LITMIR.BIZ

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a story about a rigged dialogue sermon Jack Bishop and Bill Jamison cooked up for one Sunday morning four decades ago, when Jack climbed into the pulpit and purposely wandered off into a slightly tangential, uninteresting direction and on cue Bill, then the Senior Warden, stood up and said loudly enough to be heard throughout the nave something to the effect of “Bullshit,” and Jack reacted, and they proceeded to hold an across-the-nave dialogue centered on the topic and direction. I thought, what a creative and daring way to engage the congregation, and why can’t we do that every Sunday morning in the sermon time? Hold a real dialogue, wrestle with the issue(s), allowing everyone to grab hold and go home convicted by their own words? And celebrating our diversity! Why should I get up there in the pulpit every Sunday and pretend that I know what they need and ought to hear? Make the sermon a real sermon, a dialogue, a discussion, a multi-logue? But, alas, I was never daring enough to try it. Too bad!

      And maybe that had been possible in the very early years of the church, that the elder could facilitate the members’s sharing about the Scripture readings among the saints. But then Constantine legalized us, and the Constantinian need for us became that the elders shape us into good citizens of the empire, loyal, obedient, faithful, subservient, conforming citizens. And for the elder, in loyalty to the emperor, to instruct us in our duties and behavior as good citizens. Oh, what a seduction was in that! And, still today we preach at the people.

      And in the midst of my musings and Stephen’s sermonic monologue these words sprang into my consciousness, “From your perspective, young man, that may make sense, but from mine, as an old man, it does not make much sense.” And I have NO idea what those words were about!

      But I still yearn for a richer, deeper, fuller, more complete, less conflictful experience and sense of “It,” of God. And I know that will never happen within this comfortable circle of standing stones.

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      Pentecost XXII—October 12, 2008

      This morning at the coffee hour discussion Brad Bateman framed his discussion about the relatedness of religion and the economic life by citing a sociologist of religion who posited that what we get out of our religious life, out of church is a 1) sense of the transcendent along with 2) rules for daily living. He underlined that by confessing that is what he gets through the liturgy of the Episcopal/Anglican Church. And as I ruminated this morning, sitting in my circle of standing stones, that made sense to me. For me a combination of liturgy and intellectual life of this Episcopal Church offers transcendence, and the force of this circle of people offers a sense of what they and I (and therefore God?) think would be good, useful, beneficial behavior on my part, and what would be outside the pale of acceptability, what would be unhelpful, or even destructive behavior from me toward them (and beyond). Transcendence, that which is greater than me, than us, than all of this; and rules for daily living within and beyond this circle.

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      Pentecost XXVI—November 9, 2008

      The first reading today is Joshua 24:13, the covenant renewal ceremony of choosing for YHWH. But the reading asks me why I choose YHWH. And that throws me back to the paradigm of mystic-codifier-institutionalizer. Joshua was the codifier, the people were the institutionalizer. In that day the religion of the leader was automatically the religion of the people. In 1 and 2 Kings and in the eighth-century Prophets the leaders are apostate, so people’s devotion to YHWH languishes, which is the ultimate sin, the failure to devote oneself (i.e., the nation as a unit) wholly and solely to YHWH.

      The discussion at coffee hour today was about death. Scattershot. Ed Burdick states the key, we have no way to talk about death. The wall is unbreachable We can know nothing about the other side. All the talk about death/heaven/afterlife is metaphor, really talking about here/now/us. Giving structure-meaning-direction to my life, to this community, to my living in this community.

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      Advent I—November 30, 2008

      In the reading this morning the prophet pleads, “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth . . . .when thou didst terrible things . . . . Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness . . . .behold, thou art wroth; for we have sinned . . . we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags . . . .we are the clay, and thou art our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O YHWH, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people” (Isa 64:1-9). He pleads with God. For why? What has he seen? What has this prophet heard?

      I suspect that this speaker, this prophet is a visionary, that he has just had a vision so earth-shaking and so unspeakable that he cannot tell it to people, it is undescribable, inexplicable. He can only plead back toward God on behalf of the people of his birth. And I can hear his anguish. But I cannot see his vision.

      And what shall I make of that? As I step back and ruminate, I can hear, and almost touch, smell his horror. But it is not mine. Nor was it productive for his people. They were still exiled (perhaps already so at the time of this vision). Perhaps this is a tiny bit of evidence that there is an inexplicable God. But I cannot make much more out of these words, except, perhaps, that we ought to be paying more attention. And this prophet certainly is describing, pointing toward a different God than J, E, D, or P.

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      Christmas Eve—December 24, 2008

Just finished reading Betty J. Eadie’s book, Embraced by the Light the story of her second near- death experience. She spends some time in the afterlife, and comes back to tell us about it. Nancy warned me that it was an easy read, and she was right. I do not mean to make light of it, but I was not much informed, or impressed. I am certain that she had a truly visionary, mystical experience which was life-changing for her and her family. But her take on it, her apprehension and comprehension and explication of that experience are similar to others’s stories, no more informative than them, and a bit thready. Bill Byers’s8 take is deeper, more inclusive, and more confidence-inspiring.

      My first impression is that hers is a thin metaphysic, it is insufficient to take in, to sustain much of the heavier, darker side of life and reality, at least as I see it. While she does step outside the Christian box, her metaphysic is too simplistic to be inclusive (that judgment from a mind that loves, craves complexity). It is too sweet and light-filled. My sense is that she is searching for a clear, and very simple, single core-truth to all reality and life. And that, having had a very deep and thoroughgoing mystical experience, her mind grasps at a few very simplistic themes to make sense of and to explicate that profound experience.

      Hers is an educational model of after/other life. The goal of all life is to learn, to grow. But the whole is founded on, boils down to love. The outcome is too neat, too nice, too simple. While not quite Christian Scientism, her metaphysic could take in and incorporate Christian Scientism. Looking at her story from a psychological point of view, given the little bit she tells us of her personal history, there is no surprise in her metaphysical interpretation of her experience; while, in my ignorance, I do not see any traces of her Native American background (my only touch stone is Tony Hillerman’s Navaho-describing detective stories), I can sort out traces, bits and pieces of her Roman Catholic and protestant histories which she has bundled together and used as pitons to anchor her interpretation of her mystical experience. A few, carefully selected, Christian niceties seem to be her foundation stones. But for myself they are insufficient. They strike me as a nuclear family oriented comprehension of metaphysics, exactly what I might expect from her background. But they cannot cope with Hitler-and-holocaust, Mugambe sorts of realities, with the ongoing dynamics of unrefined evil that drive much of the world. Her tiny and insignificant finger-hold on evil (a personal satan who attempts to seduce individuals away from good-doing and is easily defeated by good spirits) will not stand up to the real world I witness. So I quail at some of her verities; “Insincere prayers of repetition have little if any light [i.e., power]” is a pitifully superficial and ignorant careen from contemplative prayer and folk-religion, and discourages me from taking seriously many

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