Charity vs Hospitality

(A perfect example of how things end up in drafts. Half finished thoughts.)

Shannon and I touched on this idea of where the line between hospitality and charity happens. I think it is that we are hospitable to those we consider to be equals in some way and charitable to those who are not. Generally speaking, hospitality is something that could be reciprocated and charity is never expected to be reciprocated. The assumption that the person recieving charity could have nothing to offer in return.

I don't think that is really as true as we think, and we are called to be in community with the poor precisely so they can offer us hospitality in return. No, they may never ask us to dinner but their friendship and perspective and sympathetic ear are more valuable to someone who has never been hungry for a mere meal.

Love of God

(More unoriginality from the drafts pile.)

We had a rousing discussion on the way to church yesterday. It centered around the idea of a meddlesome God. And I tried to explain that the sort of love that is authoritarian, one that will trip you for your own good is a dangerous God to get involved with. Also, a God that makes everything for a reason, and that reason being to bring us back to Him is also a dangerous God to get involved with.

Or perhaps not, perhaps the danger is thinking we can accurately interpret God's intention with whatever happens in this life. I think that is a very short path to hubris. And evil. People refuse to grasp how much power they possess, because they think being powerful is synonymous with being evil. But if you do not own your power and responsibility for making Heaven in the Incarnation, then you are, actually being evil.

Things left undone are probably the worst sins of all.


God does not make suffering so that we can be better people. Suffering is the result of the fall - the corporate and even individual sins of humanity. To say that God created a hurricane so that people would suffer and be better for it is completely wrong - that is hardly loving? But to say that hurricanes happen because of the activity of the world necessary to sustain life on a planet is totally accurate. To say that within the entire event of a hurricane - where the action of wind and weather meets the human response, we find God in the response. If a hurrican is from God, then the response of humans towards other humans is the opportunity to act as God towards each other, to show the love of God towards each other, to see God, Jesus if you will, in the suffering that comes out of it.

I do not ascribe to a vengeful God. I think that a vengeful God is our projection onto God, and yes, I believe that lots of what is in the bible is our projection. Humans wrote the thing in response to God - because seriously, why would God write such tripe and nonsense as we find in the bible.

Men's Group

(More things found in the drafts pile.)

From the twitterverse: @avika says, "Most programming job descriptions basically translate to this: how compatible are you with our ongoing poor choices and can you save us?"

This so completely sums up how I feel about joining a new church. I expect all clergy feel this way, but it is much the same way with any parishioner.

My local parish is a wealth of possibilities, as I suspect all parishes are, and it is quite an achievement as a memorial to mid century America, a la San Francisco. I must admit, I love Rite II, Prayer A, week in and week out. I appreciate with my whole heart that we sing old standards and new, that are both musically challenging and theologically rich. I even love the 2 minutes of every 20 that I get from the sermon. I could do without the other 18 minutes of exegesis, but you can't have everything, I suppose.

I absolutely despise how tightly everyone is cleaving to walking up the aisle in precisely the correct manner. I absolutely despise that in a congregation of 25, there are 4 people seated behind the altar, and that the bishop's chair is squarely between the altar and the Cross. I also don't know what to do with the eternal, we must raise money in order to keep the building open.

I do not care about the building. Any care I have about a building is the care that we are leveraging the miracle of non-profit, non-mortgaged real estate in San Francisco.

I would not mind having a bible study - with all the academics hauled out. I kind of miss this, and didn't get enough of it in seminary, too much learning of criticisms, less application.

I would love to have the thing they call a "men's group." They never have this for women. Women get together and fundraise or fundraise or maybe clean and cook. Men go out to breakfast and talk about how to be Christians in the actual world, not the church kitchen.

Gaiman Sermon ette

(Things you find in drafts.)

I just finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I think that is what it is called. In any case, it's the new Neil Gaiman book, and I keep falling asleep last night trying to read the last 10 pages. I'm so pleased that someone is still creating mythology in this world.

It quite allowed me to coalesce something that has been floating around in my head. Which is the desperation, often not in the slightest bit quiet, that permeates the Christian religion I encounter these days. It looks a little different, depending on where you encounter it, but it never ceases to extrude desperation all over the conversation.

In one place, it is the desperation to care for the poor. Great gaping maws of need, and I'm not talking about actual poor people, but those who support and care for them. So much energy, bustling, running, yelling with words and actions, the physical needs of the world. The environment, the rights of this or that group, the food insecurity, the lack of clothing, water, immunizations, and on and on. It reaches as loftily as the well off can imagine and as nitty gritty as the lowliest child dying in his mother's arms as I write this.

It's all the same cry. Give me peace. Jesus left peace here. It's all around us. It's inside every one of us. How does that verse go, Peace I bring you, God's own peace I leave you. Something like that. But we keep running around as though if we dump enough sand in the hole, it will be an adequate substitute for peace. Neither chicken little, nor Joel Ostrogoth have peace. They are not sharing it with you. They are throwing sand, hoping to obfuscate the the lack of peace, because neither know what it is.

It is not catastrophizing, as my therapy puts it, even if there is a catastrophe looming.

It is not material security, as though most material security isn't a crap shoot of luck and circumstance.

It isn't even “making peace” with a situation, a pretty form of giving up.

I certainly can't give you any of those things. I spent too much time in therapy and I'm actually pretty shallow and selfish with my money. And if anything, my gift to this world is to point out the lameness, and I am never content. I have no idea what that means, and even medication isn't giving it to me. We are not meant to be content in this world. But it doesn't mean we are to be chasing money or solving problems, either.

This is the peace of the Lord.

I SEE YOU.

I HEAR YOU.

There is not, really, a damn thing that I can do to change your circumstance, to make your life into something it is not, but I can see it, I can hear it. And to the very, very, very best of my ability, I can see and hear your life through your own filter and not my own.

Lessons from a book I finished this morning. We can never truly see ourselves, wisdom won't bring it, therapy won't bring it, Strength Finder 2.0 is a waste of money if that is what you are trying to do with it. We can see others, if we stop trying to use them as mirrors as we seek ourselves.

I see you.

There is peace, because we so much want to see ourselves, know ourselves, understand ourselves.

The peace Jesus brings, the peace of the Lord is being seen. Being known.

And anybody can do it. It's not some special thing you learn in school, nothing about the circumstances of your birth or upbringing. Anyone can stop looking for themselves and start actually looking at other people.

I see you.

And when I am actually seeing you, actually hearing you, no matter who you are or what your circumstances, I can only love you. Not do anything for you or with you or about you. I can only love you, because you are shockingly amazing.

Another lesson from the book this morning – Personhood isn't a pass/fail exam. It just is.

But in those moments when I stop looking for me and start connecting with you. Then I am peace, I am the peace that Jesus brought to this world. And without doing a single thing, I bring about the kingdom of God.  

Autosermonium, a telling of Jonah and the Bush

This is the title of the book I will never publish. The sermons I write myself. There are a few on this blog already. Coming out of (I sure hope coming out of) 6 months of insanity, I'm sitting here carrying a migraine. The ones I bring on myself when, for lack of better language, I don't let my chi flow free. Surely there is some adequate Christian language for this, lost in a hole in the ground before the nutjobs raided the castle.

So here I am, hardly a Mothers Day sermon, although, if the church is your mother, here's my truth this week.

A reading from Johah 4 (paraphrased)

Jonah left the city and squatted down in the hills outside to watch God raise Holy Hell. God put up a bush to give him shade but in the morning, God killed the bush to get Jonah's attention. "Oh kill me already," said Jonah. "You're that angry about the bush, then," said God. "So angry I want to die," said the emo Jonah. "Jonah, you are all beat up about a stupid bush and you are completely avoiding the point - which is all the people in that town you stormed out of yesterday." Here endeth the lesson, and the book.

I've heard preaching on Jonah before. Usually, people talk about the whale and spend a ridiculous amount of time discussing the difference between a whale and a big fish. Which is a bush if I ever heard one.

I'm coming off a long season. In short, I skipped the liturgical celebration of holy week because I actually had to live it a couple weeks before and after that, anyone talking to me about the woes of the altar guild or copier errors would have sent me into a rage spiral. If you mentioned those things on facebook, I've unfollowed you. I'll try to remember after ordination season to put you back in the newsfeed.

So today, when I decided I needed to find a totem bible figure for this season of my life, Jonah came quickly to mind. I've always had a soft spot for Jonah and that damnable bush. So, I pulled up the story and read Chapter 4. The part I paraphrased.

And I realised, that stupid bush is the church. Which is just perfect, and horribly accurate, and why didn't I see this before. But really, the church is this dumb bush. The exact quote: " You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night." I can't tell you how many articles get rewritten every single day about the death of the church in America. Frankly, I don't have much patience for them anymore. Because at the end of the day, it's all summed up right here.

I suppose the impatience I have had with the church for so long has everything to do with the fact that they are still watering the damn bush half a mile out of town, leaving everyone to try to figure out how to save themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to save people these days. Not in the Old Time Religion sense of getting them wet so they can clean toilets in heaven, but in the sense that the world is such a fucked up mess of a place to try and live and how do we all stop from going completely bonkers. For real, that trauma has replaced suffering in the common language is perhaps not a total disgrace, but that barely anyone can actually speak between the two languages without sounding like a complete twat is actually beyond disgraceful.

I spend a huge amount of my time with people either getting slammed by life, common enough, or escaping it, also common. The ordinary time of this culture, all of Western Civ, I expect, no longer has anything to hold it together. And I'm not proposing we try, like many Islamic countries are, to put the lid back on Pandora's box. The only way out is through, and I have no idea where all this leads. But, given the obsession of my generation with tribes, with creating family of choice rather than the national nuclear familial project we inherited, I expect that the larger project of culture will continue to wander down it's barrren path.

There are going to be new bushes. But they are going to be like any salvage plant - a tiny leaf in rooting powder and the rest of the plant, soil and pot, tossed in the trash to keep the rot from contaminating this new plant. And it probably won't even work. (Can you tell I do this sad trick often in my own gardening?) It's going to be very custom work, very small scale, and it's going to be hard pressed to attach the word institution to it. It's certainly not going to be paying anyone's salary.

And what's going to be the hardest I think, is that I have this great resource, but mostly, it's going to have to spend some time in quarantine before we see if it's going to survive. And in the meantime, I've got to figure out how to hold people together, navigating trauma and suffering, saving the people while decontaminating them, helping them toss the dead parts, the old soil and possibly even the pot.  (I think I've walked this metaphor right off the end of the branch, surely a sign to hit post and run.)




In case you are too lazy to go looking for this on your own...

Jonah 4 (NRSV)

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’

Banal Bites

For here
it's the banal
that pops up from no where

It's the things
young college students
with their new lease on
suffering
call "triggers."

I hope
you never meet any real triggers
and that someday
you learn to appreciate

The banal bites for what they are

Tiny moments for healing

Pocket Wisdom

The mind has wall
Brick Stone Dirt Paper

A corrall for everything
 and for not anything

Today

I'll look behind
Door #2

But I may choose
not to play with
who or what
 I find