Gratitude and Granddaughters

It was a "Melmo Morning" on Saturday at our Orlando apartment.  Our son Sam was visiting us with his two little girls.  They had had a huge day the day before. 

They had flown on a plane for the first time with their daddy and their Auntie Anna. 

They played their great grandparents, their FarMor and FarFar, and their aunties and uncle.

Lilly helped make her own "Rectangle Birthday Cake" (her choice when asked: round or rectangle?).  She helped mix the batter and spread it in the pan.  While it was baking, we made chocolate frosting.  While it was cooling, we made four neon colors of icing in plastic zip loc bags, and when the cake was cooled, we frosted it and Auntie Simone helped her decorate it.  It may not have been elegant, but Lilly helped make it herself, and that made it very special.

By Friday night, everybody was tired.  After a good sleep, the girls were awake and rested and ready to tackle a big Saturday.  The girls wanted to wear T-shirts with their favorite Sesame Street character.  Sophia, at 22 months a girl of more words every day,  was ecstatic.  "Melmo! Melmo!" she shouted joyously.  It was a "Melmo" morning.

At breakfast and at every meal, Lillian expresses her gratitude and thanks Jesus for the food.  I am glad that her parents encourage her to be grateful.    Here's a little meditation that I found recently when I was looking for something else in my Word files.  I wrote it four years ago, when Lillian's birth was imminent. 

 When I was a child I had my share of what I irreverently call “Jesus Junk.” Most memorable was a 12 inch wooden ruler, painted fuschia, with the inscription, in the King James translation: “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a worker that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).  I guess I was supposed to remember, when I did my math, that I should study hard, and that I could divide things like line segments in half by means of the marks on my ruler.

Perhaps you have children or grandchildren who have participated in a program called AWANA, a Scout-like weeknight Bible club for children ages 3 to 12.  Some of  my children did, when we lived in Ohio.  AWANA takes its name from this same verse in 2 Timothy.  AWANA is an acronym for “Approved Workers are Not Ashamed.”   Its goal is to help children to acquire the spiritual tools and insights to grow up to be faithful evangelical Christians.  AWANA accomplishes its goals by making sure that children learn how to behave respectfully, by having them memorize  a lot of the biblical passages that summarize the importance of believing in your heart and confessing with your lips that Jesus is Lord.  AWANA gives kids facts, and lots of rules of thumb, especially from the Book of Proverbs for healthy, productive living.  AWANA tells children: Follow the rules, work hard, do your best, and your work will be approved by God.  And to a large extent this is true.  We can see the appeal of AWANA to parents who see the world out there, with all its dangers and temptations, and want their children to be safe. 

Once, when I was assistant at a parish with more than a thousand families on the rolls, I taught a class for parents and godparents of infants and young children.  There were to be about ten baptisms the next day, and so we started out by introducing ourselves and sharing our best hopes for our children.  What kind of adults did we want our children to become?  By what values did we hope they would live?  At first people said they wanted their children to be healthy and happy.  And to know that they could achieve whatever they set their minds to.  They wanted them to be successful, to have friends, and to be friends.  As the conversation continued, the answers became more deliberate and thoughtful. These parents said they wanted their children to be able to face hardship and persevere.  They wanted their children to be able to look up into the sky in awe and wonder at the beautiful world they lived in.  They wanted their children to love to learn, to be unafraid to ask questions.  They wanted them to be compassionate and generous and grateful, to know how to forgive and to ask forgiveness.  They wanted their children to love God and to be certain that God loved them.  They wanted their children to love others in Christ’s name and to be passionate in their pursuit of justice.  One dad, known for his ability to cut to the chase, borrowed a wonderful Yiddish term and summarized: “I want my kid to be a Christian Mensch.”

The AWANA approach and the approach of that group of Episcopal parents are a little bit different.  The AWANA approach lends itself well to being taught to gangs of little children on Wednesday evenings.  Creating a Christian Mensch is probably the work of a lifetime, something that is caught, not taught.  I follow Jesus Christ as an Episcopalian partly because I believe that there’s a brittleness about the AWANA approach.  Like many rules of thumb, the idea that if you believe certain things and behave in certain ways you will be productive and happy works most of the time.  But not all of the time.  Often, despite our best efforts, we have a very hard time. If you’re taught that there’s a one-to-one mapping between your good work and God’s blessings in your life, your faith can snap when you come to the hard places and the formula doesn’t seem to be working.  I want my children and grandchildren to have a faith that is resilient in the face of hardship.

“Study—do your best—to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed,” says Paul in the Second Letter to Timothy. Sometimes I think AWANA leaders may have forgotten the larger context of this verse that they seem to understand to advocate making oneself approved by correct belief. Just a few verses earlier, Paul was saying that his life doesn’t look so great by a lot of ordinary measures.  He’s in chains, under house arrest at best, not free to go where he wants, at the mercy of the Roman system of justice, to which he had appealed when he feared for his life at the hands of irate Jewish brothers who didn’t understand the appeal of the story of Jesus.  Paul speaks in this letter about dying with Christ in order to live with him.  We need to remember that Paul seldom speaks of the resurrection and freedom and even glory of life in Christ without also speaking of his crucifixion and suffering.   

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus give shape and meaning to Paul’s own suffering.  His hope in Christ makes present hardship worth enduring.  God’s people have always understood that God is present even in pain and suffering; God’s hand is guiding the lives of nations and individuals, even when everything seems to be falling apart.  In the Psalms we read:

         You, O God, have proved us;

                  you have tried us just as silver is tried.

         You let enemies ride over our heads;

         we went through fire and water;

         but you brought us out into a place of refreshment. (Psalm 66:10-12)

 I want my children, and my granddaughters, to have that sort of resilient faith that will enable them to persevere, to keep trusting God through the hard times, confident that, in spite of appearances, God will, indeed lead them out into a place of refreshment. 

Every person comes to those hard places eventually.  It is one of the great privileges of my priestly vocation to hear the stories of people’s lives, to stand with them as they cope honestly and graciously with illness, with the aftermath of other people’s wicked and cruel behavior, with financial reversal, with the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease and mental illness, with the untimely death of people far too young to die, with the betrayal of adultery, with the heartbreak of addiction.  I see people struggle with doubt, I see them ask: Why?  Where is God in all this?  How is any of this my fault?  Living with these questions—because people don’t seem, usually, to get any obvious answers—requires a resilient sort of faith that is much more about relationships than about formulas or quick fixes.

 The book of the prophet Jeremiah makes two important and rather obvious references to real estate. Once, Jeremiah made a very public contract to purchase property in his hometown (Jeremiah 32:1-12).  It was a sign of hope that, even though God’s people had been displaced from their homeland by political upheaval, in due time they would come home.  But Jeremiah also tells the people in exile that God’s message to them is: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters….Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jeremiah 29).  Jeremiah had it from the LORD that the period of exile would be seventy years: roughly a whole lifetime. Jeremiah knew some fellow-prophets who were saying: don’t get comfortable here in exile.  You’ll be going home soon.  God is going to rescue you.  Jeremiah, by contrast, is telling the people two important things.  The first important thing is that there is no place where God is not with us.  Even in exile, even in a foreign land, God makes crops to grow, God can bless with fertility, God can bring forth and preserve future generations of children.  The second important thing is that we must sometimes trust for a long time that God is faithful before we see the fulfillment of God’s promises. 

I want my children and my grandchildren to know and live by this truth. Furthermore, I want them to have a kind of trust in God that sees evidence of his power to heal, to forgive, to love—and says “Thank you.”

There’s a wonderful little story from the gospel of Luke.  It tells of ten men, ostracized by a disease that they didn’t deserve, that they didn’t do anything to catch. Ten men who probably heard all kinds of whispers and maybe also some taunts, from people who assumed that disease is a punishment, a logical consequence of poor choices.  Ten men whose illness forced them to the very margins of society.   All cried, like the Psalmist, from “out of the depths” of suffering and despair.  All ten called: “Jesus! Master! Have mercy on us!” 

Jesus healed all ten.  He didn’t worry about whether they were Jews or Samaritans.  He just healed them. Here’s what he did:  He sent them to the priest, who would certify that they were healthy and could return to the community.  He sent them on their way, it would seem, before they were healed.  In their own little community of outcasts, there was enough faith that all ten started on their way even before there was evidence that anything would happen.  All ten were healed.  One man, the “outsider’s outsider,” a Samaritan, came back to say “Thank you.” 

Did Jesus, in frustration, un-heal the other nine?  No.  That’s not how Jesus gives.  Jesus is not like your great aunt who told your mother that she would no longer send you a birthday check because you had failed to send a thank-you note for the last one.  Saying Thank You is not some sort of quid pro quo, or an insurance policy for the next time you need Jesus to do something for you. 

Think about what we teach our children about gratitude.  We say “Thank you” not because it will get us more next time, but because it is the right thing to do.  It helps to maintain relationships.  It is right to share your delight in what you have been given, and in the giver of the gift.  I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times, but I will make a thousand and one:  Eucharist, our English word for what we do when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, is related to the Greek word for giving thanks. What we are about when we celebrate the Eucharist is giving thanks.  We give thanks for a rehabilitation that dwarfs the one experienced by the lepers that Jesus healed, for, as one of our Eucharistic prayers says to God: “You have brought us out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

I want my children and my grandchildren to have the sort of relationship with God that sees his goodness all around, and, delighted and rejoicing, says Thank You.  I want to have this sort of faith, too.  I want to have the sort of grateful, trusting heart that gives thanks even from places that feel like exile.  I want to have the sort of grateful, trusting heart that gives thanks to God from circumstances that feel like prison.  Someone who had this sort of faith was the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who went to prison during the Second World War for protesting Hitler’s policies.  From prison, like Paul, he wrote letters and papers that were somehow preserved.  One contained words that Pratt Green turned into a hymn.  If my children and my granddaughters can pray this prayer with all the courage they can muster, I will be pretty certain that they are safely, and gratefully, home in the Reign of God.

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered,

and confidently waiting come what may,

we know that God is with us night and morning,

and never fails to greet us each new day.

Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented,

and evil days bring burdens hard to bear;

O give our frightened souls the sure salvation,

for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming

with bitter suffering, hard to understand,

we take it thankfully and without trembling

out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us

the joy we had, the brightness of your Sun,

we shall remember all the days we lived through,

and our whole life shall then be yours alone.

Come to the Party!

Before long I will be moving to Minot, North Dakota, where I have been called to serve as priest at All Saints Episcopal Church.  This is a 24 month assignment, with a very specific goal.  I am being called to lead worship, to preach and celebrate the sacraments, and to help provide pastoral care.  Meanwhile I look forward to working with a group of people who are to be ready in two years to take over these duties, on a volunteer basis, under the supervision of a seminary-trained Canon Missioner who has responsibility for half a dozen congregations in the Diocese of North Dakota.  This model of ministry is sometimes called "Total Ministry." 

The parish has identified candidates for Holy Orders, and the members of the Diocese are in the process of affirming those calls.  The individuals involved will be training locally to serve God's people in the community through All Saints. 

I am excited about this new assignment.  One of the little secrets that most people don't know about me is that, despite having the M.Div. (Master of Divinity, the basic 3-year professional degree for clergy) and an S.T.M. (Master of Sacred Theology, an additional post-M.Div. degree that allows a person to devote intensive study to an area of particular interest, in my case, history of biblical interpretation in the Anglican tradition), and despite having been ordained for 25 years, I have no course work on my transcript either in liturgy or in preaching.    Now I'm getting to revisit these subjects, along with the others that a candidate for the priesthood must learn.  They are all prescribed in the Constitutions and Canons of the Episcopal Church.   It looks to me like a lot to cover in three years of full time seminary study, much less in the two years I'll have to work with these people--and they will continue in their full time work or professions both now and (until they retire) after they are ordained.  

On the recommendation of my bishop, the Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander, I picked up a copy of Patrick Malloy's Celebrating the Eucharist  (New York: Church Publishing,  2007).  Professor Malloy was our speaker at the conference for priests of the Diocese of Atlanta last month at Camp Mikell.  He's a very organized, engaging speaker.  I'm looking forward to digging deep into his book.  There's nothing like having to teach someone else to force a person to re-examine practices and presuppositions.   I admit to feeling my skin crawl a little as I confront the flurry of details in this book.   I am a little bit "spatially challenged."  You do not want me near you in a line dance.  I nearly trip and fall on my face as I think about a simple instruction to put my right foot in front of my left foot.   But Professor Malloy promises that there are principles behind his prescriptions, and I believe him. 

In his introductory chapter, he writes:

The liturgy is a kind of "rehearsal."  In and through it the church, using the medium of ritual, behaves as it aspires always to behave, but in a very stylized and controlled way. The exchange of the Peace, for example, is seldom an actual event of reconciliation between enemies, but is a stylized gesture that rehearses the community in reaching out with love to whomever is near.  By this very act of "rehearsing," the church can grow, if only by the smallest increments, into being what it aspires to be. (p. 7)

I read Malloy's comment last week as I was preparing to preach at today's celebration of the Eucharist, on the strange, multivalent parable of the Wedding Banquet for the King's son (Matthew 22:1-14).  

Themes of wedding banquets are bound up, in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, with a vision of a joyous, culminating, triumphant celebration of the Reign of God. The book of the Prophet Isaiah contains oracles about the feast of rich food and well-aged wines that God will provide "for all the peoples" on the Day of the LORD, the day when God will "wipe away the tears from every face" and destroy death forever.    The Book of the Revelation to St. John presents the culminating vision of the triumph of God as the Marriage Supper of Jesus, the Lamb of God, to the Church.  The image is rich: the slain Lamb of God, with all those allusions to Passover, has triumphed over death to be both Victim and Victor.  

When Patrick Malloy says we "rehearse" who we are in liturgy, he is implying that all of this imagery and metaphor may be ringing in our hearts and minds.  When the Celebrant recounts in prayer that Jesus "stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself..." Episcopalians who know Holy Writ and their prayer books may well think of the prayer we may pray daily in Morning Prayer, in which we say, "Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross, so that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace."  They may well see in the Cross, not only a symbol of suffering and death, but an evocation of the four cardinal directions, and remember words of scripture about people coming "from east and west and north and south" welcomed into God's kingdom.   

One of the things we "rehearse" in the Eucharist is the invitation and the welcome of Our Lord to the most unexpected, most undeserving people, even to "prostitutes and tax collectors," the idiom of Jesus' day for the lowest and most despicable members of society.   The Reign of God makes a place for the orphan, the widow, the foreigner, the blind, the lame, the sick, the suffering, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned--in short, for all the people who are most easily overlooked, or, worse, most easily blamed for their own lot in life, whether or not it is their fault.   

Jesus tells this parable during Holy Week, addressing the Temple officials in Jerusalem, people with whom he typically has little patience, people who represent hypocrisy, arrogance, and self-centeredness.  Jesus had been telling parables that those officials heard as judging them.  The shoes were fitting, and pinching!  But, like all parables, this parable addresses the rest of us, as well.   I know I'm not alone in finding this parable hard to wrap my mind and heart around. 

• The king has issued his invitation, in a way analogous to the "save the date" messages I receive from my friends whose children are planning to be married several months hence.  
• As the event gets close, the king sends servants out to tell everybody: "Come to the party!"
• People's response to the invitation, now that the time is near, range from indifference--continuing to go about their business--to outright hostility. Some of the invited guests actually kill the king's servants. Why this extreme response to the king?
• The king appears to put the party on hold while he takes retaliatory measures that remind me of nothing so much as the kind of violence I used to see on TV cartoons when I was a child.
• The king REALLY wants people to attend the party, so he sends out servants to the thoroughfares and the countryside, to gather everybody in: good and bad.  No excuses. No advance warning...
• Then, when everybody is celebrating, the king focuses on one person who is not wearing the prescribed wedding clothes, confronts him, asks him how he showed up there, and proceeds to have him tied up and thrown out of the party into the outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth."  Gnash, gnash, gnash....
• How is that fair?  It just doesn't fit with the picture that Matthew's Gospel has been building up, of the Kingdom of Heaven as being for ALL the people, as a celebratory party to which God has been issuing invitations to EVERYBODY. 

This parable can play on people's anxieties.  What if I am thrilled beyond measure to be at God's Great Party, so unexpectedly?   What if there was still some secret handshake, some secret dress code I know nothing about, some measure by which I will be find wanting and, having tasted the great food and danced the dance with abandon, God is going, still, to yank me by my (sartorially inappropriate) collar and throw me out?   Am I going to hell after all?  And do I want to be at a party where the guy next to me seems to have been thrown out because he didn't have time to go home and change clothes before he accepted the invitation of the King's servants?

Or perhaps you've heard in a sermon or a Bible study that the guy without the wedding garment is the person who is trying to sneak in without an invitation.  (The king would naturally have provided the tuxedos or togas along with the engraved invitations, the explanation goes.) The next step in this way of telling the story is often that those kinds of people are Jews, homosexuals, adulterers...and they're going to hell. 

In her reflections on this parable in The Christian Century (vo. 128 No. 20, October 4, 2011), Mary Anderson  imagines the thoughts a parishioner might have to that kind of sermon on this parable:

Imagine that an active member in a congregation has just heard that sermon.  She has tears in her eyes.  She hears the judgment loud and clear.  Her son-in-law is a self-proclaimed atheist and her granddaughter is unbaptized at age six.  She has a wonderful neighbor who is Jewish; her longtime doctor is the best listener in the world--and a practicing Hindu.  How can she be happy in heaven without them? She was told once that heaven will be so incredible that she won't miss these people, but she can't imagine rejoicing in the Lord under these conditions.  She can't imagine her sweet grandchild in hell.

But the grandmother has accepted the invitation; she's put on Christ and considers herself clothed with righteousness.  She has recommitted herself on many occasions to imitating Christ.  So what would Jesus do, she wonders.  The congregation rises to sing a hymn rejoicing in salvation, and worshipers dutifully recite the Apostles' Creed.  The grandmother's voice catches on the words of faith, "he descended into hell."  She's never had a satisfactory explanation of what Jesus was doing in hell between his death and resurrection.  For her at that moment, after suffering through a sermon that sent her loved ones to outer darkness, she knew what the creed meant for her.  Before he was raised from the dead, Jesus went to retrieve those who had not heard the gospel through no fault of their own.  Jesus went to get those cast into outer darkness and bring them into the kingdom with him.  If she was clothed with Christ, she reasoned, she was called to be like him.

By the time of the final hymn she decided that to really be like Christ, she would pass up heaven in order to comfort her grandbaby in hell.  ..She would descend into hell as Jesus did.  She left church convinced that day that if we truly live a transformed life, we can't stand by and feast while others starve and burn.  That just isn't the Jesus way!

...Isn't this what Jesus did and what Jesus would do? Orthodox interpretation or not, the parable interpreted her life, and she found herself exiting worship with a slight limp [--an allusion to Jacob wrestling with God--] but rejoicing nevertheless.  (p. 20)

Anderson says that these parables judge us.  We see in them, ideally, what God needs us to see.  We hear the story in the context of our great weekly re-enactment (PRE-enactment??) of the Heavenly Party.  (Another blogger on this theme, The Rev. Rick Morley on September 27th, writes about his preference for "party" over "banquet," which makes him think of plastic tablecloths and vats of overcooked green beans and rubber chicken: events to which one is supposed to go, but to which one may not really want to go.)  If we read carefully, we can see that the role in this parable of the King's subjects is to really enjoy the party.  The role of the King's servants is to keep crying out: "Come to the party!"  The servants are NOT assigned the role of doorkeeper or of fashion arbiter.   The king's servants keep inviting and inviting and welcoming and welcoming.  There is still plenty of room at the party!

And the King does not give up easily. (Hearers of this parable are going to draw parallels between the King and the Owner of the Vineyard in the parable we heard last week (Matthew 21:33-41), whose chief character traits are perseverance and patience.) The arms of love are extended in an embrace.  But there is freedom in the embrace.  The king does not force anyone to come to the party.  We can leave it up to the King to sort out these matters, and, however undeserving we think we are, however surprised we may be to find ourselves at the party, we can eat and drink with great joy.  And we can say, "Thank you. Thank you, Thank you."  That is what we rehearse, Sunday after Sunday, in our liturgy that is called The Great Thanksgiving.  Even though the bread does not look like bread.  Even though we have just a tiny taste of wine.  The bread and wine are the Body and Blood of Jesus himself, offered for us.  A great and holy mystery is that Jesus is the host of the feast, and the Feast himself.

My friend, the Rev. Penny Nash, preached a wise and compelling sermon  on this parable this morning at Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, Virginia.  You can read it here.