Tongue-Tied September 16, 2012 Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B James 3.1-12

            The blue whale is the largest animal ever, living or extinct. Its tongue weighs over two and a half metric tons – more than a full-grown bull elephant.

            And your tongue is far more dangerous.

            James dizzies his readers with a kaleidoscope of multi-colored metaphors to depict the danger of human speech: The tongue is a snaffle-bit, a tiny piece of tack that puts Man of War through his paces (v.3), a rudder, hidden below the waterline but guiding the whole ship (v.4), a lit cigarette butt flicked onto the tinder-dry roadside stubble of a drought-stricken landscape (v.5-6). A speaker rides his tongue like a rodeo cowboy, strapped to the back of a raging bull hoping somehow to hang on (v.7-8). Like a treacherous municipal water supply, people’s mouths can contain invisible doses of deadly e. coli (v.11-12).

            No surprise, then, that James opens up with a warning: “My brethren, be not many masters.” It’s not only tough to walk the walk; it’s treacherous to talk the talk! 

“Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth,” the psalmist prayed. “Keep the door of my lips.” (Ps 141.3) God calls us daily to the dangerous work of opening our own mouths. The reward justifies the risk because speech can point our world to Christ. Given the stakes, it might not be a bad idea to offer that prayer at the start of every day – and maybe at the start of every sentence.

Shut Up and Speak!

Doug

Sunday Go-To-Meetin’ Clothes September 9, 2012 Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B James 2.1-17

            Clothing counts, and the tendency to judge the human book by its sartorial cover runs deep.

            Alexander Solzhenitsyn records in his book The Gulag Archipelago that even amidst the wretchedness of Stalin’s concentration camps some prisoners sought to signal their superior status by distinctive wardrobe. “But here,” Solzhenitsyn chuckles, “the possibilities were not great.” If the camp issued black uniforms, these men angled for blue ones. They took their peg-legged uniform britches to the tailor’s shop and ordered wedge inserts to create a sort of ghetto bellbottom.

            James knows he’s bucking DNA when he orders the church to ignore exterior upholstery. Rabbinic law dictated that if a wealthy citizen went to court with a poor one, the rich guy had to dress down to the level of his opponent, or upgrade the other man’s wardrobe to match his own. James goes even farther: He dares to envision the Sunday service as a place where clothing does not count at all and costume has no impact on community.

            In the church of my childhood neglect of a necktie ran the risk of rejection. In today’s ruthlessly casual congregations a trendy T-shirt and a tattoo might earn a favorable entre. James argues not so much for a specific uniform as for a people so formed as to remain uninformed about the form that drapes the person beneath.

            We can’t walk around naked; for most of us the aesthetic objections would be sufficient if there were no moral ones. The trick is to wear our clothes but never let them wear us. Legend holds that the dapper Fred Astair used to bring his suits home fresh from the tailor and throw them up against the wall to show them who was boss. That might not be a bad daily discipline for the Christian getting dressed.

            In the end, it is either the clothes that make the man, or the man who transforms the clothes. On the day of his conversion Francis of Assisi shed the splendid draperies of a rich merchant’s son and changed togs with a passing peasant. G. K. Chesterton writes,

In place of the girdle which he had flung off. . .he picked up a rope more or less at random, because it was lying near, and tied it around his waist. He undoubtedly meant is as a shabby expedient; rather as the very destitute tramp will sometimes tie his clothes together with a piece of string. He meant to strike the note of collecting his clothes anyway, like rags from a succession of dust bins. Ten years later that make-shift costume was the uniform of five thousand men; and a hundred years later, in that, for a pontifical panoply, they laid great Dante in the grave.

             The goal of the gathered church is not change the habits of beggars so that they can afford to dress like rich men. The Spirit of God aims to transform the souls of beggars so that their very clothing becomes the rich revelation of the indwelling Christ.

Suit Up!

Doug

Triple Threat September 2, 2012 Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B James 1:17-27

            “If you want your pastoral care to leap light-years ahead,” advises Fred D. McGehee, “fill it with genuineness, accurate empathy, and a gift-love known as nonpossessive warmth.” Or, as an older pastoral tract puts it, be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.

            Empathy, McGehee contends, is “everyday mind reading” in which we enter the experience of others and thus find ourselves comprehending their words and actions. “Empathetic persons,” he concludes, “find it easy to believe in incarnation.” If I refuse the small act of inhabiting someone else’s thoughts, feelings and motives I can scarcely believe that God the Son really moved into my neighborhood of mortal flesh and was at all points tempted. If I am swift to hear, I can take other people seriously by letting their reality colonize my own.

“Genuine people,” McGehee explains, “model healthy self-disclosure. Consequently, they have less difficulty believing in divine revelation.” Oddly enough, silence can be more revealing than speech because it leaves our actions to write their own, unadjusted autobiography. If I’m choking up on the bat of self-disclosure, it’s hard to believe that God would swing away, even in the person of Jesus Christ. If I am slow to speak, I can belay the verbal spin-doctoring that protects my crafted self-image; people can see who I really am.

            Nonpossessive warmth loves without controlling. “The sole reward to the giver,” McGehee explains, “is to see the good this high positive regard does in the receiver’s life.” Consequently, “because of the way persons who practice nonpossessive warmth live their lives, they find it easy to believe in the biblical concept of divine redemption.” If I constantly calculate the payoff for loving others, I find it difficult to believe God doesn’t keep the same kind of balance sheet. If I quit angling for a jackpot I can stop being mad when loving people fails to pay off.

            Incarnation, revelation, and redemption: If I will listen up, shut up, and give up, I can invite people to experience the God of the Bible. Better still, I can even experience that God myself.

Believe Up to What You Live,

Doug

G. I. Jesus August 26, 2012 Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B Ephesians 6.10-20

            Archaeologists rooting around in the rubble of ancient Sardis happened on the bones of a solider who fell in the thick of the fighting. He fought for the Lydians against the Persians about half a millennium before the birth of Christ. His bones tumbled from the ruins of a mud-brick wall in which his corpse clearly served as no more than mortar: No embalming, no grave-goods, not a single artifact to mark his identity.

            But they knew he was a soldier who fell while doing his duty. His bones told the tale.

            The muscle insertions on his upper arms indicated that he habitually hoisted a shield with his left and swung a sword with his right. The cracked bones in his left forearm indicated that he had wielded it as a shield long after the enemy’s blows hewed his own shield to slivers. His right hand clutched a stone – caught up as a weapon of chance, perhaps after his sword broke. The compressed vertebrae of his neck betrayed the constant weight of a helmet.

            Now that’s a faithful soldier: so dedicated in duty that thousands of years in an unmarked grave fail to erase the imprint of his armor.

            “Put on the whole armor of God.”

            Paul admonishes the Ephesian believers to fight in full harness, to live such daily discipline in Christ that their very skeletons preach the gospel long after their tongues fall silent. Those marching orders remain unchanged for today’s spiritual warriors.

            Cling to faith in the risen Christ as the all-encompassing explanation against which the schemes of the skeptics shiver. Wield the Word of God with such persistence that even if they finally pry the written book from your hands you can battle on because you have hidden it in your heart – and etched it into your bones. Walk through life with a head habitually hung low because nothing but humility can bear the weight of a salvation given by grace alone.  

            Christ bears yet the scars of His service, badges of courage for all eternity in the presence of the holy angels. (Rev 5.6) One day when the graves gape and groan to lose at last their mortal prey (1 Th 4.16), and we rise to meet our Lord in resurrection bodies beyond our present imagining – may they yet be scored with the souvenirs of our soldiery which will shout forever to the praise of God!

Full Battle Rattle,

Doug

Listen Up! August 19, 2012 Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B 1 Kings 2.10-12, 3.3-14

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

-       T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

In the Wild Horse Desert about ninety minutes south and west of Corpus Christi sits a silent prayer retreat: No TV’s, no radios, no internet, and only spotty cell phone service. They call it Lebh Shomea.

That’s what Solomon asked God for: a lebh shomea.

The Lord opened up God’s Big Ol’ Grab Bag o’ Goodies, the divine Disneyland that the televangelists are always promising. Name-it-and-claim-it, Solomon my boy, and it’s all yours.

And the child king replied, “Give thy servant lebh shomea.”

It literally means, “a listening heart.” The Hebrew verb moves in two directions, combining the ideas of hearing and acting. “I want the kind of heart that hears what you command and then actually does it.”

And that’s where lebh shomea meets Lebh Shomea. In the sleepless rain of cyber-chatter that envelopes our days, bits and bytes outshout the still, small voice that tells our hearts the truth. Sometimes a listening heart has no chance unless we take it to a place where there isn’t quite so much else to hear.

The very first time Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel it is not to pronounce a truth but to ask a question: What seek ye? And the answer is interesting: Rabbi, where dwellest thou? (Jo 1.38) The Word is more interested in hearing than speaking and the proto-disciples prefer presence to precept. Malcolm Guite, in his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, describes this as “the radical idea that the Word behind all words and scriptures has been made, not more words, but flesh.”

Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Only where there is lebh shomea, and enough silence.

Shhh!

Doug