Neverland

from Easter 6, RCL - year A

Do we remember the commandments?
Do we remember that the Holy Spirit is our defense?
Do we remember very often that God required a leap of faith to mature us as Christians – as the whole Church?

It is easy to believe that tradition requires constancy from us. It is easy to say that we ‘live and move and have our being’ in God, but to really do so in the furnishings of our Anglican tradition. It is easy to claim that we have found our “2nd star on the right and straight on ‘til morning” path to heaven.

But where do those directions actually take us? These are Peter Pan’s directions to Neverland. Neverland is where we remain children forever. Neverland is where we find the comforts and constancies of childhood. Neverland would appear to be a perfect representation of heaven. After all, were we not admonished to have faith like little children?

Yes, but we weren’t told to act like them.

Neverland isn’t heaven. It isn’t a taste of the kingdom of God. Neverland is really just more of the same – all the jealously, the anger, the hurt and the longings of real life, but with less coping skills. Neverland is life without the possibility for change.

Now, I think very few people actually confuse Neverland with Heaven but I think that a lot of us are confusing it with the Church. Most of us, individually and corporately think we are preserving, with our buildings and traditions and interpretations of Scripture, a perfect slice of God’s kingdom. We think we are creating something set aside, something sacred, in the world. And we are so sure this is the case that we can no longer see through our smells nor hear through our bells that the world we have created ‘in here’ is exactly like the world ‘out there’ but with less coping skills.

And that is the saddest thing of all. Because we have those coping skills but they are like the alarm clock in the alligator. We are so afraid of that alligator, that leap of faith and imagination to truly envision the Kingdom of God here on earth, that we cannot snatch the clock back, we cannot allow ourselves to grow up.

What if we want to, though? How do we escape our Neverland? How do we start creating God’s Kingdom on Earth instead of echoing what has happened to God’s creation in microcosm?

Exit Peter Pan, stage left. Enter Jesus Christ, stage right. Because it is true that Jesus told us to have faith like little children in the Father. But, he has fundamentally altered the parent-child relationship. We have been invited to have a different relationship with God than Moses had with Him. The burning bush was scary and said, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Through Christ, we get to grow up. Now the Father is approachable because our big brother has softened Him up a bit, and our Father can now say, “I raised you right, use your best judgment, and if it doesn’t work, I will forgive you and we will figure it out together.”

How can we believe in that freedom and that forgiveness? We can believe in that forgiveness because when our best effort meant we killed Jesus, God forgave us and used it as an example forever. We can believe in that freedom because we are not alone as we sometimes imagine. We have an Advocate, whom we can hear when we are following the commandments, Love God first. Love your neighbor with the same care you give yourself.

What should we do with this freedom and forgiveness? We could create a Neverland, a place no different than the world of hopelessness around us. We could fear change and cling to tradition. We could argue over who owns the buildings, who is allowed to be God’s child, and start wars over the correct interpretation of such phrases as “the atonement by the sanctification of the most precious body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ.” As long as we fight each other instead of the despair of the world, we show the world that we have no peace to offer. We can create this Neverland because we are the adult children of God. We have been left to our best devices – if we will choose to use them.

Do we remember the commandments?
Do we remember that the Holy Spirit is our defense?
Do we remember very often that God required a leap of faith to mature us as Christians – as the whole Church?

These are our defenses. These are our devices. These are what build the Kingdom of God as a light in the darkness of despair instead of Neverland.

What if we embraced the commandments? What if we started every meeting not with a recitation of minutes but a reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan? What if we really took to heart St. Peter’s admonition that “it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering is God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil?” Peter Pan believed if you ignored it, it would go away, but we know this to be false. Suffering will continue to exist because that is our growing edge, and because that is part of accepting the consequences of an adult relationship with God.

But if we choose, daily, to be God’s representative in the middle of human despair, if we choose, daily, to take that leap of faith, then not only will we be following the commandments, not only will we have received the Holy Spirit, but people will be drawn to us. And if we choose, daily, to be present to God’s people, then we will be able to answer them when they ask, “why are you doing this for me?”

Our defense, our testimony, is, in the end, all we have to give. It is fashionable to call it a faith story, but that is misleading. A story is something we make up. A story will lead us to Neverland. Defense is no better, because a defense is an excuse, a justification in the face of wrongdoing. We are not wrongdoing. The Kingdom of God will not come about through legislation; it will not come about through soup kitchens and homeless shelters. We do not need to leave Neverland to vote and none think they are hungry in Neverland, but they starve all the same. Because what humans are looking for cannot be found in stories or excuses, but only in God. Only in God do we have testimony; only in God do we have truth. The truth that feeds the soul, that faces the despair, that creates the relationships that build the true Kingdom of God.

Remember the commandments.
Remember that the Holy Spirit is our defense.
Remember that God required a leap of faith to mature us as Christians – as the whole Church.


Amen.

The Joy of Old Friends

There are no friends like old friends, or so the saying goes. They have seen you at your worst and still like you. They have seen you at your best and are not jealous. They know your stories and are excited for the latest update; how your spouse is doing, how old the children are, what you are working on now. Don’t get me wrong, I like new friends too, but the old friends keep us connected to our lives.

I have had the great fortune of being away from many of my friends for the last year. It didn’t feel fortunate at the time but that is precisely the point. By being removed from our comfortable places, we get the jolt we need to reevaluate the decisions that we have made. You know the ones, they nag in the back of the mind. The ones we may have made in anger or in haste. By experiencing discomfort, it could be the result of moving to a new town or even a death of a loved one, we get a second chance to look at our lives and perhaps, correct the course.

God calls to us to keep faith, to keep community. Our relationships are what ground us, our friends are what remind us, that our God is found in the ties that bind us, one to another. Jesus was trying to get us to expand the length and increase the quantity of those ties, because, through God, we are capable of compassion and friendship with people we think we can’t like, that we have become angry with, that are different from us.

If you’ve had a jolt lately, like me, I encourage you to try looking for the blessing, the opportunity to reevaluate those things that are nagging you. But most especially, I encourage you to look up an old friend and say, “Hi.” To all of you that I have missed and have missed me, it’s good to be back and I am glad to see you.

Intro to a new sponsoring parish

Well, this post is a year late. No Vocations this year. Probably not next year either. Bishop and Priest both changed this year. Also, not looking good on the no seminary debt front, but if I hadn't thought it possible, I might never have talked myself into going. 5/24/09


To all of the parishioners at Holy Spirit, Sutherlin:

(First, I want to say hello again to Donna and Margo and all the other wonderful ladies I met from Holy Spirit at the Women’s Spirituality Day. It was wonderful to meet you and I am really looking forward to the chance to get to know you all better.)

A little bit of biographical data about me. My name is Heather Michele Schwebach Lee (I go by Heather Lee) and I am 35 years old. I have 2 children, a daughter Francis (10) and a son Simon (8). I have been married to (Allen) Shannon Lee for almost 13 years and he is currently living in San Francisco while we financially prepare to pay for seminary without incurring student loans. I have a BS in philosophy from Portland State University and graduated in 2001.

I have been an Episcopalian since 2002 and have attended parishes in four diocese (three were in CA in the course of 2 years.) I am canonically resident in the Diocese of Oregon and have been a member at St. David’s since 2004.

St. David’s is a small congregation. I have been blessed by spending so much of my formative time with this loving and supportive group of Christians. I have been able to experience as many aspects of ministry as I have wanted or needed as I explored a call to the priesthood. Consequently, I am an acolyte and chalice bearer, a lay reader and preacher and a regular contributor to the monthly newsletter. I have helped create liturgies for the Easter season and I am most proud of having helped the Sudanese Fellowship Mission create a liturgy that is Anglican in nature but a joy and comfort for those from a non-liturgical background as well.

I love the supportive, familial nature of small parishes, however, I am aware that without the overarching support of a diocese, many opportunities for small congregational ministries would be lost. Consequently, I am an active member of my convocation, attending Convention as a delegate for the last 2 years, and an alternate the year before. I am also part of a team of Metro-East Convocation Youth Leaders who sponsor and support an ecumenical summer camp for children in Southeast Portland each year.

Of special note is my role as a Trainer for the Anti-Racism Commission here in the Diocese of Oregon. I feel particularly blessed that God has called me to do this work and I have been given many opportunities to draw on organizational skills I knew I had. God has also opened up avenues of personal growth in public speaking and leadership that I did not know were in me.

As for my current plans, I am in discernment now and hope to attend Vocations Conference next spring. I am entering seminary this fall because this is the path that has opened up for my family. It is my hope, after seminary and the ordination process, that I will be able to serve in a small parish outside the Portland metro area, however, God’s plan generally unfolds in it’s own time.

I hope that this letter provides a quick background on me. I am always available to answer any specific questions that might arise. Please feel free to contact me; Donna Anderson has my contact information and I am giving her permission to share it with anyone who would like it.


Peace,
heather lee
st david of wales, portland

February 9, 2008

Admission Letter - Not sure why I have all the drafts of things and not the final copies.

CDSP is the culmination of 5 years of doubts, questions and fears. The first time the idea even crossed my mind that I, too, could attend a seminary was during the 2003 General Convention. Sadly, it wasn’t even my idea. My husband informed me that I should stop yelling at NPR and just go to seminary already.

I put seminary out of my mind and instead got more involved in my parish. If there was a need for shelter coordinators, I stepped up. If there was an opening in the rotation for acolytes, I learned how. When an opportunity arose to learn to preach, I cried my way through my fears of public speaking and learned to do that too. As I learned that I was exceptionally talented at things that I certainly had never exhibited talent in before I began to wonder if seminary would actually get in the way of those talents. Having spent so many tears on relearning to see myself, why mess with a good thing?

Eventually, it became clear that I was exploring the call to ordination. I had to start rethinking seminary, since seminary was a huge part of the package. In fact, I am still working on that call. God willing, this education will be put to use building bridges between Christ and the people I minister to now.

That isn’t why I am ready to go to seminary now. That is why I need to go to seminary, eventually.

I have reached the limits of self-directed study.  I have reached a place where I am ready to start breaking down and rebuilding what I know of my own faith, of the historic Christian faith, and the faith of others outside Christianity. It is the convergence of those three sets that makes CDSP my school of choice.

My own faith has been the concrete faith of childhood, the anger of disillusioned youth and the convoluted musing of philosophers. New aspects of faith that I hope to nurture and expand at CDSP include the notion of truth that is not fact, and the faith of the child that Paul speaks of, that of trust in the face of uncertainty.

My spiritual upbringing in the Baptist tradition has often left me on half built bridges of my own making. The belief that the individual conscience is an accurate indicator of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit belies the tradition of the Apostolic Church recorded in the New Testament.  However, a little bit of church history, which I did not receive in that tradition, has made it clear how and why the tradition evolved. I want to know more about the various permutations that the Church has manifested. I want to encourage the current rise in unity between denominations that is currently manifesting in the American landscape. Only knowledge, which leads to understanding, can make that possible. That CDSP is part of that unity makes it particularly desirable.

Lastly, people have found many ways to span the gap between God and themselves.  While I have my reasons for thinking that Christ will be the penultimate way in which God breaches that divide, other bridges have much to teach us about our own historic choices in permeating His Gospel in the world.  Evangelism happens one changed life touching one other life at a time, and it can never take hold with honesty and integrity when it does not respect the ways in which each life has crossed the span between God and self. Monotheism is not monolithic. Each of us has a personal revelation of God and it is a varied as life itself.

Spiritual Autobio - Seminary

As I look back with the perfect vision of hindsight, even now, it seems that things are unfolding as they should though I often had no idea how they were related at the time. My education has brought me to this place in my spiritual journey even as my spiritual formation has affected my education choices. I can wish that my journey was more original but I cannot say that I would change anything.

It seems too cliché to start a personal essay with, “I was born.” But it is true none the less that my spiritual journey has been powerfully affected by the fact that I was born at all. As part of the first generation to grow up knowing that babies did not have to be born, I was powerfully reminded that “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” wasn’t about my soul, it was about my breathing. In my youth, the struggle for my soul was not between apathy and faith but between the moral certitudes of Southern Baptist and Catholic grandmothers.

I always went to church as a child. The God of my earliest memories lives in snow encrusted edifices lit by flickering candles. Gradually, He morphed into the revival tent God of simple truths, rousing songs and playdough. Eventually, He became a damning God of Revelation.

By the time I reached college, I had reached the end of my patience with the shaming God of my youth. One of those grandmothers had died, the other had lost interest, and my pastor had no answer but prayer. I took a Bible as Literature class and became furious that for so many years I had been expected to understand God’s Word in a vacuum. Convinced that the Church had no answers for the metaphysical questions of Truth or Beauty, I changed my major – to philosophy. It was through the philosophy department that I met my first spiritual mentor. Dr. Betty listened to my complaints, encouraged my questions and never presumed that his answers might be the only answers. The result was not a crisis of faith but a crisis of existence. It was through this drastic repositioning of myself in the cosmos that I was able to let go of the God of my youth and be receptive to adult faith.

The defining characteristic of life is that it only stops once. Eventually I got off the couch, got married, had kids and finished my philosophy degree. I did not go back to church and became quite indifferent to Christians. Unlike many families, I was not the instigator of our return to Church. My husband, who had never lost his faith so much as stopped watering it, needed to share his faith with our children and needed to find his own way back to God. I went along. I cried a lot. I was amazed to discover that the lessons of charity and community that I heard as a child had a place in the adult church.

It was at this church that I met my second faith mentor. Katherine was in the ordination process when I met her although I did not know it at the time. At 30 years old, a supposed inheritor of the womens movement, I had never met a woman who was a faith leader. I knew many women with power in the church, but that power was always resource power, a withholding or negative means of expression. As I watched Katherine’s ordination into the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, began to see that women could hold and share the positive, authoritative power of God’s love.

As I have answered God’s call, and not the altar call of belief, but the baptismal call to action, I have watched the Spirit expose hidden gifts that others have seen but I have not. In my mothering circle, I have been the one called in for miscarriages and broken relationships. I have many times been the first to receive good news of jobs, births and weddings. I have often been an arbitrator of moral dilemmas, the one to sound out the answer the question, “What should I do?” I have had to flip my self-perception head over heels. No longer am I a shy person who vomits at the mere thought of public speaking, but a preacher. No longer am I the only one home when things need hearing, I am available for that very need.

I have come to see how important it is for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Indeed, my perverse fear is that I may be extraordinary, and then how will I get anything done? It isn’t the martyrs or even the apostles who have impressed me with their abilities to preserve or testify the gospel of Christ, but the women who opened their homes, with or without permission, and formed the first communities. It isn’t the movers and shakers of theological debate that motivate my growth, it is the people who can listen to gossip and still see Christ in both the speaker and subject. I want to be one of those people.

Tradition - Old School

2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Proper 27 Yr C BCP

It’s a funny thing-tradition. If you were to listen only to the news or only read the online journals of prominent Epsicopalians, you would think that our little corner of the Christian Church had managed to corner the market not only on pure Orthodox faith but the front row seats to the Apocalypse as well.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So, the gospel today talks about the tradition of marriage and the resurrection and there are all sorts of views on marriage in our church and indeed, in the whole world vying to be the last word on tradition and I’ll get to that, but I found that spending some time with Paul and learning what he thought of tradition was actually more useful than choosing sides and picking out Pauline text to back me up.
Because here is the thing – Paul was a crazy traditionalist.

We are all actually a lot more like Paul than Peter. Paul did not know Jesus personified – he only knew Christ crucified and resurrected. In fact, our experience of Jesus is larger than Paul’s because he didn’t have the gospels. Paul didn’t even have Paul – he was truly living on the cutting edge of faith. So why was he going on about tradition? Edges seem like the sort of place where tradition would lose its authority.

Well, because Paul was Paul. He had a conversion experience on the way to Damascus; he didn’t get a concussion resulting in amnesia. Paul didn’t become someone else, he became Paul – renewed. In the same way, our baptism is our own conversion experience and no matter how sanctified the water is – it doesn’t drown out our past or give us amnesia about who we are, instead it allows us to see the same world but with renewed and indeed sanctified vision.

A lot of people didn’t get what Paul was doing – obviously, or he wouldn’t have had to keep writing letters saying, do what I said, already! One way of seeing what Paul was doing is to think of him as a tentmaker. Paul was tying knots in the fabric of Christianity but he wasn’t making thread. Tradition was the warp of his weaving. It was the thread that stabilized the newly formed cloth. Because remember, Paul really took to heart the idea that the Christ fulfilled the prophecy. It had to connect with the old if it was to fulfill it, but it didn’t have to be the same thing. One might say that for Paul, tradition had to be sanctified by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And what the heck does that mean anyway. Well, it probably means I spend too much time reading theology books and need to get some more fresh air. But what it really means is that tradition, also known as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” only matters, only works, if it sets the thing it is about aside for the glory of God because Jesus died and was resurrected. So, I suspect that who Paul was writing to had a lot to do with what particular traditions needed to be maintained, to get people to stop paying attention to the small stuff, and to start paying attention to the huge amazing and astounding fact that Jesus was resurrected. It isn’t like this happened all the time. God really isn’t in the habit. Even today, we don’t bury Aunt Muriel and go back in three days to make sure she didn’t get resurrected or anything.

And that brings me to the gospel. Paul and Jesus were in complete accord on this. The resurrection makes talking about tradition sort of meaningless. Jesus spent a lot of his ministry telling and showing people how he was coming to fulfill the law and then showing us all how much we had mucked up the intention of the law with our traditions about it.
One of my favorite, oh, call him an anti-apologist curmudgeon, is GK Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy he says that "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

So, in giving the vote to the dead, we have to remember that the dead not only can be dead wrong, but they are certainly entitled to change their mind now that they have come face to face with the glory of God. And don’t forget about the legion of dead who are there because some living person honored tradition over life itself. I suspect that the dead actually have a pretty radically different view of things now that they are not longer afraid of death. So let’s not assume how they would vote at all.

Instead, lets consider that Jesus is trying to tell the Saducees that the traditions of the living, like marriage, matter to the living, but that the priorities of the resurrected are all but incomprehensible to us. This is especially true if we spend too much time hanging onto traditions that aren’t working anymore. That way being – to keep us focused on the amazing astounding stupefying fact that Jesus was resurrected.

If we, as Christians, truly believe that we live in a now and not yet state of resurrection ourselves. If we as Christians truly believe that we are the hands and feet of Christ, then we are the tools of the resurrection. It is our duty, then, to make sure that all Christians(past present and future) live lives focused on the amazement of resurrection, of being a wholly new creature, set aside for God’s own joy. That is our mission, that is our story of salvation. Freedom from fear; fear of death, fear of being stranded at the altar, fear of being married to seven brothers.

Traditions are useful only in that they free us from our fears. Traditions are useful only if they liberate us to see God as clearly as possible, and the clearest we will ever see the Glory of God is to believe as literally as we can, the resurrection of the Christ. Because when we can really believe that, we can really believe that our sins are forgiven and we can really get on with the important stuff – which is liberating others from their fears and letting everyone see the face of God shining into the world.

All things come of thee, oh Lord
And of thine own, have we given thee.

I pray each of us goes into the world this day, a shining beacon of God who lights us all from the inside. And I pray each of us trust in our faith with the strength of our tradition, which is of Jesus Crucified and Christ Resurrected. Amen.

Moving off Commonhouse

So, I am not adverse to technology, only adverse to upgrading. I have been putting off migrating my blog over to something more attractive and easier to use for about a year. Since I am about to leave town for a month, I am, of course, messing with it now.

No promises of substantive posts for the summer, but by fall, it should pick back up again.