Kirkepiscatoid

(Annotated anatomical drawing by Paolo Mascagni & François Carlo Antommarchi, 1826)

On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our
Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks
to you, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, "Take,
eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the
remembrance of me."
--Eucharistic Prayer A, Book of Common Prayer, p. 362

Philippians 3:21:

He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.

The last few days, I've been waking up with the infamous "crick in my neck." I'm not sure when that started happening on a semi-regular basis. I'm guessing it's about the time I first noticed I could no longer turn around and look backward with my neck only, out the back window of my truck, and had to turn my torso around, and sometimes even unhook myself from my seat belt to turn around enough to look backward safely.

It's no secret where this is coming from. Over two decades of looking down a microscope have slowly started to settle into a litany of chronic minor neck, shoulder, and back issues--the #1 chronic occupational injury of pathologists. Oh, it doesn't stop me from anything. I still look the high school aged sacker at Hy-Vee in the eye as I hoist my 40 lb. sack of dog food and say, "Naw, I'll carry it out myself." I still am a whiz at heavy objects for my size. I feel as cognitively strong or stronger than I ever did, even though I know I am not thinking as fast or am not as easily highly focused as I used to be. I still have the stamina to do everything I want to do--but now it takes me longer to recharge, and might require a nap or two that didn't used to be necessary.

In short, I know that muscle by muscle, neuron by neuron, and organ by organ, my body is slowly betraying me--yet I feel I am as much of "me" as I ever was. I feel blessed that I have unusually good health--yet I know for the first time in middle age, that as far as our physical existence goes, entropy rules. None of us escape the betrayal of our physical selves although some of use will know the name of the thing that does us in, and others of us will simply fall apart slowly until one day we just grind to a non-specific halt. We will all either rust out or burn out, and we are not given the date and time that will happen. Every day, our physical selves become more and more transformed to the body of our humiliation.

But if I were to tell you who I believe in almost as much as God, I would tell you it's Sir Isaac Newton...and the Gospel according to Sir Isaac says, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Now, Newton was talking about physical motion, but consider the possibility of spiritual motion. I like to think that on those days when we feel our physical morbidity and mortality with one side of our brain, but are mentally ok with who we are, we are actually living in the balance point of feeling that equal and opposite action-reaction interplay between the physical and the spiritual. So much has been read and said about "living in the now." I like to think that living in the now simply means to live in the place where there is zero net force between our physical and spiritual selves. When we live in the place more on the physical end, things like our ego, our pride, our fear, get in the way. When we live in the place more on the spiritual end, we become navel-contemplating mystics, living in a world totally inside our own head, with no desire to share it. Yet to understand why our goal should be in that place of "zero net force," we have to live some of our days in the not-quite centered spaces on either side of it.

I know people might think I'm a little nuts when I admit that physics helps me understand what "living Eucharistically" is all about. But often, on Sunday, when I hear one of the many versions of our Eucharistic prayer, I hear that call to empty ourselves. To pour our bodies into an oven-fired food product, and to exsanguinate into a chalice.

I think about how those of us in the more liturgical Christian denominations are both attracted to the earthiness of bread and the bright shininess of a silver-plated, gold-lined chalice. We simultaneously desire to be one with the Earth, and one with the bright shiny holy hardware objects. When we eat the bread, we know that alone, we are not the same as the totality of the "given-up" earthly body of Christ, but with Him inside us, we are more than ourselves. When we drink or dip from the common cup, we know that, again, we are not the totality of the lifeblood of God, but we can be the vessel that offers it by ingesting it. We take the bread from the hands of the priest--holy earthiness shared between two human hands--and we take the wine with our own lips in the same way as we thirst for a relationship with God.

So, yeah, I wake up each morning with all those reminders of my body's slow transformation into humiliation--the crick in my neck, the stiff foot from plantar fasciitis, the creaky knee from too many years as a catcher. They are quite adamant about reminding me of that transformation. But at the same time, things like my prayer time, Sunday worship, and things like simply "kickin' back and havin' holy thoughts" remind me of my body's transformation into glory. It's a realization that our bodies are much more than our physical selves, and that they are not just "us" personally--they're ALL of us.

Here's my latest LOLsaint for the occasion...

June 29th commemorates the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul, traditionally believed to be the year 67. Saint Peter was crucified; Saint Paul, being a Roman citizen, was slain by the sword.

II Corinthians 2:14-17:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not peddlers of God’s word like so many; but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence.

It's now becoming the time of the year that one of my favorite roadside weeds starts to dot the landscape...chicory. When you ask most people "what chicory smells like," they will tell you sort of an earthy, nutty smell. But they are talking about the ground-up roots. Honestly, most people have never bothered to smell a chicory flower. We drive by perhaps thousands of them en route to work, but never stopped and bent over and actually smelled one, or admired its fragile beauty.

The picture above is one I took of a chicory flower some time back. I've shown that to people and they did not recognize it as a chicory flower...simply because the vantage point of the photo is "up close." Chicory flowers are something we glance at from a distance, and our eyes tend to fill in some little nondescript blue thing without much detail or any colors besides blue.

So, as I pondered this passage yesterday, I was sitting in my yard and saw a little clump of chicory across on the other side of my gravel road--the side I don't mow--and as I pondered what "the aroma of Christ" was like, I started pondering what the aroma of a chicory flower was. I realized I honestly didn't know.

It actually took a few sniffs to discover it.

First my nose was filled with the green smell of the fresh rain from earlier. Then I could smell a green earthiness--kind of a faint oregano smell--of the leaves. But it took a while to smell the flower itself, which carried the air of a faint, light, sweetness--so light, the rest of the plant, and the smell of the roadside itself easily overpowered it.

I pondered the passage some more. I walked back across the gravel road and smelled some more. Back and forth a couple of times or so. The smell of the chicory flower became easier to detect each time I tried. Eventually, it was easy.

I thought for a while about how seeing Christ in everyone we meet is so hard. There are so many people that are easy NOT to like. I am sure there are people who can't see Christ in me with a magnifying glass. But maybe we make our mistake by limiting ourselves to "seeing." Maybe we should be smelling.

I thought about some of the people in my life that have taught me the most about being in the presence of God. Most of them are rather...well...earthy people. They are not always physically attractive. They are perhaps a little heavy on the four letter word usage. They are sometimes quite blunt, a little too raucous, a little overpowering. Some are not even very religious. But I'm that way to an extent, too. What I have come to appreciate, what I have come to love about those people is that I discovered Christ living within them because I sat still in their presence, sat in their "now," and over time I saw who they were as children of God. I saw little secret acts of mercy and kindness spring from them. I saw the truth of God in the earnestness of their blunt, unvarnished moments. Many times the presence of God sprang from them when they did not even know it themselves.

I'll be honest, I still can't see Christ in everyone. I probably never will be able to, totally. But I have figured out that some of them, you can't "see" it--you have to sit in their presence and smell it, and I will only smell it if I keep returning to try to pick up the smell.

Acts 15:1-12:

Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders. So they were sent on their way by the church, and as they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, they reported the conversion of the Gentiles, and brought great joy to all the believers. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, “It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.”

The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter. After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

The whole assembly kept silence, and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles.

I couldn't help but use the blurb from the old Ronco Veg-O-Matic ad for this one. Many of you remember this post from last year, when I picked up on all the flap about a deacon with visual impairment using a laptop with an ornate cover for an overlay to read the Gospel. It was one of my most-read posts of 2009. The discussion on the Episcopal blogosphere was quite amazing. Many news sites and blogs had picked up the story of how she could more easily proclaim the Gospel with the larger font she could put on her laptop. Opinions ranged from "You go, girl!" to "She's breaking the Canons." All in all, though, it was a healthy discussion.

Well, by the Grace of God and with the consent of the people of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, that deacon, Stephanie Shockley, is now a priest. The photo above shows that her laptop has also earned its new stole and chasuble, so to speak. She is using her laptop as the altar book and my understanding is that it is now rigged with a foot switch for easy hands-free scrolling so that she can do the Eucharistic prayer seamlessly with both hands doing all the things the priest's hands are supposed to be doing at the Holy Table.

Others might feel differently, but I believe there was a special kind of rejoicing in Heaven Sunday, June 20, even greater than when a newly ordained priest ordinarily does that wonderful "First Mass." I truly do. And what she has done to get to this place gives me hope that the core document of faith of the Episcopal Church--our Book of Common Prayer--can be even more portable than ever before. It allows us to "do church" in more ways than we have yet imagined.

When I heard of her upcoming ordination, I sat and played with my iBCP application on my iPad. I thought about how it would be possible for a person to lead worship with it, with no flipping of pages, no muss, no fuss, no trying to flip stuck pages. I thought of how "the Eucharist is the Eucharist," whether is in a cathedral or a small parish, in a church or a foxhole, indoors or outdoors. I thought of how all it now takes is a smart phone or an iPad. Where can our collective church imaginations take us with this realization? Who knows!

I think a short prayer is in order here:

Almighty God, to whom nothing is impossible,
we give thanks for your servant Stephanie
and for the unique journey that she has taken
simply because she desired to proclaim God's word
to the best of her ability.

Open our eyes to the wonder of where technology
can begin to proclaim God's word
in places we cannot even dream of yet.
Insert in our conscious minds prophetic dreams yet to be dreamed
and mission fields yet to be discovered through the power of discovery.

Grant that Stephanie's ministry continues to be one
of faithfulness to you, and quiet persistence to do your will.
Grant that we be led to similar ministries of our own,
whether lay or ordained.
We ask these things in the name of your son Jesus Christ,
who was not afraid to show his own faithfulness and persistence.

AMEN.

I had a day away from Trinity today--this Sunday and next Sunday I am supplying for the 1st Presbyterian Church here in Kirksville. Had a couple requests among my blogging friends to post what I preached about today...so here it is...


Proper 7C—1st Presbyterian Church, Kirksville, MO-June 20, 2010

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?”

When Jesus began to challenge the voices inside this poor tormented man’s head, the man’s own reply must have echoed through every fiber of his being and bounced off every one of the voices inside of his head. If we pulled out a different sort of “bible”—the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, the DSM-IV—it’s pretty apparent this man was a schizophrenic. He heard many people speaking to him inside of his head. Voices that told him to rip his clothes off and run around naked because the mere weight of clothing reminded him of a humanity that was too painful for him. Voices that demanded silence of such a degree that the only solace he got was among the dead. My guess is when he heard music playing in the street, he got special messages from the music that he thought were meant only for him, and some of the messages weren’t very pretty.

I would also bet money that people in town weren’t prone to speaking too highly of him. At best, on a good day, he was probably one of those colorful characters like many we’ve known in Kirksville over the years. If they had newspapers back then, he probably would have always been submitting editorials and running for public office—and even getting a few votes. At worst, on his most difficult days, he was bound and chained—the legal version of “committed to 96 hours of observation” in those days. People probably wondered how they could lure him out of town to another place, little children made fun of him in the streets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people in town tried more direct methods of discouraging him like flinging the contents of their chamber pots at him when he passed by. All because these voices—“Legion”—would not leave him alone.

So imagine what he was feeling when Jesus—with no introduction, no asking of permission, and with no regard to his personal space—began to command the unclean spirit—the voices of “Legion”—to come out of him. This man didn’t know much, in his psychotic state, but he must have looked at the face of Jesus and knew this man was the holiest, purest thing he’d ever seen—and his heart must have sunk because he knew he wasn’t anything close to that. He must have known exactly who he was at that moment—so in a last ditch attempt to get this fully human, fully divine man to not be profaned by the likes of him, yelled, “What have you to do with me, Jesus?”
What have you to do with me, Jesus?
(pause)
Wow. Let’s step back from that one a second. Now, many of us here today spend some amount of time on a regular basis, inviting Jesus to bring healing of various sorts to ourselves and to the lives of others. But when Jesus takes the initiative on that one, sometimes our response is more like the story of this poor tormented man than we would like to admit. All of a sudden, when we feel God start to work on us in our lives, to bring us to a new and better place, we suddenly stiffen up and take three steps back and go, “Now wait a minute. I don’t deserve this. I’m not really a terribly nice person on some days. I’m fairly ashamed of some of the things I’ve done, and I’m not really proud of some of the places I’ve gone in my life. No one is knocking at my door to hand me the Mr. or Ms. Congeniality prize. I am SO SERIOUSLY not worthy.”

Hmmm. (Pause) “What have you to do with me, Jesus?”

Well, as we continue on in our Gospel story, what happens next was probably quite a show. Oh, my goodness, there must have been squealing, and splashing, and mud and the swine herders yelling, and as those squeals subsided, all there was left was a bunch of floating hog bodies, an ominous, growing, silence, and a bunch of really, REALLY angry swine herders. I like to imagine, as that silence grew, all of a sudden, this man who had lived a life of torment, a life of feeling possessed by darkness beyond his control, for the first time in many years, for a few split seconds—heard absolutely NOTHING inside of his head—and even that nothingness can feel frightening. We all know that old saying, “Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t know.” That peace, that silence, might actually have felt for a bit like “the devil he didn’t know.”

But luckily for us, nature abhors a vacuum—and so does God. As our story plays out, we discover this man regains his senses—he is “clothed and in his right mind.” Somewhere in this, his mind begins to become filled with goodness and the healing force of the Holy Spirit. That happens to us, too, when we stop backing up from the touch of Christ and simply stand still and feel his hands upon our face. That happens when we share a meal at his holy table in communion with God and each other. That happens when we catch that split-second glimpse in the sparkle of the eye of someone we know truly loves us. Our voices of darkness are replaced with voices of light. Our naked imperfection becomes covered with the warm, comfortable sweatshirt and blue jeans of a new life in Christ.

Just a heads up here. The meaning of this light, this warmth, this brilliance that comes out in us from Christ’s incandescent incarnation, is not always going to be apparent right away. I really doubt the swine herders in our story ever really cared that our man was healed in this story. I imagine they went back to town angry as all get-out and it is very possible that 20 years later, you could load them up on a little too much wine and they could still get on a roll about how “that dude with a beard came to town and ran our hogs down the bank and drowned them.” After all, it did make the people in Gerasenes nervous enough to escort Jesus to the city limits. But as with all good things, time has a way of revealing the truth, and the full goodness of good things. It’s very important we have faith enough to trust in the power of time.
(Pause)
There’s one more place we need to go with this story this morning. Let’s look at what our newly healed man’s response is. Right off the bat, he wants to go hang out with Jesus, like a puppy following him down the street, wagging his tail, begging “take me home with you.” Really, there’s nothing new about that. It’s our natural inclination that when someone changes our lives, we want to follow them forever. We’ve all done it. Maybe it’s a beloved teacher, or a much-admired professor, the friend who went to bat for us when our back was to the wall, the lawyer who saved us from a great injustice, or the doctor who pulled us through a dire illness. On this Father’s Day, maybe it’s a dad, or a grandpa, or an uncle, or a man in our lives who had no reason to be like a dad to us, but did anyway, that we remember. Maybe it’s even a caring pastor or a dynamic preacher! Imagine that!

But look what Jesus tells the man. “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” He’s nice about it. He doesn’t throw a rock at the man or anything. But he’s pretty clear about one thing—go take your own journey with this. Tell everyone. Show your thanks to God and to the people in your community--not me, personally.

Jesus is telling the man to TAKE OUR STORIES OF HEALING TO THE STREETS. Christians, by and large, have a tendency to be very generous about our stories of God’s healing within the walls of the church, and at coffee hour afterwards, but we get a little edgy about telling this story at work, or to a friend whom we are unsure of how they feel about matters of faith. We get a little nervous about that “E” word—evangelism. We get images of tent revivals and people coercing us against our will to say and do things that just feel kind of scary, allegedly in the name of Jesus. Most of us are not going to want to stand on the corner of Franklin and Washington and shout to passers-by about how God has healed and delivered us. I don’t know about y’all, but I can’t even put my finger out and say, “Repent!” without busting up laughing.

So, ok, let’s all take a deep breath. Jesus didn’t tell us to do any of that stuff. He simply said “Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.” We can start right in the privacy of our own homes in a plain brown wrapper. We can start by simply doing things like saying grace at our table at home, and continue the habit when we have people over for supper. We can start by telling our children and the children close to us in our lives about the good things God does in our lives. In this Internet age, we can admit on Facebook that we are praying for someone. We can e-mail our friends a great prayer we bumped into on the internet, we can find a time each day when we pray for the needs of others and ourselves and perhaps read a little Scripture while we’re at it, and admit to others that, “Yeah, I do that every day,” with a sheepish grin on our face. If we simply start by doing that, it will spill out into the rest of our lives as a matter of course.

So today, as we continue with the rest of our worship, I’m going to leave y’all with a little take home assignment. Some of you in this sanctuary today know I started out as a junior high teacher. So I will admit I am into “take-home assignments.” But this is an easy one, and there won’t be a quiz. You are on your honor for this one. I promise I will do this one along with you, too, so I’m in this with all of you. Simply go home today and ask the question, “What have you to do with me, Jesus?” All we have to do is keep asking the question until we hear something. Imagine what could happen in Kirksville and the world if everyone in this room heard just ONE thing to that question. To borrow from the late Sam Cooke, “What a wonderful world this would be.” AMEN

Canticle 21, p. 95, BCP You are God (Te Deum Laudamus)

You are God: we praise you;
You are the Lord: we acclaim you;
You are the eternal Father:
All creation worships you.
To you all angels, all the powers of heaven,
Cherubim and Seraphim, sing in endless praise:

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.

The glorious company of apostles praise you.
The noble fellowship of prophets praise you.
The white-robed army of martyrs praise you.
Throughout the world the holy Church acclaims you;

Father of majesty unbounded,
your true and only Son,
worthy of all worship,
and the Holy Spirit, advocate and guide.

You, Christ, are the king of glory,
the eternal son of the Father.
When you became man to set us free
you did not shun the Virgin's womb.
You overcame the sting of death
and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
You are seated at God's right hand in glory.
We believe that you will come and be our judge.
Come then, Lord, and help your people,
bought with the price of your blood,
and bring us with your saints to glory everlasting.


Almighty God...
You are God...and I am not.
I realize if it were totally up to me,
I would be claiming benevolence,
But I would really be simply doing as I wish.

Sometimes I strain and strain to hear what you would have me do,
What it is that would most please you,
But I forget that in doing that,
I have lost sight of you.
You do not expect me to have a relationship
Where I am required to bring an "A" home on my paper every day
To get your approval.

You are God, the Almighty;
Author of all creation,
praised by saints and angels,
apostles, martyrs, and prophets.
Yet you not just have room to love me,
but desire to love me.

I am no saint.
I am no angel.
I am no apostle, nor prophet.
I am only me.
I am not even a very nice person some days.
Yet you often show me how much you love me
and only ask that I love you back
and share this love with community.

You ARE God.
I simply ask for you to teach me to hear you better.