No appointment necessary

If we didn't have our calendars, we'd be in big trouble. Especially this time of year. Look at all we have to fit in. As we prepare for the Christmas, we have to schedule family visits, get-togethers, office and school parties. We have to make sure the lights go up and schedule when we are going to buy the tree. We even have to schedule when we do good: soon people will start ringing the phone off the hook for a chance to help out in the Soup Kitchen or Jacob’s Christmas--some at the last minute! No doubt about it, there is a lot to do, and if we don't have our calendars, blackberries, smartphones and planners ready, then we just aren't going to be ready.

But here is the pinch. We know when Christmas Day is coming, but the Gospel reminds us that we don’t know when God is coming. Jesus says that whenever it is when God will wrap everything up will be a surprise even the angels and to Jesus himself. We can schedule all our Christmas gatherings, we can coordinate with relatives, we can even plan our outreach and our gift-giving, but God does not make an appointment. God just shows up.

In the Gospel today, we hear Jesus tell the story of Noah. Generally, we assume that God sent the flood because people were being very bad, evil even. It turns out that they weren’t paying attention. They were so wrapped up in the everyday that they forgot about God. They forgot why they were doing all the things they were wrapped up in doing. And while they were busy, God showed up without an appointment.

So if Christ returned right now, unexpectedly, what would you tell him? "Go away, I'm busy getting this meal ready. We've got guests coming tonight." "Don't bother me now, it's my wedding day. I've got a million details to take care of." The question Jesus poses in today's Gospel is this: what or who is most important to you now?

There is another way that God will not be shoe-horned into our appointment books. Did you hear Jesus talk about how some people are taken and some are not? I don’t know about you, but when I hear this passage, I want to start trying to either decipher how and when this is going to take place, or I want to spend all time trying to get myself to front of the cosmic line. But this is just another way to make God fit our timetable. God doesn't make appointments. God shows up. So be watchful and be ready.

If you don't know how to be ready, don't worry. Jesus says something in Matthew that gives us a clue about how to be ready: You don't know when a thief might break into your house, so you prepare for him at all times. We can all relate to this, right? You lock your doors and windows. You leave a light on when you're gone. You insure your possessions. You do these things now because a thief could come at some unknown time. He won't make an appointment. And neither does God.

How do you prepare for the unexpected coming of the Son of Man? Well, let's build on that thief-in-the-night image a bit. Who is it that you would readily let into your house without an appointment? I don't think you would open your doors wide to an unexpected stranger. But you would welcome in a friend. Who is it that you'll let interrupt your busy work schedule? It's not some pushy salesman who shows up unannounced. A trusted co-worker, a boss, or a friend maybe. And if a friend calls long distance, even during an important meal, you'll talk to them. If it's a stranger or a rob0-call, you hang up. We prepare for the God who doesn't make appointments by living in relationship with Christ.

Some people think Advent is a time of quiet waiting. If we limit our thinking about waiting to something passive...we sit, God acts...we may miss something wonderful. Advent is also a time of active searching! Of looking for something great. We should be searching for the face of Jesus in the faces of the people God sends us and looking for hope when people say there isn’t any. When we start living what we are looking for, living for what we await, then we will begin to see that God is already unfolding it all around us.

While we often wonder how we can keep Christmas centered on Christ amid all the commercialization, we perhaps need to stress even more the need to keep one's daily life centered on Christ amid all the other demands placed on us by work, family, and self. The way we get ready for Christmas, the way let Christ be at the center of Christmas, is not to toss out the trees, the gifts, and music. And we certainly won’t keep Christ in Christmas by yelling at the poor store clerk who says “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas.” The way to have Christ be at the center of Christmas is to let Christ be at the center of our living every day. The more familiar we are with him, the deeper our relationship with God, the more attentive to the face of Christ in the people God sends us, then the more ready we will be for him when he arrives.

There is a wonderful video that I saw on YouTube not long ago. It is to me a perfect picture of how it is that God comes to us without an appointment.

About a month ago, something wonderful happened at Macy's in Center City Philadelphia. Have you ever been to Macy’s in Center City? It is the old Wanamaker’s Department Store, and th main selling space is huge three or four floor open hall surrounded by balconies. Always playing in the background is music from the Wanamaker Organ - the world's largest pipe organ. At noon, the giant organ stopped. And then began the familiar introduction to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's "Messiah" at 12 noon, to the delight of surprised shoppers. Salted throughout the store were members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia and member of 28 participating organizations. 650 choristers performed a "Random Act of Culture.”

I love this because it is a great illustration of what happens when God comes among us. It isn’t so much something happening which takes us away from the cares and concerns of this world, as it is God joining us where we live, work and play. When we become aware of God’s power and presence in our lives, then everything changes. When the 650 choristers starting singing the Hallelujah chorus, they did not stop being shoppers, or neighbors, or co-workers or friends, but they did change. They became messengers, signs of God at work among us. And you know what, just as these singers were there all along, God was there all along. The God we were waiting for, the purpose, the joy, the wonder we were waiting for, was there all along. We discover, as we go about the daily work of living a faithful life, that God is not up there, out there, far away, but it close by, right here, near to our hearts, our lives, our struggles and our triumphs. When we see that God is among us, everything changes.

God does not make an appointment. God appears. Advent is a season of waiting, yes, of anticipation and hope. More than that, Advent is a season for searching. Look high and low, search your hearts and the faces of the people around us, in beautiful places of worship, in everyday places of living, and most especially in the low, mean places of poverty and hardship to find the face and presence of God. We cultivate what we wait for every day as we deepen our life in Christ. When we bring hope to places where there was no hope, when we live what we wait for, then we discover that God’s love and power was there all along. God's doesn't make appointments. God doesn't need an appointment. God's hope and power and glory unfolds right before our very eyes, often when we least expect it.

Some thoughts on the Covenant, Part I

These are the lead essays for the November 21, 2010 edition of Anglicans Online. The first is an excellent summary of the issues involved in the upcoming debate and vote on the Anglican Covenant during this weeks General Synod in the Church of England. They (and I) recommend Bishop Pierre Whalon's essay on the Covenant.

A show of hands please: Who knows that this week the Church of England, through its General Synod, will vote on The Covenant? (Don't know what The Covenant is? Here it is. Like a guide? The Archbishop of Canterbury will tell you all about on a YouTube video.)

As the mother church of whatever-we-consider-the-Anglican-Communion-to-be, the vote of the CofE on this will be a statement of sorts about The Covenant.

If it's rejected, perhaps that indicates a wholesale rubbishing of the concept itself, a thumbs-down to the idea that the communion needs a child-minder in the form of a juridical uber-committee. (The 'No Pope' party.)

Or rejection might come because a majority think it too woolly, without enough structure and process built into it. (The 'Not Strong Enough' party.)

Or perhaps a rejection will indicate that the majority disagreed with, say, the use of the participle in 'covenanting church' or the squidgy concept of a 'shared mind' and voted down the whole bit based on poor word choice or dodgy syntax. (The 'Red Pencil' party.)

If it passes, it may suggest that the CofE is tired of the unruly children within the Communion and think it high time that they be told to settle down. (The 'Need Some Discipline' party.)

Or perhaps its approval would suggest that a majority can't bear to conceive of yet another revision, report, or Covenant 3.0™ surfacing in the next few years and just want the bloody thing to disappear. After all, passing legislation, approving reports, and then filing them away has a long and honourable history in our church. (The 'Just Pass It and Forget It' party.)

Truth to tell, people, doesn't it seem like we've been hearing about, reading about, blogging about, fretting about, and rabbiting on about The Covenant™ (or its many forebears on the ancestral family tree) for the past few decades? And here we are, joining the fray.

It shouldn't surprise any of our readers, long-time or occasional, that we look at The Covenant™ with a gimlet eye. We're willing to live with a high degree of tolerance and ambiguity within the Communion and grant a wide berth to the members of the 38 national provinces, through their own structures and governance, to do the best they can to advance the Gospel in their part of God's vineyard.

If we were in high dudgeon, for example, about the decision of a national church to allow lay people to preside at the Holy Eucharist, we should take advantage of all the media at our command to make our displeasure known. But not for a moment would we want an Anglican Standing Committee (or Sitting Committee) in place to discipline, censure, and diminish that theologically muddle-headed province.

And we're quite happy with the Covenant that's already in place in the Anglican Communion. Didn't know we had one? Oh we do: It was assented to by all the bishops who attended the Lambeth Conference of 1888. It's called the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. It's spare, clear, and its four premises have served as compass points for the Communion for more than 120 years. You'll recognise it as Anglican. (The, er, new Covenant™? Not so much.)

Who needs anything more?

Here is the second lead essay, for those who are sick and tired of the debate about the Covenant.

A long-time acquaintance of ours, known to us only through the Internet, is a medical doctor. Converting to the Episcopal Church in the USA in the late 1970s, he's a passionate, thoughtful Christian who has this to say about his church:

Since I became an Episcopalian in 1978, the denomination

(1) has never told me anything that I knew was not true;
(2) has never told me I was better than anybody else;
(3) has never told me to hate anybody;
(4) has never told me to do anything I knew was wrong;
(5) has surprised me with the lack of hypocrisy among clergy and laity;
(6) has never pestered me for money.

The denomination doesn't proof-text, embraces natural science, supports a person who chooses a clean-living single lifestyle, treats your private life and your politics as your own business, uses the golden rule as a guide to behavior, regards all people of good-will as friends, focuses on life in this world, and insists that the Gospel faith and the Christian commitment are not merely personal or cultural prejudices.

I say I made a good choice.

In fewer than 150 words, our friend has summarised why his branch of the Anglican Communion is a Christ-centred structure for living his life. We wonder whether this was something that the average person in the pew could do.

If there were a slip of paper in the pew next Sunday that asked you, in 150 words or less, to write why you're a member of, say, the Anglican Church of Canada or the Anglican Church of Australia, could you do that? So often it's hard to think beyond why we've chosen our parish; our immediate context.

Often one hears: 'I attend Saint Swthin's rather than Saint Bede's because Father Bumbleton is such a good preacher'. Or 'We've visited Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches in the last few months. We'll decide based on the Sunday School times'.

These days it's rare for doctrine and dogma to be the determining factors in the choice of denomination. How many Presbyterians really assent to the concept of predestination? How many Methodists can articulate what distinguishes their church from others? Choosing one denomination over another seems likely now to be based on cultural and comfort factors.

If mainstream churches blend and blur, does it matter? If the boundaries are no longer neat amongst Unitarians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans, does the Kingdom of God stumble? In the future, the shards of Christendom may slowly — with all the difficulty and emotion that comes from change — become one (as we were, long long ago). Reunification with Rome and the Orthodox? That's a thorny next step, one our descendants will need to tackle.

A good map for any potential merging of denominations was agreed in 1888 by all the bishops at the Lambeth Conference. It's called the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. Four basic points, non-negotiable. You'll recognise it as Anglican. And we think that's a good thing.

Who needs anything more?

Miscomprehending Jesus' reign

Maybe you’ve seen documentaries about it on the Discovery Channel or Nat Geo. There are even guided tours now, but it was once upon a time it was a deep dark secret. Nothing more than a rumor, idle gossip or an urban legend…or more accurately a rural legend! When I first went to minister in West Virginia nearly twenty years ago I heard stories about the “Secret” at the Greenbrier Hotel, a luxury resort in southwest West Virginia. Stories were about “the bunker.” The bunker, they said, was a huge bomb shelter dug into the mountain immediately behind the main building of the hotel. There were stories of the mysterious “television repair shop” whose staff went around in coveralls. Maybe there were a lot of broken tv’s at the Greenbrier or else….these “television repairmen” worked in the bunker.

Turns out all the stories were true. It was revealed that the government did build a huge bunker at the Greenbrier, and it was designed to hold the entire United States Congress during and after a nuclear attack. The idea was that when the alert level was high enough, the entire US Congress would be taken by train (later by plane) to the Greenbrier.

The television repair guys really did work in the bunker…except for the ones who repaired televisions. And to top it all off, the entrance to the bunker is behind the curtained wall of the grand ball room. It was hidden in plain sight.

When the bunker was officially revealed, everyone saw it as a relic of the cold war. It shows how we our national defense was built around protecting the leaders first. Maybe that makes sense strategically, but it was kept a secret not because of fear of Soviet attack, but out of fear that a frightened citizenry might resent or even rebel against the idea that the elected leaders of this country might get a level of protection that the rest of the citizenry would not.

In today’s Gospel we hear about Jesus being taunted while he is being crucified. The religious leaders taunt him because he said he was the messiah. They jeer if he were really the messiah he should save himself the crucifixion they inflicted. The soldiers and even one of those crucified with Jesus echo the same taunt. In jeering at Jesus, the Romans taunt all Jews by putting up the sign “Here is the King of the Jews.” What kind of people has a king who gets crucified?
Notice that this insult and taunt echoes what Jesus heard in the wilderness at the start of this ministry: the Evil One tempts Jesus to hurl himself off the pinnacle of the Temple so that angels would appear and take care of Jesus at his moment of greatest need.

They were so certain of Jesus’ powerlessness, that they dared him to take revenge against his tormentors as they were certain they would do if they were given divine power and a chance to use it.

Of course, God is up to something else. Everyone but one person—the second thief also being crucified—misses the fact that God is work in this crucifixion. It is easy miscomprehend the kind of reign that Jesus brought to earth.

Many people think of God as someone who made the watch and wound it up and then stepped back to let it tick away by itself. If we think of God as involved in our lives and creation at all, we have this image of God up on the top floor in the cosmic executive suite pushing heavenly paper, making divine decisions and letting others do the dirty work. So it is easy to think that if Jesus is the messiah, he is somehow privileged by virtue of his elevated status. Yeah, Jesus walked on earth but he has the key to the most executive washroom of them all. And we assume that when push comes to shove, he will act accordingly: he will, sooner or later use his power to get more power. This is at the core of one of my many problems with the theology and images of Jesus put forward in books like the Left Behind series, where in the last volume Jesus is portrayed not as the Savior on the Cross but as a vengeful, angry who obliterates his enemies. The cross, in this way of thinking, is a mere set-back, an incomplete distraction from the Real Jesus, who comes to give roundhouse kicks to his enemies.

But Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem in a motorcade. There was no divine limo with the flags of the kingdom led by an angelic flying wedge of Electra-Glide motorcycles. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. And even when arrested, falsely accused and mocked, he did not strike back. And when he was crowned king, it was a crown of thorns, and when he was lifted up, it was on a cross. Clearly God’s idea of kingship, of reigning in glory is very different than ours.

The reign of Christ is a reign of broken people who are healed; it consists of a citizenry of service; God’s reign is built on powerless people who find their power, their purpose and their hope in a living relationship to a loving God who made us and loved us first.

The most basic way we participate in God’s reign is through our prayer and worship. God is not far away in the Cosmic Executive Suite but close to us right now. Christ meets us at the point of our deepest need, and lives with us through all that life brings us.

It is the gathered people of God who are citizens of the reign of God. It is the people of God learning and doing the work of Jesus who represent Christ’s reign to the world God loves. It is people who gather in prayer, study, worship, service who embody the reign of God. It is when God’s people look beyond what separates us, dare to gather around Christ’s Eucharistic table, dare to baptize and teach, even in the face of our differences, that we show off that Christ’s reign is bigger, more enduring, more powerful than any that human beings can come up with by themselves.

Our tendency to reduce God’s reign to only the institutional life of the church—instead of seeing our institutional life as a servant of our status as followers of Jesus and citizens of his reign—turns the Church into nothing more than a bomb-shelter, nothing more than a place to huddle against a scary world. We are so much more than that: we are citizens of Christ’s household, we are members of His body. We are Christ’s people in God’s world making his reign known in our work, relationships, and our daily living.

Yesterday was a good day to see the reign of Christ in action: once again this church and several volunteers from a variety of other churches and groups came together to serve Thanksgiving Dinner to one hundred and twenty or so guests at the Ark Soup Kitchen. While this was going on, one crew of volunteers from this parish was renovating our chapel bathroom to make our church more welcoming to everyone who comes here. Another crew was laying paving stones in the sidewalk. Others were getting ready for the Interfaith Thanksgiving Choir Festival this afternoon.

Last week, I got a "tweet" from Charlie Barebo. Charlie, remember, was our Consecration Sunday speaker a few weeks back and is chair person of the New Hope Campaign. He was in Kajo-Keji, Sudan, last week with Archdeacon Stringfellow. So I get this message from halfway around the globe on my phone last Sunday and it says "School is open. Pictures coming." You know what that means, right? It means the Trinity Primary School in Sodogo which you and I and lots of people in the Diocese of Bethlehem helped build is now open and teaching kids, half of them girls. You see, that's how God's reign works. That's how Jesus' kingdom operates. A bunch of faithful people see a need, have a vision, act on it, and putting their own selves aside they share power with school kids they've never met across the globe.

When people whom the world would say have every right to ignore the weak and look past the hungry make turkeys and bake pies and serve the humblest of God's people, that is living in the Jesus' kingdom. This is a citizenship of service.

And when do that, the world is turned upside-down, because people who fed, visited, schooled, cared for, and the ones who step out of their comfort zone to do it, cannot see God’s reign as something far away. Citizens of service cannot reduce God to some kind of cosmic chief executive. People who known God's healing cannot settle for ecclesiastical bomb-shelter anymore. The surprise is that in Christ God is intimately involved in all our lives every day. Through his Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, Jesus both establishes his reign and rule over all creation, and makes it possible for all of us to become by faith citizens of God’s reign.

The second thief on the cross understood this. He does not expect Jesus to save his own skin but he does expect and know that Jesus’ authority will defeat death and become, against all expectation, a gateway to life with God. When we see Christ's power and reign in the cross we will know that we are remembered as Christ comes into his kingdom.