Daily Lesson for August 26, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Mark chapter 14 verses 3 through 10:

3 And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. 4 There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? 5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. 6 But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
10 Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.

Yesterday I got into a discussion with some friends about the differences between charity and justice, prompted by a book one of us was reading that called into question whether much of the work the church does is of any real use or whether it's just a sort of pablum that makes do-gooders feel even gooder, but doesn't really do anything to solve the actual issues.

As we were talking I remembered some of the criticism that was levied against Mother Teresa for her having cared much for the dying poor in the streets of Calcutta, but not having done much to change the actual situation. It was a criticism with some truth in it I knew, yet still it didn't quite sit right.

Now Jesus' words, spoken about another woman who was criticized for what she did for him just before his own death, come with moral clarity and force: "She has done what she could."

Mother Teresa herself said, "Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love."  The woman who anointed Jesus did not change the fact that Jesus was going to die, but she did what she could; she brought dignity to his death with her small act of great love.

And for that, Jesus said, she was to be remembered -- and not criticized.

Daily Lesson for August 25, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Mark chapter 13 verses 32-37:

32 “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. 35 Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—36 lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”

No one knows the day or the time, not the angels, nor even the Son, but only the Father -- and also people trying to sell books.

Okay, that was a little snarky; but it is exasperating that books keep being written about the imminence of the end of the world and the anti-Christ being some possibly identifiable oil magnate in Russia.

This is not what Jesus meant when he said, "Stay awake."

Yes, we are to be awake, and vigilantly watching  for the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds -- in other words, Jesus' metaphorical description for the end of this age and the beginning of the next.  But we are not to be out speculating as to some date or time or precipitating event. That is a waste of time at best and at worst can lead millions astray.  Jesus said, when you see the fig tree get tender and the leaves bloom you know summer is present -- but until then there's no use trying to wish it any closer. Summer is going happen when it happens and no sooner; that's what 5 years of living in Vermont taught me anyway.

Until the final day comes, we need to keep short accounts, say, "I love you," a lot, and don't say or do things or not say or not do things we'll regret. We're to try to live like each day may be our last -- because nobody knows; I mean nobody.

Daily Lesson for Momday, August 24, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Acts chapter 26 verses 12-15:

12 "In this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. 13 At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me. 14 And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ 15 And I said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting."

When we think of Paul's Damascus Road experience we usually think of it only in relation to his conversion to being a follower of Christ; what we often miss, however, is that incredible moment was also the changing of his mind.  It was the day that the "Jew of Jew" Paul, intent on shutting down "the Way" for its purported apostasy, would soon be bringing its good news to the Gentiles.

Of course this was unfathomable to Paul before it happened.  There was no way in the world this could ever be the case. He would resist it with all his might.  But then Jesus spoke: "It is hard for you to kick against the goads."  A stubborn mule will resist prodding (goading) by kicking back.  This was an old farm saying, but even a city boy like Paul knew what it meant. Resistance was going to only bring about more pain.

There are things we accept. There are things we kick against. And there are things we have to have a Damascus Road experience to change our minds about.

But in the end, God gets us to where He wants us to go.

Daily Lesson for August 21, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Mark chapter 12 verses 41 through 44:

41 And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. 43 And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. 44 For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Sometime back a very wealthy man wrote an additional $10,000 check at the end of the year over and above his already substantial pledge.

When I thanked him he told me that has he not given that additional $10,000 he would have ended up in a higher tax bracket and owed Uncle Sam at least that much more. 

"The LORD knows I didn't really give another $10,000 to the church and I want you to know it also."

That's what I call a rich man with integrity.

Daily Lesson for August 20, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Mark chapter 12 verses 28 through 31:

28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

When asked for the single greatest commandment Jesus gave two. Paraphrasing the law and combining two separate commands Jesus said, "Love God and love your neighbor."  In other words, we cannot do the former without doing the latter.  Love must be extended horizontally as well as vertically.

But let us not miss something else very important here. Quoting the book of Leviticus, Jesus said we are to love our neighbor -- as ourselves.  Implied here is a third commandment -- that we love ourselves, that we truly and deeply fall in love with ourselves, and that we learn to do so rightly.

But isn't the love of self our whole problem?  Don't we need to quit loving ourselves and our own selfish ways?  The medieval monk St Bernard of Clairvaux is helpful here. He talked about there being Four Loves. And a good question to end on is which of his Four Loves are you loving with:

1.  The love of self for self sake

2.  The love of God for self sake

3. The love of God for God's sake

4. The love of self for God's sake

Far be it from me to presume to add to the saints, but according to the lesson today perhaps there ought also have been a fifth love:

5. The love of neighbor for neighbor's sake, for God's sake, and for self sake.

That is indeed the greatest commandment - what I would call the summa bonum of Love.

It's good to be back home friends.  

British Evasion #13 -- A Final Post

British Evasion #13 -- Final Reflection

This morning I left my hotel on Grace Church Street and began the first hundred-or-so yard leg of my 4,000 mile journey back stateside. On the way to the station I took a slight detour to have one final look at St Mary Woolnoth Church where John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, was pastor three centuries ago.  The doors were just about to be opened to the communicants for morning prayer.  I looked a last time at the wind-buffeted, and now-exhausted-sooted ship on the back of the church, an obvious reference to the many years Newton served as a seafaring captain before taking Anglican orders.  I then glanced down the tiny back alley street of Lombard toward the church clock immortalized in Eliot's The Waste Land.

Upon my departure for England three weeks ago, I asked everyone that they pray I would eat and drink deeply of this experience and that my soul would find spiritual sustenance in the places I would visit and the people I would meet. I give thanks for all the prayers and am pleased they were indeed answered.  My soul is greater for having been on this journey, first together with Irie and later alone, experiencing the history of so many holy places, and having reflected on what it means to be human with so many deep and faithful Christians from around the world.  It was a moveable feast, these past weeks, and I am profoundly grateful for having taken part.

Now I am back at St Mary's, where the feast began, and now also ends. The clock dings.  It is not yet nine as in Eliot's poem; but it is time to go home.

I make my way down to Monument station and am immediately hit with the reality that the last three weeks have not been a feast for all.  I pass by a homeless man still asleep in the underground station. He is cradled in the fetal position inside a sleeping bag with his thumb in his mouth. The homeless have been one of the constant sights I have seen everywhere I have been on this trip.  Their presence has been a constant reminder of the great human need that is always among us; and all along the way of this trip I have been an observer of how they are treated and cared for both by church and society.  This morning, passersby gently drop coins into a folded navy blank set out in front of him.  Someone has offered up a half dozen donuts. In this dimly lit London tunnel, all judgement has ceased.  What is offered before this man -- before this image of God -- is pure human compassion.

I come to the turnstile entrance which leads down into the tube and ask the attendant how I might pay for a single ride to Heathrow with cash rather than credit. She tells me the machine is broken but I can go ahead and get on the train and take it to the terminus and tell the attendant the machine was broken. "They will let you pay there -- or just pass for free."  I am uncertain about this idea knowing that it sounds at best technically illegal; but after a moment's hesitation I decide to risk it because I figure in the end it will be worth writing about either way -- not the least if I am apprehended by a British bobby.  This then sends me into a reflection about all that it has meant for me to write and share my experience abroad with friends back home these last few weeks.

The last Sunday I was at home the lectionary reading was from Mark 6 where Jesus, after an intense season of ministry by his disciples, tells them to "Come away and rest awhile." They are tired and worn and have had no leisure even to eat for themselves the Scripture says.  So they get into their own wind-worn vessel and head across the Sea of Galilee in search of respite.  I told the congregation this really was a coincidence and I was not just cherry picking scripture to justify a getaway across the pond.  I also begged them not to do what the crowd of 5,000 did in the story -- hurrying around the lake to meet Jesus and the disciples when they came ashore for their vacation.  "If you're there waiting for us at the gate when we touch down in London," I told one guy friend from church, "Irie is going to kill you."

But in ways that could not have imagined or perhaps welcomed and which definitely would not have even been possible just a few years ago, the congregation has been here in England with me the whole time -- through the web. Just a couple of days before I left a friend asked me if I was going to be blogging during the trip. I told him I didn't know but was thinking about it. "You should," he said, "because people will like that.  And it'll be good." 

And with that the people had run around the pond to meet us.

If someone had told me that I would write 13 posts about my trip, some of them multiple in parts, and many of them over 10 paragraphs in length I am pretty sure I would have responded that in spite of what my friend said it wouldn't be good.  I was going away, to be apart and rest awhile and the idea that I would be writing this much and having friends encourage me to write more sounds on the face of it far from the whole idea of a sabbatical.  

Yet during the course of the trip I kept thinking of what happened in the story and what Jesus told his disciples when they came ashore and saw 5,000 hungry people in need of their daily bread. "Give them something to eat," he said.  I kept thinking throughout the trip that those words were for me.  And I did my best to keep writing and keep giving something to eat to all those who had come across the pond with me.  And in a mysterious and counter-intuitive way I am not tired at all but in fact deeply rested, and what I had to give not diminished but multiplied, and my soul not hungry but deeply satisfied.

Everything became clear for me while preparing for one of my Oxford classes on Augustine and reading his book On Christian Teaching. In it, Augustine begins with a reflection on the feeding of the 5,000 and its parallel to the process of his writing. He says that he is beginning the work with a word inside him which, but knowing he does not yet have the whole book in mind.  For that, he says, he leaves it to God to provide, likening it to the fish and loaves Jesus provided to the multitude by the Sea.  Augustine says he has only enough to begin to write with, but trusts that in the end it will be enough to end with also -- and even more.  He says this because he believes that in the miracle of God's economy there is always enough of that which is meant to be shared.

My train finally reaches its destination at Heathrow.  I go up the steps and discover one of the gates has been opened and I walk through without paying anything. There is no British bobbie in sight. I have saved £15, which I will use to purchase a few additional gifts for friends back home. 

It is good to receive, I think to myself, and as our Lord said even better to give.  But above all it seems best to both receive and give. This trip, this moveable feast, has definitely been both.

And Jesus took the fish and the bread and he blessed them and he broke them and he gave them to the disciples to give to the multitude.  All were satisfied.  And after it was all said and done and finally time to go home, there were 12 basketsfull leftover.

British Evasion, #12, August, 16, 2015

British Evasion #12

One of the profound joys of these last weeks has been the experience of saints past through the places they inhabited. There is a holiness to these encounters.  Deep calls out to deep as we walk the cobblestone paths they walked and kneel in the wooden pews where they prayed.  Here, the secular becomes sacred and an old sandstone church becomes the site for the mysterious communion of saints.

Saint is a loaded term. Usually when we hear saint we think of those who have died and then been canonized as one truly a saint now in heaven. And I definitely do not mean anything less than that.  But the word saint most originally included all those in the faith together -- living and dead.  The communion of saints is the fellowship we share together which has the power to transcend both space and time.  Here is what Celtic spirituality calls "thin places" -- the sacred site where heaven draws near to earth.

Christ Church, Oxford is a thin place for me -- a place of encounter with the great cloud of witnesses. Here I walk the same stone path John Wesley and William Penn walked as students. I see the after-effects of their weight and the weight of a whole host of others bearing down in certain places, their footsteps quite literally imprinting themselves, sinking even, into worn and weathered stone.  It is a metaphor for what they have all together done to lay their collective mark on the future.

But it is another former student of Christ Church that I have felt most deeply connected to here, one of my great heroes of the faith from the last century -- Trevor Huddleston.

The son of a diplomat, Huddleston was a student here in the 1930s when he watched a mass of marchers -- mostly miners, and dock workers, and other poor, working class people -- make their way through Oxford on the way from South Wales to Westminster.  It was definitive moment for Huddleston, marking a movement away from a world of diplomacy and ivory towers and toward the poor of the earth.  Moved by what he saw, the young Huddleston decided to devote his life to making a difference in the conditions of the world -- which he indeed did.

Upon graduation from Christ Church, Huddleston began the path toward ordination in the Anglican Church and then became a monk within a special order called the Community of the Resurrection. In 1946 the community sent him to Sophiatown, one of the poor, black slums of South Africa, and the place where he would leave his own most indelible footprint.

The poverty and prejudice Huddleston saw in South Africa were at once sobering and also galvanizing. Soon he took up the cause as one of just a few white allies of the black community, speaking out against the rising Apartheid regime and helping to organize against it. The level of Huddleston's political activism was unusual for an Anglican monk and subversive to the powers that were. After 13 years in South Africa the Community of the Resurrection decided Huddleston had gone far enough, and called him back to England for fear he was causing too much trouble.  

But Huddleston's political impact on South Africa had just begun.  After his return to England, he published a book on the injustices he witnessed in South Africa titled Naught for Your Comfort, which landed him on the cover of Life magazine and brought awareness of the problem of Apartheid to millions.  Even as he rose to the rank of bishop and then ultimately Archbishop in the church, Huddleston continued as the most public face of the anti-Aparthied movement in Britain and a persistent gadfly to worldwide leaders and businesses who wished to turn a blind eye to what was happening in South Africa.

To get a sense of just how great Huddleston's contribution Was to the anti-Apartheid movement one only has to read what Nelson Mandela said about him upon Huddleston's death:  "No white person has done more for South Africa than Trevor Huddleston."

Knowing that here in Oxford is where Huddleston first received his call makes it a place not only of study but also of pilgrimage for me. Huddleston is one of the saints I have set before me as a paradigm of ministry.  He was both a pastor and a social reformer, priestly and prophetic -- someone who made a difference in both the lives of individuals and also society as a whole.

There is an image of Huddleston's ministry that speaks profoundly of the kind of priest he was.  It comes from a black South African who was in Huddleston's parish as a child. He said any day Huddleston might be playing in the streets with a gaggle of poor children from the village in the morning, and then in the afternoon receive a visit from a most important dignitary or government official. This is, to me, a picture of ministry in the first order.

That same man who was in Huddleston's pariah also speaks of two other things about His former priest. The first is his remembrance of Huddleston coming a great distance to make weekly hospital visits when the boy was sick with tuberculosis for a year. The other is his memory from only the age of 7 or 8 when he was walking down the street with his mother, a domestic worker, and the two saw Huddleston and Huddleston took off his hat to in respect to the mother.

The man later described that moment with as the most defining moment of his life.  

"I didn't know then that it would have affected me so much, but it was something that was really -- it blew your mind that a white man would doff his hat," he said.  

"And subsequently I discovered, of course, that this was quite consistent with [Huddleston's] theology that every person is of significance, of infinite value, because they are created in the image of God.  

"And the passion with which he opposed apartheid and any other injustice is something that I sought then to emulate."

That man who would indeed go on to emulate Huddleston's passion, the little boy in the story, is Desmond Tutu.

I am standing here beneath the Tom Gate where Huddleston first entered the walls of Christ Church. I hear the same carillon of bells he would have heard the day he received his call.  I walk the same cobblestone road outside the gate into the world. It is the communion of saints -- a reminder to me that I am not alone on this path, but rather surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Others have gone before; and others will come after.  And right here and now, this distance is very thin.