These Bones

No one told us what to expect when we picked up my mother’s ashes from the crematorium.

The taxi turned into the parking lot at the top of the hill, across from the Chinese cemetery. Some chickens pecked around in the grass. The funeral director led us around to a table on the far side of the building, and then they brought her out.

She was in what looked like a large lasagna pan. She was fine dust, some ribs, an arm bone. The heat of the oven had broken her skull into three pieces.

“Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel came uninvited into my mind. No, I said to myself. No.

We said no when they asked if we wanted to keep her teeth, to melt down the gold fillings. They took the tray around the corner, and in a moment we heard a whirring like a coffee grinder. They made a funnel out of newspaper and poured the dust into the urn. The funeral direction said he would take the ashes to the embassy to be certified for travel, and would drop them off at the apartment tomorrow.

The day before, Easter Sunday, Dad, Colin and I walked behind the hearse, coughing on exhaust fumes as it trundled the few hundred yards from the funeral hall up the hill. Dad asked them to turn off the gospel music blaring from the radio. On a portico outside the crematorium, we laid white flowers on the casket.

“Alleluia, Christ is risen,” I choked out, somehow.

“The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia,” said my father, brother, and assembled friends, uncertain.

I don’t believe any of this, I thought.

That night I had a nightmare that I had forgotten the sound of my mother’s voice.

On the flight home I stowed her securely under the seat in front of me and watched Frozen.

Six months later, before we buried the ashes in the churchyard, I stood with a wheelbarrow and shovel putting dirt back into the hole. We had it dug to a double depth, so Dad’s ashes could be there too, when the time comes, but it was a bit too deep. We were to gently lower the urn into to the grave and even with my long arms it was too deep for that to happen. I added a few inches and hoped for the best.

In the end it made no difference. Dad and I knelt in the gravel, guiding the urn down. But I lost my balance and fell, the heavy urn pulling my arms down into the grave. My forehead slammed into the gravel. The urn stayed upright, the lid secure. I stood up, sheepish and trembling, my sleeves muddy. Mother Suzanne touched my shoulder.

“You’ve taken her as far as you can,” she said.

In December, as I prepared to switch phones, I found a voicemail from February. Amiable, about nothing, like our conversation the night before she died, before anyone had an inkling her heart was already betraying her, and in a few hours would suddenly give out. “Have a good day,” she signed off.

I entered this Holy Week, the liturgical anniversary of her death, with unease. But it was so much better than I expected - I was just glad to be in an identifiable place. Last year I boarded a plane Maundy Thursday morning and got off Good Friday at midnight a world away, spending the meantime in a great nowhere tunnel in the sky.

This Easter Vigil I spent with the clanging of bells rather than drinking scotch and telling stories and drafting a funeral liturgy I thought my non-religious mother could live with, for lack of a better term. This Easter instead of saying goodbye I said hello, bringing a glass of wine from Easter brunch out to the grave. I sat in the sun, liked some alleluias on Facebook, sent some emails.

At a Thursday night Bible study the other week we read the passage from Luke where the risen Jesus appears among the disciples in Jerusalem and shows them his wounded hands and feet, the gash in his side. Teresa asked us who in the story we identify with. The only characters to choose are the unnamed disciples and Jesus. Everyone picked disciples.

“Come on,” Teresa said, “doesn’t anyone identify with Jesus?”

“Ok,” I said, “I do. Today is the calendar anniversary of my mother’s death. And I’m grateful not to be able to re-feel things about that day, the splitting headache, the nausea. Today can’t be more different than that day for me. Some good things have happened. I have a new and interesting kind of relationship with my dad, for one, and that’s a gift.

“But look at Jesus here. He’s resurrected but still wounded. The world did something to him that resurrection can’t undo. I’m back, in a way, too. But I’m not the same.”

Last Saturday I found myself crying in the final scene of Die Walkure. Wotan, king of the gods, stands over his daughter Brunnhilde. For complicated Wagnerian reasons he has had no choice but to place her unconscious body, living but no longer immortal, on a high rock.

The music lasts far longer than strictly needed for the action in the stage directions to occur, so for a long time Wotan gazes at his beloved daughter, delaying as long as possible the moment when the flames rise, she will be hidden from his sight, and he will go back into the world.

“Do not hold on to me,” Jesus says to Mary Magdalene. But how hard it is to let go and turn away.

“Mortal, can these bones live?”

These bones, ground to dust, buried in the churchyard?

No. Maybe. I don’t know. I'll just keep saying the creed.

But. Love is patient, love is kind, love never dies. Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things.

Love, believe this for me.

This is a participating post in the Acts 8 Moment BLOGFORCE challenge, which asks, "Where have you experienced resurrection this Holy Week and Easter season?" Participation in the BLOGFORCE is open to anyone who's interested, just follow the link to learn how.

Sermon: A Special Snowflake

Proper 24 - October 19, 2014.
Readings: Isaiah 45:1-7; Ps. 96; 1 Thess. 1:1-10; Matt. 22:15-22.

Married. Or Not.

Last October at the Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis my partner of 8 years and I were married. Or not. It's a little confusing.

I mean, there were rings and flower girls and a huge party and a photographer and heaven knows it was expensive. But absent from the service leaflet were the words "wedding" or "marriage". Instead the service was the "Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant". When we signed the big book, it looked like a wedding register, but taped over the word "marriage" was a little slip of paper reading "lifelong covenent".

Back in the day, when I was a bit more of a firebrand, I used to say there was no way I would get married in the Episcopal Church until it was truly recognized as marriage. Government recognition be damned - as important as it is I mostly never cared what it thought as long as in the eyes of the church my family was really, truly equal.

Instead, the government got there first, and Frank and I walked down the aisle in Indiana, a state that most definitely does not recognize our marriage, while legally married some months earlier in the state of New York, to receive from our church the Sacrament of Marriage Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant.

Like I said, confusing.

And to some, insulting. I get that. But not for me.

The mission of the church, as expressed in the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, is to "restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ." It is awfully hard to do that as a divided body. Our prayer book clearly recognizes this, including a prayer for Christian unity that asserts that we are in "great danger from our unhappy divisions" and goes on to ask that "we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity."

I would venture to guess that a large part, if not the majority, of those involved in the composition of the liturgy for the Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant and the theological reflections that accompanied it would in fact support the church's recognition of the sacrament of marriage for same sex couples. I don't blame them for coming up with something different: that was not the charge the 2009 General Convention gave them.

Particularly given where so many states are today, there are some who regard the same sex blessing rite as a timid half measure - a creature of politics designed to avoid overstepping the sensibilities of some in the church in the name of preserving denominational unity. And of course that is what it is. But that isn't only what it is.

The Holy Spirit desires unity for all of us. That is why the story of Pentecost is more or less the story of the Tower of Babel in rewind. It is the spirit that allows us to tell the Christian story and to be heard. And for each Christian there may be no stories more powerful than the working of God in our life. By taking measured steps, the Episcopal Church has done its best to avoid irretrievable alienation to create time for us to tell our stories to each other, person to person, parish to parish, diocese to diocese.

Some have left, and I'll spend no time here commenting on that other than that it should be cause for sorrow for everyone involved. But many have stayed, and I am no less in communion with the Bishops of Georgia, Northern Indiana, or Alabama - all of whom would in some measure disagree with me on questions related to the possibility of holiness in a same-sex relationship - than I am with the Bishop of Indianapolis. This is because by staying together we have decided not to forestall the possibility of changing. Through the activity of the Holy Spirit we remain in one awkward family, demanding not agreement but remaining in conversation, relying on the bonds of love.

To LGBT people caught in the middle, particularly those in dioceses less friendly than my own, the demands and sacrifices of the present situation may be unjust. In my diocese I am eligible for a not-quite sacrament packaged in a very well-written liturgy. There are many dioceses where that is not available. I don't have a good answer for that.

But in recent years there's a story in the Gospel of Mark that has become one of my favorites:

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.  

Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5:25-34)

This, as far as I know, is the Bible's only example of an involuntary miracle. An woman whose hemorrhages would have made her unclean for many years sneaks up behind Jesus. She does not ask for permission but boldly/timidly claims her blessing. She feels her healing before Jesus acknowledges it.

That's how it will be with many of us for now. If the church decides in 2015 or 2018 that it's ready to declare marriage between members of the same sex a sacrament - great. I hope we do so and I will do my part to make that happen. But this "official" sacrament of marriage is one that I will never receive, because it is already mine. Last October Frank and I touched Jesus's cloak and claimed our blessing. There's nothing second rate about the sacrament we received - even if for the moment the Spirit demands we officially call it something different.

A New Year's Resolution for the Episcopal Church: No More Photos of Buildings

Go to a lot of Episcopal Church web sites, and chances are the first thing you'll see is a picture of the exterior of the church building. Or maybe the interior, empty. Or the sign, which will probably say something about welcoming. The trouble is that none of these images communicate useful information about why our communities are special and worth checking out. Here are four reasons to quit with the pictures of buildings already, and four more productive things to do instead.

4 Reasons Not to Take Photos of Buildings

1) No one cares. Unless you’re Washington National Cathedral or St. John the Divine, your building may be pretty, but it’s not pretty enough that you should lead with its image. Your building is important to you because it’s the site of countless communions, baptisms, funerals, weddings: events that have made a difference in your life. Your affection for your building is a side effect of your participation in a worshipping community, not the other way around.

This historic photo of the Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis is beautiful but it doesn't tell you anything about the church community.

2) It reinforces the wrong narrative. The popular narrative about the Episcopal Church these days is that we’re a grand old church in decline. When we post exterior shots of our edifices or interior shots of empty pews, we’re implicitly telling visitors to our web sites and Facebook pages that that’s all we’ve got. There are plenty of growing Episcopal churches out there that have other things they can be taking pictures of. Even if your church isn’t growing today, there is some spark of resurrection power that keeps you and your fellow parishioners coming back. Show that.

3) It takes courage to go into a church. Believe Out Loud recently published an article about the courage it can take for an LGBT person to walk into a church. That’s true, but it’s actually too narrow a view. In an increasingly unchurched culture, where Christianity has a sometimes deservedly shoddy reputation, think about what it takes for any person who has never been part of a church community, or who hasn’t been part of one for a while, to come inside. A picture of your beautifully dressed altar or sign out front communicates nothing about whether this is a safe space.

4) It misses the point of Jesus. In John’s Gospel, right after driving the money changers out of the Temple, Jesus says “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19). John goes on to state explicitly that Jesus is referring to his own body when he says this. Our focus then, is not to be on the buildings where God is worshipped, but on God. Our buildings are places where we gather in community to orient our lives together around Jesus. But if we’re focusing on the buildings, we are fixating on what “will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2), not the raising up that’s happening in our lives.

4 Things to Do Instead

1) Focus on people. People coming into a church want to have a sense of who they’ll meet when they’re there, who they’ll be praying and breaking bread with. It’s fine to have posed shots of your clergy and staff, but have pictures of people in worship, fellowship, and service. Show what being a part of your community is like.

2) Focus on faces. Shots of the back of people’s heads are nearly as common in church photography as empty buildings, and just as off-putting. There’s a reason you don’t see many depictions of the backside of the cross - it doesn’t communicate useful information. I suppose back of the head shots say something about the age of your congregation, but that’s about it.

3) Use close-ups. It’s ok to include long shots in the mix, but closer shots of people laughing or praying or serving together will have a lot more details and a lot more interest. When you’re taking team pictures at a Habitat build or CROP Walk, remember that you don’t have to include people’s entire bodies in the picture. Cut ‘em off at the waist so we can see faces.

4) Everyone in your congregation can participate. Most people in your congregation probably have a camera in their purse or pocket. Harness that. Churches can establish new social norms and give permission to use them. Not every church will or should arrive at the same standards (be thoughtful about photos of children, for instance), but most every church should be able to come up with something. Then, encourage people to post the pictures to your church’s Facebook page or Flickr account where your communications team (you’ve got one of those, right?) can curate them.

Maybe you’ve got a great building. Maybe you don’t. Either way, stop taking pictures of it. In 2014, resolve to show the light and joy of your community gathered in Christ’s love. Check out the links below for a little inspiration.

Web sites:

St. Paul’s - Seattle, WA

Nativity - Scottsdale, AZ

Facebook:
The Episcopal Church in South Carolina - 2013 in Pictures

Video:
A Year of More - All Saints - Indianapolis, IN

Thanks to Carolyn Clement (@singingcarolyn) and Mark Alves (@markalves) for insights that contributed to this article.

Updated 1/1/2014 to add link to The Episcopal Church in South Carolina's excellent 2013 photo album.

Bible Challenge Week 26

I was supposed to write for the Bible Challenge blog this week, but I missed my deadline and Grace+ is on vacation till midweek, so I'm posting this here till she's back and able to post it on the Trinity blog.

Bible Challenge Week 26: Esther 4-Job 9, Psalm 143-148, 2 Corinthians 2-7

If this week’s readings have a common theme, it is the contingency of mortal existence. Read with modern eyes, it is hard to escape a sense of foreboding for the Holocaust in Esther’s story of a plot to slaughter all of the Jews throughout the Persian empire. Through skillful political maneuvering and some measure of good fortune Esther and her adopted father manage to avert catastrophe and achieve a secure status for the Jews in Persia. But this security is no longer due to Israel being a powerful kingdom. It comes instead from the goodwill of political authorities, and is therefore constantly at risk.

The book of Job, where we’ll be spending most of the rest of August, is a deep theological exploration of the meaning of suffering. In the section we read this week, Job, a righteous man under the law, loses most of his possessions, his children, and his health. His friends begin to posit explanations for his suffering, with those we read to this point focusing on Job’s inherent imperfection as a mortal and the possibility of some unknown transgression.

Meanwhile, the reader sees that God is permitting Satan to test Job. What is most surprising about this is the direct acknowledgment, in scripture, of what we know to be true. Terrible things happen to people for reasons that we cannot discern. It may be too much to say that these things are God’s will, but our powerful God does not stop them. We read in Job a foretelling of our own contingency, that no matter our efforts, injury, accident, or disease stalk us all. To dust we will return.

Yet what is a jar of clay but moist, pliable dust fired in a kiln? We are not without hope. In his second letter to the Corinthians, a loving follow-up to his reproving first letter, Paul emphasizes that contained within our mortal bodies is the spark of our creator. This spark does not protect us from being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, or struck down, but: “We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day...Because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

How then to respond to the challenges, suffering, and affliction of our lives? Well, we can do as Job does in these early chapters: rage against God - a legitimate and sometimes appropriate choice. But this section of the Psalms gives us another way forward. Psalm 148 is a full-throated song of praise to the creator from the whole creation. Paul writes that “Christ always leads us in triumphal procession”, for which songs of praise are typically more fitting than laments as marching songs.

I Like Bar Charts and I Cannot Lie

I have been a long-time admirer from afar of St. Paul's Seattle, who I think has a marvelous online presence. I'm going to be in Seattle for the first time since I was a teenager, so I'm super-excited that I finally get to visit this Sunday.

But one thing I asked myself was whether this church could possibly be as good as its website. I'm a data-driven kind of guy, so I scurried right over to the Episcopal Church Office of Research's website, and boy howdy, was I impressed.

See that red bar? That's average Sunday attendance more than doubling since 2004. This in a denomination whose prevailing narrative is that we've been in decades of decline.

Now, St. Paul's is a progressive Anglo-Catholic parish, the kind of place Ross Douthat argues is ideologically unsavable, and liturgically is relentlessly uncool. I can't say for sure what's going on at St. Paul's but it got me thinking about another progressive Anglo-Catholic parish I've been hearing some buzz about, Atonement Chicago.

Ok, not as dramatic as St. Paul's, but numbers are moving the right direction.

And then I thought about the parish where my church's rector did her fieldwork in seminary, St. Paul's Norwalk, another progressive Anglo-Catholic place, and...wait, is that right? Average Sunday attendance up 300% over the last 10 years?

What about other progressive Episcopal churches without the high church accoutrements? One of my favorite places to visit is Grace Chicago. It's located in the rapidly changing South Loop neighborhood, and its congregation reflects the neighborhood, with young professionals and the urban poor sitting side by side.

I can't tell you for sure what's going on at all these places - Grace is the only one I've attended, but at my peril I'm going to hazard a quick guess. In a recent article for Religion Dispatches, Meghan Florian wades into the debate sparked by Rachel Held Evans' article for CNN, "Why Millennials are Leaving the Church." Florian notes, "The thing that I miss most in this flurry of articles? Mention of the holy spirit moving in people’s lives. Encounters with the living God." This insight hits the mark for me.

The Anglo-Catholic style of worship attempts, and occasionally succeeds, at mediating an experience between the human and the divine. I make no claim that Anglo-Catholicism is the only way to do this, nor even the best way - just that its deliberateness, drama, and occasional obscurity may confer some advantages in communicating the mystery of God. But Grace Church, which isn't high church in the slightest, manages to communicate this too, through extensive use of silence and through the moving practice of allowing the congregation to declare their intentions for the Eucharist while standing around the altar at the 8am Sunday service.

Whatever the style, these practices in worship - in progressive churches, no less - define a space and time set aside for the holy, offering the potential for an encounter with the undefinable divine. Couple that with a sincere welcome for visitors coming in the door (I'm looking to experience this St. Paul's Seattle - don't disappoint me), and you may have something very powerful indeed.

At Some Point Fights Must End

A friend forwarded me an article from the American Spectator this morning deploring the Boy Scouts' change in policy to permit gay scouts to participate without lying about who they are. The author, Mark Tooley, argued that in changing its policy, the scouts consign themselves to the same fate as the Episcopal Church:

The BSA is deciding the follow the disastrously predictable path of once mainstream but now dying institutions like the Episcopal Church, which gets occasional media plaudits for its sexual liberalism but is otherwise ignored. And like the Episcopal Church, the BSA of the future, after losing a million members or so, will probably rely on the endowments of the dead rather than the active interest of the living, much less the very young.

Mark Tooley is with the Institute for Religion and Democracy, an outfit whose primary purpose is to discredit progressive theology within mainline Protestant churches. They mainly hang out on the disaffected internet fringes (Virtue Online, Juicy Ecumenism, etc.), and occasionally manage some mainstream exposure. They have little history of caring much about the Boy Scouts - the real target of their attack here are the UCC, the Episcopalians, etc. The most surprising thing about this article is its naked animus toward gay people; their normal MO is to cloak themselves in respectability before going on the attack. I don't worry too much about these people because they are basically PR hacks whose paychecks depend on their holding of these views.

That said, Tooley's statistics with regard to the Episcopal Church are correct. And even his interpretation of them, to a limited degree. Focusing for a moment on the Episcopal Church, in my view the great fights over sexuality over the last few years have been one of the reasons for our decline in numbers (though there are many others). That doesn't mean the fight isn't worth having, but we have to recognize that fighting comes at a cost - which is that few people want to join an organization that is fighting. The fact that these fights have stretched over decades, complete with lawsuits and schisms, means that taken as a whole, the church has been focusing so much on its internal stuff that it is little wonder that our funerals outnumber our baptisms by a wide margin.

Again, that is not to suggest that the fight was not worth having. But at some point the fights must end. The Episcopal Church has not gone as far on same sex marriage as I would like; neither have the Boy Scouts gone as far as I think they ultimately must with regard to adult leaders (I was a Life Scout; I came out before making Eagle and left before I could be kicked out). But now is a good time for laying down arms.

Within the Episcopal Church, the space that has been created allows for conversion of hearts. There are many who disagree with the stance the church has taken with regard to LGBT people. But they have chosen to stay. So we can remain in conversation with each other, worship together, and mutually prove to each other that it is right for us to remain in relationship. This is a posture that enables an outward focus to re-engage with the world outside the church, and to invite people into Christ's love, not our quarrels.

Just so with the Boy Scouts. Will hundreds of thousands leave? Time will tell. But just as many churches say they will cease to sponsor Boy Scout troops, there have been many churches that, for reasons of conscience, have declined to sponsor them. They should not wait for the Boy Scouts to come around on gay leaders before they shift their stance. The correctness of the decision the Scouts have just made will be found in a new generation of Eagle Scouts, some gay, some straight, who have grown up in an organization that values all young men, and who will reform the same organization to similarly value adults.

For both the Boy Scouts and the Episcopal Church: no one will ever care how just our policies for membership and participation, ordination and marriage, are if we are ultimately self-involved organizations who make no difference to anyone else. It is time for those who have campaigned for change in these organizations to pivot from agitation to support, while recognizing there is still work to do to get to full equality.