Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Note New Link

Just wanted to call everyone's attention to the new link to Maggie's blog.  Maggie used to be a member of my church and is now serving as a deacon at another Episcopal church in the area.  The blog includes her sermons and they (and she) are awesome!

Monday, April 25, 2011

Baptismal Vows

One of my favorite parts of Easter Vigil, besides the great music and the fire, is the renewing of baptismal vows. We do this other times of year too – basically whenever there's a baptism, but apparently we do it on Easter Vigil whether or not anyone is baptized that night. It's always a deeply meaningful experience for me – I think renewing baptismal vows on All Saint's last year was part of what finally pulled me back into the church.

In a way, this is odd, because I'm not overall very concerned with vows. I get frustrated in stories where the hero has decide between his honor, often in the form of keeping a vow, or following his heart for love or compassion or justice: to me the answer is obvious in those cases – the vow needs to go. One of the regular guest preachers at my church once mentioned in a sermon that sometimes there just isn't enough to us to fully act with integrity. Despite our best intentions, we can outgrow our vows or become something we never planned to be and wind up in a situation where keeping our vow imprisons us and possibly those around us. I actually love stories where that happens – don't give me the shiny hero that always keeps his word and avoids even the appearance of impropriety or the slightest hint of temptation; give me the failed ascetic who's broken all of his vows but one, whose honor is in tatters, but who is true to his love (yes, I am thinking of a particular story here). Even with marriage vows, I believe that one ought to go into them with the intention of permanence and shouldn't flee as soon as things get rough, but I also believe that it's possible for people to make honest mistakes or to change dramatically enough that the best thing for both partners is to separate and make something new from their individual lives. (Children, of course, complicate this even further, and I don't pretend to know the answers or to be able to judge when the partners of a marriage have or have not tried hard enough to stay together.)

And yet, and yet...something in the baptismal vows stirs me. The belief part not so much. It's important and all, but it's the familiar Apostle's Creed, not so different from the Nicene Creed we say every week. No, it's the active promises that make my heart swell and cast a solemn calm over my mind. To continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers; to persevere in resisting evil and, whenever I fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord; to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor as myself; to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. These aren't simple things to do – half the time I don't even know what it really means to love my neighbor as myself, and it's often not clear how to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ to people who know the Church as an institution of exclusion and condemnation. More often than not, it's a struggle for me to even remember to try – it's not that I find it too hard; I don't even get to that point – it's that I'm self-centered and caught up in whatever's going on with me and I simply forget that God is my life. So there's a lot of work to be done there.

But standing at Easter Vigil, with dear friends on either side of me, and all of us in the church proclaiming that same intention, I can believe that there's hope. That the life of Christ is possible, that the kingdom of God can exist here on earth, and, perhaps most importantly, that it doesn't depend on our feeble human efforts – I will, with God's help.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday service was tonight. It's always one of the most powerful services of the year for me, often actually more so than Good Friday. I think there are two reasons for that: the foot washing and the stripping of the altar.

I like the way my church has done the foot washing the past couple years. Everyone has their feet (well, foot) washed by a parishioner and then takes a turn washing the feet of the next person. (We have three chairs and basins so that this doesn't take all night). That way you get to experience both aspects – the vulnerability of having your feet washed and the symbolic experience of washing someone else's feet.

The sermon tonight discussed what for me is a really important aspect of the ritual: the fact that having someone wash your feet is in some ways hard – more generally, the fact that being open to intimacy and vulnerability is hard. In my case, I'm normally not into being touched by strangers – I've begged off of getting pedicures with more “girly” family members, I have no interest in seeing a massage therapist, and I don't even get my hair shampooed when I go in for a haircut. And it's not a personal space issue or a hygiene issue – it's absolutely an intimacy issue. I don't know what to say or how to behave when someone I don't know is dealing very concretely with my body. For me it's different with friends, but for a lot of our culture it isn't – we don't touch people and we don't expect to be touched, and I think that's part of what makes the foot washing act so powerful.

Washing someone else's feet is the easy part. But every year, I challenge myself to stay present while I'm having my feet washed. To really be there and not zone out to somewhere safer. To allow myself to feel and even enjoy the sensations of warm water, soft sponge, and fluffy towel. To look into the eyes of the person who's washing my feet and accept the fact that they're doing this voluntarily as well, to affirm that we are part of a community, part of a family even, and that in some way we do love one another, even if we don't know each other's names. The fact that the foot washing is in no way sexual doesn't change the fact that it is intimate. And like many things in the church, the symbolic act is practice for the “real” one, in this case, practice for being vulnerable, for taking the risks of opening our hearts and exposing our weaknesses – and for patiently and lovingly caring for others in their vulnerability.

After the foot washing and Eucharist are over, the Holy Thursday service ends with the stripping of the altar. The clergy, after removing their vestments so that they're dressed all in black, take away the Communion cups and plates, remove the crosses and candles and prayer books, put away the cushion from the altar rail, and fold up the altar cloth, leaving the altar bare. This time and Good Friday are the only times in the year when the congregation sees the altar without a cloth, the only time the clergy are in black, the only time the church looks so empty.

Watching one of the priests taking out an armful of books tonight, I thought that it almost looked as if they were fleeing, gathering up what they could and abandoning the church. (Of course this is not to say that our clergy would do anything of the sort – it's a reflection on the evocative power of the liturgy, not on the character of the priests!) I think that abandoned look helps to put us in the place of the disciples when Jesus was arrested and killed. They didn't know Easter was coming. As far as they knew, their friend and teacher who they loved was gone forever. Obviously the sense of sadness evoked by a stripped altar is nowhere close to the pain of seeing a friend taken away and tortured, but that empty feeling helps us to remember what they experienced, to slow down and think about what it meant.

Part of the reason I love all the beauty of my church is that it gives a sense of sacred space. The colors and the stained glass and the decorations all tell me that God is there in a special way. They don't cause God to be there – God is there regardless of how a church is decorated or whether there's a church at all. But they help me as a mortal creature to get some small sense of the wonder and beauty of God. So on Good Friday, when the altar is empty and the clergy are in black and I don't have all those reminders, it helps me to remember and reflect on the fact that humanity killed God, and that God allowed it. Of course God is still here on Good Friday, and of course God still existed after Jesus died also – but there's also that sense of God being absent that echoes Jesus' cry of “Why have you forsaken me?” God came to earth, lived among us, gave Himself to us, and we killed him or betrayed him or denied him or claimed he wasn't our responsibility or stood aside or didn't understand. And of course Easter happened, and in a few days we'll be thinking about that, but it isn't time yet.   

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Here We Go Again

Okay, my month-long hiatus is up and then some, so it's time to get back to writing. The thing on my mind at the moment is that I seem to be slipping back into orthodoxy despite myself. I've written before about not being sure just who or what Jesus actually is/was other than being important and somehow closely connected to God. That's not really true. The truth is that I do in fact believe that Jesus was God, as much God as the Father yet somehow different, but one with the Father from eternity. That during His earthly life Jesus was God-with-us, fully human and yet somehow also fully God. That He accepted death willingly as a consequence of human reactions to His message about God's kingdom, that He was raised from death, and that His life, death, and resurrection have deep meaning for all our lives and our search for God.

It's somewhat strange to me that I believe this. It seems much more reasonable to believe that Jesus was closely connected with God but not in a way different from other people, or that the resurrection was something metaphorical, or even that Jesus became one with God but wasn't always so. The rational arguments for faith have always seemed nice to me when I've been in a more orthodox state of mind, but they've never been the reason for my belief. It might be an important argument that there needs to be an explanation for how the apostles went from a bunch of scared people in hiding to a collection of missionaries boldly proclaiming the Good News. But it's not really why I believe. Instead, I believe because, in unguarded moments, that's where my mind goes. If I don't take care to hem in my faith with words, then I slide right back to the traditional, crazy-sounding beliefs.

This is inconvenient. It's inconvenient because I'm a scientist. I don't like working with a sample size of One. It's uncomfortable drawing such large conclusions about reality from a single case study with no possibility of replication and no lab notes from the actual time of the event. It's also uncomfortable because I've learned so much about how fallible our minds are, and how easily we do fall into superstition and irrational beliefs – so settling on a belief because I have trouble not believing it could be kind of a silly thing to do.

It's inconvenient because it upsets my sense of pluralism. What do I do with the fact that people have so many different religious beliefs while believing that one reflects reality? I can accept that God chose to reveal Himself to different people in different ways, I can certainly believe that God accepts whatever path people take to come to know and love Him, but it's still really hard for me to say “this tradition, these beliefs, and not others” even just for myself.

It's inconvenient because there are so many questions I still can't answer. Why use such a harsh method as evolution to create the species of the world? Why are there diseases and natural disasters? Why are we set into the world with these brains barely out of beta and less free will than we think we have but apparently more than we handle? I believe that God is wise and benevolent – despite all evidence to the contrary, I can't seem to un-believe it for long – but there's so much I don't understand.

But that's the way it is for me. I'd be more worried if I saw more potential for harm in it, but that's not what I see. If anything, my beliefs challenge me to be a better person, more compassionate, more thoughtful, more concerned with justice, more inclined to listen before judging. (Which is not to say that it makes me good at any of these things, just somewhat better than I might otherwise be, or at least making more of an attempt). So at worst I'm a harmless delusional – I don't think I am, but some sense of the fallibility of human minds requires me to at least admit to the possibility.