Above Average October 2, 2011 Proper 22 Ordinary Time, Year A Philippians 3.4-14

           The day before the final game of the 1941 baseball season the Red Sox’ Ted Williams had a batting average of .39955. Since the league rounds to the nearest decibel, he could have benched himself for the next day’s double-header, thus clinching the only .400 average in the history of the game.

            Williams chose to play.

“If I’m going to be a .400 hitter,” he insisted, “I want more than my toenails over the line.” He went six for eight and finished at .406, a mark that remains unmatched to this day.

            Paul would’ve liked Ted Williams.

            Paul insists on intensity in the pursuit of Christ. Three times in two verses the apostle uses a term that is of the break-the-tape type vs. the toenails-over-the-line variety: “Lay hold . . . laid hold of . . . having laid hold . . . .” A preposition intensifies the basic Greek verb: The idea of the Christian life is not to sneak in on a technicality but to finish with a flourish.

            But Paul tempers this intensity with soft-hearted humility and hard-headed reality. First the humility: What really counts here is not how hard he holds on, but who holds onto him. The center-piece of his grabbing is the certainty of having been grabbed: “I was laid hold of.” We call this grace. Bluesman Bill Withers once told his children that we pass through “all right” on our way to “wonderful,” “and when you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it because that may be as far as you’re going to get.”

Then the reality: Paul denies perfection in v.12, but appeals to the perfect in v.15, and counts himself among their company! I approach this paradox as a rejection of perfectionism. New York Times reporter Lawrence Cheek describes his efforts to construct hand-crafted frames for the portholes in a boat he built. He produced work that was flawed but serviceable, something he had to come to terms with as a “recovering perfectionist.” He calls his productions, “a recording of my own skills at the time – imperfect, but not because of sloth or carelessness. They testify to the best work I had in me at the time.” Paul’s “not that I have . . . already become perfect” echoes the Greek verb and tense of Christ’s cry of “It is finished” from Calvary’s cross. (Jo 19.30) Our momentary best finds sufficiency in the permanent best of Our Lord.

Intensity: I won’t sit safe on a .399 batting average while the season’s still going on.

Humility: I won’t worry that a subpar performance undoes the gift I didn’t earn in the first place.

            Reality: I will give to God the best work I have in me today.

            Intensity, humility, reality: Not a bad formula to bear in mind on your next trip to the plate.

Batter Up!

Doug

Collect

Heavenly Father, Your Son declared His perfection at the moment of His death. Grant us grace to pursue perfection without fear, knowing that in the end we cannot fail because we are held fast in the grip of Your perfect grace. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.           

Benediction

May you serve Christ with intensity

            That demands the best you have.

May you serve Christ with humility

            That demands your best be better.

May you serve Christ in the reality

            That He makes your best sufficient.

           

An Unenviable Indulgence September 25, 2011 Proper 21 Ordinary Time, Year A Philippians 2.1-13

            If you set a bunch of monkeys to work to earn slices of cucumber they toil away industriously. But start paying one member of the group in grapes and the rest suddenly lose their taste for gourds and go on strike.

            This is called envy, and it can make monkeys out of us all.

            Science writer Natalie Angier marvels at our race’s addiction to a sin that hurts like a hair shirt. “It is,” she observes, “a vice few can avoid yet nobody craves, for to experience envy is to feel small and inferior, a loser shrink-wrapped in spite.” (See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17angi.html.) Envy is a Mobius strip of selfishness, a twisted, single-sided spiritual prison which offers no reward beyond the opportunity to go on feeling bad.

            Paul offers Christians an escape from this zero-sum game envy, and the exit is shaped like a cross.

            “Be like minded . . . let this mind be in you.” The old King James preserves the underlying link between verse two and verse five in the original Greek. In the middle comes the mandate to avoid “selfishness,” a word that originally referred to a day-laborer who saw nothing in a job but what he could get out of it in the short-term. Not surprisingly, it quickly migrated to politicians and party squabbles. This selfishness sits at the center of two lists of virtues which amount to unity (v.2) and selflessness (v.3).

            So all pursuit of virtue and all avoidance of vice comes from having the right mindset. William James famously defined conversion as a shift in the habitual center of one’s personal energy. Paul says the Christian is one whose habitual center shifts from self to self-sacrifice, whose bull’s eye in life lies at the cross-hairs of Calvary, whose focus on the absolute glory of God obliterates all awareness of her own relative rank.

            Christian unity can never consist of an effort to get in harmony with one another. We are far too inconsistent – and too envious – for that. Oneness instead arises from each individual clawing his way downward toward the standard of the cross. And when we get to the very bottom, Paul claims, we will realize we have arrived at the top. Or, better still, we will discover that top and bottom no longer matter, and that we are free at last.

Enviously,

Doug

Collect

Heavenly Father, your Son sacrificed glory for the bankruptcy of the cross. Grant that we, taking up our crosses, might set aside self in the service of others, that in the unity of the church the world might see the unity of the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Benediction

When you feel small

            May the mind of Christ enlarge your love for others.

When you feel ignored

May the mind of Christ make you aware of others.

When you feel worthless

            May the mind of Christ deepen your delight in others.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

Same Court, New Rules September 18, 2011 Proper 20 Ordinary Time, Year A Philippians 1.21-30

            Sam Owen wants to play tennis like Jesus.

            Not that the four canonical gospels reveal much about the Son of Man’s forehand, although there’s probably a Nag Hammadi knock-off somewhere that covers the topic. No, Sam, a former tennis standout and current Episcopal seminarian, wonders whether “Christian competition” is an oxymoron. College tennis coach and devout Christian Comron Yazdergdi likens his racket to Moses’ rod: You throw down a snake, the very embodiment of deadly temptation, and pick it up again only by careful obedience to the voice of God. (Read more at http://www. nytimes.com /2011/ 09/03/us/03beliefs.html.)

            These two examples hit the key points of Paul’s admonition to the Philippian believers: “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ . . . striving together for the faith of the gospel.”

            Conduct yourselves comes from a Greek verb that gives us words like politics and police – the idea of conforming to the standards of one’s social milieu. This was a flag-waving word to the Philippians, whose city was an official Roman colony, meaning that it’s residents enjoyed all the privileges of native turf even though actually located in the provinces. The worst crime a Philippian could accuse someone of was acting in an un-Roman fashion. (Acts 16.21, 37) Yet Paul boldly insists that as Christians they have a higher citizenship and serve a superior Lord. Every action and attitude that a Roman citizen assumes without thinking about it now faces re-evaluation in light of the cross.

            That won’t be easy.

            Which is why Paul makes three references to Christian unity and, on the third, defaults to a sports metaphor: He wants these subversive citizens to strive together. The root of that verb begets the English word athlete and could literally be rendered something like “competing as teammates.” The wholesale rejection of surrounding social norms requires either a sociopath’s indifference to other people or the formation of a new community.

            Yazgerdi nearly quit tennis after his conversion, not sure that his competitive spirit could be of use to the Holy Spirit. Sam Owen decided to switch his mindset from a contest to a dance, admiring the good play of his opponent as a contribution to the overall beauty of the game. I don’t play tennis so I don’t much care how Jesus would have played. But I do spend money, and speak to people, and wear clothes and vote and drive a car. And I must do three things if I want to call myself a Christian: pay enough attention to uncover the standards by which I automatically do these things, rethink them by the standards of the Sermon on the Mount, and find a colony of the Kingdom where I will have the positive peer-pressure of other ex-pats who claim citizenship in my true home.

            Oh, and golf: Jesus wouldn’t have played at all.

Fore!

Doug

Collect

King of Kings, Your Son came to proclaim the in-breaking of a reign that uproots all human systems and upends all earthly statutes. By faith may we defy the standards of this world, and in fear may we fly to the support of Your church, that in us all might now see that coming day when the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ, together with the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, Amen.

Benediction

May you live as rebels to the kingdoms of earth,

            As a sign that those kingdoms will crumble.

May you live as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven,

            As a sign that God’s kingdom has come.

May you live as a colony of the citizens of the Kingdom

            To find strength in this clashing of kingdoms.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

            

Ten Years Later: A Response from a Soldier

Captain Ron Fisher, Battalion Chaplain, United States Army and a graduate of Logsdon Seminary/South Texas School of Christian Studies, emailed a thoughtful and challenging reply to my blog on the upcoming anniversary of the 911 attacks. I believe his insights should be available to a wider audience. With his permission, I am reproducing his remarks below:

I applaud your courage, for surely what you've written here is an unpopular devotion with much of the blood lusting mass in our society and Church (or seminaries).  I was deeply grieved to see Americans (many of whom would claim Christianity as their faith) celebrating in the streets at the news of bin Laden's execution.  That response failed to reflect the spirit of Christ to me.  The enemy too is created in the image of God.  This makes our, those of us in uniform, killing a sacred act, one not to be taken lightly or without much thought and prayer.   

I recall an experience in Baghdad.  We were in a home with two women and a number of children.  Our mission was to deliver bread and space heaters as the inhabitants in this Muhalla there were without food and heat.  There was a picture of a man on the wall.  When we asked through the Interpreter with us who the man was, he answered, "He is their husband.  But, you killed him.  He was a sniper for Al-Queda." The thought struck me that we in uniform aren't always able to turn the other cheek or to love our enemies, but that doesn't keep us from loving their families in their absence.  

For what's it worth, I very often find myself conflicted between the realities of God's Word on the matter and my own growing conviction that there remains certain individuals and groups in the world today who just need to get dead.  Luther said being a Soldier "is a holy vocation." Paul seems to me to suggest the same in Romans 13.  While the Western Church remains fixated on winning Catholics in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, the Church allows the rapid expansion of Islam to penetrate every sector of our society.  We are losing the war for souls in America and abroad.  Granted, war is not the answer, but neither is indifference or inactivity on the part of God's people.  

Ten Years Later September 11, 2011 Proper 19 Ordinary Time, Year A Exodus 14:19-31

            Ten years ago today the towers fell.

            For a decade we have dropped bombs; we have sent soldiers; we have deployed drones. We routed the Taliban; we toppled Hussein; we took out bin Laden. The terrorists murdered 2,977 people on 9/11. The Pentagon confirms the deaths of 6,215 American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

            War as an act of revenge is always a failure.

            C. S. Lewis argues in his famous essay, “Why I Am Not A Pacifist” that an extreme pacifist must demonstrate that wars always do more harm than good, a position that is speculative and thus beyond proof. One could counter that an advocate of just war must prove that at least some wars do more good than harm, also a matter of pure speculation.           

War as deterrent may be justifiable, but war as an act of revenge is always a failure. Sacrificing six thousand lives to avenge three thousand is bad math; it runs on the red side of the ledger, and the red is not ink but blood.

When the Twin Towers fell the terrorists danced in the bazaars. When bin Laden died Americans chanted “U. S. A.!” in sports stadiums. The helpful questions ten years later may not be whether we should fight, but how we should feel. When Israel saw the Egyptians float dead to the shores of the Red Sea, they sang, but since the story predates sheet music by several centuries, we do not know if it was a march or a dirge.

The Talmud, the ancient rabbinic commentary on the Law, contains an interesting legend about the crossing of the Red Sea.

But does the Holy One, blessed be He, rejoice over the downfall of the wicked? When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation. God silenced them and said, “My creatures are perishing, and you sing praises?”

The sacred historian reports this portion of the Exodus story in terms of a new creation as dry land emerges from a watery chaos. What perish in the formless void are armies and instruments of war. What walks dry-shod into new life are the formerly enslaved. God makes no apologies for acting on behalf of the oppressed, but grieves the oppressors would not repent.

Jesus came to preach the Kingdom of Heaven, a whole new world of restored reality that arises from the maelstrom of the fall. Cheek-turners and peace-makers enter freely. Self-avengers sink.

Perhaps it is important on this awful anniversary to speak of the need for action in the face of evil. Perhaps it is important to encourage those who die in our defense. But perhaps it is also important to say, even if only to ourselves, that God’s heart grieves for each of God’s creatures who dies on either side.

Sadly,

Doug

Collect

Mighty God, You are the great defender of the dispossessed. Place Yourself between us and all harm and make clear our path through chaos to salvation, not for us only but for all who trust in You. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Benediction

May God send forth the pillar of His presence:

            A light before you and a guard behind you.

May God call forth His creation out of chaos:

            A path to lead you and a wall to defend you.

May God show forth His judgment on evil:

            A fear to awe you and a love to win you.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.