasive and high-handed manner and was involved in an escalating series of conflicts from the very beginning that would eventually cost him his episcopacy.

The final straw was his refusal to let a Montgomery rabbi speak at St. John’s. The rector of St. John’s defied Beckwith and let the rabbi speak anyway. Beckwith responded by having the priest tried in ecclesiastical court, but the court found the priest not guilty, and Beckwith rightly saw this as a vote of no confidence. The bishop agreed to turn over all his episcopal authority to the bishop coadjutor who was to be elected at St. Paul’s, Carlowville, in 1922. Beckwith kept his promise and continued as Bishop of Alabama in name only until his death in 1928.

The newly elected bishop coadjutor, William George McDowell, had been rector of Holy Innocents, Auburn (in effect, the campus chaplain at Auburn), and he quickly won the hearts of the people of the Diocese of Alabama. McDowell displayed a new awareness of social and political issues. McDowell and Birmingham Presbyterian pastor Henry Edmonds, worked quietly (although unsuccessfully) behind the scenes to achieve a more humane outcome in the infamous “Scottsboro case” However, like Bishop Cobbs in the early 19th century, McDowell worked himself to a state of exhaustion and finally his body gave out. In 1938, after visiting Mobile’s Trinity Church, McDowell was too ill to return to Birmingham. He was admitted to the Mobile Infirmary, diagnosed with pneumonia, and died within days.

The young rector of the Church of the Advent, Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter was elected Alabama’s sixth bishop in 1938. Still remembered with a mixture of warmth, awe, and respect by older Episcopalians in Alabama, Carpenter was larger than life in many ways. Standing 6 feet, 5 inches tall, he had been the Ivy League wrestling champion at Princeton, and he had a large, booming voice, marked by a deep, patrician Southern accent. His enormous hands and his voice made an indelible impression on those he confirmed: “May you daily increase mo-ah and mo-ah in the Holy Spirit…”

In almost every way, Carpenter proved an effective leader for the Diocese of Alabama. He was fortunate in presiding over the diocese during the “baby boom” that followed World War II, a time when almost every religious group in the U.S. was experiencing growth. During Carpenter’s episcopacy St. Luke’s (Mountain Brook), Ascension (Vestavia Hills) and St. Thomas (Huntsville) were founded as missions but quickly became large parishes. Other churches that had long been missions also achieved parish status, such as St. Andrew’s (Tuskegee), and Epiphany (Guntersville); and new missions were founded: Grace (Cullman); St. Alban’s (Birmingham); St. Christopher’s (Huntsville); St. Stephen’s (Huntsville); and St. Matthias (Tuscaloosa).

Among Carpenter’s most significant accomplishments was the founding of a permanent diocesan camp named after his predecessor. A summer camp program for young people had begun under Bishop McDowell, but under Carpenter the diocese took steps to put camping on a firm and permanent foundation by acquiring land in Winston County (near Jasper) and establishing Camp McDowell, sometimes called the “heart of the diocese.” Three generations of young people have attended Camp McDowell and/or worked as counselors. Camp McDowell continues to expand its facilities and program, and it is in constant demand, not only by Episcopalians but also by other groups.

Carpenter’s leadership during the Civil Rights movement is still controversial and disputed, but it seems fair to say that he was more backward-looking than forward-looking during the Civil Rights struggle. On two very significant occasions Carpenter took positions that would paint him and the people he led as reactionaries. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., announced plans to demonstrate in Birmingham during Holy Week, 1963, Carpenter and six other religious leaders urged King to wait. King responded devastatingly in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” pointing out that “to the Negro, ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’.” Two years later when King organized the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, Carpenter did everything in his power to prevent Episcopal clergy from participating in the march, which he termed “foolishness.” However, it should be noted that Carpenter had good relationships with black clergy in his diocese; he facilitated meetings between Birmingham’s black and white leadership in his office; and it was on his watch that Camp McDowell was integrated.

The deaths of four young girls in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in September, 1963, served as a catalyst for passage of the 1964 civil rights act. But it was the death of Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels in August, 1965, that brought home to many Episcopalians in Alabama and elsewhere the potential for violence in the civil rights struggle. A student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Daniels was a native of New Hampshire and a graduate of Virginia Military Institute. Inspired by King’s summons to clergy of all faiths to come and march in Selma, Daniels’ came to Selma in early 1965. He stayed on to help register black voters and tried to build bridges between the black and white communities. In August, Daniels was arrested for participating in a demonstration in Lowndesboro. After a few days in the county jail in Hayneville, Daniels and his fellow demonstrators were released. Daniels, Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe, and two young black women walked from the jail to a nearby store to buy cold drinks. At the store Tom Coleman, a state highway department employee, confronted them and aimed a shotgun at one of the young women. As Coleman fired, Daniels stepped in front of the young woman, taking the blast and dying almost instantly. Coleman also fired his shotgun at the fleeing Morrisroe, hitting him in the back. In spite of vigorous prosecution by the Alabama Attorney General, Coleman argued that he had acted in self-defense and was found not guilty by a jury made up exclusively of white men.

Carpenter retired at the end of 1968. He had been in poor health for some time and died less than a year after retiring. George Murray, Bishop Coadjutor of Alabama, (and also a signer of the letter urging Dr. King not to demonstrate) became the seventh bishop of Alabama. More liberal than his predecessor, Murray urged Alabama Episcopalians to find ways to participate in President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. However, Murray’s most significant achievement was to successfully divide Alabama into two dioceses, a project that had been discussed in the Diocese of Alabama almost from the very beginning.

After a long period of study, the Diocese of the Central Gulf coast was created in 1970 out of the lower third of Alabama (below Montgomery) and the Florida panhandle. Murray chose to step down as the seventh Bishop of Alabama and become the first Bishop of the Central Gulf Coast. In Murray’s place, the people of Alabama elected native Alabamian Furman Stough, the rector of Trinity Church, Florence, and a former missionary to Okinawa.

Stough proved to be a bishop of energy, vision, and ambition. He established a companion diocese relationship between Alabama and South Africa’s Diocese of Namibia; he gave his blessing to and helped plan and build federally-supported housing for low income elderly persons (Episcopal Place in Birmingham); and he oversaw the Church of the Advent’s re-designation as the cathedral of the diocese. Stough was also nominated for Presiding Bishop in 1986 but lost to his close friend, Edmond Browning, Bishop of Hawaii. Browning invited Stough to join his staff as director of the Presiding Bishop’s Fund (now Episcopal Relief and Development). However, after a short time in New York, Stough returned to Alabama.

Stough served as bishop of Alabama during one of the most tumultuous decades in the history of the Episcopal Church. In 1976 the General Convention voted to replace the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with a new prayer book and authorized the ordination of women as priests and bishops. Stough ordained Alabama’s first woman priest, Marianne Bogel, a hospital chaplain, in 1977.

In 1989, Alabama’s Bishop Suffragan, Robert Oran Miller, a former United Methodist minister, was elected to succeed Stough. Miller’s episcopacy was not much less tumultuous than Stough’s. Gay and lesbian Episcopalians increasingly insisted on full inclusion in the church. An Integrity chapter, the organization of gay and lesbian Episcopalians, was organized in the diocese in 1991, and the diocese established a taskforce to deal with the AIDS pandemic.

In 1997 Miller announced his intention to retire following the election of a bishop coadjutor. The diocese chose Henry Nutt Parsley, Jr., rector of Christ Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, who became the tenth Bishop of Alabama when Miller retired. Parsley’s episcopacy has been characterized by a more intentional and assertive program of church growth by planting new churches in growing communities. In 2006, Parsley became the second bishop of Alabama to be nominated for Presiding Bishop but lost to Nevada bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to hold the highest position in the Episcopal Church. Also in 2006, the Diocese of California elected Marc Andrus, Alabama’s bishop suffragan, as eighth Bishop of California. John McKee Sloan, a native Mississippian serving as rector of St. Thomas’s, Huntsville, was elected to replace Andrus in 2008.

In The Power of Their Glory (1978), a sociological study of the Episcopal Church, Kit and Frederica Konolige observe, “To a large degree, the Episcopal Church produced . . . America.” The same could be said of Alabama. The Episcopal Church in Alabama began as the church of the planter aristocracy and became the church of the industrial barons. Episcopalians have a distinguished record of leading Alabama and its institutions. For the most part, the Diocese of Alabama has been very well served by its bishops and priests. However, the religious landscape of the 21st century will be very different from the recent past. In some ways, it will be more like the situation Bishop Cobbs faced in 1844; Alabama will be more religiously fragmented, and more and more groups will be competing in the religious marketplace. Once again the Episcopal Church in Alabama will have to win the right to be heard, to organize congregations in groups new to the state, and to commend itself by its commitment to gospel. It would be well for Alabama’s Episcopalians to keep in mind what Bishop Carpenter frequently told those he confirmed:“Remember who you are and what you represent.”

Good new for failed Pharisess

2010-10-24T22:47:00.001-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. October 24, 2010.

I want to tell you a story, or rather, I want to retell one of Jesus’ stories. Jesus lived in a world of villages, an agrarian, rural world, and this is reflected in most of his parables. He tells us of the sower whose seed fell among rocks and weeds, as well as nourishing soil; he tells us of the wealthy farmer who built more storehouses but was poor in the things of the spirit; and he tells us of the fishermen whose nets are bursting with fish of every kind. But the parable in today’s gospel reading concerns two persons who were both more urban and also somewhat less universal than the figures in most of Jesus’ parables. They are a Pharisee and a tax collector.

The two could not have been more different. One was a success and the other was a failure. But which was the success and which was the failure? That is the question that makes the story interesting. The Pharisee is a moral success--the Publican is a moral failure. However, although the Pharisee was a moral success, he was a religious failure, and the Publican, although a moral failure, was a religious success.

Now let’s not stereotype the Pharisees. They were a renewal movement within first century Judaism. Their goal was to make it easier to observe the commandments of the Torah. And they were no more or less likely than anyone else to be hypocritical. Frankly, hypocrisy is a temptation common to all religions. Several years ago, a Harvard professor greeted my friend Peter Gomes before Easter and said, “Well, Dr. Gomes, I expect that you’ll be celebrating Easter in Memorial Church with all those hypocrites.” Peter replied, “That’s right, Professor. Why don’t you join us? There’s always room for one more!”

So the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable stands for me, for you, for any of us who forget that it is we who need God and not God who needs us. In place of the word “Pharisee,” we might use the word “priest” or “bishop” or “theologian” . . . you fill in the blank. The Pharisee in Jesus' story reminds me of the great but less than modest Sir Winston Churchill of whom it was said: "There but for the grace of God ... goes God".

So much for the Pharisee, now who was the tax collector. He was in the employ of the Romans and collected taxes for them. In other words, he worked for the foreign rulers who occupied Palestine. He made his living by extorting money. He was a collaborator and a crook. But although the tax collector was a moral failure, he was a religious success. The tax collector in Jesus’ parable stands for the alcoholic who has finally admitted that he is an alcoholic. He stands for the unwed mother who is struggling to give her children a better life and more opportunities than she could ever hope for herself. He is the person who has come to the end of his rope and has let go -- acknowledging his failure and casting himself into the hands of a loving God.

But there is not as much difference between these two characters as may seem: the tax collector is a failed Pharisee. The tax collector is the one who has realized that he cannot climb up to God on a ladder of accomplishments. When we realize that God is not impressed by our degrees or bank accounts or impressive job titles, that we cannot draw near to God by piling success upon success, we are tempted to despair. But when in the dark nights of our soul we say, "God have mercy upon us", God draws near to us.

A useful technique of Bible study and meditation is to put ourselves in the Biblical event about which we are reading. Unfortunately I like to flatter myself. I imagine myself going to the manger with the wise men, although in reality I probably would have stayed home rather than risk the long and difficult journey. I imagine myself remaining awake with Jesus in Gethsemane, although I know that I would certainly have snoozed with the other disciples. And I like to think that I would have risen early with Mary Magdalene on Easter, although I hate etting up early, so why I think I would have behaved differently on the first Easter, I don't know.

If you were to put yourself into the reading from Luke's Gospel, which character would you be? The Pharisee or the tax collector? Where would we put ourselves? You don't have to tell me; you don't have to tell anybody.

We would like to think that we would be the penitent tax collector rather than the proud Pharisee. But would we? It's all too easy to come before God with a list of our accomplishments. It's hard, desperately hard, to come before God with a catalog of our moral failures.

I want to tell you a story about a failed Pharisee. I have a friend named Bartle. He's not a real person; he's a character in a novel, but I feel as though I know him. Bartle was a priest of the Church of England who experienced a divorce and now is carrying on an affair with a young, Jewish woman. Bartle's life is a mess. He has failed at everything he has ever attempted. Bartle's one remaining link to the church is his annual confession at Christmas.

The story begins as Bartle sits in the back of a dingy old church near London's King's Cross Station. The portion of the psalter assigned for that day includes the phrase, "'I will walk in my house with a perfect heart. I will take no wicked thing in hand; I hate the sins of unfaithfulness: there shall no such cleave unto me....", but Bartle could think of nothing but the ways he had been unfaithful to everything important to him: unfaithful to the priesthood and, above all, unfaithful to God. He hated going to confession but felt that his life would fall apart if he abandoned this last bit of spiritual discipline. What was the point of confessing his sins, Bartle wondered? God's law was "an impossible counsel of perfection". Then, as he was tempted toward the absolute sin of despair, another text occurred to him: "'My strength is made perfect in weakness.' These words, for Bartle, were the first stage of a journey leading up to the only Love who was fully good and true".

'Lord God,' said Bartle in his inmost soul, 'My priesthood is a gift which, like all your other gifts, I have wasted and squandered and spoilt. But, even now, let my very imperfection be itself priestly. I know nothing of you. My attempts to follow you have all failed, again and again and again.... [But] even now, as I promise to do better, I know that I have nothing to look forward to but failure and more failure. But it is to you that I come, dear Physician of life. I no longer dare to ask to be perfect, even as you are perfect. I dare only to kneel in your presence in all my muddle and impurity and doubt and offer these things to you. Muddle, impurity and doubt is all that I have to offer you, O holy child of Bethlehem. O friend of sinners, O helpless child, this is my offering to you.'

When he came out of the church into the dark, dewy evening... Bartle felt the world transfigured.

(from Love Unknown by A.N. Wilson, pp. 151-155.)

Note one more thing about today’s prable – its location. It takes place in a house of prayer, a temple. Like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we find ourselves in a place of prayer. The question for us is, Have we come up to the Temple to brag about our accomplishments or to acknowledge our failures?

This morning we will solemnly and corporately confess our sins: "We have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone." And then I will affirm that God forgives you and forgives me.

Now Episcopalians maintain (rightly) that it is not necessary to confess our sins to a priest We usually say that the proper time and place for the confession of sins is the quiet of our own homes or in the moments before worship. But I must admit to you that my own spiritual discipline is defective. I do not do a serious moral and spiritual inventory of myself often enough. And as for the moments before worship, when I am not leading worship, I am more likely to spend that time in idle conversation than I am in self-reflection or careful consideration of my neighbors' needs. So, I believe that we need public prayers of confession on a regular basis. And we especially need them when we come up to the temple to pray so that we can remind ourselves that we are on the side of the Publican, not the Pharisee.

Here in this temple today, we are all failed Pharisees. Like the Pharisee, we offer God our success. The bad news is our success or our accomplishments are not enough. The good news is that God accepts us as we are; God wants our failures, too.

There are great talents and gifts in this congregation. Among us and our families and friends there is wealth and accomplishment beyond the dreams of most persons on the earth. But I know that I personally struggle with a sense of failure. No matter how much I accomplish, it never seems to be enough. And I don't believe that I am the only one who feels that way.

Offer thanks to God for jobs and homes, for spouses and children, for degrees and honors. But then look beyond the accomplishments at the failures, for they are there, too, and offer them to God.

Today's Gospel reading invites us to offer God our moral failures. Offer God the alienation that has come between you and your spouse. Offer God the destructive behavior that has you in its grip. Offer God the hopelessness, verging on despair that makes you wonder whether or not to get out of bed in the morning. Ultimately, each of us, like Bartle, must come to God on our knees and pray the prayer that Bartle prayed: "...dear Physician of life. I no longer dare to ask to be perfect, even as you are perfect. I dare only to kneel in your presence in all my muddle and impurity and doubt and offer these things to you. Muddle, impurity and doubt is all that I have to offer you, O holy child of Bethlehem. O friend of sinners, O helpless child, this is my offering to you."

There is muddle and impurity and doubt in my life and in the life of each person here. For to say that we are muddled and impure and doubting is simply to say that we are human. And when we recognize that that is the way things are and in this life always will be, we are tempted to despair but instead we should offer it to God, for God is in the business of taking "muddle and impurity and doubt" and replacing them with forgiveness and healing. After all, God took a Cross, the cruellest instrument of judicial murder ever devised, and turned it into the instrument of our redemption and the sign of eternal hope.

Wrestling with God

2010-10-17T09:17:00.000-05:00

The film The Last Station deals with the last few months of the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Late in his life Tolstoy had a powerful religious experience. He came to believe that he should practice a form of radical obedience to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and so he became a pacifist. He also began to give away his wealth, and he was a very wealthy man. Tolstoy was not only a successful novelist; he was also an aristocrat who owned valuable estates. The only problem was that his wife Sofia did not share Tolstoy’s religious views. The film depicts their relationship as contentious and stormy but also deeply loving. One moment they are yelling and cursing at each other and the next they are holding each other and calling each other silly, endearing names.

I suspect that is the way it is with a lot of our most important relationships. Whether it is a parent, a sibling, a child, or a friend, our closest relationships are often the stormiest. Someone once said that it is easy for our parents to push our buttons because they installed them.

The story of Jacob in Genesis is a great example of this truth. He was a man who was involved in a series of stormy relationships, and the storms were usually of his own making. Jacob’s character was a mixture of weakness and strength. While still in the womb, Jacob struggled with his brother Esau. God explained the struggle to Rebecca by telling her that “two nations” were in her womb. “The one shall be stronger than the other and the older shall serve the younger.”

Genesis says that Jacob came into the world holding on to the heel of his brother Esau. Thus, he was given the name “Jacob” which is usually defined as the “supplanter” but another way to translate the Hebrew name Jacob is the “deceiver.” From the beginning to the end of his life, Jacob would catch the heel of others to hold them back so he could get ahead, to trip them up so he could get the advantage.

The author of Genesis compares Jacob and Esau, telling us that Jacob was a homebody and Esau was an outdoorsman and hunter. But Jacob appears to be intellectually stronger than Esau. Catching Esau at a weak moment when he is famished, Jacob drives a hard bargain, forcing Esau to relinquish his blessing in return for a bowl of food. But when Jacob disguises himself as Esau and goes into their nearly blind father Isaac, lying to him in order to receive the laying on of Isaac’s hands that actually confers the blessing, Jacob appears to be morally and spiritually weak.

The tables are turned on Jacob when he works for his uncle Laban. Jacob the deceiver becomes Jacob the deceived when Laban tricks him into marrying his older and less attractive daughter Leah, then makes him work seven more years to marry his younger and prettier daughter Rachel whom Jacob really desires.

So what are we to make of this story of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious stranger through the night until day breaks? I believe this story tells us something profoundly true about ourselves.

First, we are told that Jacob is alone. It is often when we are alone that significant people enter our lives. There is something about solitude that opens us up. When a relationship ends, whether through divorce or the death of a loved one or when someone simply walks away, we feel dead, we feel that we will never love again. And then someone new comes into our life. We live again. We love again. And we live and love in new and unexpected ways, ways we did not know we could live and love.

Alternatively, in the solitude that follows the end of a relationship we may discover ourselves anew, we may find new and undiscovered aspects of ourselves.

Secondly, note that it was dark when the stranger wrestled with Jacob. Often it is when we are in deepest darkness that new insights come to us. The darkness may be actual night when we simply cannot sleep. It may be the darkness of doubt and uncertainty. When the old certainties flee away, we may learn that we can live with uncertainty and doubt.

Thirdly, the mysterious stranger dislocates Jacob’s hip so that he is permanently marked and forever after walks with a limp. We must not think that we will be as good as new when a relationship ends, when a loved one dies, when we lose our job, when we can no longer believe in the old certainties. Things are never the way they were, the way they used to be. Things are always different. We are always different. We do not come to the end of our lives without collecting a few scars along the way, but the scars can be a source of strength. They can open us up to new love, new life. They can open us up to God, to each other, and to new parts of ourselves.

Former U.S. senator and cabinet member Max Cleland lost an arm and both legs in Vietnam. His autobiography is entitled “Strong at the broken places.” Our broken places can be our greatest sources of strength.

Novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder once wrote, “In love’s army only the wounded may serve.” Do not let your wounds make you bitter; let them open you up. Look around you at your fellow soldiers in love’s army. Each of them bears some wound as proudly as a Congressional medal of honor.

Finally, Jacob received a new name. “You shall no longer be called Jacob the Deceiver but Israel – the one who has wrestled with God and prevailed.” We are not only named at birth or at baptism, and it is not only our parents who name us. We are always being named or perhaps we are always discovering what our names are.

One of C.S. Lewis’ least known and most unusual books is Till We Have Faces. The title comes from an enigmatic quotation: “How can we see the gods until we have faces?” Each of us has a face we show to the world. The problem is that the face we show to the world may not be our real face, our real self. We may not even know what our true face is. Life is a process of discovering what our real face is, what our real name is, who we really are.

We learn our real self, our real face, our real name through struggle. We learn who we are in those solitary moments when we must fall back on our own resources, when God comes to us in both struggle and loving embrace. We learn who we are in the darkness when the familiar certainties have fled. We learn who we are when life has beaten us up and left us bruised and bloody. We learn who we are when the mysterious voice speaks out of the silence, the solitude, the darkness and tells us that we are no longer the person we thought we were, when the voice speaks the new name that we never heard before but which we immediately know to be right the first time we hear it.

I want to conclude with a story you may have heard me tell before. An eminent rabbi died and came to the gates of heaven. He walked confidently up to the angel who maintains the book of life and said, “I am Rabbi So and so, please let me enter.” The angel said, “I’m sorry but you’ll to wait until I call your name.” So the rabbi waited and waited and waited as people he knew or complete strangers entered. He waited as the great and the unknown entered ahead of him. He waited as great saints and even great sinners entered the kingdom of God. Finally, the angel stopped calling names and closed the book. Tearfully, the rabbi said, “You never called my name!” The angel replied, “Ah, but I did. The problem is, you do not know your name.” Life is a process of learning who we are, what our real name is. And we only learn our names, our identities if we struggle alone, through the darkness with the One who knows us and calls us by name.

Seek the welfare of the city

2010-10-10T12:39:00.002-05:00

Someone once asked humorist Will Rogers if he belonged to an organized political party, and he replied, “No, I’m a Democrat.” Think about that for a moment. Right now, I think it applies to both political parties.

I like to paraphrase Will Rogers’ joke and tell people that I don’t belong to an organized religion; I’m an Episcopalian.

We have all heard that one should never discuss politics or religion in polite company. People tend to have strong, even passionate, opinions about both subjects, and a discussion of either topic is likely to generate more heat than light.

But as a religious leader people often want to discuss religion with me. I don’t mind; I think it’s a little ridiculous not to talk about the subjects that interest us and which touch on the deepest concerns of our hearts.

People often tell me that they believe that organized religion is pernicious, and they even say that it has done and is doing more harm than any other institution. They cite the conflicts in northern Ireland, the middle east and elsewhere.

Let’s just look objectively at that idea. There’s a good deal of support for the idea that religion does more harm than good. Religion appears to be at the heart of many dangerous conflicts. Religious differences are part of the reason for the hostility and suspicion that divides Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan. There is even less reason for the differences that divide Protestant Northern Ireland from the Catholic Republic of Ireland. How can two groups that both profess the Christian faith be so bitterly divided? And then there’s the Middle East. As humorist Tom Lehrer said in his song “National Brotherhood Week,” “Oh, the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Hindus hate the Muslims and everybody hates the Jews…”

In our own country, we seem to be in the midst of wave of anti-Islamic feeling, but if we want to encourage Muslims to reject extremism, we have to reach out to our Muslim neighbors with understanding.

Let’s take a closer look at the accusation that religion spawns hatred, misunderstanding and violence. There’s some justification for this idea. The Roman empire systematically persecuted Jews and Christians who would not offer sacrifices in the temples of the gods who were believed to uphold the Roman state. Christians, then, returned the favor when Constantine converted to the Christian faith in the 4^th century. In the Middle Ages Jews cowered in their homes in fear on Good Friday because Christians often rioted through Jewish neighborhoods beating and even killing Jews on the day of Christ’s crucifixion.

Muslims conquered the Middle East and Northern Africa by force in the 7^th and 8^th centuries. Jews and Christians were free to practice their religion in many Muslim countries but were treated as second class citizens.

During the crusades, Christians indiscriminately slaughtered Jews, Muslims, and even eastern Orthodox Christians in their campaign to reassert Christian rule over the Holy Land. And we won’t even go into the Inquisition…

So far, so bad. Now, let’s look at the evil done by explicitly secularist and atheist regimes. If we total up those killed just in the 20^th c. by the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, we reach a conservative estimate of 50 million. That greatly exceeds the number of those killed in wars of religion in the last 2000 years by a factor of 2 or even 3.

The word "religion" is derived from two Latin words that mean to "re-connect". That's the true purpose of religion: to united, not divide... to join, not to

Religion has given us schools and hospitals, teachers and doctors. Mother Teresa was motivated by her love of God to serve the poorest of the poor; Gandhi’s campaign to achieve Indian independence was profoundly spiritual; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., never deviated from his commitment to non-violent resistance because of his deep faith in God; the Catholic teachers I met in Bangladesh provide education for hundreds of children, most of them not Catholic but Muslim; and we could go on and on.

In today’s Old Testament reading the prophet Jeremiah writes a remarkable letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon. Jeremiah could have told the exiles to resist, to do everything in their power to sabotage the Babylonian regime. But instead Jeremiah told them to “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

I believe that Jeremiah’s words sum up the purpose of religion. Even though we believe that this world is not permanent, that our eternal destiny is in a world to come, that in some sense we are exiles here, we, too, should bend every effort to work for the well-being of this world, to plant gardens, to build schools and hospitals, to care for the sick, lift up the fallen, nurture children, befriend the friendless, and to make this world as much like heaven as possible.

Oh, the places you'll go!

2010-09-12T19:06:00.002-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. The baptism of James Gordon Brush. St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL. Sept. 12, 2010.

Today we are baptizing James Gordon Brush. I am going to explain baptism to him, but the rest of you are invited to listen, too.

Gordon, I want to begin with a quotation from one of the most important and best-known theologians of the last century:

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You’re off to great places!

You’re off and away!

The theologian, of course, is Dr. Seuss. Somehow I doubt that his doctorate was in theology, because most theologians I know would have to write an entire book to say what he says in only four lines. But it’s hard to find a better explanation of baptism than Dr. Seuss’s book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up!

You’ll be seeing great sights!

You’ll join the high fliers

Who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind because you’ll have speed.

You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.

Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.

Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Gordon, today is the day you launch out into a sea of adventure. Or (to repeat what Dr. Seuss says)

You’re off to great places!

You’re off and away!

Don’t let anyone tell you that the Christian life is safe and peaceful. In baptism your ship sets sail and you leave the safe harbor behind and sail into adventure and adversity. That may sound a little scary but remember this: you will never be alone. Look around you. Everyone here is going along with you on that adventure. Today you become part of what someone called “one family with a billion names.” Today you acquire millions of new brothers and sisters on every continent, every nationality, and every race. And especially remember that whether your ship sails into the storm or the calm, Jesus is going with you on your journey through life.

Gordon, we have several gifts for you: First, here is a baptismal certificate. I’ve made it large deliberately. I wanted it to be about the same size as the certificate priests receive when they are ordained, because the most important ordination anyone receives is the ordination all of us receive in baptism. In baptism, Gordon, you are ordained into the priesthood all Christians share. All baptized persons are ordained to proclaim the Good News; we are all ordained to reach out to the lost and lonely, the hungry and the hurt; we are ordained to lift ourselves and others into the healing and transforming presence of God through prayer.

Second, I will take some water from the baptismal font and put it in a bottle for you to keep. Remember, Gordon, that while life is always good, it is not always fun. Or as Dr. Seuss puts it

I’m sorry to say so

But sadly, it’s true

That Bang-ups

And Hang-ups

Can happen to you.

You can get all hung up

In a prickle-ly perch.

And your gang can fly on.

You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch

With an unpleasant bump.

And the chances are, then,

That you’ll be in a Slump

And when you’re in a Slump,

You’re not much fun.

Un-slumping yourself

Is not easily done.

All of us go through slumps, Gordon, but baptism gives us the resources to deal with slumps. That’s why I’m giving you some of the baptismal water to take home. When you find yourself in a slump, look at this bottle of water, and remind yourself that were baptized. In baptism you are given the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit can lift us out of any slump.

Third, we are giving you this t-shirt. In the early church, people who were baptized wore white garments for 50 days after their baptism. This shirt is too big for you today, although in no time at all, it will be too small for you. But remember what it says: You are a Christian, a child of God, an heir of the kingdom of Heaven; a disciple of Jesus; and a member of God’s royal priesthood. All your life, people will try to make you forget who you are. They will try to make you think you are something other than and less than the person God made you to be. Don’t let them do that. A former bishop of this diocese used to say to the people he confirmed, “Remember who you are and what you represent.” This shirt will help you do that.

Fourth, when we go back to the font, Deacon Mary will light a candle from the Paschal candle and give it to you. You’re supposed to burn it every year on the anniversary of your baptism. The candle will remind you of the light that burns brightly inside you. You may not always see that light, but it is always there. All of us go through dark places from time to time, and when you do, light your baptismal candle and remember that God’s light is burning in your heart.

Finally, we are giving you a cross. Most Christian churches have crosses inside or outside or both. There’s a large cross on the front of St. Alban’s and many crosses inside. The cross has many meanings. The most important meaning of the cross is that it tells us that God can take the worst possible thing that can happen to us and turn it into something glorious. But in a sense, the cross is a sign that shows us the way to go when we get lost.

Sometimes, Dr. Seuss says

You’ll come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!

Do you dare to go out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…

Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?

Or go around back and sneak in from behind?

Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find.

For a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind .

There’s a story about a little boy who got lost in a big city. Fortunately, a policeman found him and walked around the neighborhood with him, hoping that he would see a landmark. Finally, they stopped in front of a big building with a cross on top, and the little boy’s face lit up, and he said, “It’s OK, officer, this is my church. I can find my way home from here.”

Gordon, when you come to that “place where the streets are not marked” (and all of us find ourselves there from time to time), look for the cross and look for the church. The cross will point you the way, and the church is full of people who will help you find your way home.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,

As you already know.

You’ll get mixed up

With many strange birds as you go.

So be sure when you step.

Step with care and great tact

And remember that Life’s

A Great Balancing Act.

Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.

And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

Amen.

Oh, the places you'll go!

2010-09-12T19:06:00.000-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. The baptism of James Gordon Brush. St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL. Sept. 5, 2010.

Today we are baptizing James Gordon Brush. I am going to explain baptism to him, but the rest of you are invited to listen, too.

Gordon, I want to begin with a quotation from one of the most important and best-known theologians of the last century:

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You’re off to great places!

You’re off and away!

You’ll be on your way up!

You’ll be seeing great sights!

You’ll join the high fliers

Who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind because you’ll have speed.

You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.

Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.

Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Gordon, today is the day you launch out into a sea of adventure. Or (to repeat what Dr. Seuss says)

You’re off to great places!

You’re off and away!

Second, I will take some water from the baptismal font and put it in a bottle for you to keep. Remember, Gordon, that while life is always good, it is not always fun. Or as Dr. Seuss puts it

I’m sorry to say so

But sadly, it’s true

That Bang-ups

And Hang-ups

Can happen to you.

You can get all hung up

In a prickle-ly perch.

And your gang can fly on.

You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch

With an unpleasant bump.

And the chances are, then,

That you’ll be in a Slump

And when you’re in a Slump,

You’re not much fun.

Un-slumping yourself

Is not easily done.

Sometimes, Dr. Seuss says

You’ll come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!

Do you dare to go out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…

Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?

Or go around back and sneak in from behind?

Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find.

For a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind .

You’ll get mixed up, of course,

As you already know.

You’ll get mixed up

With many strange birds as you go.

So be sure when you step.

Step with care and great tact

And remember that Life’s

A Great Balancing Act.

Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.

And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

Amen.

Three upcoming events

2010-09-06T21:29:00.002-05:00

Here are 3 upcoming events that you might like to know about:

Sunday, Sept. 19 and 26, at St. Luke's, Mountain Brook, at 4 pm. I'm giving 2 lectures on the Evangelical Revival of the 18th and 19th centuries and Anglicanism. Did you know that the only Episcopalians who spoke out against slavery were the evangelicals? Come to my lectures and find out why.

Thursday, Oct. 21, at the Birmingham Public Library, at 7.30 pm. I'm giving a piano recital that I'm calling "Scenes from Childhood." Here's the program:

Mozart - Variations on Ah! Vous Dirais-je maman (better known as "Twinkle, twinkle...")

Schumann- Scenes from Childhood, Op. 15

Margaret Bonds - Troubled Water

Liszt - Waldesrauschen

Shostakovich- Selections from his Preludes, Op. 34

Chopin - Ballade in A flat, Op. 47

Sunday, Oct. 24, at the Culural Arts Center, Gadsden, AL, at 4 pm. I'm repeating the recital as a benefit for Christ Episcopal Church in Albertville. Last April, a tornado virtually destroyed Christ Church. My concert in Gadsden is free but people will be asked to make a contribution of at least $25 to the Christ Church building fund.

Holy Impatience

2010-08-23T21:36:00.005-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church. Aug. 22, 2010.

Patience, we are told, is a virtue. And so it is. When a slow driver gets in the fast lane on I 65 and we want to tailgate him or her, then we need to be patient; when the employee at a fast food place (who, after all, is only making minimum wage) gets our order wrong then it’s better to be patient than to yell at him or insist on seeing the manager; and we really need patience our computer malfunctions and we call support and have to press 1 for English and then choose from 1 to 5 for the next level and then between 1 and 9 for the next level and then enter our social security number and our birthday and our mother’s maiden name and the birthdates of our children and so on and so on… If you still have some patience left at the end of a process like that, then I will personally nominate you for sainthood.

I’m especially impatient. You will never convince me that elevators don’t speed up if you press the up or down button more than once. When the electronic voice at the other end of a phone call asks me to state the purpose of my call in a few words, I always ask for a real human being.

But there are times when patience is not a virtue.

In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a series of demonstrations in downtown Birmingham. Today his goals seem reasonable, but in 1963 they were considered too much, too soon and too fast. They were deemed dangerous and extreme. King sought the integration of public facilities such as lunch counters, drinking fountains, and rest rooms and insisted that department stores begin to hire black sales clerks. Charles Carpenter, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, and 7 other religious leaders issued a statement asking King to postpone his protest. They had a point and there was some justification for their appeal to King: Birmingham’s newly elected mayor, Albert Boutwell, was a reasonable man and there was reason to think that he would work with Birmingham’s civic leaders and with King to achieve at least some of the goals that King sought. So Carpenter and his colleagues urged King to be patient. After all, he was trying to overturn a system that had been in place for generations. Why couldn’t he wait just a little longer?

One of the things that fascinated me about my freshman year in college was the vast collection of causes that my fellow students were involved in. Now keep in mind that this was way back in 1974 when the earth was cooling. The causes then were somewhat different from the causes today. There would always be a table or two outside the freshman dining hall asking us to sign up for a fast to raise awareness of world hunger. Another would urge us to support the boycott of South African business that upheld the system of apartheid. Another would ask us to sign a petition to eliminate nuclear weapons. A few of my more conservative classmates became disgusted with the daily array of liberal causes they encountered and formed a group called “Students for a perfect world now” and from time to time they would also set up a table outside the dining hall.

But sometimes what seems like wild-eyed idealism in one generation can seem like simple decency in the next generation. We take for granted the goals that King sought in 1963, but Carpenter and Birmingham’s other religious leaders urged him to wait just a little longer. King replied to Carpenter and the other religious leaders in his famous essay, “Letter from Birmingham jail.” And King’s reply took the wind out of Carpenter’s sails.

”For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." …. “justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights.“

Several years ago Rabbi Milton Graffman, who also signed the letter to King urging him to wait, came and talked to my students at Samford about why he had counseled King to be patient for a little longer. He was very persuasive. But after Rabbi Graffman left, I asked my students who had been right – King or Graffman. My students were all white, middle class kids, but they all said that King had been right and Graffman had been wrong. They said that if King had waited, things would never have changed.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus encounters a woman who had been crippled for 18 years. He is so moved by her situation that he speaks to her, lays his hands on her, and heals her without even being asked to do so. And when Jesus healed the woman, a leader of the synagogue blew up at him. Much like the religious leaders in Birmingham in 1963 the leader of the synagogue wanted Jesus to wait; he wanted the woman to be patient. After all, she had been crippled for 18 years. Why couldn’t she be patient and wait just a few hours until the end of the Sabbath?

In a way, the leader of the synagogue was correct. Surely it was not asking too much for Jesus to observe the Sabbath code and do no unnecessary work on the holy day. Was it asking too much for the unnamed woman who had suffered for 18 years to suffer for only a few more hours?

Perhaps Dr. King could also have heeded Birmingham’s religious leaders in 1963 and postponed his demonstrations. Surely black people who had waited 300 years for the end of slavery and then waited another century for basic civil rights could wait just a little longer.

But sometimes patience becomes not a virtue but a vice. There comes a time when we have been patient enough; when justice has been delayed too long. Sometimes it is right and good and perhaps even holy to be impatient with injustice, to feel a righteous anger with the evil in the world.

Jesus told the leader of the synagogue that the woman (who had been afflicted for 18 years) had suffered long enough. The end of the Sabbath was only a few hours away, but even that was too long for Jesus. God’s will is for human life to flourish; the Bible calls it abundant life. One of the church fathers said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

We need to be impatient for the sake of justice, for the sake of God. We need to be impatient with hungry and poverty and homelessness. We need to be angry with barriers to the abundant life that God desires for us.

I still smile when I remember the students who started the “Society for a perfect world now”. They had a good point. The evils and injustices of the world cannot be corrected in a single grand gesture. It takes time and hard work and even patience and today’s gains can be wiped out in a moment. We seldom move forward in a straight line and it is usually a matter of two steps forward, then one step backward.

The sorrows and ills of the world are too much for any one of us to cure. There is too much power in the wrong hands and too little in the right hands. But the Good Samaritan was not asked to care for every traveler who had been robbed and beat up and left for dead; he only had to care for the one whom he saw beside the road to Jericho. God does not ask us to feed every hungry child, house every homeless person, comfort every broken heart; God only asks us to use our resources to the best of ability, to respond generously to the needs we know about; God asks us to be faithful, not perfect.

My fellow freshman did not quite get it right. A perfect world now is never possible but a better world is always possible. Let us all commit ourselves to a holy impatience and a righteous anger when we see injustice and cruelty, and let us all re-commit ourselves to making not a perfect world because that is not in the power of humans to accomplish. Rather, let us commit ourselves to the small steps and little improvements that are in our power to do which will create a better world.

One final post about visiting India and Bangladesh

2010-08-19T11:34:00.001-05:00

Here are some random thoughts that I wrote down while I was in India. I hope someone finds them helpful or amusing or something. If you do, please be in touch!

Things to do, not do, or just keep in mind when you visit India and Bangladesh (well, mostly India):

1. There's a big difference between 1rst class and 2nd class train travel in terms of accommodations, cleanliness, food, comfort, etc. Always travel 1rst class. (Also, read what Mark Twain wrote about Indian trains in his "Following the Equator". Is it possible they are still using the same trains?)

2. Take Cipro every day!!

3. If you take Cipro every day, then you can eat a little more adventurously, So eat the samosas made by the vendor just outside the Sri Ramakrishnan monastery in Calcutta. They're wonderful! You can also safely drink the chai on the trains.

4. Visit Varanasi (Benares) if you want to understand Hinduism. And by all means watch the Brahmin priests offer fire to "Mother Ganga" on the banks of the Ganges.

5. But if you do go to Varanasi, be prepared for a strong shock to your sensibilities. Some of it requires a fairly strong stomach.

6. Speaking of strong stomachs, eat at Karim's in Delhi. It's close to the south gate of the Jama Masjid mosque. Try the grilled goat. It's delicious!

7. You can do one or two overnights on India trains, if you go 1rst class and don't try to do them on consecutive nights, but don't try to do four. Also, next time I'd like to try a long 1rst class day trip.

8. Pace yourself. India is huge and you can't see it all in one visit. Decide what you want to see. Also, don't do too much in any single day.

9. The Taj Mahal is gorgeous but the Red Fort is (to me, anyway) more interesting.

10. If I had it to do again, I would spend more time going to see the sites associated with the British rule of India (Lucknow, Simla, and more of Calcutta).

11. I would also like to go to south India and find out more about Indian Christianity.

12. Next time I'll plan better and actually see some of Mumbai.

13. Skip the changing of the guard at Walla Bagh. It's hot and boring (although it tells you a lot about the relationship between Pakistan and India).

14. Speaking of hot, DO NOT travel in July or August. Try to go during late fall or winter.

15. Kingfisher beer is great.

16. Jet Airways is a terrific airline.

17. Hire a local guide. There are things they know and can do for you that you cannot know about or do on your own.

18. Eat at the Crystal restaurant in Amritsar. It was by far the best restaurant we visited. Also, order their Murg Frontier.

19. Make a list of all the odd signs you see, e.g., Guru Nanak Honda, Krishna Used Vehicle Parts, etc.

20. Make a list every day of the unusual things you see, e.g., women in saris riding motorcycles, whole families sharing rickshaws, etc.

21. Finally, and most importantly, visit India. I suspect that most western visitors (esp. from the US) think about turning around and going home for the first 2 or 3 days. But if you let go of your expectations and preconceptions and don't expect India to be just like the US, it becomes fascinating.

The words of the prophets in the age of information

2010-08-15T06:58:00.001-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL. Aug 15, 2010. Proper 15C.

It is often pointed out that we live in the “information age” or that our economy has become an “information economy”. What that means, of course, is that first, we are bombarded with vast amounts of information. This information comes in the form of the spoken and written word, but it also comes in the form of images. It is transmitted via print, radio, television, movies, and the internet. It also means that we are an information economy because more and more people make their livings creating and composing the information that we receive or in creating and maintaining the infrastructure by which the information is transmitted and received.

It seems to me that this information takes at least two primary forms: First and foremost is entertainment. We could literally spend every moment of our lives being entertained. Turn on the radio or television, put a CD on the stereo, pick up a book (yes, there are people who still read), or sign on to the internet. There are sitcoms, dramas, soap operas, comedies, and a million other forms of entertainment. Fortunately, there is still something in the human heart and mind that craves engagement with other creatures of flesh and blood; otherwise, we might starve to death in a semi-hypnotic state in front of our televisions.

The second form of information is information per se. We are also subject to a constant stream of so-called news, journalism, or current events. It seems that we’ve been hearing about the Gulf oil spill for years, not months. Television journalists have interviewed every fisherman and all the restaurant and hotel owners on the Gulf coast. Information also takes the form of emails, memos from the boss, newsletters from the neighborhood watch, your college alumni organization, or Zionist Environmentalists for Peace in Afghanistan.

Philosopher Marshall McLuhan distinguished between “hot” and “cool” forms of information transmission. “Hot” transmission leaves little or nothing to the imagination; “cool” transmission requires fairly intense engagement. I think church, then, is a “cool” form of information exchange. You have to make the effort to get out of bed, shower, dress, get in the car and drive here. You have to sit, stand, or kneel in response to the liturgy. You have to read the service leaflet; respond in the appropriate way at the appropriate time; find the right hymn in the hymnal and so on.

In other words, church is terribly anachronistic. These days most of the information we receive is “hot”; it requires little or no engagement or participation from us. And that is one of the reasons that it is so difficult to persuade people to come to church, especially an Episcopal Church. The church’s “cool” information is hard-pressed to compete with the millions of forms of “hot” information all around us.

Here’s another way to think about it: Not very many years ago the fastest growing city in the U.S. was Las Vegas. What is the principal industry in Las Vegas? Entertainment. My friend John Killinger who taught preaching at Vanderbilt for many years interpreted that fact to mean that the church was losing ground because people were putting a premium on being entertained and the rapid growth of Las Vegas was just a symptom of that phenomenon. Think about it: The local parish church cannot compete with show girls and magicians, much less with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Lautner of the Twilight movies. And the churches that are successful have adopted a show business format for their worship services. The mega churches have orchestras or at least heavily amplified “praise bands”. They project the lyrics of the “worship songs” on screens in front of the church. (Note that music sung in such churches is never called a hymn; The word “hymn” sounds much too old fashioned.) And in some of these churches the worship leaders’ faces are visible via closed circuit television on screens in every part of the building. No wonder the Episcopal Church is losing members!

But I also have to say that even though these mega-churches have adopted an entertainment format for worship, some of them do a wonderful job of feeding the poor, housing the homeless, and helping people who have lost jobs find new ones. Some of the pastors of these churches are prophetic in the best sense of the word. For the most part, I believe Rick Warren at the Camel Back Community Church in California is one such pastor. But I also believe that many pastors preach “lowest common denominator sermons”. There is one pastor of a mega-church whose face I see multiplied dozens of times whenever I pass the book section at Walmart or Target or any such place. He urges people to live their “best life now” but I wonder what he does with texts such as “take up your cross and follow me.” His youthful, happy face makes me think that he has never suffered, never felt one moment of doubt. If that is so, how can he possibly help lonely, hurting people? But I digress..

I want to suggest that something is missing from the “hot” information all around us, and Jeremiah puts his finger squarely on the issue: “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed!" How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back-- those who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.” The information age is marvelous at transmitting entertainment and facts, but it has no place for the prophetic word. In other words, the information age tells us what we want to hear but not what we need to hear; it fills our eyes and ears with dreams but not with anything that really challenges us.

Imagine NBC or Fox or HBO announcing a new series: “The Last Prophet Standing” or “The Prophet Files” or “Meet the Prophets”. And every week Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Isaiah or someone like them would spend 30 minutes or an hour lambasting us for neglect of the poor or propping up military dictatorships or just our own personal shallow spirituality and failure to cultivate a deep relationship with God. Before you could say “Nielsen rating” it would be cancelled.

So that is part of the reason that it is so difficult to get people to go to church. Every week someone reads aloud words such as these of Jeremiah: “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name….” Or these words of Jesus: “"I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled…. Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” And I make an effort to apply these words to our lives today. And the culture says, “No thanks; I think I’d rather watch re-runs of Law and Order.”

We (and I really mean all of us, myself included) would rather listen to easy words, smooth words. We don’t want to hear what the prophets have to say. We don’t want our dreams troubled. We prefer “hot” information to “cool” information.

Now, it would be easy for me to stop there. It would be easy for me to deliver a diatribe against a culture that does not have a place for the hard and challenging words of the prophets. But I think there is a word especially for St. Alban’s in today’s readings. I want to challenge you, me, and all of us to listen for the hard words that God might have to say to us.

One of the ways that you can tell the true prophets from the false ones is that the true ones always challenge us. They will invariably tell us the things that we do not want to hear. Perhaps I have not said enough about St. Alban’s and its future. Perhaps I should more frequently talk about the hard choices we need to make to be faithful. If I have failed in that, I ask God’s forgiveness and yours. St. Alban’s and just about every Episcopal Church I know faces a very rocky road. We are all going to have to work very hard to get people in the pews. We have to remember that the church has both a front door and a back door, and we have to make sure that more people are coming in the front door than are going out the back door.

If we are faithful and St. Alban’s grows and changes, here are some of the things that will happen:

There will be conflict
Households will be divided
Children and their parents will be alienated from one another
Some people will even leave the church

Of course, some of that will happen even if we do not grow and change. In other words, there is healthy conflict and unhealthy conflict. How can know the difference?

If our conflict is healthy, if it occurs because we are trying to do God’s will, here is what will also happen:

God will strengthen us
Jesus will be with us
Our light will shine so brightly that people will be drawn here

I am not bold enough to say that any of this is the “word of the Lord,” but I think it might be God’s word to St. Alban’s right now. However, we will only know that if we try it and find it difficult and challenging but ultimately life-giving.

What does the Lord require?

2010-08-08T13:51:00.003-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. Aug 8, 2010

Someone once said that if the people of India are the most religious people in the world and Swedes are the most secular people in the world, then America is a country of Indians run by Swedes. I’m not sure whether or not that’s true, but I’m pretty sure that India is the world’s most religious country. As I’ve said, there are millions of gods and goddesses; there are probably even more temples in India than there are Baptist churches in Alabama; and every home, office, and public space has a shrine in it.

In Calcutta we visited two Hindu holy places. The first was the Sri Ramakrishnan monastery. It is a beautiful, peaceful, prayerful place. The meditation hall is set in a beautifully landscaped garden. It is well back from the street so traffic noises do not interfere with meditation. The meditation hall itself is spacious and airy. When I was there, there were perhaps 50 people meditating. People simply sat down on the floor wherever there was space. It was very appealing, and I suspect that the rest of the group felt as I did that it would be nice to stay for a while and pray or meditate.

Just down the street from the monastery was a very large temple dedicated to Kali, the mother goddess and wife of Shiva. The contrast could not have been greater. The temple was noisy, crowded, dirty, smelly. There were hundreds of people lined up, waiting to give their pujas or offerings to the priest to place before Kali. They were seeking the goddess’s help for employment or healing or whatever. After a person got to the head of the line, they handed their gift to the priest, and then exited on the other side of the temple. Except for waiting in line, the entire transaction took less than a minute.

I had a strongly negative reaction to the temple. The monastery had been serene and spiritual; the temple seemed just the opposite. And then I had an insight: I realized that what I had seen at the temple was probably much like St. Paul saw in the first century. When Paul visited Corinth or Ephesus, he would have seen people bringing offerings to the temples of Apollo or Zeus or Diana and giving them to the priests, who then would kill and sacrifice the animal or throw the incense on the altar.

This sort of religion is about a transaction. You offer the god or goddess flowers or incense or money or a sacrificial animal or some combination of these things in the hope that the god or goddess will then get you a job or heal you or your loved one or allow you to conceive and bear a child. In Paul’s world there was one additional aspect to religion: you had to keep making sacrifices to the gods to avert their anger. On almost every page of Homer’s Odyssey there are references to the importance of averting the anger of the gods; it was one of the most important parts of Greek religion.

Now, with that in mind, look again at today’s reading from Isaiah:

Hear the word of the LORD,

Listen to the teaching of our God,

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

says the LORD;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams…

I do not delight in the blood of bulls…

…who asked this from your hand?

…bringing offerings is futile;

incense is an abomination to me.

…I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

…even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

It is almost unimaginable that a priest of Diana or Kali would ever say, “Bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.” Bringing offerings and burning incense is mostly what the worship of Diana was all about it and worshiping Kali is still about but it is not what the worship of Israel’s God is about. The prophets tell us that Israel’s God has a different set of priorities. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, does not desire burnt offerings, the blood of bulls, and incense. Isaiah tells us that Israel’s God wants us to

cease to do evil

learn to do good;

seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow.

It seems obvious to us: The worship of God and living an ethical life are inseparable but it was a new idea when Isaiah wrote these words in the 8^th century BC. It signaled a revolution in religious understanding. Israel’s prophets called for a radical reorientation of Israel’s religion. Ritual and sacrifice were to become secondary and justice and righteousness were to become primary. Or to use Isaiah’s words again, “I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals have become a burden to me… but cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow… “

The Protestant Reformers sometimes used the phrase negotium cum Deo – “business with God.” All of us have business with God and God has business with us, but the kind of business we have with God is not a commercial transaction. This was the great insight of Israel’s prophets. Our business with God is the kind of business a child has with her parent, not the kind of business that a customer has with a sales clerk. Or to borrow Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s great paradigm, we relate to God as a “Thou”, a person, not as an “It”, a thing. We do not make our offerings to God in an effort to bribe God into giving us what we want. The very idea is absurd.

Doesn’t it follow, then, that our worship of God should consist primarily of living ethical lives? Why don’t we dispense with the vestments and hymns and even communion and just help Habitat for Humanity build houses for the poor? But that’s not quite right, either.

One of my colleagues during the India trip made a striking observation when he noted that all the religions we encountered – Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christians – used beads in some way. He was right; the Catholic rosary is only one example of the use of beads, but Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Sikhs also use beads as a way of focusing the mind and heart in prayer and meditation.

However, I think there is something more significant about the use of beads. I think their significance is that they are tangible, something that can be touched.

Unlike the angels, humans are not pure spirit. We are a compound, an alloy. We are amphibious. We are part spirit, part matter. We live in both the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh. We need something tangible to anchor our spiritual lives, and the beads that Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Roman Catholics hold in their hands are signs of this.

At the heart of the Christian faith is the belief that in Jesus of Nazareth God became tangible. In Jesus, God became something we can touch and see and taste and smell and hear. And every Sunday Christ becomes tangible again as we bless and break and share the bread and wine that he gave his disciples so long ago.

Anglicans are right to “worship God in the beauty of holiness.” Isaiah does notn condemn ritual per se; he condemns ritual that is divorced from justice. He condemns our worship only if it serves to make us forget the oppressed, the widow, and the orphan. We need ritual because we are human and we need the sights and sounds of worship to awaken, encourage, and inspire us once again to “do justice and love mercy”. We need worship to remind us that the God who became tangible in Jesus of Nazareth makes common cause with the oppressed, the widow, and the orphan, and when we touch those whom the world despises, we are touching Christ himself.

Namaste!

2010-08-01T07:13:00.001-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church. Aug. 1, 2010.

Thank you for the incredible opportunity to visit India. I know that Ryland and Mary took good care of you while I was away, but I could not have been away so long with your patience and understanding, and I am grateful.

Late in his life, Mark Twain undertook a round the world lecture tour that included several weeks in India. He described India in these words: “…the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence… of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history…”

I think, though, he underestimated the number of gods and goddesses. According to our guides, India has anywhere from 30 million to 300 million deities.

I read that the letters in the word “India” stand for “I’ll never do it again.” I suspect that a great many Western tourists feel that way when they arrive. But I also suspect that a lot of people change their minds after they have spent some time there.

To one degree or another, I imagine many of you are asking the question, Why did I go to India and Bangladesh? And what did I learn there?

First, let me tell you why I did NOT know go to India and Bangladesh and what I did NOT do there.

I did not go to India and Bangladesh because I believe that all religions are the same and all spiritual paths lead to the same place. Both statements are manifestly untrue.

On the contrary, religions are unique expressions of the universal quest for meaning, to make sense of life, to find God or whatever name you give to ultimate reality.

And there are as many spiritual paths as there are people on earth. Most spiritual paths are good and wholesome; some are not.

I also did not go to India and Bangladesh because I believe that we should try to convert people of other faiths to our faith. Make no mistake: I believe that Christianity is unique. I believe that God is fully and perfectly revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

But Jesus no where tells us to convert people. Instead, he tells us to teach and make disciples and to baptize. Those are things that do not happen in a moment. They happen over a long period of time. You have to win someone’s confidence as they come to know you as a person of faith and integrity. And it is only when you have done that that you can begin to share the Christian faith with them and they can begin to find out if they want to be a Christian.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey once said that there is a difference between proselytization and proclamation. Christians are called to proclaim the good news of God in Christ, not to proselytize. Proselytizing reduces the other person to an object, a statistic and is often manipulative. But proclaiming the good news respects the other person, and proclaiming is less about words and more about deeds.

We have an obligation to proclaim the good news, not to proselytize people of other faiths.

So why did I go to Bangladesh and India and what did I learn there?

First, I went because we are living in a small world that is becoming smaller.

One of the pastors on our trip told us that his ten year old granddaughter who attends a school in Huntsville has three friends who are Hindu and will no longer eat “cow.” If not now, then soon, most of us will know someone – a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, and perhaps even an in-law – who is Muslim. And it is entirely likely that we may also know someone who is Hindu or Buddhist. That is demographically inevitable.

What is not demographically inevitable is that we will reach out to people of other faiths in love and understanding unless we have prepared ourselves in advance with some knowledge of their faith.

We did not have to go to India and Bangladesh to get to know about the Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh faiths. We could have learned all about them by reading books, by taking classes, and by meeting and talking with Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs in this country. But we all know that there is a huge difference between knowing about something or someone and really knowing that thing or that person.

When someone new moves into the neighborhood, what do you do? Do you wait for them to come and knock on your door and invite you over for dinner? Sometimes that happens. But more often than not (especially in the South) we walk across the street or next door with a loaf of bread or an apple pie and say, “Hi, I’m Barry, I’m Ann, I’m Ryland, I’m Mary… welcome to the neighborhood. Where are you from?”

My fellow clergy and I crossed the global street. We knocked on the doors of Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists and told them that we wanted to get to know them, to hear their story, to find out how they prayed, learn how they experienced God, and we also told them a little of our own story.

And we took them a gift. We took with us ten copies of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. It was my idea. It seemed appropriate not only because Lee is an Alabama novelist and this year is the 50^th anniversary of the novel’s publication but also because of the book’s message of tolerance and understanding and respect and the obligation to confront prejudice and ignorance and bigotry.

On our first Sunday in Bangladesh we spent more than an hour with the director of the state-supported Islamic Foundation and members of his staff. My impression of them is that they are not terribly well-educated apart from their knowledge of the Quran and Islamic traditions. But they were willing to give us their time, to share their views with us, and to listen to us. They also repeatedly insisted that any Muslim leader in Bangladesh who advocates violence will be removed from his position. And we were talking with the people who had the power to make this happen because the Islamic Foundation in Dhaka trains all the clergy for all the mosques in that country.

We all signed a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and gave it to the director, and he seemed genuinely touched. So I hope that in years to come the director of the Islamic Foundation in Bangladesh will remember that a group of American religious leaders came to listen and talk with him and gave him a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

All across Bangladesh and northern India we met and talked with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs, and we asked most of them, “How do you experience God?” And they gave us different answers. Some answers we could understand and made sense to us; some did not make sense to us. Some times the differences of language and culture made it hard to understand. Sometimes the gap between their religion and ours was just too wide to cross.

Although I believe that no two religions are alike and not all spiritual paths go to the same place, we asked them about their experience of God because we also believe that there is wisdom in all the great spiritual systems and that God can be sought and found by any person.

Here’s an illustration: In Calcutta we went to the Mother House of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. While there we met and talked with Sister Gertrude, the second nun that Mother Teresa recruited. Two Hindu men were serving as our guides in Calcutta and I watched them closely and noticed that their faces were truly glowing as they listened to Sister Gertrude talk about Mother Teresa.

Something similar happened in Delhi. Our guide there was a Muslim named Ali. Ali took us to the house where Gandhi was living at the time of his assassination in 1948. Ali told the story of Gandhi’s struggle to lead India to independence and then his efforts to end the terrible violence that followed the partition of India into separate Hindu and Muslim states. Then he told us of Gandhi’s death. As he did so, it became clear to me that even though Ali was a Muslim, he regarded Gandhi as not just a political leader but also as a holy man.

What I learned from those experiences is that there can be a kind of holiness in any person, regardless of religion, who devotes his or her life to prayer and service. And that people of all religions are capable of recognizing and responding to that holiness.

But the most important thing I learned in Bangladesh and India has to do with the Christian faith.

On our second day in Bangladesh Archbishoph Joseph Marino, a Birmingham native who serves as the Vatican nuncio or ambassador to that country took us out into the Diocese of Mymensingh in the jungle north of Dhaka. We saw two schools run by the Catholic church . The first one was quite large. At least a couple of hundred students gathered in a field to greet us, applauding us as we walked into an open sided hall. They gave us flowers, and danced, and sang.

Afterward, we went even farther into the jungle to a small school. But there they also gave us flowers and danced and sang.

The majority of students in these schools are Muslims, not Christians, but the Muslims respect the Christians and their faith. They have reason to respect the Christians because the Christians have built schools that educate Muslim and Christian alike. The Christians help provide health care and build houses. And above all the Muslims respect the Christians because the Christians respect the Muslims and do not try to convert them.

I learned that a lot can be accomplished with a very small investment. It costs these students no more than $7 a month to attend these schools. Teachers receive only about $200 a month.

These schools educate the people who are going to lead Bangladesh. The prime minister herself is a Muslim but attended a Christian school, and she has a deep respect for the Catholic church. When Archbishop Marino was going to Rome, she said to him, “Ask the pope to give me his blessing.” And when she went to Rome, she requested and received a private audience with the pope, and there is a photograph of the prime minister’s meeting with the pope in Abp Marino’s living room.

What I learned in Bangladesh is that we can change the world with the application of a little energy and a little money and we are doing it in Bangladesh but we are not doing it in enough places. The United States is a great country, full of generous people, and we are more than willing to lend our military aid to countries that are at risk. These are all good things. But as a percentage of our GDP, the U.S. gives less foreign aid to the developing world than any other country. We can do more and we can do better.

I want people of other faiths to know Christians because of their commitment to education and health care and support of human rights. I want them to respect us because we respect them. And I believe that by doing these things we can transform the world.

I want to conclude with the traditional Indian greeting that can mean either hello or good bye. Shailesh, our guide in Banares was a Brahmin priest, and he taught it to us.

First, you join your hands palm to palm; then raise them to your forehead; and then lower them to your heart. One hand represents me and the other represents you. It is a way of saying, “I have you in my head and my heart.” While doing this, one says, “Namaste”, which means, “I honor the divine light within you.”

We went to Bangladesh and India to say namaste, to tell the people we met that we have them in our heads and our hearts and that we honor the light that is in them, whether they are Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or Jews or Christian. We made no judgements about who has more or less of this divine light, because that is not a judgment for mere mortals to make; that is a judgment for God to make.

Namaste!

India-Bangladesh #9

2010-07-26T22:34:00.005-05:00

One final India story (and in a way the most annoying). At passport control in Delhi the official gave my passport an odd look, said something to me, and tapped a line on the stamp I received in Dhaka. Eventually I understood that I was supposed to have registered at the Indian Foreign Office within 14 days of arriving in Calcutta. I pointed out that I was leaving within the 14 day grace period, so I assumed that I did not need to register. The passport guy said, "But you did not register, so you may not leave." I started getting worried. He asked another official to come over who confirmed what he'd said and who reassured me that I just had to drop by the Indian Foreign Ministry and poke my head in the door. Apparently, they just wanted to make sure that I was having a good time and have me fill out a customer satisfaction survey about my time in India.

I never did fully understand why I needed to register. I've always thought that you only need to register if you're going to stay for a long period of time in a country. I had to register with the British Foreign Office when I was a grad student in the UK and occasionally I would write the Foreign Minister letters that said, "Hi! Remember me? I'm still working on that damn PhD."

My registration in India seems to have had something to do with getting permission to re-enter India. In other words, they were not going to let me leave because I had not properly requested permission to re-enter India. So if I missed my flight, went to the Foreign Office the next day and properly registered, then I could leave India and return as often as I liked. The only problem would be that, of course, I would have missed my flight home and would be stuck in India and would lose my job and would become a ward of the state and a drain on the national budget and would eventually bring down the Indian economy. Alternatively, I could get a job as a "chai walla" (tea boy) with the Indian railway or a post card vendor in Benares and become responsible and economically productive, at least until I got hit by a van full of tourists being driven by a maniacal and incompetent driver and was condemned in my next incarnation to be a passport control officer at the Delhi airport as a way of making atonement for all my bad karma.

Eventually, I explained all this to the passport guy at the airport. Well, maybe I didn't explain it exactly the way I've told it here but I did manage to convince him that although it defied the imagination I had no desire to return to India. Two weeks or dust and dirt and marginal accommodations and dodgy food and undrinkable water and bathrooms that were unbearably filthy and flies... everywhere flies and traffice that was designed to deal with India's over-population problem and so on. So giving me a deeply suspicious look, ht epassport guy reluectantly stamped my passport, closed it, gave it back to me, and said, "Thank you, Mr. Vaughn. I hope you had a good time in India."

The strange thing is that I realy did have a good time in India. The place exerts a mysterious fascination. At first, India gives you a violent punch in hte gut with its heat, humidity and monsoon rains, dirt, flies, poverty, and so on. But once you get past that, once you accept India on its own terms, instead of imposing your own expectations, then India comes alive and spaces open up. It will always be frustrating and challenging because that's its nature. In several years, I think, I would like to return (if the Foreign Office will let me). Although I would like to do stuff a little differently: No over nights on trains (unless absolutely necessary). I want to see more of British India and South India. But I have become a reluctant and conflicted fan of this enormous, beautiful, appalling and incredible place we know as India.

India-Bangladesh pilgrimage #8

2010-07-25T07:48:00.003-05:00

Today is my last day in India. I skipped the sightseeing this morning to pack and get ready to leave. A.B. Sutton of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church and I took a taxi around 1.30 to join the rest of the group for lunch.

After lunch we toured New Delhi, the city that the British built when they moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi early in the 20th c. This appears to be the most western city in India. The British built a beautiful capital city of grand buildings and wide avenues.

Our first stop, however, was at the house in which Gandhi lived for the last 4 months of his life. Gandhi envisioned a united India in which Hindus, Muslims, and those of other faiths would live together peacefully, but as in all political movements there were disagreements. The other three leaders of the Indian National Congress - Nehru, Jinnah, and Patel - all aspired to be India's first prime minister. Jinnah, a secular Muslim, and Nehru, a Hindu, made a deal with the British for the partition of India into separate Muslim and Hindu states immediately before independence in 1947. Thus Pakistan and India were created out of what had been a single country.

Partition of the country into separate Muslim and Hindu states sparked terrible violence. In an attempt to stop the violence Gandhi came to Delhi to appeal for calm. He was given a house by Birla, a prominent Indian industrialist. Independence and partition occurred in August 1947. On January 30, 1948, at 5 pm, Gandhi, supported by two grandnieces, walked into the garden of the Birla residence to lead a prayer meeting. As Gandhi raised his joined hands for the traditional India greeting of "Namaste", a young Hindu man rushed forward, knocked one of Gandhi's grandnieces to the ground, and fired 3 bullets into Gandhi's body. About 15 minutes later, the Mahatma was dead. His last words were "Lord Rama."

The house and garden where Gandhi was killed are kept as a museum and shrine. There is no doubt in my mind that Gandhi was a remarkable man who consistently preached and practiced nonviolence. My favorite part of the museum was a cartoon showing Gandhi speaking to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying, "The funny thing about these assassins is that they think they actually killed us."

After seeing the Gandhi museum we drove to the site of the Indian parliament and presidential residence. The president's residence was built by the British viceroy Lord Curzon in the early 20th c. and is enormous and imposing. It may be as much as ten times as big as the White House. In front and on either side of the presidential residence are two administrative buildings that are equally imposing. The current president of India is a woman, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, who is a Hindu. However, her vice president is a Muslim man; India's prime minister is a Sikh man; and the president of the congress is a Christian woman. Amazing India...

The final site was the India Gate. Like Paris' Arche de Triomphe, the India Gate is a war memorial. In 1914 Gandhi made a personal appeal to Indians to fight on behalf of Great Britain in WW1 and almost 1 million Indians volunteered. There were almost as many Indians fighting for Britain as from Britain's 4 "white dominions" (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa) combined. The India Gate commemorates 90,000 Indians who died fighting for Britain.

I leave for Amsterdam tonight and then for Atlanta tomorrow. It's been an amazing journey and in a few days I will share some general thoughts about my experience of India.

India-Bangladesh pilgrimage #7

2010-07-24T22:48:00.004-05:00

Our hotel in McLeodganj had a restaurant on the roof. The second morning I was there I sat outside in the sunshine, drinking tea, and looking down into the valley. McLeodganj is about 6000 ft above sea level, and everywhere there are spectacular views.

Our second day started with a bang... literally. As we were driving into Dharamsala, our driver tried to pass a bus on a curve. As we rounded the bus we slammed head on into another bus coming our way. Fortunately, our vehicle and the one we hit were going very slowly. We suffered only a few cuts and bruises.

Palden, our guide, got us 2 taxis and we continued. Our first stop was a Tibetan cultural center. It was one of the loveliest places we've visited in India. The grounds are beautifully manicured, flowers were everywhere. We crossed a bridge over a koi pond going up to the temple. While there we watched Tibetan artists painting traditional Tibetan Buddhist icons, doing needlework, and making furniture. The temple featured a status of the Buddha as the "warrior monk" and it felt like a really prayerful place. Before we left we had a really good lunch in the cafeteria.

After lunch we visited the temple or monastery of the 17th Karmapa lama. He is the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. Along with about 100 people we sat cross legged on the floor until the Karmapa lama and other monks entered. Then one by one we went forward to receive his blessing.

The next day our two taxis took us from McLeodganj to Amritsar. I think we were all a bit nervous as the taxis descended the mountain on narrow and windy roads. Also, it rained heavily at intervals. But about 6 hours later we arrived in Amritsar.

Amritsar is the holiest city in the Sikh faith because it is the home of the Golden Temple. Our hotel was located just around the corner from the temple. It sits in the middle of a large compound with other buildings on the four sides. In the cener is the "pool of immortality" and in the center of the pool is the temple itself. Its walls are stone but they are covered with gold and it's a brilliant sight in the day and even more brilliant at night when the light reflects in the water.

Sikhism is a synthesis of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam and began in the 16th c. Today there are about 20 million Sikhs, mostly in India, and it may be the 6th or 7th largest religion in the world. The goal of Sikhism is to eliminate the 4 evils: ego, greed, anger, lust, and attachment. The central ritual of the Sikh faith is reading from the scriptures written by their gurus. The Sikh holy book is kept in the center of the temple. From 4 am to 10.15 pm every day it is open and there is constant singing of its texts. We were able to look down upon the book and the musicians from a gallery in the temple. There were 2 singers, each playing a "lap accordion" and a drummer who was drumming extremely complex patterns. Just before the book was closed and put away for the night, the music changed. It became louder and everybody began singing along. Then a portable throne was brought in, the book was packed up, and with great ceremony it was put away until 4 am the next day.

Also in Amritsar we saw the site of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh. Gandhi had called for a national day of purification but the British interpreted this to be a national strike. A British general fired on peaceful protestors in Amritsar, killing hundreds and injuring over a thousand. It was one of the most significant events leading up to independence in 1947.

Later that day we drove 30 km to the Pakistani border and watched as Indian and Pakistan troops changed the guard and lowered their flags. Then we were off to the train for our last overnight train journey. The train left Amritsar right on time and arrived in Delhi only a little later than scheduled. After transferring to our hotel and resting a bit we went out to see the Jama Masjid mosque (the largest in India) and to have lunch at Karim's, a famous Muslim-oriented restaurant near the south gate of the mosque. Our guide in Delhi, Ali, ordered for us and the food was delicious (even though I afterward learned that I was eating goat).

The highlight of our first day in Delhi for me was a visit to the site of Gandhi's cremation. It is a national shrine and like all holy places in India one is required to remove one's shoes. I removed my shoes but not my socks and afterward regretted it. There is something different in these holy places when one feels the cold marble or sun-warmed stone or earth beneath one's feet. One feels a deep connection with the place and also feels strangely vulnerable and exposed.

India/Bangladesh #6

2010-07-20T08:42:00.004-05:00

A little more about Sarnath and Buddhism: Another piece of sculpture in the museum at Sarnath is the earliest known depiction of Buddha. Dating from the 3rd century AD, it depicts Buddha seated with his eyes half closed and the index fingers of his hands intertwined. Our guide Shailesh said that one interpretation of the hands is that the Buddha was untying a knot that represents the dilemma of suffering.

Later that day Shailesh took us out on the Ganges in a small boat. He told us that there are 100,000 shrines or temples to Shiva in Varanasi. That was believable as we were rowed past at least a dozen just on the banks of the river. Less easy to comprehend is the Hindu practice of cremating bodies atop wooden funeral pyres along the banks of the Ganges. We saw at least a dozen such pyres. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that.

As the sun set we were given small cups made of a single leaf of a tree with a candle in the center. As Shailesh said a prayer in the ancient language of Sanskrit, we lit the candles and set candle and flowers adrift on the river. The glow of the candles reflected in the water as the sun set was enchanting. Shailesh told us that all Hindu prayers include the following petitions: "May all beings be happy; may all beings be free from fear; may all beings look upon one another with eyes of love. And if pain still remains in the world, may it come to me."

After our sunset cruise, we walked to a restaurant overlooking the river and watched as young Brahmin priests made offerings to "Mother Ganga." I have to say that it was a beautiful ceremony. Their movements were like ballet. First, they rang bells as they turned in circles to summon the gods from all corners of the world. Next they waved lighted sticks of incense to cleanse themselves. Then they offered flowers and finally they offered fire.

Reflecting on our time in Varanasi and Calcutta, I realized that Western Christians believe that worship must be quiet, solemn, sober, and interior. But that is not the way most humans at most times have worshiped. For most people in most times, worship is about saying the right words and performing the correct rituals. It seems noisy, chaotic, and far from worshipful to us, but not to them. More about this later...

The next day we took another overnight train. Our first overnight on a train had been 1rst class; this one was 2nd class (but it was the best we could get). I have to admit that I did not enjoy it, but we did get to Agra only about 2 hours late.

Agra was the seat of the Mughals (Mongols) who ruled India from the early 16th century until defeated by the British in the 19th century. It is better known as the site of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jehan as a tomb for his favorite wife, Mumtaj. Taj Mahal means "palace of Taj". It was completed in 1639.

The Taj Mahal is rightly regarded as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It is made of brick but every surface is covered with white marble. From a distance it looks weightless and seems to float above the ground.

However, more interesting and appealing to me is the Red Fort across the river from the Taj Mahal from which Shah Jehan ruled. It was also the seat of Akbar who ruled the Mughul empire from 1556 to 1605, approximately the same dates that Elizabeth I ruled England (1658-1603). In fact, Elizabeth wrote Akbar a letter in which she said, "We have heard of your humanity..." Akbar (a Muslim) was noted for his toleration of other faiths.

We had one other 2nd class overnight train trip: from Agra to a station near Dharamsala. However, it was exactly on time leaving and arriving. From the train station we had a 3 hour van ride up into the mountains to the village of McLeodganj, near Dharamsala. The main road was closed for repairs, so we took a secondary road that was never wider than 1 1/2 lanes and often narrower. McLeodganj dates from the British period and its name means "McLeod's place". I wonder who McLeod was!?

Dharamsala is the headquarters of the Dalai Lama, who is both the spiritual head of the Tibetan branch of Buddhism and the head of the Tibetan government in exile. The Chinese communists initially promised him and his people autonomy but installed their own government in 1960, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to India.

McLeodganj is filled with Western tourists and the commerce they attract: restaurants, hotels, coffee bars, and internet cafes (in one of which I'm typing this). Every coffee shop seems to have WiFi. The streets are no more than 15 ft wide and cars go by at regular intervals, offering careless pedestrians the chance to learn about the cycle of death and rebirth first hand. As in other Indian towns, cattle wander freely, depositing their offerings wherever they please. The pedestrians who avoid the cycle of death and rebirth are likely to participate in the blessings bestowed by the sacred animal of the Hindu faith.

India/Bangladesh pilgrimage #5

2010-07-20T04:52:00.003-05:00

We were booked on the over night train from Calcutta to Varanasi (Benares) but the train was several hours later departing and arrived 22 hours later than scheduled. Our guide, Nagendra, assured us that this rarely happens.

The villages between Calcutta and Varanasi are primitive. Except for electric lines and people talking on cell phones, there's not much evidence that this is the 21st century. In the more developed towns the railway stations are covered and a few more enterprising Indians put out boxes covered with cloth on which they offer water, sweets, and other things. The women walk by in saris and the men with heavy sacks of flour and rice on their heads.

Warren Hastings, the British Governor General of India from 1773, greatly admired Indian civilization and commissioned a translation of the Bhagavidgita, a Hindu holy book. In the preface he wrote, "Every instance which brings the Indians' real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teachus to estimate themby the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings, and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance."

Our first stop after checking into our hotel in Varanasi was to drive out of the city to Sarnath, the birthplace of Buddha and site of his first sermon. The story of Buddha's life is fairly well known. Born around 550 BC to a noble family, he was known as Prince Siddhartha. After a sheltered childhood, he began to inquire about the suffering he saw and decided to become a monk. After years of meditation, Siddhartha received "enlightenment" and became known as the Buddha (the enlightened one). He taught that the central problem of human life is suffering and that suffering is caused by attachment to things that are temporal and finite. The path to enlightenment, Buddha taught, is to release our grasp upon the things that cause suffering.

Sarnath contains a small but impressive museum of antiquities. It houses the top of a pillar that dates from the 3rd century BC erected by Prince Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, to mark Buddha's birthplace. The top of the pillar or capital consists of 4 lions, facing the 4 directions. The lions symbolize Buddha who was (according to Hindu thought) a member of the "warrior" or lion caste ("shakya") and is sometimes known as Shakyamuni (the lion or warrior monk). Although it no longer exists, the pillar also supported a 32 spoke wheel. The 32 spokes symbolized the 32 characteristics of an incarnation of the god Vishnu, because Buddha was believed to be such an incarnation. The spokes also symbolized the Buddha's Four Noble Truths times the Eight Fold Path to enlightenment. Although India is a predominantly Hindu nation, the state of India adopted the 4 lions of Ashoka's pillar as its official symbol.

Across the street from the musum is an archeological site containing the ruins of "stupas" or shrines, commemorating the birthplace of Buddha and site of his first sermon.

India/Bangladesh pilgrimage #4

2010-07-17T03:50:00.005-05:00

Tuesday the group went to Dhaka Univ and to a mosque, but I spent the day with the ass't nuncio, Msgr Mark Kadima, a Kenyan priest. There was a problem with my visa that I had to straighten out with the Indian embassy in order to return to India. It was an enjoyable day because I got to see more of Dhaka at the street level. Mark took me with him to do some shopping and he also found a little shop where they repaired my watch for about 25 cents. (Unfortunately, I promptly broke it again.)

In the afternoon we met with a group of Sufi Muslims. Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that is very accepting of other faiths. The Sufis believe that God is in all of us. It is also said to be the predominant form of Islam in India.

Abp Marino had us all to dinner again that evening. Other guests included Father Francesco, a missionary in Bangladesh who is very involved with the Sufis. Francesco is from Milan and trained as a pulmonary surgeon before entering the priesthood. Another guest was Brother Guillaume, a member of the Protestant Taize community. A Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin d'Hingan, who is in charge of a mission to lepers, sat across from me. I was seated between Abp Marino and Chairmaine Mendes, the wife of Neo Mendes, a business man in Dhaka.

After dinner Abp Marino thanked us for coming. Then I toasted him for his hospitality. I quoted Methodist theologian Albert Outler, an official observer at the Second Vatican Council. Outler said that if Pope John XXIII had lived a couple of years longer, he and the other observers would have been singing the "Te Deum." I said that if we could spend a few more days with Abp Marino, many in our party would have been singing the "Angelus." But Rabbi Jonathan Miller made the most moving comment. He said that one of the prayers in the Sabbath liturgy thanks God for "giving life to those who lie in the dust," and he said that that was what he had seen the archbishop and the Catholic Church do for the people of Bangladesh -- give life to those who lie in the dust.

Afterward, the archbishop gave us lovely gifts: a medallian commemorating the election of Benedict XVI, a rosary blessed by the pontiff, and a book about Bangladesh.

We got back to the hotel between 10 and 11 but had to be on our way the next morning by 4.45 am to make our flight to Calcutta. As it was, the flight was delayed by several hours, but we were met in Calcutta by representatives of our tour company who took us to the hotel. After lunch we toured the Victoria Museum, an enormous Victorian building that chronicle British rule in India and is a monument to the Queen Empress of India. Anup was our guide our entire time in Calcutta and seemed very pro-British. He said that families still aspire for their children to go to Britain for their education. The British succeeded, he said, because they made an effort to understand Indian culture and accepted it.

After the Victoria Monument we went to the "mother house" of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. I can't convey how moving that experience was. Mother Teresa's very simple tomb is in a chapel on the ground floor. One floor above it is her room. It contains a small bed, chair, and table. We talked at length with Sister Gertrude, the second nun that Mother Teresa recruited. She was delightful. She had been one of Mother Teresa's students at the Sisters of Loreto school before she founded the Missionaries of Charity. After becoming a nun, Sister Gertrude also trained as a physician and took care of Mother Teresa during her illnesses and was with her when she died. However, the most moving part of that visit was watching the faces of Anup and our other guide, Nagendra. Although both are Hindus, they hung on every word Sr Gertrude said and their faces glowed as they listened. It is abundantly clear that Mother Teresa is just as much a saint to the Hindus as to Catholics and other Christians.

Mother Teresa said, "There is only one God and He is God to all; therefore it is important that everyone is seen as equal before God. I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, a Catholic become a better Catholic." She also said, "The fruit of silence is prayer; the fruit of prayer is faith; the fruit of faith is love; the fruit of love is service; the fruit of service is peace."

In the evening I went with Steve Jones, the pastor of Southside Baptist Church, to a mall for dinner with Subir, an Indian pastor who operates an outreach to street children. He and his staff take them from the street and the garbage dumps each morning, give them a bath, teach them, and offer them the chance to learn about the Christian faith.

The next morning we left the hotel around 8 am. Our first stop was Calcutta's enormous flower market. There must be at least 100 stalls selling thousands of flowers. The reason for the market is that flowers are among the principal things offered to the Hindu gods/goddesses and certain flowers are sacred to certain gods. Every home and work place has a shrine to a god that always has fresh flowers in front of it.

Our next stop was the old synagogue. For hundreds of years there was a substantial Jewish population in Calcutta and there were 4 synagogues. Now almost all the Jews have left and the synagogue no longer has services. It is a beautiful building, however, that looks very much like a church on the outside. Inside it has box pews as you would see in an 18th century Anglican church. The thing I liked best, though, was a plaque outside the door commemorating a member of the synagogue who flew with the RAF in WW2, was killed over France, and is buried in France.

Afterward we went to the Sri Ramakrishnan monastery. To get there we took a boat across the Ganges. Along the way we were able to get a good view of Calcutta. The monastery is a deeply prayerful place. The main part of it is a meditation hall that is about the size of St. Alban's. The floor has no seating; people just sit and meditate wherever they wish. Ramakrishnan was a Hindu holy man who taught the unity of all religions. His disciple, Swami Vivekenanda, visited the US and spoke at the Chicago Congress of World Religions in 1893. They founded the Vedanta Society, an outreach to the US.

Near the monastery is a huge temple to Kali, the mother goddess. It is as chaotic, noisy, and unprayerful as the monastery is quiet and meditative. Nevertheless, the Indians seem to prefer the temple. It was thronged with people seeking to offer Kali gifts. It seemed to me that this must have been the kind of thing that St. Paul saw when he visited Athens and saw the temple to the "unknown god."

After lunch we visited a Jain temple and we finished the day with a visit to artisans who make larger than life statues of the gods that are used in festivals.

I am writing this in Varanasi (also known as Benares), the holiest of Hindu holy cities. But more about that latter. You might want to know, however, that I'm writing from an open air internet cafe with no air conditioning just around the corner from our very nice hotel and located on a street that is not much better than a dirt road. The contrasts in this country are jaw dropping...

India/Bangladesh pilgrimage #3

2010-07-12T22:55:00.005-05:00

Archbishop Marino, the Vatican nuncio or ambassador, entertained us at dinner our first and second nights in Dhaka. The other guests with us the first night included a Kenyan priest, Mark, who is the assistant nuncio and who was previously in Ghana. There were also 2 Bangladeshi priests, James, who teaches at Holy Cross College (we would call it a high school) and Emmanuel, academic dean at the Catholic seminary.

In Bangladesh, a Muslim country, Friday (the Muslim holy day) and Sat are holidays, and Sun is a work day. Sun morning began with mass at 7.30 am. The US ambassador, Jim Moriarty, and his wife, Lauren, regularly attend mass, and we got to meet them briefly.

Our first stop was Holy Cross College. Apparently, it's one of the best schools in Dhaka, and there were many families waiting there to try to get their sons admitted. We met the principal who told us that the school is mostly Muslim. He also said that fees for a student are only about $7 US and that a teacher's salary is about $2000 per year.

We then made stops at the cathedral, a parish church, and the hospice run by mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. The hospice was quite moving. It's as primitive as possible. There's no air conditioning, just 3 to 4 wards with multiple beds. One ward contains children with severe birth defects.

In the late afternoon we went to the Islamic Foundation, a government-supported institution that trains all the imams (clergy) for the mosques in the country. The director and staff emphatically told us that Islam is a peaceful religion and those who engage in terrorism are not Muslims. When it was founded Bangladesh was officially secular. A subsequent government made Islam the official religion, although the constitution explicitly states that all persons are to be allowed to practice their faith freely. From what I've seen, religious freedom is a reality in Bangladesh. There is considerable interaction among religious leaders and there appears to be no hostility.

In the evening we were again at the nunciature for dinner. The guest of honor was Mohammed Zamir, a member of the Bangladeshi cabinet and former ambassador. Zamir was fascinating. He speaks several languages and has published 13 books, including a book on the teachings of Islam. He is also a published poet. Zamir represents the progressive wing of Islam and a fatwa (religious decree) of death was issued against him for his writings. Nevertheless, he often travels without his bodyguard. He told us that he makes his bodyguards nervous. "What will happen if there's an attempt on your life?" one asked him. He replied, "Well, I may be dead; you will lose your job; but the world will go on."

Monday morning we left at 7.30 am to visit the Diocese of Myminsingh in the countryside. Bishop Puna of Mymeesingh traveled with us. One of our first stops was at a school where the entire student body of at least 100 students was lined up in rows to welcome us. They also sang and danced and presented us with flowers. We went even further into the jungle to visit another school. When we arrived, the priest told us that they had already had 163 snake bites there this year. Such encouragement!

We also met 3 students from the Univ of Notre Dame who are volunteering at the schools for a couple of months. They are part of an organization at UND that supports the schools by staging boxing matches. This year alone they raised $100,000.

India/Bangladesh Pilgrimage #2

2010-07-10T03:36:00.005-05:00

My hotel in Mumbai had a beautiful restaurant on the 18th floor. The restaurant faced southwest and you could just see the harbor in the distance. It's monsoon season and from sundown to sunrise the rain lashed at the glass at a ferocious rate. The food was at least as good as the view; they had buffets at both breakfast and dinner with a variety of Asian and Western foods.

The second day I was in Mumbai I walked across the street to a mall where there was a large food court that included a McDonald's. Someone told me that in India the McDonaldses offered a good vegetarian burger (in a country where the cow is sacred, you can't have a regular hamburger), so I had to try it. They were right. By the way, the McDonalds was located between Subway and KFC. Do you think we can teach our minimum wage employees to speak Hindi as well as those in India speak English?

Across from the food court was a a bookstore. It had several shelves of fiction and a small history section but the largest section appeared to be business and management. India's economic future seems promising.

The India rupee is worth only a little more than the Italian lira, so you end up with a pile of change. The exhange rate is about 45Rs per dollar. I'm carrying my wallet and passport around with me in a "fanny pack." All things considered, this seems to be a good idea but it also feels as though there's a flashing neon sign over my fanny pack, saying "Look! Here's Barry's money and passport!"

Security is amazingly tight at the airport and hotel. Both have barricades in front of them to prevent attacks involving vehicles. To entern the hotel one has to pass through a metal detector and send one's belongings through an x-ray machine.

I am now in Dhaka, having flown here at 8 am this morning. I left the hotel at 6.15 am and rode thru relatively empty streets to the airport. However, I got a better sense of the poverty and overcrowding than on my way in. From the hotel to the airport the streets are lined with the most primitive dwellings. Frankly, such poverty is terrifying to me.

At the airport I met up with 3 more members of my group who flew in from the US last night: Ed Hurley, pastor of South Highlands Presbyterian, Ray Dunmyer, pastor of St. Thomas' Catholic Church in Montevallo, and Bob Hurst, pastor of United Church in Huntsville. Archbishop Joseph Marino, a Birmingham native who is papal nuncio in Dhaka, met us at the airport, facilitated our passage thru customs, and had his driver take us to our hotel. We will see the rest of our party tonight at dinner at the archbishop's residence.

First report from India/Bangladesh pilgrimage

2010-07-08T04:12:00.004-05:00

Heathrow Airport. Wed., July 7, 2010.

Time is starting to slip away. I left Atlanta Hartsfield last night at 11 pm, flew about 8 hours to London Heathrow and arrived around noon GMT. I had an 8 hour layover in London and now it is almost 8 pm. I'm waiting for a 9.25 pm departure on Jet Airways. Then I fly about 8 hours to Mumbai where it is 10 hours later. Imagine the "word problem" in math class: "If Barry wants to go to India and flies thru London, what time will it be when he has dinner 2 days later?"

After arriving at Heathrow I slept for 3-4 hours at a little hotel in the airport. My room was about the size of one of my walk-in closets but was clean and comfortable. I also had a shower. It cost 37 pounds and was worth every pence.

It feels great being back in the UK. I really miss it. I always think about moving here permanently when I visit. I think one thing that holds me back is the fact that Britons no longer dream and dare really big things (eg, the Indian railway system which they built in the 19th century). I think WW1 knocked the wind out of them and they've never quite recovered (although they rallied admirably in WW2). Americans are still capable of big things (eg, the moon missions) and the world today needs bold and determined dreamers.

Last night I felt rather melancholy as I waited for my flight in Atlanta. I realized that I am reluctant to do things that frighten me. I would like to re-capture some of the "derring do" I had 20-30 years ago.

I enjoyed watching the other people in the Heathrow departure lounge. They are the Empire in microcosm. When I sat down there were a young man and young woman sitting behind me speaking a language I did not recognize. However he was clearly "chatting up" the young lady. You don't need to know the language to know what he was saying! To my left was a group of young English "lads." They were dressed somewhat roughly but their accents gave them away. They were not from East London (Cockney) or Liverpool/Leeds (think "The Full Monty"). Instead, their accents were Home Counties (around London) or Cotswolds. They were just slumming.

My flight to Mumbai was aboard Jet Airways, an Indian airline. The plane was beautiful and the service was impeccable. It's the way flying used to be. I greeted the flight attendant at the door of the plane with the traditional Sanskrit greeting "Namaste" (roughly, "I honor the light within you"). She flashed me a bright smile and responded with the traditional gesture - bowing with hands joined in front of her heart. I slept for 3-4 hours during the 8 hour flight and was awakened by a child's piercing shriek. There were several children in my area of the plane and most were well-behaved but there was one child who wailed constantly. He or she would have made Linda Blair's character in "The Exorcist" look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

I arrived in Mumbai (Chatrapati Shivaji International, to be exact). It appears to be a work in progress. In fact, it seems to have been in progress for about 25 years, judging from the age of some of its incomplete sections. As I rode in a taxi to the Mumbai Westin I thought that India appears to be everything I've always heard it to be -- poor, crowded, beautiful, and complex. Two very poor people - one very young and one very old - asked for money as the taxi stopped at lights. I did as I had been told and ignored them but it was painful.

More soon...

We hold these truths...

2010-07-04T07:06:00.003-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Birmingham, Alabama. July 4, 2010.

“We hold these truths to be self evident…” They are not the first words of the Declaration of Independence, but they are perhaps the best known. The truths that Jefferson thought to be self evident, of course, were that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Between the 18^th century and the present there has been a great reversal. In 1776 it was “self evident” to virtually everyone that there was a Creator, but the idea that political and civil rights were innate to human nature was a novel idea, far from universal, and even considered dangerous by many. Today most countries at least pay lip service to the idea of human rights, but the idea that there is a Creator is far less “self evident” than it was in Jefferson’s day.

Although “we hold these truths” may be the best known words of the Declaration, it is the words of the final sentence that always move me close to the point of tears: “… for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

“…our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” They were solemn words then, and they are solemn words now. But in 1776 they were more than just words. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Adams, and the rest of the signers committed high treason when they voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence on this day in 1776 and signed it in the days following. Their votes and their signatures made them rebels against the greatest military power of the 18^th century, and there was every reason to expect that they would fail and that Britain would prevail in the war that was certain to come.

But they succeeded and in succeeding they transformed themselves. On July 4, 1776, they were rebels against their rightful sovereign, George III, but when Adams and Franklin signed the Treaty of Paris in 1784 they became patriots, no longer subjects of a crown but citizens of a new republic – the United States of America.

The words “patriot” and “patriotism” are troublesome. They are troublesome for Christians because we have divided loyalties. On the one hand, in his letter to the Romans Paul tells us to be subject to the “governing authorities” because they have been “instituted by God.” On the other hand, the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that we are citizens of a “better country”, a “heavenly” one, a city “whose architect and builder is God.”

One of the reasons that “patriot” and “patriotism” are troublesome is that some confuse the United States and this “heavenly city” of which the Letter to the Hebrews speaks. From the beginning of our history some have believed that America has a divine mission. John Winthrop implied as much in his sermon to the Massachusetts Bay pilgrims in 1630 when he said, “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us.” In the 19^th century the idea that the U.S. had a special, divine mission became the idea of “manifest destiny” and was used to justify some terrible injustices, such as the mass resettlement of Native Americans or sometimes even their massacre. But that is not what Winthrop intended. For him, God’s blessing upon America was conditional. We shall be that “city upon a hill,” he said, if we “delight in each other; make each other's conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together…” But if we do not do those things, Winthrop said, then we will be “a story and a by word” throughout the world.

I think no one understood this better than President Abraham Lincoln. On the eve of his inauguration in 1861 Lincoln referred to the United States as God’s “almost chosen people.” I think the “almost” refers back to Winthrop’s idea that God’s blessing upon America is conditional, and in 1861 no one knew better than Lincoln that one of the conditions was the elimination of slavery.

“Patriot” and “patriotism” may be troublesome, but I believe they are good words, and I consider myself to be a patriot. Patriotism is out of favor with many on the left and with many within the Episcopal Church, in particular, because it can be easily abused. To many, patriotism implies an uncritical support of their country. It implies a kind of idolatry that puts country in place of God. But it need not be so.

I believe that the New Testament advocates a sober and clear-eyed patriotism. In other words, we have an obligation to support our country and its elected officials, even though we know that it is provisional and finite, and that our ultimate loyalty is to the Kingdom of God.

The American experiment is unique, not perfect. One of the things that makes the American experiment unique is our capacity for change, development, and self-criticism. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he not only meant men, not women, he also meant white men who owned a certain amount of property. But Jefferson’s words took on a life of their own. “Men” became “men and women;” “white” became “black and white;” and “property” became “rich and poor.” And our understanding of those words is still evolving.

At its best, the United States aspires to be a “city upon a hill”, but we are an earthly realm, beautiful but flawed and imperfect. Or in the words that Wellesley College professor Katherine Lee Bates wrote:

America! America!

God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

But my patriotism is even better expressed by Abraham Lincoln’s friend, Carl Schurz, a Union general during the Civil War and later a U.S. Senator. Schurz said, “I trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

Babel or Jerusalem?

2010-05-24T09:44:00.001-05:00

I have to admit that I think I would have liked Babel. In my mind’s eye I see a combination of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Babel is a city of architectural marvels. It has the tallest sky scrapers, the greatest museums. Its orchestras and musicians play in the finest concert halls. It even has spacious and reverent cathedrals that soar upward, filled with prayer, chant and incense..

The problem with Babel is that it is a destination. Once you have come to Babel, there is no point in going anywhere else. Its people are proud and complacent. They have the finest of everything and not only do they know it, they let everyone else know it, too. To live in Babel is to have arrived.

Jerusalem, on the other hand, is different. Jerusalem is a little shabby. Its buildings are a collection of different styles, different materials. One building may be part gothic, part Romanesque, and then when they ran out of money, they just completed it with plain, unadorned concrete blocks. Jerusalem’s streets are narrow and the streets are not well maintained and you can’t get anywhere without making a dozen turns and asking directions at least five times.

But Jerusalem has a sense of excitement and adventure that Babel lacks, because Jerusalem is not a destination; it is an embarkation point, a launching pad. Jerusalem is where one goes to be equipped for mission.

The most arresting phrase in the story about Babel is “Let us make a name for ourselves.” In the Old Testament in general and in Genesis in particular, to name is to control, to master. God names each part of creation as God creates it: “God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night… God called the dome Sky and the dry land he called Earth…” And above all God named the first human being – Adam.

But the people of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. In other words, they wanted to control themselves, their lives, their own destinies. But this is not an option, and the older we get, the more we understand that we are not the masters of our fate and the captains of our destinies.

Our only choice is to cooperate with God and become a part of God’s story, a part of the city that God is building, or to resist God. Babel was a city that defied God. They not only wanted to make a name for themselves, to be in charge of their lives, they wanted to build a tower that touched heaven. In other words, they wanted to be God’s equals. But that is not an option. God is God and we are not. Babel’s ambition is the essence of sin – to move God out of the center and take God’s place.

What does all this have to do with St. Alban’s? First, note that St. Alban’s is located at the end of a dead end street. That’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because people do not drive by and see us and say, “That looks like a nice church. I think I’ll visit it some Sunday.” It is also unfortunate because of the symbolism. It suggests that St. Alban’s is a little like Babel, that we too, are a destination rather than a launching pad, that we are less like Jerusalem and more Babel.

But sometimes the Spirit breaks through. The Spirit broke through to the disciples on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit came as fire and wind to a bunch of dispirited and disillusioned disciples. Jesus had left them. He had gone away to his Father in heaven. What were they to do? Their Lord and master had gone and the authorities were seeking to do to them what they had done to Jesus. And then in the midst of their pity party, the fire of the Spirit descended upon them.

And that is what is happening to us, I believe. Last Christmas it is EXACTLY what happened, when, in the midst of the Christmas Eve service, George swung the thurible and it hit the altar rail and hot coals flew out all over the carpet. George, you thought that was an accident, but I believe it was the Holy Spirit!

In the great scheme of things, burning a few holes in the carpet was no big deal. But the coals that escaped from the thurible did more than burn holes in the carpet. They began to ignite our imaginations. What if we replaced the carpet? What if we painted the church? What if we made those renovations that we’ve been talking about for years? What if we put in new windows?

And so we have. The carpet is gone. The paint on the walls makes the building look bigger, brighter, and more welcoming. And it is no accident that we now have windows that open outward. They open to let the Spirit in and to let the good news of the gospel out.

The Spirit is also at work among us as we reach out to our sisters and brothers in Haiti and at home. We are becoming known in the diocese as a small church with a big heart for outreach.

It is a lot easier to live in Babel. As I said at the beginning, I think I would have liked Babel. It is a beautiful city and has everything in it to delight the mind and the senses. But there is something missing – a sense of adventure, a purpose.

We are not meant to live in Babel. We are meant to come to Jerusalem so that we may be sent out proclaiming the gospel in every language.”Every language” means not only French and Yoruba and Mandarin. It means the language of the school teacher, the dialect of the accountant, the accents of the insurance agent and the banker. Each of us speaks a different language. Try to find a way to proclaim the gospel in the language that you speak, whether you are a doctor, a lawyer, or an Indian chief. And if you have trouble proclaiming the gospel in your language, ask the Spirit for help. Because when the Spirit gets hold of you and sets your heart on fire, there’s no telling what you will say or where you will end up.

Righteousness and justice are the foundations of God's throne

2010-05-17T09:49:00.001-05:00

“The LORD is king; let the earth rejoice; let the multitudes of the isles be glad.”

When we say Psalm 97, the words pass through our brains ever so briefly and then are launched into the air from our tongues, and we do not even pause to think about them. But if we did pause, we might be astonished by them. We might even be somewhat reluctant to say them. For Psalm 97 makes several staggering claims.

The first claim is that the LORD is king. The Psalmist is not making the unexceptional and not especially interesting claim that a Supreme Being rules the universe. This was a claim that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, and other Deists would have been comfortable making. The Deists believed it was self-evident that the world was created by a wise and rational Almighty Lawgiver. But this is not a claim that is as easy for us to make as it was for them.

At the beginning of the 21^st century we have learned that the universe is far more mysterious and far less rational than Jefferson, Franklin, and Locke believed. Darwin taught us that creation took place over millions of years, not seven days, and in some sense is still taking place. According to Darwin the creation of a single species required the extinction of millions of earlier versions of that species that could not compete successfully in the struggle for food and reproduction. Astronomers have taught us that the universe is not a cozy little group of planets and satellites with our sun burning brightly in the center but rather it is a dizzying array of galaxies that exploded from the Big Bang and are speeding off into the void and will one day either slow and cool down to absolute zero or will fall backwards into a mass so dense that light itself will not be able to escape from it. Marx and Freud taught us that we are not even the masters of our own motives and minds but rather are swayed unconsciously by our economic needs and by irrational impulses.

So I am glad that when the Psalmist said “the LORD is king”, he was not saying what the Deists said. Rather, the Psalmist said, “Yahweh is king”, Israel’s very own covenant God was king. And this was an astonishing claim. It was astonishing because Israel was one of the smallest kingdoms in the ancient near east. Israel’s neighbors all had their own gods and goddesses and they generally believed that their own gods exercised their powers within their countries’ borders. The people of the ancient world believed in tribal gods, not cosmic gods. Even the mighty Persians and Egyptians believed that their gods’ powers were confined to the lands that their people ruled.

But this is not the only remarkable thing that the Psalmist said. The Psalmist went on to say that “righteousness and justice are the foundations of Yahweh’s throne”. To get a sense of why this is an amazing claim, think of what the Psalmist might have written. He could have said, Strength and power are the foundation of Yahweh’s throne. He could said that Yahweh’s kingdom is based on domination and force. But instead he said “righteousness and justice are the foundations of Yahweh’s throne.”

It was not an easy claim to make in the ancient world and it is not an easy claim to make today. To the ancient Jews righteousness and justice meant far more than simply adhering to an arbitrary collection of rules. To be righteous and just was to live in harmony with one’s neighbors. A just community was one in which the elderly and orphans were cared for; it was one in which even the stranger from another land was treated with kindness and respect. The righteous person was one who cared not only for her family but also for the neighbor she did not know and who had no claim on her kindness. And the Psalmist makes the startling claim that we are to order our lives in this way because these are the very foundations of the world: “Yahweh is king… righteousness and justice are the foundations of his throne.”

Israel’s God was not a God to approach lightly. Yahweh is a God shrouded in mystery (“clouds and darkness are round about him”); the earth fears the lightning bolts that he hurls from the heavens; and even the mountains “melt like wax” at his presence. Righteousness and justice may be the foundations of his throne but Yahweh “burns up” his enemies.

But Israel is called to rejoice in this fearsome Deity. “Zion hears and his glad and the cities of Judah rejoice” but they are invited to rejoice precisely because Yahweh is a God of righteousness and justice. It is those who are just for whom light springs up and those who are “truehearted” who are joyful and glad.

We need to hear the good news of Psalm 97 because we live in a world which seems to be anything but righteous and just.

Not only have we learned that the physical world is not the orderly Deist universe that Franklin and Jefferson believed in, we have also learned that the moral universe is also chaotic.

The international banking crisis showed us that some bankers were gambling with the money entrusted with them as though they were members of an Elks’ lodge on a junket to Las Vegas.

The oil spewing into the Gulf shows us that the company entrusted with bringing the oil safely to shore and preserving the integrity of the environment lobbied heavily against putting safeguards into place that might have prevented the spill.

The debt crisis in Greece makes it seem as though the government of that country was paying its bills with high interest credit cards and giving no thought to how they would pay back the credit card companies. Now their irresponsibility threatens to shake the already shaky international banking system.

All three of these crises show us a failure to exercise oversight by those charged with the responsibility of regulating and warning.

They also show us our own failings: Our belief that property prices would always go up and never go down; that the stock market would go up for ever; that we could overconsume oil and other limited resources and never have to face the consequences.

We failed to remember that the foundations of Yahweh’s world are righteousness and justice. We forgot that God expects us to exercise wise stewardship of his world, that we are called to be prudent and frugal in using the resources, including financial resources that God has given us. And in many cases we forgot that success and wealth also impose great responsibility, the responsibility to be as righteous and just as Yahweh is – to care for those who have less, who have been pass by and passed over, who are weak and vulnerable.

We have worshiped the false gods of riches and power and (as the Psalmist says) we have been confounded.

It is time for us to turn back to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah; to turn back to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is time for us to listen and watch for the coming of Israel’s God and to sign and rejoice, to hear and be glad for the coming of this God who judges rightly.

And it is time for us to pray that God will once again establish the world upon righteousness and justice.

The Great Experiment - Easter 2010 (April 4, 2010)

2010-04-06T18:23:00.000-05:00

The Great Experiment

J. Barry Vaughn. Easter 2010 (April 3, 2010). St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL.

The great physicist Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity by conducting what he called a “thought experiment.” Instead of going to a laboratory and firing up the Bunsen burner or measuring the velocity of electrons, he simply imagined what would happen to two clocks. One would be on a train that could travel at the speed of light and the other would remain stationary. OK, then, that’s about all I know about Einstein and the theory of relativity. But I like the idea of thought experiments, so let’s conduct a theological thought experiment.

Imagine a world without Easter. In the first book of the Narnia chronicles – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis tells us that Narnia is under the spell of an evil and powerful witch who has decreed that it will always be winter and never Christmas. But instead let’s imagine that it is always Lent and never Easter or simply that there is no Easter because, after all, Lent implies an Easter at the end of forty days.

What would such a world look like?

First, the New Testament would be entirely different. If we removed Christmas from the NT, we would lose only 2 or 3 chapters at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. There are no other references to the birth of Jesus. But if we remove Easter, then we lose the ending of all four gospels; we lose most of Paul’s letters because it seems as though almost every other sentence in Paul refers to the resurrection or at least presupposes it; and we lose much of the rest of the NT because on almost every page is an idea, a fact, a concept that makes no sense without the resurrection. The gospels make absolutely no sense without the resurrection. Take the resurrection out of the gospels and what do we have? We have some lovely parables; some pretty exciting miracles (hard to beat that one with the loaves and fishes); some truly impressive moral teaching; and several other very nice things. But Buddhism also has some great parables; Islam tells us of miracles performed by the prophet Muhammad; and every other moral and religious system in the world has a set of moral teachings that is probably 80% identical to the things that Jesus said.

In other words, without the resurrection, without Easter, the question we have to ask about the New Testament, in general, and the Gospels, in particular, is . . . so what? Why pay any special attention to Jesus of Nazareth? He was an inspiring speaker; he showed remarkable compassion; he may even have worked miracles; but he was not significantly different from half a dozen other spiritual, moral, or religious figures.

Second, let’s take Easter or resurrection out of history. If we take the resurrection out of history, then we suddenly lose our bearings. In the west, the resurrection is the great starting point. Our calendars begin with the life of Jesus (as I’ve already implied) not because of his parables or miracles but because he died and rose again. The resurrection of Jesus completely re-oriented life. In the Roman world, Sunday was not a day of rest; it was the first day of the work week, but the resurrection of Jesus transformed a working day into a joyous festival.

Third, take the resurrection out of the equation and there is no satisfactory explanation for the rise of the Christian church. By the end of the first century the Christian faith had spread as far west as the British isles; as far south as Ethiopia; and as far east as India. Why and how did this happen? What energized the followers of Jesus to risk their lives to take their message to the ends of the earth? What was it about the message they proclaimed caught the imaginations of people as diverse as the peoples of Britain, Ethiopia, and India? Well, let’s go back to our thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Paul and the other Christian missionaries of the first century had told their listeners the story of a Jesus who had taught people the story of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and had healed the sick and even multiplied the loaves and fishes and then had been betrayed and arrested and tried and condemned and executed and then… well, that was pretty much it. What a … well… sad and dull and somewhat tedious little story.

But that is not the story they shared in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and took to the ends of the earth. Instead, they told about the parables and miracles and the suffering and crucifixion but what made the story different and caught the imagination of their hearers was the absolutely staggering ending: Jesus did not stay in the tomb; he rose again on the third day.

Let’s take the thought experiment one step further. What difference would it make if we acted as though the resurrection was real? I ask this question because I’m convinced that most of us think and act as though there was no Easter.

We’re great about giving up martinis and Marlboros for Lent but when Easter has come and gone, it’s pretty much business as usual.

What if instead of thinking of Easter as the end of Lent, we thought of it as the beginning of the most exciting part of the year? What if instead of giving up something for Lent, we took up things for Easter? What if we lived as if Jesus really did rise again on the third day?

Easter makes a difference, the resurrection makes a difference, because it reveals God’s plan for creation. It’s like turning to the back of the book and finding the answers or seeing how the story ends. It tells us that death does not have the last word. It tells us that God longs to gather human life in all its flesh and blood and messiness into the divine life and that there is future for flesh and blood beyond death and decay.

How might the world be different, how might we be different, if we took the resurrection seriously? The resurrection of Jesus is the story of a man unjustly condemned to death who is vindicated by God by being raised to new life. What does that imply for us? It implies that we belong on the side of those who have been unjustly and unfairly treated by political and economic systems – the unemployed, the uninsured, the unjustly imprisoned. The story of the resurrection is the ultimate miracle of healing. All healing is a way of pushing back death. The story of Easter tells us that part of our job as Christians is to bring wholeness to a world of fragmentation and death; to bring hope to the depressed and despondent; to seek out the lonely and unloved.

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, and former professor of New Testament at Oxford, has wonderful parable about the resurrection of Jesus. Imagine that a wealthy patron of the arts has given a magnificent painting to a church. The congregation is grateful but their church is small and there really isn’t a good place in it for the painting. They try hanging it behind the altar but it’s too tall. They try putting it in the narthex but there isn’t enough light there. They put it in the parish hall but the heat and humidity might damage the painting. Finally, they come to the conclusion that to accommodate the painting they will have to tear down their church and build a new one.

That is what the resurrection implies. We have tried to modify the story of the resurrection to make ourselves comfortable, to accommodate the injustices of our economic and political systems. We have tried to tame the story of Easter to fit our belief in a world in which there are no surprises, no miracles, and in which dead men certainly do not rise again. But the resurrection will not be trimmed or modified.

In the Easter story we have been given a thing both surpassingly beautiful and uncommonly strange, so beautiful and strange that it does not fit into our world. We live in a world of death and decay but Easter speaks to us of a world in which death is destroyed, the world is renewed, and we can be born again to lives full of joy and wonder. But this news sounds too good to be true. We have been disappointed too many times, and as the poet says, we are “half in love with easeful death.”

Our natural reaction is to find ways to take away the beauty and strangeness of Jesus’ resurrection but instead we should ask, “How does this strange and beautiful thing change us and change our world?” That’s when the real work begins. That’s when we start to rebuild ourselves and our world in the image of the resurrection.

The Lord's Prayer 2: Hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...

2010-02-28T09:05:00.003-06:00

Hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it. We call Oct. 31 Halloween because it is the eve of All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day. The saints are the hallowed ones, that is, the holy ones. So, hallowed means holy. Hallowed be thy name means may your name be holy. But that just begs the question, what is holiness?

If hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it, then holy has a somewhat negative connotation. We generally associate holiness with morality. A holy person is surely a person of unimpeachable morals, and generally, we define holiness in negative terms – a holy person is one who doesn’t lie, cheat, steal, carouse, and so on.

However, I think an old gospel song has something to teach us about what it means to be holy. Do you know the old gospel song, “Take time to be holy”?

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;

Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul,
Each thought and each motive beneath His control.
Thus led by His Spirit to fountains of love,
Thou soon shalt be fitted for service above.

What I gather from this old hymn is that holiness is a more positive than negative. It’s about what we do rather than what we do not do. Furthermore, it is not as much about morality as it is about having a close relationship with God.

So back to the Lord’s Prayer. What does it mean, then, to hallow God’s Name or to pray that God’s Name may be hallowed? First, we have to realize that in Judaism to speak of God’s Name is just a more reverent way of speaking of God. The rabbis frequently spoke of Ha Shem, that is, the Name, because to speak of God directly was regarded as irreverent or impertinent. So the prayer is really saying, May God be hallowed or holy.

But surely God is already holy. To pray “hallowed be your Name” seems as redundant as saying May earth be round or May fire be hot. So we have to ask, where and when is God’s Name not hallowed? Then the answer becomes obvious: God’s Name is not hallowed on earth.

On earth we hold many things as holy--success, fame, riches, sexual pleasure—but God is seldom on the list. We take time to watch too much TV, have an extra piece of cheese cake, sleep an extra hour in the morning, but we seldom take time to “speak oft with thy Lord; / Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word./ Make friends of God’s children, / help those who are weak…” and so on.

So to pray Hallowed be thy Name is to pray not that God would change but that we would change, that we would become people who will hallow God’s Name by our words and deeds and that our world would become the kind of place where God’s holiness would be acknowledged.

And that leads directly to the next two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The first phrase of the Lord’s Prayer already teaches us that there is a distance between where we are and where God is. God is in heaven; we are on earth. But the third phrase of the Lord’s Prayer—“your kingdom come”-- teaches us that God longs to collapse that distance, to bring heaven and earth together. But this petition is also one of the most subversive prayers we can pray.

In this petition we are acknowledging that our world is not as it should be. One of Jesus’ most outrageous statements was “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” Righteousness is that state of affairs when the hungry are fed, captives are freed, the widow and the orphan have an honored place, and we would welcome the homeless poor into our own homes.

This prayer is subversive because it exposes that fact that none of earth’s kingdoms is the kingdom of God. It is subversive because it teaches us to look for and long for the day when God will rule. Earthly kingdoms will come to an end and God will rule alone.

This is a subversive prayer because it reminds us that God does not single out any nation for a special blessing. In 1914 German soldiers marched to war with the phrase Gott mit uns (“God with us”) inscribed on their belt buckles.

When I hear “God bless America” or see it on a bumper sticker, I always mentally add “and God bless everyone else, too,” because righteousness is no more at home in America than anywhere else on earth. The poor, the hungry, and the homeless in our midst show us how far we are from God’s kingdom.

While there is much that we can and should do to make this world resemble God’s kingdom, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that in the end transforming this sad, old world into a place that welcomes its rightful Ruler is not so much our accomplishment as it is God’s gift. We pray, “THY kingdom come”. It is God who comes to us, God who bridges the gap, collapses the great distance between heaven and earth. In the parable of the prodigal son, the dissolute young man wakes up one day and realizes that he is in a “far country” and begins his journey back home. But when he comes within sight of his father, his father rushes out to meet him. And so it is with us. We are in a “far country” but even now the Father is rushing toward us with arms open wide in love.

Finally, we pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. In a sense, all three of the petitions we have considered today are saying the same thing. When God’s Name is truly hallowed, and God’s kingdom comes, then God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. But the final petition also touches us in the very center of our being.

We live in a world which exalts individual achievement. The athlete who wins the gold medal in the Olympics gets her picture on a box of Wheaties; the winning team in the World Series is invited to the Oval Office to meet the President; the candidate who fights his way through the primaries, wins his party’s nomination, and has the best sound bites gets to be the President. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that there is something more important than the single-minded pursuit of success and self-aggrandizement. “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that this petition echoes Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. In contemplating the terrible trial that awaited him, Jesus prayer, “:Not my will but thine be done.”

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” may be the most difficult phrase of the Lord’s Prayer for us to say, because we have no idea what God’s will might be. We can only pray this petition because of the second word of the Lord’s Prayer – Father. Jesus has already assured us that we are praying to a loving Parent, a Parent who wants the best for us. The problem is that although we think we know what’s best for us, the truth is that we do not really know. But God does. To pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to put our trust in the One to whom we pray.

C.S. Lewis said that in the end we can either say to God “Thy will be done” or God can say to us, “Very well, then, THY will be done.” Imagine the consequences of the latter: To prefer our own will to God’s will is to drive down a dark road without headlights, it is to set out into the wilderness without a map. But to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to trust that God loves us, that God knows the route that will take us safely through the wilderness, and that God has already made a way and prepared a place for us at the end.

“Hallowed be your Name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven…” These three phrases take us from heaven to earth; from the heavenly realm in which God’s will is done, to our world in which anything but God’s will is done, to the assurance that the day is coming when earth will resemble heaven and God will be at home among women and men. So we believe, so we pray, so we act. May it be so. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer 1: Our Father in Heaven

2010-02-23T22:20:00.003-06:00

According to Luke, Jesus’ disciples came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and Jesus replied, “When you pray, say, ‘Father’…” or as Matthew has it, “Pray then this way…” In either case, the Lord’s Prayer is (if you will) the principal text in Jesus’ school of prayer. Even if it were not presented to us as Jesus’ own teaching on how to pray, it would be well worth our time to pay careful attention to this prayer. It has been on the lips and in the hearts of Christians for 2000 years. Throughout that time it has been said innumerable times every day and in every human language. Along with “Now I lay me down to sleep…” and “God is great, God is good…” it is usually the first prayer that we learn as children. The Lord’s Prayer begins and ends in God’s heavenly kingdom: “Our Father in heaven…” and “the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.” But the route it takes away from and back to God’s presence runs through the very heart of human life. So I invite you to join me in sitting with the other disciples at the feet of Jesus to learn what he meant when he said, “Pray then this way, ‘Our Father…’”

Today I want to look at four lessons we learn from the Lord’s Prayer: First, prayer is a skill we need to learn. Secondly, all Christian prayer is corporate. Thirdly, the Lord’s prayer teaches us that God relates to us as a parent to children. And fourthly, that we can never go so far from God that he will be unable to hear our prayer.

“Pray then this way…” implies that we do not know how to pray. How could that be? Isn’t prayer a universal human impulse? Why did the disciples go to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray”? They were Jews, and at the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jewish faith was over a thousand years old. For over a thousand years the Jewish people had raised their hearts and hands to heaven and called upon the Almighty. Even if they had been Greeks or Romans, they would have known how to pray. All of the world’s religions have teachings and traditions about prayer. Doesn’t prayer rise spontaneously from a feeling of gratitude? I think that all of us have a natural desire to offer thanks for the good things that come to us unsought and unasked for – the startling red of a maple in autumn or the stranger who opens a door for us when our arms are loaded with groceries. Prayer seems not only natural but inevitable when disaster strikes – when a newborn’s fever grows higher and higher and nothing seems to bring it down, what parent in the world does not turn to prayer? When the crops fail, or the river overflows its banks, or there hasn’t been a drop of rain in months, is there anyone who does not at least yearn to believe that there is a God who will hear and answer our prayers? And especially at death, don’t we naturally turn to prayer to pray for peace for those who have departed this life?

Prayer appears to be a natural human response to both the good and the bad situations that inevitably accompany human life. And yet, whether we read Matthew or Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus seemed to think he needed to teach his disciples to pray.

Why do we need to know how to pray? The Lord’s Prayer itself is the answer. It is at once both simple enough for a child to learn and understand and also a deep vein of spiritual treasure from which the greatest of saints can mine inexhaustible riches. To be sure, prayer is a natural and universal human impulse and God hears all prayers. However, while our natural impulses are all God’s good gifts, they need to be shaped and trained. It is natural for a child to want to speak, but without hearing her parents talk to her, she will not advance beyond the oooohs and ahhs of infancy. Hunger is a natural impulse, but a child needs to be introduced slowly and gradually to healthy and nutritious food. And so it is with prayer. The spiritual life requires as much training as sports or music. The Lord’s Prayer is a set of exercises from which both the beginner and the advanced student can benefit.

The first word is the first lesson: “Our…” By nature our prayers are selfish and individualistic. We seek to get our own needs met. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are not isolated individuals but parts of a greater whole. As with the Nicene creed, so with the Lord’s Prayer, this is a text for the baptized. In the early church, those who were to be baptized at the Easter vigil were taught the Apostles’ creed and the Lord’s prayer either right before or immediately after baptism. Baptism makes us no longer an “I” but a “we” . “We believe…” “Our Father…”

Perhaps the greatest and most destructive mistake of the modern West is individualism. In contrast to human experience from the beginning of time, the women and men of the modern West believe themselves to be captains of their fate and masters of their destiny. But in John Donne’s words, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main....” This is even more true for Christians. Baptism makes us members of the body of Christ and participants in a fellowship that extends throughout time and space. There is no such thing as a solitary Christian, and there is never a Christian who prays alone. And this is the first thing the Lord’s Prayer teaches us. “Our Father…”

The second lesson is about the nature of God. Without a guide us it would be natural to think of God as remote, removed, indifferent, or perhaps even hostile. This seems to have been the belief of the Hellenistic religions. It was assumed as a matter of course that the gods were vindictive and vengeful and so sacrifices were offered to acquire their good will or to avert their anger. One did not have a parent/child relationship with the gods; at best it was more like master/slave. But the Jewish faith taught that God freely bound himself in love to his people in a covenant relationship that could not be destroyed. And Jesus opened the vision of God’s love even more and taught that the relationship that Israel had with God was the relationship that God desires to have with each of us. And this is expressed in the second word of the prayer: “Father”.

Before I go any further I have to acknowledge that “Father” is a problematic word. A few years ago a wit took a jab at our preoccupation with inclusive language:

How shall we sing the praise of Him

Who is no longer He?

Where shall we go to learn

The sex of Deity?

“Father” is problematic for many reasons. First, it implies that God is male or at least masculine. But feminists have taught us that masculine and feminine are cultural constructs. They are categories we impose on each other, but in no sense are they natural or universal. God is beyond our limited concept of what it means to be masculine or feminine. The great Catholic feminist Dorothy Day said that God’s love can be “harsh and dangerous”, but God’s love is also soft and yielding. Love makes God vulnerable. Isn’t that one of the main things we learn from crucifixion? Love took God the Son on a journey from heavenly glory to ignominious death on a cross, from the right of the Father to the right hand of a petty criminal. Harsh and dangerous are categories many of us associate with masculinity, but vulnerability is a quality often associated with the feminine. In a sense, addressing God as Father is a subtle way of undermining our assumptions about both the feminine and the masculine, because we see in God qualities associated with both genders. God is both yielding and resistant, both fierce and tender. We limit ourselves when we define masculine and feminine too narrowly, but God defies our limits and expectations.

However, the great problem of addressing God as Father is that it appears to bless a form of patriarchy. I think the way to deal with this is to acknowledge that it is true. While I believe that the Lord’s Prayer is a universal prayer that Christians always will and always should pray, it is also a product of a different time, place, and culture. The world out of which the Lord’s Prayer came privileged the masculine and could not conceive of God as other than Father. Jesus shared many of the assumptions of that world, but in his acceptance of women as his disciples, in his defiance of the conventions that kept women and men apart, and in his choice of women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection he helped lay the groundwork for the full empowerment of women, even though that took centuries and is not yet fully complete.

I sincerely believe that the day will come when someone will compose a prayer addressing God as Mother, a prayer that will catch our imaginations and move our hearts. Such a prayer will not supplant the Lord’s Prayer but it will balance it. But that day has not come yet. However, when we pray “your kingdom come” I believe we are praying for the day when women and men will share equally in God’s work and when we will perceive that all along God has been as much our Mother as our Father.

The last point I want to make to day is about how we locate God. The Lord’s Prayer addresses God in heaven. The third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer give people almost as much trouble as Father. To many “in heaven” implies that God is far away and not near, that God is out there instead of in here. Heaven is infinitely far away. How, we think, could a God who dwells in heaven be concerned with whether or not we find a job or our spouse’s emotional cruelty or the incessant phone calls from bill collectors? How, we wonder, could the high God of heaven bend his ears to hear not only our voices but even the silent prayers of our hearts? That is precisely the point. By teaching us to pray to our Father in heaven, Jesus is telling us that distance is not a factor with God. No matter where are and no matter where God is, God hears us. As Paul writes in Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, not even the distance between heaven and earth.

However, there is another message in the third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray to our Father in heaven is an acknowledgement that our world is not yet as it should be and we are not yet as we should be. We are not yet ready to welcome God’s rule. Our world is still a place of injustice and cruelty, of deceit and treachery. The Bible does promise that God will one day come to dwell among us, but that day has not yet come.

The Christian faith teaches us that God is both beyond us and within us, both transcendent and immanent. The Lord’s Prayer expresses the longing that God’s world and our world will one day be identical. But in this present time we must sadly acknowledge that that is not yet the case. While present with us by the power of the Holy Spirit, God does not yet dwell fully in our world.

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we discover that we are not alone, but rather God’s beloved daughters and sons who are invited into a relationship with their heavenly Father and with Christians in all times and all places and that that the deepest desires of our heart are heard in heavenly places. “Pray then this way…”

Two collections of my sermons are on Amazon.com

2010-01-27T08:54:00.003-06:00

Thanks to everyone who reads the sermons on my blog. I thought you might like to know that two collections of my sermons are available on Amazon.com. The first is entitled As One Unknown and the second is We Would See Jesus. Each one is $20.

As One Unknown

Table of contents

He comes to us

Introduction 7

Hymn tune: Bluff Park 9

On a day when men were numbered 13

What the wind said to the shepherds 19

In the beginning was the word 25

The toils, the conflicts, the sufferings

In a new light 35

Cleave the wood and I am there 41

Loaf bread and jug wine 49

Strong at the broken places 57

Worthily lamenting our sins 63

All washed up 69

One unknown

The bad news of Easter 77

An idle tale 83

But we had hoped… 91

A tall tale 95

Seeing Jesus again 99

Our own experience

Taking big steps 109

Enemies: A love story 117

Candles against the darkness 123

If the Lord is with us, Why? 129

Under the sign of the question mark 135

Between “Once upon a time”… 141

Nostalgia and remembrance 147

His fellowship

Saints and sinners 155

Has God rejected his people? 161

Outside agitator 169

A more excellent way 175

The Pharisee and the Prostitute 183

Weaving community 189

The impossible possibility 195

We Would See Jesus

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Invocation 11

Waiting for Jesus

Waiting for God 15

Remembering the future 19

Songs of exile 23

Let the skies pour down righteousness 27

New lamps for old 31

The kingdom of love 35

It’s good to be king! 39

Amid tears and great laughter 43

Seeing and hearing Jesus

We would see Jesus 49

Guess who’s coming to dinner? 53

Practice resurrection 57

Keeping secrets 61

The enduring word 65

Words, words, words 69

Named, not numbered 73

The sound of silence 77

The language of heaven 81

God is in the details 85

St. Paul’s Christmas story 87

Hearts and voices heavenward raise 91

Following Jesus

Dancing with God 97

Bread alone? 101

Errand into the wilderness 103

Carry-on baggage 107

Why is this night different? 111

The foolish farmer 115

Taking the plunge 119

Final Jeopardy 123

Mind your manners 127

Dr. King remembered 131

The view from Mt. Nebo 137

Other sermons

What does love taste like? 143

You are what you eat 147

O brave new world 151

Family values 155

The devil made me do it 161

Crossing boundaries 165

Life before and after the comma 169

Very good or very nice?

2010-01-24T20:36:00.001-06:00

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good.”

In the aftermath of the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti recently, we may want to question God’s judgment that the world he created is not only good but very good. Or we may want to question God: How can you create such a world and then declare it to be good?

Part of the problem lies with the word “good.” Being southerners we assume that “good” means “nice,” but that is not what God said.

We want a nice world but instead God gave us a good world. We want a world, a universe, created by Disney, an amusement park world. We want a world with manageable risks, a world in which we can have carefully managed adventures, a world over which God presides as a kind of benevolent, cosmic policeman or nanny. But God gave us a world in which there is real risk and real adventure, a world in which the stakes are high, a world in which our lives and eternal destinies are at risk.

Look around at this good world which God has given us. Think not only of “this fragile earth, our island home” but think cosmically. The universe began with an unimaginable act of violence – the Big Bang. The Big Bang hurled into motion a violent universe. Stars are born, grow old, and die long, protracted deaths, ending as black holes, dense balls of matter whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them.

Life on earth is no less violent. Most species do not survive the long evolutionary climb up from the primordial protein soup. God gave us a dangerous, violent, and beautiful world which is not nice but is good.

So in what sense can this world be said to be good? How can it be good if life for most creatures is “nasty, brutish, and short”?

In Genesis 1 God not only said that the world was good, God also charged us with stewardship of the world. A world that produces earthquakes and hurricanes plainly needs a great deal of stewardship.

Scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne said that God made the world so that the world makes itself, and a world that is always making itself is a dangerous, violent, and unstable place. The Haiti earthquake shows us how true this is. Our task of stewardship is to mitigate what happens when the world makes itself.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction.” We all know intuitively that creation often requires destruction. It took the deaths of thousands of young men in the Civil War to bring an end to American slavery. The price we paid for the fall of the Soviet Union was the creation of a more dangerous and unstable world. The renewal of our inner cities requires the destruction of blocks of slums.

However, our faith, our hope is that destruction yields creation, new life, resurrection. At the very heart of the Christian faith is a powerful symbol of death and destruction – the Cross. But it is a symbol of death that has become the symbol of ultimate hope.

I believe that God’s heart broke when the earthquake struck Haiti. But I also believe that God’s heart had been breaking for Haiti long before the earthquake. God’s heart was broken with Haiti’s poverty, disease, and corrupt government. And I believe that what really breaks God’s heart is our failure to be stewards of creation, our failure to care for and love our sisters and brothers in places such as Haiti.

Where was God, we wonder, when the earthquake struck Haiti or the planes struck the World Trade center or when Katrina hit New Orleans? It’s a fair question and God is a very big God and doesn’t mind our questions, even our angry questions. But the more important question, the question that should really matter to us is Where were we when the earthquake hit Haiti? And where had we been for decades before that when Haiti and its people were suffering?

May our prayer today and always be that our hearts will break when God’s heart breaks, that we will be stewards of this world that is good but not always nice, that we will be there for our sisters and brothers in Haiti and wherever suffering holds sway, and that from every terrible destructive event God will bring creation, new life, and resurrection.

When water becomes wine

2010-01-17T05:34:00.003-06:00

Today’s sermon is part 2 of the sermon I started last week. The thread that connects them is water. Life on earth is very wet. Now Dr. Vaughn will give a pop quiz. How much of the earth’s surface is covered with water? (This is the audience participation segment, so don’t be afraid to shout it out!) The answer: about 75%. And how much of the human body is water? About 60%.

Water is easy to define: it’s two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But what do we mean by “miracle”? Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? A miracle is supernatural intervention in the normal order of things. A miracle is when we pray for rain in the midst of drought and get a downpour. A miracle is when someone with an advanced case of cancer goes into remission and is still healthy years later. How do you define miracle?

Probably all of us have personal stories or stories that have been handed on to us of events that seem miraculous. But I’m equally certain that we have as many or more stories of times when miracles did NOT occur: prayers unanswered… cures that did not happen…

Skeptics can raise many objections to miracles. They rightly point out that the universe is a finely calibrated mechanism. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, no more, no less. I’m told that if water froze just one or two degrees above 32 Fahrenheit or boiled one or two degrees below 212 that life on earth would be impossible. Either earth would be a frozen wasteland or all the water on earth would boil away, and our world would look like Mars or the moon. How can God intervene in this system without creating havoc?

My point is that it’s easy to find arguments against miracles. But we’ve all had moments when the odds have been stacked against us and somehow the miracle occurred: the rain came, the cancer went into remission, the check really was in the mail.

Maybe there is another way to explain miracles that preserves the integrity of the natural world and also allows for divine intervention. Perhaps a miracle is not something that happens OUT there but something that happens IN here, inside us. A miracle is less a change in the world, an intervention in the natural order; a miracle may instead be a change in us. Perhaps the real miracle is when our eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us.

And that brings me back to Jesus and the wedding feast at the Episcopal Church in Cana. I know they were Episcopalians because they drank all the wine and asked for more! On the face of it, this appears to be a simple story. A wedding party ran out of wine; Jesus took six enormous clay pots of water and turned every drop of it into the finest wine. That’s a miracle by any definition.

But let’s change our perception just a bit. Isn’t water always turning into wine? Wine, like the surface of the earth and our bodies, is mostly water, and water is always becoming wine. It falls to earth as the rain in Napa or Sonoma counties in California or in the Burgundy region of France. The roots of the grape vines draw it up from deep in the earth, and it fills the clusters of grapes. The juice of the grapes is squeezed into vats and aged in barrels. Then it is decanted into bottles, shipped all over the world, and we buy it at Publix or the Pig. Water has become wine again, just as it has for thousands of years.

Is that a miracle? It can be a miracle when God opens our eyes to see it as one.

What I’m going to say next is especially for Ben and Vera whom we’re about to baptize. The rest of you may listen in but this part of my sermon is for our special guests.

Ben and Vera, in a moment I will take water, the very same water that covers much of earth’s surface, the same water that makes up 60% of our bodies, the same water in which Jesus was baptized, the water that becomes wine in the vineyards of California and France, the same water that he turned into wine at Cana, and I will pour a little of this water three times on your heads, and a miracle will take place.

I doubt that there will be any thunder or lightning; you are unlikely to feel or look different, but everything will be changed. In the water of baptism God claims you as his own forever; you became an inheritor of the kingdom of God; you will be numbered among the saints on earth. In baptism God makes a promise never to forsake you. You may forget your baptism; you not only may, you will break your baptismal promises. But God will never forget that you are his beloved son or daughter.

Today you begin a journey, a voyage across life’s sea. There is water all around you and within you. Water is a very good thing. We cannot live without it. But I think we need more than water; I think we also need wine.

There are moments when the water of life becomes wine, when life suddenly becomes intoxicating, when friendship blossoms into romance, when words are no longer enough and we simply must burst into song, when we stand on top of Shades Mountain and watch the colors of dawn or sunset transform it into a magical kingdom.

Ben and Vera, tomorrow is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew a thing or two about miracles. He watched as injustice was turned into justice and suffering was redeemed. He watched as power yielded to love.

Ben and Vera, my prayer for you is that there may be many moments when the water of your life becomes wine, when your eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. But I also pray that you will be a part of that transformation, that you will seek out those who are less fortunate – the hungry, the homeless, the sad and weary – and be a part of the transformation of this world into the kingdom of God.

To help you on your baptismal journey, I have several gifts I want to give you on behalf of St. Alban’s.

The first gift is this t shirt. In the early church, newly baptized persons wore white robes to symbolize their new lives in Christ. This t shirt will help remind you of what happened today. On the back it has the word “Christian” surrounded by several synonyms for Christian: saint, child of God, and so on… The second gift I have for you is a small container that I want you to fill with water from the baptismal font and take with you. Baptism is powerful. The story is told of the great German Reformer Martin Luther that once when the devil tempted him, Luther shouted at him, “Be gone, devil; I am baptized!” When temptation comes, remember that you are baptized.

And the third gift is a small cross. The cross may be the ultimate symbol of how God turns water into wine because the cross shows us that God can turn defeat into victory, darkness into light, and death into life eternal.

Welcome to St. Alban’s, Ben and Vera. And bon voyage!

Good advice or good news?

2009-11-12T01:23:00.001-06:00

William Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1911 to 1934 said, “The gospel is good news, not good advice… we can find no economic principles in the gospel.” I think Dean Inge was correct and today’s readings give us a great illustration of his observation.

The readings from First Kings, Psalm 146, and Mark all tell us about widows. The widows in First Kings and Mark literally give their entire life’s savings to what they believe to be good causes. Psalm 146 tells us that God sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.”

Let’s update the story of the widows in First Kings and Mark. Imagine that you are a priest and that a woman who is neither quite young any more nor very elderly comes to you for advice. She says, “God has told me to empty my bank account and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development.”

If you went to one of our Episcopal seminaries, then you had to take Counseling 101 and there you learned the technique of reflective listening, so you try that first, “So, I hear you saying that God has told you to give all your money to Episcopal Relief and Development?” Clever opening, huh? And she says, “Yes, that’s right.”

Then you decide that you need more information. “How much money do you have? What are your sources of income? What are your obligations?” She goes on to say that she is on disability and has a small monthly pension from the company her late husband worked for and has about $3000 in the bank. She pays $400 a month for an apartment that is subsidized for low income persons. And she has a son with medical problems whom she helps financially whenever she can.

Counseling 101 never prepared you for this.

Frankly, if she were my parishioner I would probably begin by telling her that God never tells us to undermine our economic well-being. God certainly never tells us to empty our bank accounts and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development or Green Springs’ Ministries or even to our parish church. I would tell her that God’s will for us is to be prudent about our financial needs; I would suggest that she talk to someone in the parish who can help her maximize her return on her money and perhaps help her find a better paying job. And I might suggest that she see a good therapist who could help her work through that business about hearing God tell her to give away all she has. After all, we’re Episcopalians and our God doesn’t do things like that.

But then there are those troublesome stories in the Bible. God sends the prophet Elijah to a woman and her child who are only one meal away from starvation and commands her to feed Elijah rather than herself and her child. Elijah reassures her, “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.” Jesus commends another woman for putting “every thing she had to live on” into the Temple treasury.

I have a feeling that Counseling 101 did not prepare me too well for dealing with someone whom God has told to empty their bank account. It certainly did not prepare me to deal with someone who takes Psalm 146 literally.

For the most part, I have put my trust in rulers and children of earth. I have believed and still believe that we live in a world that works pretty well most of the time. I believe that people who work hard and play by the rules will usually experience at least modest success; that our market-driven economy maximizes opportunities for most of us; that our political system provides a stable framework within which people can exercise initiative and reap great economic benefits. Then, a little over a year ago, the international banking system imploded. The pillars of finance, the giants of banking, began to topple. In other words, current events began to resemble the words of Psalm 146.

Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, *
for there is no help in them.

Every year at commencement Harvard University bestows honorary degrees upon a dozen or so men and women for their achievements in scholarship, business, politics and other fields. In 1996 Harvard honored philanthropist Walter Annenberg, the founder of TV Guide. It may only have been a coincidence that Annenberg had just given Harvard $25 million but be that as it may, it was probably more significant that Annenberg at that time held the record for money given to American institutions of higher education. However, immediately after honoring Annenberg, the university marshal said, “Mr. President, we have with us today another philanthropist…” The other philanthropist was Osceola McCarty, a black laundry woman from rural Mississippi who had given her entire life’s savings, some $300,000, to an historically black college to be used as scholarships for its students. Annenberg may have given more dollars to American universities but Osceola McCarty gave everything she had. “She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on…”

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying: It is probably not a good idea to empty your bank account and give it to any cause, however worthy, even St. Alban’s! But sometimes prudence and faithfulness are at odds. Sometimes we are called to make some wildly extravagant gesture, rather than to live our lives within the parameters of prudence. The gospel after all is not good advice, it is good news.

Jesus wept

2009-11-12T01:21:00.000-06:00

According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus visited Jerusalem only once as an adult, but John’s gospel tells us that he visited it at least three times. If John is correct, then the story of Lazarus makes a little more sense.

Bethany was a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Martha and Mary lived there with their brother Lazarus. It would have been a logical place for Jesus to stay during his visits to Jerusalem. Probably all of us have friends in large cities who have opened their homes to us when we have come to their towns, thus sparing us the expense and bother of staying in a hotel. Of course, in the time of Jesus there was no such thing as a hotel. To visiting Jerusalem or a similar city one had to have a friend who would open his or her home to you.

We know little about Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Luke’s gospel tells us that when Jesus visited Mary and Martha that Mary sat at his feet but Martha was busy with many things. What little we see of Mary and Martha in today’s gospel readings is consistent with that story.

At any rate, it is clear that the two sisters and their brother were friends of Jesus. So it is surprising that when Jesus hears that Lazarus is gravely ill that he hesitates rather than going at once to Bethany.

This is one of the mysteries of John’s gospel. Jesus has one idea of time; the people around him have another. For Jesus, time seems to go backward and forward; sometimes it speeds up, sometimes it slows down. When his mother tells him that there is no more wine for the wedding feast at Cana, he tells her that his time has not yet come. Present and future become one when he tells the Samaritan woman that the hour is coming and now is when all earthly places of worship will become redundant because God requires only that people worship him in spirit and in truth.

John’s portrait of Jesus also shows the early church struggling to make sense of the idea that Jesus was both fully human and fully one with God. Sometimes John’s Jesus seems to be an almost unearthly figure without human weaknesses and needs. When the disciples bring him food, he says that he does not need it because for him to do the work of God is food enough.

But the Jesus we see in the story of Lazarus is a fully human being.

At the very beginning of John’s gospel he tells us that Jesus is the very LOGOS of God who has taken human form. Logos means word, thought, reason. In other words, in Jesus the distance between God and humanity has collapsed. God’s inmost thoughts have taken on human flesh and dwell in the midst of us. At the beginning of John’s gospel, the author draws back the curtain and lets us in on the secret that others will discover during the course of the gospel as they see Jesus work miracles and finally be raised from the dead.

So if Jesus is the very thought, the very word of God, the word through which God spoke creation into existence, we expect miracles. Changing water into wine, giving sight to the blind, multiplying loaves and fishes – these should not cause any difficult for Jesus. Even raising Lazarus from the dead… But what we do not expect God’s incarnate word to do is to cry. This is the real miracle in today’s story. The raising of Lazarus from death to life is impressive but what moves me is that Jesus weeps, that there are tears at the very heart of God.

Today is All Saints’ Day. The saints, of course, are God’s elite. We know the saints because they are the ones who exhibit heroic sanctity. Like Mother Teresa they give their lives to serving the poorest of the poor; like Albert Schweitzer they spend their lives working in a tiny medical clinic in Africa while writing great books on theology and editing Bach’s organ works (actually, I think Schweitzer overdid it a bit). Like Martin Luther King, Jr. they risk and finally give their lives as they stand up for and speak out for dignity and justice for all.

This is all true as far as it goes, but I believe that the story of Lazarus tells us something else about real sanctity. Real sanctity, real holiness, also weeps. The saint is one who sheds tears over the death of a friend. The saint is one who shares her grief with others, and lets them share their grief with her.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said, “...I am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God shold hear us not; but He wold hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.”

Today’s reading from the book of Revelation tells us of a new heaven and a new earth in which death is no more. But it goes on to say that “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” We all long for a world in which death and sickness have disappeared, in which the hungry are fed and the homeless have shelter. I would change only one thing about this new heaven and new earth: Leave room for tears. I believe that real sanctity is to experience the whole range of human feelings from tears to laughter. That is what makes us human, that is what makes us holy. That is what draws us to one another and also draws us toward God.

You are what you eat (Proper 13B, Aug 9, 2009)

2009-08-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

I constantly hear stories about obesity in the US in particular and the developed world in general. Fast food and processed food bear a large share of the blame for that, plus the constant bombardment of commercials that urge us to eat to excess: We grew up with “umm ummm good”, “where’s the beef?” and “nothing says loving like something from the oven.” We are told that we live in a “consumer culture.” What an apt description! We are not told that we live in a culture of buying and selling, but a culture that consumes.

The obesity epidemic is nothing compared to the epidemic of overspending and overbuying. We have an appetite not only for food but for clothes, car, electronics goods, and for any number of other things called “consumer goods.” We don’t just purchase these things; they become a part of us and we feel deprived if we don’t have them or if they are taken away. Each thing we purchase or consume becomes a part of us.

“You are what you eat”. That famous quotation comes from 19^th c. German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was an atheist and his point was that human beings are nothing more than matter. Our bodies incorporate the food that we consume, but when we die and are reduced to our essential elements, we, in turn, become food for others.

But perhaps Feuerbach spoke more truth than he knew. Jesus also said that we are what we eat, but he offers us a different kind of food: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven . . . the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (v. 51). The heart of today’s Gospel reading is a contrast, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (v. 58). In other words, your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and died, but those who eat the bread that came down from heaven" will live forever. What is astonishing about this promise is not just the assurance of eternal life, but the fact that Jesus joins the promise of eternal life to the most mundane of human activities: eating.

I would like to look at both the promise “eternal life” and the means to achieve it -- eating the bread that came down from heaven.

First, the desire for life after death seems to be fundamental to human nature, The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume once said, "It is a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever," but I am not sure that many people agree with him. Indeed, in 21st century American culture, there seems to be an almost desperate need to believe that there is life after death. Suddenly there seems to be a half dozen TV shows that deal with the idea of life after death and the possibility of communicating with the dead.

Eternal life is not an “unreasonable fancy” — it is at the very heart of the Christian faith. To divorce eternal life from the Christian faith is to render the faith anemic and puny. In today’s gospel reading Jesus reminds us that “the living Father" (v. 57) sent him. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about life, both here and hereafter. To accept that death has the last word is to accept that Gods power is limited, but that is not what the Bible teaches. Jesus promises that he will raise “raise up” those who are nourished by his body

and blood.

It is just as true, however, that the Christian faith is about life BEFORE death, just as much as life AFTER death; life in the here and now, and not just life in the hereafter. Indeed, there is continuity between life in this world and life in the next. As priest and poet john Donne put it, " . . . all the way to heaven is heaven . . . [the] soul that goes to heaven meets heaven here . . . the true joy of a good soul in this world is the very joy of heaven . . . (Sermon LXVI in Herschel Baker, ed., The Later Renaissance in England, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1975, p. 561). The promise that eternal life belongs to those who eat and drink Christ’s body and blood grounds us in this world. The promise of eternal life is not annexed to some elaborate ritual; we are not askaed to bathe in a sacred river or to offer sacrifices or to repeat a magic formula. Instead, we are invited to a meal.

I imagine, however, some asking, can it be that simple? Can we really receive eternal life by eating and drinking at the Lords table? To answer that question, first, imagine how we come to the Lord’s Table. In the world of Jesus, bathing was relatively uncommon, but if one was invited to a dinner party one bathed and anointed oneself with oil. Similarly, before we come to the Lord’s Table, we are washed in the waters of baptism. Also, to sit down at table in first century Palestine implied that the guests were at peac e with the host and with one another. Jesus admonishes us to be reconciled with one another before offering our gift at the altar (Matthew 5.23-24).

The 16th century Protestant Reformers condemned the mass because the consecrated bread and wine had become isolated from the other parts of the liturgy; they had become ends in themselves. However, when we properly celebrate the sacrament of the Lords table, then we will have met Jesus all along the way. We will have been baptized into his death and resurrection; we will hear him speak in the voice of scripture; we will be reconciled with those against whom we have sinned; we will be nourished on his body and blood; and finally, we will hear him command us to go into the world to do his will.

The late second-century theologian, Irenaeus of Lyons, called the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table “the medicine of immortality.” Jesus did not employ the metaphor of medicine, but he did promise that if we are nourished on his body and blood, we will have eternal life.

Jesus wants us to live in a different kind of consumer culture. He wants us to create and live in and invite others into a culture that consumes the bread of life, in scripture, in prayer, in service to others, and in the sacrament of the altar.

The meal we share with believers on earth is the heavenly banquet in earthly guise. Saints and angels gather around whenever we set the table, whether the sacrament is celebrated with all the pomp and ceremony at St. Peter's in Rome or with loaf bread and jug wine at summer camp, because it is the earthly extension of the marriage feast of the Lamb. Come and take your place at the table. It’s time for dinner.

Too soon to tell - A sermon about the actions of the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church (July 26, 2008)

2009-07-26T15:09:00.001-05:00

J. Barry Vaughn. July 26, 2009. A sermon about the actions of the 76^th General Convention.

Probably a majority of us here today came to the Episcopal Church from some other church. When you came to the Episcopal Church the priest who prepared you for reception or confirmation more than likely taught you about Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker and the so-called “three legged stool” that he built. You were told that Anglicans believe that while scripture is first and foremost, the Bible must be interpreted by reason and tradition. Please don’t use the phrase – “three legged stool.” It does not come from Richard Hooker,;it distorts what Hooker said; and it is misleading. Hooker borrowed an image from the Bible’s Book of Proverbs and instead referred to scripture, tradition, and reason as “a three fold cord not easily broken.” I have a problem with that analogy, too, but that’s a topic for another sermon.

There is no doubt that Hooker was right. Like Anglicanism, the `Reformation also had three principles: grace alone, faith alone, and scripture alone, but scripture is never alone. It is paramount but it is never alone. Scripture is frequently ambiguous and must be interpreted in light of reason and tradition.

I think that Hooker’s “three fold cord” has another application. It is also a useful model for looking at Anglican history. The first phase of Anglican history was dominated by scripture. Anglicanism, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, is a product of the Reformation. We are one of the Reformed churches, along with the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and so on. The first great leaders of Anglicanism – Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, Richard Hooker, and so on – were men deeply steeped in scripture.

` But the Reformation principle of scripture alone proved unworkable. The Reformers substituted a paper pope – scripture – for the flesh and blood pope and it did not work. There must be some hermeneutic, some guide for interpreting scripture, and so the age of scripture was quickly followed by the age of reason. The age of reason gave us Jefferson and Franklin and the movement we know as Deism. Deists threw out everything they deemed incompatible with reason, such as miracles, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and so on, and tried to reduce religion to a few simple principles that could be derived from reason; There is a God; religion consists exclusively in ethical behavior; and there is an afterlife when the good will be rewarded and the evil will be punished. But while this is admirable, it is not Christianity.

So the age of reason gave way to the age of tradition. Finding Deism to be pretty thin gruel to nourish a spiritual life, 19^th century Anglicans turned back to the early church. They rediscovered the catholicity of Anglicanism. They insisted on the continuity between Anglican bishops and the bishops of the early and medieval church. They rediscovered the practices of the early church – confession, fasting, pilgrimages and so on. Above all they rediscovered the centrality of the eucharist.

Anglicanism has lived in the age of tradition for some time now but I am making a prediction. Please write this down because some day I may be famous for saying this: we may have already entered the fourth age of Anglicanism and I believe it will again be the age of scripture. The church of the developing world is a church of the Bible. And this is the coming church. The world you and I live in, the developed world, is rapidly being de-christianized. So the church of the developing world is coming here to re-evangelize us. Listen carefully to what I say next: A century from now the Episcopal Church you and I know will not exist or rather it will exist but it will be transformed and the transformation will be as complete as the change from caterpillar to butterfly. But I know one thing about the church that is to come: it will again be a church of the Bible.

Week before last in Anaheim the General Convention made two decisions that have occasioned a great deal of controversy. First, they lifted the moratorium on the election and consecration of gay and lesbian bishops. Second, they took very tentative steps toward developing a liturgy for blessing same gender couples.

Whether you think General Convention was right or wrong, please keep this in mind: the church is not a museum piece. It is not static. We are a pilgrim church, not a church of those who have already arrived. The church is dynamic, not static. We are always changing.

However, the church does consist of both fixed and variable elements. The difficult is knowing what things are fixed and what things are variable. The so-caled Serenity Prayer is very applicable to our situation: “Lord, help us to change the things we ought to change, to accept the things we cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference” And there’s the difficulty – having the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and should change and what we cannot and must not change.

I believe that certain things are fixed: scripture, the creeds, the sacraments, and so on. Consider this: After the Anaheim convention, not a word of scripture has been deleted; not a word of the creeds has been changed; the Ten Commandments are intact; Jesus still tells us to love God with all our being and our neighbor as ourselves.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great American preachers of the early 20^th century, used to say, “Astronomy changes but the eternal stars abide.”

When we began to ordain women to the offices of priest and bishop, many claimed that we had abandoned the faith, but theologian Paul Avis observed that the baptismal faith of the church was unaffected by the ordination of women. We still confessed that that we believed in God the Father, in his Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. This remained the faith of the church regardless of whether we ordained women or not.

I believe the same is true today. I know that some of you are deeply troubled by the decisions of General Convention. But please remember two things: the baptismal faith remains unchanged. And secondly, remember that the church in general and Anglicanism in particular are ever changing. The church we are today will bear little resemblance to the church we will become in a century. Or to paraphrase what Mark Twain observed about the weather in New England, If you don’t like the Episcopal Church, just wait a minute.

In conclusion, I want to offer a Buddhist parable that may be helpful.

A farmer had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. The farmer went to a monk and complained bitterly about his bad luck. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the farmer exclaimed to the monk. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The farmer again complained to the monk of his bad fortune. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The farmer went to the temple to offer thanksgivng and encountered the monk and told him his wonderful news. “Too soon to tell,” said the monk.

It is too soon to tell the effect of the most recent General Convention and its decisions. But we are not asked to get everything right; we are only asked to be faithful and to trust God.

Dancing with God: The baptism of Priscilla Nicole Kottmeyer

2009-06-07T02:33:00.000-05:00

Today is not only Trinity Sun, it is also the day we baptize Priscilla Nicole Kottmeyer. Now, I know that all of you have come here to listen to me talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, especially with regard to the contributions of the 4^th c. theologian Tertullian, and I have prepared about 45 minutes of notes on that topic. However, important as the Trinity is, Priscilla’s baptism is even more important, so here’s what I’ll do: I’ll meet you back here this afternoon for my talk on the Trinity. And don’t think you’re going to get away. I know who you are and will know if you don’t show up later this afternoon!

But today is Priscilla’s big day, and I want to talk to her. The rest of you are invited to listen in.

Priscilla, first let me tell you that you have picked a great day to be baptized, but I’ll explain a little later why this is such a good day to be baptized.

You have also picked excellent parents and grandparents. Your grandmother Kottmeyer is from Strasbourg, France, a beautiful and historic city. And the Measels are from right here in Bluff Park. But the most important thing about both your parents and grandparents is that they love you very much and today they are making the commitment to raise you in the Christian faith.

Priscilla, I know that you are wondering what baptism is and what difference it will make.

The first thing you may notice about your baptism is that your parents and godparents are answering a series of questions on your behalf. For the next several years, people will be doing things for you that you are unable to do for yourself. Right now, people are feeding you, bathing you, changing your diapers. And in a few years, they will be driving you to school and ballet lessons and soccer practice. Soon you will be doing things for other people that they cannot do for themselves. That is a big part of what it means to be human. None of us is complete in and of ourselves. God made us incomplete. God made us so that we need each other and must seek out each other. In other words, God made us so that we must learn to love one another, and if we fail to love, then we remain incomplete.

Baptism is one of the first examples of how we need each other. Whether we are baptized as infants or as adults, it is something that is done for us and to us. We cannot baptize ourselves.

The second thing you may notice about your baptism is that your parents and godparents promise to reject one thing and to accept something else. What’s that about? Right here at the beginning of your life, why should we ask you to reject anything?

Priscilla, you will find that life is a series of choices. To choose one thing is to reject something else, and it is very important for us to choose well.

Today we ask your parents and godparents to make the most important choice of all on your behalf. We ask them to choose light instead of darkness; goodness rather than evil; life rather than death; to follow Christ rather than the Evil One.

Priscilla, you live in a world that hovers between darkness and light. That sounds a little scary, but there is nothing for you to fear. The darkness falls only in places where we block the light. The light is permanent; the darkness is temporary. The Bible tells us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. There are times of darkness in every life, but if you look for the light, you will find it.

Third, your parents and godparents not only reject the darkness on your behalf, they also promise to help you learn how to follow Christ. Starting now, your parents will be bringing you to church every Sunday. I know they will because they promised me they would when I talked to them about baptism, and I intend to hold them to that promise! In a few years, you will start coming to Sunday School and begin learning the story of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is not only one of the most wonderful stories you can learn, it is also the most important.

Jesus lived long ago in Israel. He was not only the son of Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, his followers experienced the power and presence of God in him in such a powerful way that the only way they could explain that experience was to say that he was the very embodiment of God, God incarnate, God made flesh, the Son of God. For a short time, Jesus taught people about the nature of God, healed the sick, and confronted the powers of evil and injustice. But the authorities feared him, arrested him, and had him killed. But three days later, his followers found his tomb empty and experienced Jesus not only as alive again but more fully real and alive than he had ever been. So even though Jesus lived 2000 years ago, we believe that he is just as alive today as he was way back then.

Priscilla, the most important story you can know is the story of Jesus. The most important friend you can make is Jesus. And today your parents and godparents are not only promising to help you get to know him, we believe that baptism is also the time when Jesus promises to get to know you, too.

Now, I said that Trinity Sunday is a great day to be baptized, and I would like to explain that. You did not come into the world alone. You came into the world as part of a complex network of relationships. These relationships make you who you are. None of us exists alone. The African word ubuntu expresses this perfectly. Ubuntu means “You are who you are because I am who I am and I am who I am because you are who you are.”

The Trinity is a good example of this. Many years ago a great Christian thinker explained the Trinity in terms of dance. Now the dance he had in mind was not the kind of dancing we normally see today. He was thinking of the circle dances that we still see on special occasions in Mediterranean countries. While there may be many dancers, they are one in the movements they make; they are one in rhythm. So, he said, it is with the Trinity. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit; the Spirit is not the Father. But they are one in love; one in power; and one in eternity. The Trinity is the dance of God, a dance that had no beginning and will have no end.

Priscilla, in a few minutes I will pour water on your head in the name of the Trinity. In doing so, I will be inviting to dance with God, and inviting God to dance with you. It is the beginning of an eternal dance, an eternal relationship. Sometimes you will dance boldly and joyfully, sometimes you will dance slowly and sorrowfully. Sometimes you may not think you have the strength to dance at all and God will do all the dancing for you. Sometimes you will hold up others who no longer have the strength to dance for themselves. But the dance goes on in every time and place, when life is joyful and when it sorrowful, when it is light and when it is dark.

Welcome to the dance, Priscilla. Welcome to God’s family.

Human Rights and Religion

2009-05-26T23:43:00.004-05:00

About half of my friends disagree with me because I favor marriage equality and the other half think I'm crazy to be a priest because all religions are bad. I have to say that the conservative churches were seriously wrong on CA's Prop 8 and should be ashamed of themselves. What would happen if everyone could marry the person they love with all their heart, even if that person were of the same sex? It's ridiculous to think that somehow that would undermine heterosexual marriages. Is love finite? Are there only so many weddings allotted the human race? Would caterers run out of wedding cake? Would Niagara Falls dry up??

But I'd like everyone to keep in mind that both abolitionism and the civil rights' movement were church-driven and both vastly expanded the scope of human liberty.

Also keep in mind that by far the greatest enemies of liberty in the last century were the regimes that were most antagonistic to religion: the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Maoist China. So I am happy to acknowledge the enormous evil done by religious institutions (and this is no small thing): the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion that followed the Reformation. I have no idea how many were killed or harmed by these atrocites, but I suspect that the number of people killed in religious wars, jihads, and so on is insignificant when compared to the number killed just in the 20th century by the regimes previously mentioned.

Guessing conservatively, the Third Reich killed at least 6 to 10 million people; the Soviet Union well over 10 million; Pol Pot exterminated at least 1 million; Maoist China destroyed at least 10 million lives. In total, at least 30 million lives were ended JUST IN THE 20TH CENTURY by regimes that opposed all forms of religion.

Yes, religion is capable of doing dreadful things, but religion's opponents seem to be capable of doing far worse things.

The Bad News of Easter

2009-04-12T07:39:00.000-05:00

“And they went out and led from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid.” (Mark 16.8)

A few years ago I participated in a seminar with clergy of several different denominations. In a discussion of the passion narratives of the four gospels, the pastor of a large Presbyterian church said, “I think we are embarrassed by the crucifixion.” After a moment of thought, I challenged him. “I don’t think the crucifixion embarrasses us as much as the resurrection. After all, we’ve all seen what the world does to brave people who speak out – they become martyrs. But what we haven’t seen is anyone rise from the dead.” We haven’t seen it; we don’t expect it; and maybe we would not only be embarrassed by it, we might even prefer that it didn’t happen.
Why would that be? Why might we wish the dead to stay dead? Well, for one thing, it’s much safer for all of us if the dead stay safely in their graves. We all admire Dr. King for raising his brave voice against discrimination and prejudice and leading the fight for civil rights. Does anyone not get teary-eyed when they hear his “I have a dream” speech? The nation mourned when he was assassinated in Memphis, and we designated a national holiday in his honor. But could there be just a tiny corner in most hearts that is relieved that he is silent? What might Dr. King have to say to us today? Would he speak out against the terrible disparity between rich and poor? Would he challenge our policies in the Middle East? Our indifference to the AIDS crisis in the developing world? We are familiar with martyrdom; we mourn when the good and the brave are cut down and silenced – the Dietrich Bonhoeffers, the Martin Luther Kings – but would we really want them to come back to challenge our complacency and indifference?
Could it be that Jesus’ disciples felt that way? The gospels tell us that on the morning of the resurrection, the women took spices and other embalming supplies with them to the place where Jesus had been buried. Of course, they were performing the last kindness that one friend can do for another – to prepare his body for its eternal rest. Of course, they were grief-stricken because their friend and teacher had been given a mock trial, tortured by the police, and put to death on the cross. But could they also have been a tiny bit relieved? Could they have thought, “We will miss his stories of good Samaritans and prodigal sons, wise maidens and unjust judges, lilies of the field and seed sown among the rocks and thorns. Who will restore sight to the blind and cleanse lepers, free the possessed from demonic power and .... but neither will he again challenge us to take up the cross, to lose our lives for the sake of the kingdom, to be glad when we are reviled and persecuted. Life is hard enough without that.”
But when they arrived at the tomb, they found it empty. How did they react? Did their hearts leap? Did they dance a jig or burst out in laughter or song because he had risen? The gospels tell us that their reaction was fear. What did they fear? They may have feared the challenges that Jesus had set before them and sets before us -- the challenge to be poor in spirit, to embrace mourning, to hunger and thirst after righteousness, to seek service rather than self-aggrandizement. Life is so much easier without these things. We want comfort, not challenge; ease, not adventure.
By and large, we want life to be stable and predictable. However, we worship a God of surprises. We worship a God who brings down the mighty and lifts up the lowly; who feeds the hungry and sends the rich away empty; who promises us that life abundant and everlasting is to be found not in safety but in risking our lives for the sake of the gospel.
Life is so much easier when we have three meals a day; when we know that General Hospital is always on at one o’clock in the afternoon; when school is out at three and mom or dad comes home from work at five-thirty; when there are drinks at six and dinner at seven. But when a stranger barges into our lives and commands us to drop our nets and follow him; to put down our knitting needles or hammers or turn off our computers and plunge into the great adventure that is God’s plan for the universe –no, that’s a little too much for us. We want to know who will pay for our medical insurance, who will feed the dog or cat, how we will pay the Visa bill, who will pick the kids up after school. Thanks for the parables and miracles; they’re lovely and we’d like to keep them, but we can do without the resurrection.
But surprise, disruption, and resurrection has been God’s plan from the beginning. To be sure, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt; they moaned, they complained, they cried out and God heard them and raised up Moses to lead them out of bondage. But what happened as soon as they were free? “Why have you brought us out of Egypt only to let us die of hunger and thirst in this wilderness?”
Have you heard of Stockholm syndrome? Stockholm syndrome is the tendency of the captive to identify with the captor. It’s the reason that Patty Hearst assisted her captors in robbing banks and other terrorist activities. We saw a shocking example of it a few years ago in the case of Elizabeth Smart, the 14 year old Utah girl who was kidnapped and held for more than a year. When the police finally found her and arrested her kidnappers, she seems to have denied that she was the missing girl, not once but several times.
Captives identify with their captors because it is safer. We naturally assume that we are less likely to be harmed if we blend in, fade into the background of our environment, mouth the ideology of those with power over us. Perhaps this partly explains the reason that many in Russia say that the murderous Stalin was a wise and effective leader or why many Iraqis preferred life under Saddam to their new-found freedom.
We want life to be predictable, and the older we get, the more predictable we want it to be. But God finds ways to surprise, upset, and disrupt us. We prefer the sofa, the television, the internet; in short, we prefer the tomb of our own safety and comfort. But we worship a God of the living, not of the dead, a God who calls us out of the tombs of our own making. We worship a God of resurrection.
Much scholarly ink has been spilled over the ending of Mark’s gospel. There are at least three possible endings for Mark’s gospel, and all of them are well-supported by ancient manuscripts. However, the most likely ending of Mark is also the strangest. More than likely, the last four words of Mark’s original ending were: “and they were afraid”. What an odd, even bizarre ending! Why would the women who went to the tomb, saw an angel sitting there, and heard the outrageously good news of the resurrection flee in terror?
I think we know why. Resurrection seems too good to be true. We do not want to be hurt or disappointed. We want our lives to be safe, predictable, , boring, dead. I know I do!! But God has other plans for us. God’s plan for us is resurrection, surprise, amazement, joy incomprehensible and full of wonder. So lose your fear, forget about comfort, embrace God’s adventure, drop your net and make a mad dash after the mysterious stranger who invites you to participate in God’s magnificent, surprising, and unpredictable plan for your life. Sing, shout the Easter alleluia, dance a jig, for Christ is risen. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!