Unexpected Friendship

In light of my recent post, "The Faces of God: God the Unexpected," I want to share a story with you.

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I lit my cigarette and began to walk down the garden path on the monastery grounds.  It had proven to be an extraordinarily long day.  The stress and anxiety had been building all day in our small flat in the retreat annex; the children had indeed driven my wife to the brink.  So when I arrived back from a day journey to interview a priest, I walked into the thick of it rather unexpectedly.

As I strolled along the gardens, I heard the bell calling the community to Compline--the final service of the day.  Compline simply means "complete" and it's a way of completing the day with a beautiful service praising God for the blessings of the daytime.  I fell down into the comfort of a wooden bench, perched strategically behind some blossoming flowers.  Privacy, I thought to myself, and a brief escape from the world.  I could not bring myself to enter the 

monastic church that evening, I was beyond my capability to use words or find a sentence to utter in the coming twilight.

After I snuffed out the butt, I sat there in a daze.  I wondered all about the predictable stuff: did we make the right decision to move our small family to England for a time?  At what cost was this to my family to merely live out one of my longest-held dreams?

Before I came round, I could see the movement of black cassocks in the distance.  I snapped to and glanced down at my watch.  Blimey, I thought, Compline was over and so was my free time. I needed to get back to help get the children to bed.  While I had not discovered any new answers to my cause, I had enjoyed a brief respite from the hell of cranky children and a distant spouse.  I dreaded going back, fearing another screaming, crying meltdown from the kids.  My ears were exhausted.  

Just then, a black cassocked monk strolled along the path.  He rose about five feet in the air

 and his grey scapular was neatly swaying as he walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hunched over.  It was too ironic or coincidental that this one brother of the Community had taken to fancy night walks following Compline and here I was in his pathway. He was clearly deep in reflection or what one professor loves to say when he daydreams, "off in wonder, love, and praise!"  I had met Father John several weeks ago during a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham down in Norfolk.  He is a Guardian of the Shrine and a runner.  A monk-priest from Northern Ireland, John has been in the Community for nearly thirty years--an incredible source of spiritual wisdom!  I remember vividly waking up from my power nap on the bus back from Walsingham when I overheard him talking about running to a nearby seminarian--he must be in his late 60's and the shock jarred me out of my slumber.  What was more surprising was this seemed to be the first time I felt as though I had something in common with another person in the Community.  Running, I thought, was the perfect God-given commonality so I went for it and begin a conversation with John.

"Father John," I cried out, "do you have a minute?"  Knowing full well that the CRs enter into their silence following Compline lasting until Matins, I chanced it.  I was desperately reaching out.  Being fully pastoral, John broke his silence and sat down next to me on the bench.  I had managed to pull myself together by this point, wiping away tears and fearing my awful smoke-stained smell.  

It did not take any remarkable power of observation to see that I needed the company and someone to talk to about what was going on inside.  John was able to talk sweetly in his Irish voice and helped me calm down.  His faith and insight truly makes him stand twenty feet into the air even though I tower over him. 

Thus began an unexpected spiritual friendship that continued on throughout my time at the Community.  He agreed to serve as my temporary confessor and spiritual guide and I remain forever grateful to him.  Just as I began to think I was alone and disconnected to the community that I found myself in, God gave me Father John.  It surpasses the explainable coincidence, this was truly a gift and one that I quickly recognized in the silhouetted figure of a small, Irish monk off in the distance.

God the Unexpected was the face that I saw that evening.  I even smiled afterwards thinking about this blog post and knowing full well that I had encountered this joyous face in the midst of my own stress and spiritual loneliness.  Thanks be to God for this and for what I believe will be a friendship for the rest of my life.

An Evensong Reflection

Preached at Halifax Parish Church

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Halifax, West Yorkshire (England)

The Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul

Jeremiah 11:1-14 

Romans 13:1-10

“Love is the fulfilling of the love,” writes Saint Paul.  Love, “all you need is love,” I overhead whilst in Liverpool the other day.  Jesus himself adds a new commandment, “love one another as I have loved you.”  How do we fit in our need for God’s love with the ever-present and enduring state of sin in our lives, knowing that the sword of wrath is nearby?  Judgment is not a popular preaching topic in most Anglican pulpits in America or I suspect here in England.  It’s simply too uncomfortable; too impolite.  We hear the words and the commands to love one another, to love ourselves, to love God and God’s creation.  But we never get clear instructions as to how we achieve this in our every day lives!  Is it physical or emotional?  Is it simply spiritual love?  Or is it Eucharistic?

Jeremiah’s warning from God about the impending disaster to befall Judah and Jerusalem seems to collide into what could otherwise be a pleasant reflection about God’s love.  How does this fit?  Covenants and disasters are not the purpose of the Old Testament.  Unfortunately, many Christians take the approach that God in the Old Testament is a jealous god ready to deliver punishment on a whim, a God of the law, and then with the flip of the page, the God of the New Testament is the God of Love revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  In fact the proper Jewish understanding of the Law is that the Law is freedom, the law is our delight—it is not a burden but rather a map to living in a loving relationship with God.    

The previous chapter in Jeremiah reveals that Israel has fallen by clinging to idolatry and worshipping false gods. There we read, “I know, O Lord, that the way of human beings is not in their control, that mortals as they walk cannot direct their steps.  Correct me, O Lord, but in just measure; not in your anger, or you will bring me to nothing.”  And now we read of God’s pending wrath. 

The connection in these two readings comes by simply looking into the center of our lives and seeing what we hold up as truth, what we worship.  Idolatry in the Old Testament would easy translate into today’s desires for more money, better appearances, and generally anything else that pulls our hearts away from the love of God.  God is always faithful, waiting patiently for us to respond to the invitation of love.  Just as Jeremiah says, we cannot direct our own steps, we need God’s help in our everyday lives.  When we try and walk alone, we follow our own will and not “thy will.”  That’s when trouble begins.

In this season following Pentecost, most commonly referred to as “ordinary time,” I prefer to look at this space before Advent as simply “Kingdom time.”  This is a time following the inauguration of the Kingdom where we are called to live deeply into its truths and live out its promises of justice, equality, and above all, love.   If love is indeed the fulfilling of the law, then we must open up our very souls to be flooded with heavenly grace.   Living in the Kingdom is not just about being good, it’s about living by God’s directives.  The latter day prophet, Mother Teresa once said, “at the end of our life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.  We will simply be judged by 'I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.’”  If there’s any doubt, then, as to what we are to do in our daily lives as Christians it is simply that. 

There’s a rather young hymn in the American Church with a simple refrain, “they will know we are Christians by our love.”  How we love and what we love are equally important to the Christian task.  In this morning’s Gospel, we heard about Jesus giving to Peter the power of the keys—the power to bind and loose on earth.  What strikes me the most about this is that we tend to bind more than we loose.  We bind out of fear, fear of the unknown, fear of the other.  We bind out of judgment—repelling those things that we see in the world that we know exist inside of us.  We bind and thus we ourselves are bound.  In light of the command to love one another as I have loved you, we should be persuaded to loosen more than we do.  We do this by love, we do this by mending broken relationships, standing alongside others in their battles with addiction and recovery, being a strong shoulder for a loved one who has recently been diagnosed with a terminal disease, or simply stretching forth our arms to our sisters and brothers living on the margins of the world.  We loosen those chains in our lives by relinquishing the power of our own idolatry.   When we honor the Christ in each stranger, we are in affect loving the Christ that lives inside of us.  We love and so let go of those things that really bind us, loosening by God’s grace and allowing the light to shine brilliantly inside of us.  

Then, they will know we are Christians by our love.

Faces of God: God the Unexpected

Today in the Church of England's lectionary (it was also read in The Episcopal Church), we read two important lessons that I think reveal the face of God the unexpected.  The Old Testament lesson was from I Samuel 17:32-49 and the Gospel was Mark 4:35-41.  In both cases I was struck by the imagery of being caught unprepared and called out by God. I heard the story of David and Goliath the Philistine in a new, unexpected way this morning.  If one of Israel could kill Goliath, then the battle should end.  David, being chosen, is clothed by Saul with armour, "mail" was the translation we read today.  Something about the clothing remains powerful to me--it wasn't David at all.  He couldn't walk in the heavy suit, it was silly. How often do we put on images for ourselves only to be taken as ridiculous?  We try on things that our not suited for us in an effort to protect ourselves.  All the while, God calls on us to come out as we are and into the unknown with faith.  It seems no coincidence, here, that David cannot wear the protective armour, but must go out in front seemingly vulnerable and possibly on a suicidal mission.

Armed with his stones, the only weapons he knows, David relies on God's faithfulness and ultimately slays the giant with a single stone.  I've heard this story many times before but I never considered the idea of being called out by God to perform this task by ordinary means by ordinary people.  The image of one shepherd going out in front of the army lines, leaving behind the protection of the masses, David goes alone with God to meet the giant for what seems to be an impossible task.  Fear, yes, fear would be coursing through me at that point.    

Saul clothed David with his amour; he put a bronze helmet on his head and clothed him with a coat of mail. David strapped Saul’s sword over the armour, and he tried in vain to walk, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, ‘I cannot walk with these; for I am not used to them.’ So David removed them. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."

I Samuel 17: 38-40

The Gospel lesson from Mark follows this same parallel.  Jesus is asleep in the boat with his disciples when a raging storm happens and causes great consternation among the sailors.  Our Lord simply asks them whether or not they have faith in God's providence.  Fear of death was all that they could think of in their future.  Jesus calms the waters and instantly their faith is restored.

Why is all this important?  God comes to us in the unexpected ways of storms and giants, calling us out of our spheres of comfort, out of our false clothing, to confront those fearful things that keep us from the love of God.  Testing?  No, I don't believe that God puts tests in front of us to see what we're made of, but rather God calls us to be authentic and stand for what and who we were created to be.  God the unexpected is the one who wants us to live fulfilling, happy lives, lovingly being who we are.  We stray from this out of fear, fear of acceptance, fear of the unknown, or worse to gain false comfort from money, job security, or anything else our culture deems important and necessary.  We do this for our will, not God's.  Thus, the storms and giants rise up as a way to strip away those things that are fleeting, like chaff in the wind. God's will and God's faithfulness is the foundation of our being, straying from that means trouble looms on our horizon.

God may act in unsuspecting ways, but I believe that all things come to some certainty in God's providence.  God the unexpected is trying to fulfill our expectant hope of eternal life in the Kingdom of Christ.  So mind those giants in your life.  Stand up and fight.  The storms will cause titanic waves to flood your sense of security, so stave them off with the faith from above. Be at ease knowing that you strive in your everyday life to live deeply into God's will.

Faces of God: God the Friend

If God was on Facebook, would you send him a friend request?  Since I don't have any "naughty" photos of anything at all, I would not hesitate to friend him!  As of this writing, there are currently 524,033 fans of Jesus Christ on Facebook, I wonder why there aren't more? Would God be the old-fashioned sort who would shy away from all things social-networking? Or would God be an i-Phone toting hipster? Perhaps both.

God seeks out relationship in any form possible.  God the friend is the sort who is comfortable in both groups and individually.  What would God's Myers-Brigg personality be, I wonder? Either way, I sense that God's idea of friendship is lasting.  As Christians, we believe that through the waters of baptism we are re-born into a new life in Jesus Christ.  We are bound to him as he is to us. The Body of Christ, the Church militant on earth, is where we strengthen those bonds as we move through the process of life.  That friendship is a bond that sustains heartaches, peer-pressure, and all the anxieties of social life in community.  

God is the chief friend, the "best" if you will.  The model is forged throughout the whole of Scripture.  As it is, God acts first and always first and relieves us of any anxiety of acceptance. God's will is to bind us into the common humanity in the life of the Kingdom.  There is no pressure from God to buy certain labels or behave differently in or around certain people. God's will is to be the friend who frees us up to be who God wants us to be--who we were created to be.    

I doubt there's any double-crossing, gossiping, or even the ultimate betrayal with God as friend. If anything, we're quick to claim that God has disappeared or somehow abandoned us--Our Lord's cry of dereliction from the cross, for example.  The reality is, and proved only by one's own journey of faith, that God is present in the darkness too.  It is easy to see and feel the presence of God in the good things of life, blessings are always nicer than pain.  Yet my own experience has shown that the pain of life we sometimes experience leaves wounds that are transformed into blessings.  Henri Nouwen's "wounded healer" concept nails this down succinctly. God is in the darkness and sometimes so close to us that we believe we've been left for dead.  Friendship, relationship, and covenant are bonds that bind and last forever.  God as the instrument in forging such bonds reveals the powerful love that links us to our creator.

I need God as my friend and confidant.  I need to know that someone cares for me while catching me every time I fall down.  God never seems to grow weary of me and all my peculiarities, much less my poor decisions and sin.  God never gives up on me while I have given up on God at certain times in my life.  It is when I discovered God quietly in the darkness that I learned God's deep well of mercy and grace.  How often have we heard that when really bad things happen you discover who your true friends really are?  Enough said.

Faces of God: God the Enemy

We need God to be the enemy.  Why?  It's the age old question of theodicy:  God and justice. Why does God allow bad things to happen?  Job knows plenty of this.  God the enemy, God in the clouds playing puppeteer with creation.  Popular thought often portrays the Old Testament God as the God of anger, wrath, and destruction.  And somehow, with the flip of the page, the New Testament God is all-loving and now wants to enter into the course of human history. 

The reality is that we want to have a reason when something happens.  In Islam, the Arabic expression is insha' allah, or "if God wills."  Unfortunately, this idea gets applied equally to the tragic death of a child, news of cancer, and the unknowing depths of endless human suffering. Does God really will death and destruction for creation?  I believe the answer is an emphatic "no."  Following the days of creation in Genesis, God blesses the work by calling it good (Gen 1:31). The pain and suffering in the world is the result of sin--turning away from God's will and looking to our own for comfort and happiness.  Cancer is not from God, nor is HIV/AIDS, or even genocide for that matter.  From my experience of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and working with death and dying in a hospital, I can speak from the depths of my faith that God is present somehow in the suffering and tears of humanity.  God's presence, whilst at times seems far away, is so close that we fail to recognize the comforting love of a friend.  God does not will destruction for creation, the rainbow set in the sky affirms God's promise to Noah that never again will God destroy the earth (Gen 9:8-16).

The only comfort that I can find in the problem of theodicy is simply that we find God's tears falling with our own.  We need to make God the enemy to rationalize why or how something so terrible could occur in our lives.  Again, see the Book of Job.  But even in Job's ordeal, he maintains faith.  Perhaps that's why this bit of the Old Testament gets a lot of attention because we cannot comprehend how and need to hear it over and over again.

There is no question that even in my own journey of faith I have blamed God for this or that offense, discovering only in the end that I am my own worst enemy.  I have also discovered that the more helpful route is to simply investigate where God is present in all my calamities.  That is the true question that we should be asking and the one that most likely contains the raw, painful answers that we cannot bear to face. God was not absent at Auschwitz; God was there amid the Hutu and Tutsi genocide.  God was there when I baptized 16-week old Jesus (Spanish) following his death.  God suffers with us because the suffering is not willed.  Yet, we do know that suffering and pain can serve as the furnace of transformation for our faith and life, but we cannot romanticize the tragedy.  

Living with the problem of theodicy is hard, faith-testing matter.  There is no one answer that completely satisfies the human heart, nor fills the cavernous voids of painful loss.  The only example we have is that of Our Lord on the cross, crying out in dereliction.  In the end, we do believe that God's justice is wrapped up in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom is where we live for God's will and not ours, where justice flows down like waterfalls, and everyone has just enough to eat.      

Faces of God: God the Lover

"God became man so that man might be engodded" 

~ St. Athanasius

The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century did a lot for the Church of England.  In it, the reformers were harkening back to the age of the patristic Greek Fathers, that age of the Church when there was nothing "popish" within the institution.  One idea, however, that never seemed to gain much ground in Anglicanism despite the claims of the movement, was that of divinization or properly called theosis.  Known quite well in the Eastern Church, the concept of humanity's process towards becoming divine is deeply rooted in the Incarnation--some may easy say that this is the completion of that moment when the Divine and Humanity intersected in the womb of the Virgin.

What does this have to do with love?  Moreover, what does this have to do with seeing the face of God as a lover?  God creates out of love; humanity being formed in God's likeness and image is a powerful measure of God's love.  Eros, not agape, is the burning desire of God and humanity.  Eros is the Greek principle of a deep, erotic love which surpasses the mere physical limitations of human flesh.  Descending into the womb while exulting our human nature is the fullness of that love.  Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, the legendary composer of the Christmas hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem," is noted as saying that in this act of Incarnation we find, "the condescension of divinity and the exultation of humanity."  Ascent meets the descent and in that we know more about our God as the ultimate lover.  Interestingly enough, this may be the most erotic imagery in the whole of the Christian tradition.

So now let us move forward one more step.  God as lover woos us.  God woos us in the very wilderness we often find ourselves.  God creates, God provides, and God woos.  Even when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Paradise, God makes and provides clothing for them (Gen 3:23).  God is the constant lover of creation, bringing and calling it into the fullness of that lover.  We are no exception to this but often stand in the way of feeling God's tenderness or being tantalized by God's scent.  Thus, to accept theosis, one has to be willing to see inside the love that was born from above and to accept God's invitation to step onto the dance floor to take a spin with the Almighty.  I doubt that the principle here is to create millions of little gods and goddesses running around the Kingdom, but rather bring humanity to its fullness, to its completion which can only be found in God.  God took the first step in creation; the invitation has been issued and a reply is requested.

As is the case with any lover, there are the warts that we try to cover over and hide.  We don't want to be naked in front of the one that we try to seduce or vice versa.  The seduction of God is to be perfect bliss and causes the ultimate "release."  This release is complete and total freedom of the Kingdom of God which dawned in the coming of Christ, but alas is not yet fulfilled.  As we move closer with God in the dance of our lives, we take down those barriers and uncover the painful areas of lives.  Trust is the result of knowing that there is another hand out there supporting and guiding your spins.  The music is endless and so is the dance.  But there is always that fear of tripping over your feet or looking rather foolish with stiff legs.  

Will you fight?  Will you always accept God's advances?  Can you resist the heavenly aroma? We will certainly try!  We are human after all.  Theosis gives me hope that I'm always in process, always moving to a beat that my soul rhythmically gets even when I try and stand in the way. 

Personally, I can identify this image in my life.  The times when I have left the dance floor because of anger or simply lacking the courage to accept my own acceptance.  Each time I come back, I find that God is ready to pick up the beat again.  Ironically, there never seems to be the cursory, "I told you so."