With Ah! Bright Wings

God’s Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhLCSh4VLmA

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Creation Window, Trinity Cathedral, Phoenix

At long last the day has arrived, Pentecost, literally meaning the 50^th day of the great 50 days of Easter. Several weeks ago, our Trinity preacher, Canon Bill Rhodes, employing all the skills and timing of a comedy club veteran, commented on the interminable sense that comes as we near the end of 50 days of Easter. Yes, sometimes we really can have too much of a good thing! His was a humorous lament for the loss of an Anglican tradition of Rogation Sunday. Rogation days represent an older, more primal sensibility recognizing that human beings exist within a network of relationships with the natural world around us, – a web of intertwined, dependencies.

God’s Nature

Christians celebrate the mysterious nature of God as we understand it. For us, Jesus alone is not God, yet, God includes and cannot be spoken about without reference to Jesus. The Holy Spirit alone is not God and yet God cannot be experienced without reference to the Holy Spirit.

For Christians the nature of God is not solitary, but communal. The concept of a trinity offers us a vision of God as a community of interdependencies. God is a playful interpenetration of three identities, which never-the-less share the same nature. Traditionally God is referred to by the gendered names of Father, Son, both masculine, and Holy Spirit, which while feminine in English is still usually referred to as he? Go figure.

We sometimes avoid these gendered terms by referring to God as having three modes or functions. In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier we often say. Yet these modes, as Cathedral graduates of Episcopal 101 will know denote functions and not relationships, and lead us to an ancient heresy called Modalism or Sebellianism. For non 101 grads you can look this up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabellianism.

The most important insight we have into God is that God is fundamentally relational. One way to avoid the gendered terms and still retain relationality is to see God as Lover, God as also Beloved, and God as Love-Sharer. If Easter is the celebration of love redeemed. Pentecost is the celebration of love shared. The lections for Pentecost provide us with three differing, yet complimentary perspectives on God as love sharer, or as we traditionally refer to this aspect of God, the Holy Spirit.

Visions of Pentecost

The Apostle Paul, through the metaphor of adoption perceives God as Love-Sharer . Human beings are no longer living enslaved to fear. God as Love- Sharer adopts us as children. Paul is not content to see the Holy Spirit as adopting us only as privileged children. For him, being children of God is not a state of minority – as in prior to the age of consent. The Holy Spirit adopts us as nothing less than heirs. Not simply heirs through Christ, but joint heirs with Christ able to participate fully in the promise of new life.

John’s understanding of God as Love-Sharer is as advocate and teacher. Jesus’ ministry comes to an end. In John, the Father is God as Lover and Jesus is God as Beloved in whom God redeems creation. The Holy Spirit, God as Love Sharer becomes the energy empowering us to live more and more deeply so that day by day we grow into the realization of God’s love for us.

The picture of Pentecost as a distinct event within a chronological unfolding of events beginning with the Incarnation, and flowing through the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and descent of the Holy Spirit today at Pentecost, is Luke’s invention. For Luke the coming of the Holy Spirit marks the transition from the ministry of Jesus to the life of the Church, which contains his spirit.

In Luke’s account of the birth of the Church in Acts:2, the descent of the Holy Spirit is depicted through powerful and elemental forces of nature – wind and fire. Addicted as we are to special effects, we wonder, some with amazement, others with incredulity, at how this could be.

Yet, Luke’s purpose here is to draw our attention to the effects upon human beings of the descent of God as Love-Sharer. He uses the metaphor of an ecstatic eruption into a profusion of different languages among those present, to do so. Hopkins echoes such:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.

Luke’s theological message is that for human society – born anew as the Church, it is no longer business as usual.

Pentecost Signals An End To The Denial Of Difference

Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Hopkins, questions why humanity so reckless of God’s gift of creation, soiling it with its smudge and smell? Extending Hopkins’ enquiry I would ask why are we as human beings so fearful of the differences between us? Deacon Myra Kingsley, our last week’s Trinity preacher, lamented the corruption of Mother’s Day. Once an expression of protest against the futility of war and the injustices of oppression which generations have trod, have trod, have trod- so that we have become insensible to the feel of the earth, now made barren beneath our feet. Mother’s Day, a movement of protest against human recklessness has, like so much else, become seared with trade, bleared, smeared, with toil sharing man’s smudge.

Luke’s vision of the Holy Spirit, God as Love-Sharer empowers us to embrace the sheer diversity of expression that lies at the heart of being human. No longer is it impossible for women and men to understand each other because of their differences. At the roots of discrimination, exploitation, and unjust systems – is the fear of difference. God as Love-Sharer, calms our fears, empowering us to embrace our sheer diversity.

At one level of perception we see that we are not all the same. We notice the obvious differences between us expressed by skin color with its inevitable associations of race, culture, language, and education. These are real differences that evoke fear because they are emblematic of a more profound experience of the differentials of power, privilege, and access to the protections that these differences afford to some and deny to others.

Here in Arizona, as a foreign worker with a work permit, I was allowed a driver’s license from the moment of my arrival. Yet, the children of foreign parents, brought illegally into the country now possessing the same federally extended legal right to remain and work as I enjoyed, are in this, great state of Arizona still denied access to something so fundamental as a drivers license.

There are yet more, fundamental differences between us. We differ in gender and sexual identity. These are the attributes of being human, through which we are profoundly formed and in many instances deformed by our experience of a patriarchal world that deeply fears and is suspicious of the power of the anima –the feminine principle.

God as Love-Sharer calms our fears of the differences between us, inviting us to embrace the incredible richness that difference brings to our human sense of community. God as Love-Sharer is the ever-present energy that permeates our experience. The Holy Spirit – that which I am naming God as Love-Sharer -is creative, interrelational, dynamic and open to the future. God as Love-Sharer is present in every moment of our lives and in every aspect of the created order within which our living forms only a part. A world that is interconnected to form a giant web of complex interconnections. The complexity of interconnection is the deeper truth that lies beyond all appearances of difference because it is our experience that what harms or blesses one, harms or blesses all.

God as Love-sharer, is powerfully present in this community. Each week as spiritually searching people, we find our way through the cathedral’s Great Doors. Initially, we are somewhat bewildered to find ourselves sitting in the pew of this church, – a church for God’s sake – whose liturgy and welcome seem both strange and wonderful at the same time. This mysterious turn in our lives brings us to return through these doors a second and a third time because those of us who are seeking God as a source of meaning in our lives know that we can be nowhere else.

Luke’s vision of God embracing all kinds of diversity is continually coming true at Trinity Cathedral. As individuals, and as a community, God as Love Sharer guides us beyond the limitations of only that which we can imagine for ourselves. Each time I face the profound disappointment of failing to achieve what I have so longed for, I have discovered that the Holy Spirit, with barely concealed sense of humor, has had something else in mind for me amazingly different from any dream of mine.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

May 18, 2013 0

Love Bade me Welcome – Part II

Short Recap from Part I

In the face of the potential fragmentation over internal differences, the Evangelist John calls his community to hold together through the active practice of purposeful love (agape). Not only will the practice of purposeful love (agape) bind the community from within, but it will also commend the community to a hostile external world. Purposeful Love operates at both community and individual levels:

Love one another; as I have loved you, by this shall the world know, that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. (closing stanza to Love, George Herbert)

Purposeful Love as Right Relationship

What are the qualities of purposeful love (agape)? How does purposeful love define the nature of the community where the members are bound together by a notion of right relationship?

For the Episcopal Church, the historical absence of a centralized teaching authority capable of declaring, and perhaps more to the point, enforcing an authorized interpretation of belief requires us to find some other basis for our holding together in community. We find this is the concept of right relationship. Right relationship is rooted in John’s understanding of purposeful love (agape) both binding a community together from within, as well as providing the means for projecting a discipleship presence into the wider world.

Agape, or purposeful love, has certain key characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of experience covered by the English word love.

Purposeful love is not dependent on emotions of attraction or admiration or liking. It does not rest upon the experience of a felt emotional bond between people.
Purposeful love honors the other, values mutuality, refrains from judging others simply on the basis of their difference from us.
Purposeful love for others does not emerge from our sense of abundance as in a kind of largess that tends to patronize others. It arises from our own prior experience of being loved. We love others in this agape way because of our own experience of being loved by God, often communicated to us through the experience of being loved by other people. In this sense purposeful love is caught, not taught.

Purposeful Love as Worship Centered

The historical absence of a centralized teaching authority capable of declaring and enforcing an authorized interpretation of belief has had a profound effect on the way the Episcopal Church interprets received tradition as we seek to be true to Christ’s teaching amidst the challenges of the world in which we find ourselves living. For us right relationship finds its highest expression not simply in that sense of shared common purpose, though this is important, but in the experience of common prayer and worship.

For Episcopalians that ancient Benedictine emphasis on the community defined as the community at prayer or in worship has shaped our Anglican character. Worship becomes for us our unique expression as a community. Our emphasis on worship, where all are welcome, contrasts us from the majority of Christian communities on the American religious landscape who define themselves through enforcement of fixed content and definition of belief, usually referred to as a confessional statement.

As we worship, so we believe. In worship we encounter God’s conversation with us as a community. This conversation comes to us through the liturgical use of Holy Scripture as the sacramental basis of an inspirited encounter with God. For us, it is not only the inspirited encounter that leads to the writing of Scripture in the distant past. Our encounter with the text is equally inspirited in the present. The sermon becomes for us our response to the conversation God seeks to have with us. Both the liturgical reading of Scripture and the reflective homiletic response is guided by the presence of John’s Advocate – the Holy Spirit , whom in chapter 14:15 Jesus declares God gives to us to continue to remind us of all that he has taught us.

Purposeful Love as Justice

The Holy Spirit teaches us as a community through the in-spiritedness of our engagement with Holy Scripture within sacramental setting of worship. Worship thus empowers us as a community to carry that in-spirited engagement out into the world where as disciples we seek to witness to the presence and action on God who is already in the world all around us.

For Episcopalians, extending right relationship into the world requires us to enter into a creative engagement with the issues of the time. This creative engagement leads us to an appreciation of our understanding of all that Jesus has taught us, deepening over time. For we, as a Church, hold that it is possible for the Church to change its mind about the particular meaning of Scripture. Interpretation of Scripture is what constitutes Tradition. Tradition is continually questioned by Reason in the light of current experience. Examples of this process in action is the 19^th Century repudiation of slavery. In the 20^th Century the struggle for civil rights in the areas of racial, and gender equality, led us to change our understanding of certain scriptural texts because we came to see in them a contradiction with the Jesus emphasis on inclusion. We continue to engage in a similar way with the issue of sexual identity in the opening years of this 21^st Century, along with an ever deepening of our commitment to global justice.

So within the community purposeful love is expressed as mutuality of interdependency. Yet, Christian community has a mission beyond its own internal world. The mission of Christian community is to provide a base for going out and speaking to the issues of the world around us. William Temple was perhaps the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury of the 2oth Century. He presided over the Anglican Communion during the dark years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. He reminded us that the purpose of the Church is to exist for those who are not yet its members. When we extend right relationship based on purposeful love into the world beyond our immediate communities, purposeful love takes on the expression of justice. For the Holy Spirit is not only a comforter, but also an advocate. An advocate is one who speaks on behalf of God’s desire for ever greater justice to govern our relationships with one another in the world.

The Enigma of Love

Returning to George Herbert’s poem cited in my previous post . Love has been further immortalized for music lovers by the English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ who scored five of Herbert’s poems in his Five Mystical Songs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNMnGNL0-uw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5JvpL6nyTc

Herbert highlights the common human experience that it is our shame that misguides us into hiding from, maybe even protecting ourselves from, the experience of love. We cannot take seriously the promise that God makes to love us, no matter what.

Herbert is talking of that love which we experience when we discover that we are beloved by God. We discover God’s love, not merely, despite our human weaknesses, but particularly because of our human vulnerabilities. Being human is to be a glorious creation much beloved by God. We hear in George Herbert that tender Christian humanism, which is an essential aspect of Anglican devotion, deeply rooted in the theology of Creation and the Incarnation.

Love one another; as I have loved you, by this shall the world know, that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:34-35)

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. (closing stanza to Love, George Herbert)

May 11, 2013 0

Love Bade Me Welcome – Part I

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful: Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat. George Herbert 1593-1633

In a Far-off Country A Long Time Ago

The poem Love, by George Herbert comes to us from the 17^th Century. Herbert, a highly educated man, spent his ministry in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside ministering to the members of his parish. Herbert is acknowledged to be one of the significant articulators of that literary and spiritual flowering we refer to as the period of the Caroline (from the Latin for Charles) Divines. The Caroline period, extending from the end of the reign of James I into the reign of his son Charles I, is a period later recognized as the flowering of Classical Anglican devotion. It is paradoxical that such a period of deep spiritual awakening should emerge within the religious tensions forced underground by the Elizabethan Settlement; tension that contributed to a period of increasing political crisis leading up to the English Civil War.

The Elizabethan Settlement resulted in the use of the law to force the English to attend divine service morning and evening each Sunday, in their parish church. A consequence of this was that people of very different religious and political views found themselves side by side in the same pew, under the same church roof. Over several generations the religious and political differences did not disappear. They finally erupt in the English Civil War. Yet, something amazing happened in this period. Despite their differences, a common Anglican identity emerged from the experience of a community in the process of being molded by the overarching language and deeply devotional liturgy of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer.

This may all sound like events of an era, long ago. Yet, those very tensions that the Elizabethan Settlement sought to contain remain today as the embedded sources of tension between increasingly irreconcilable world-views currently afflicting the fabric of American political life in our own day.

Inheritance

The Episcopal Church comes to life after the Revolutionary War as the heir to the Anglican Tradition in these United States, and consequently is a community of Christians that identifies itself by a notion of right relationship in place of common agreement on belief and world-view. Being in right relationship with one another finds its principle expression in the beauty and dignity of worship.

In the absence of a shared world-view common to all members, which is the usual way Christian Communities organize themselves, Anglican-Episcopalians hold together because we live-out the experience that when two or three gather to pray in Christ’s name, we encounter God in our midst, speaking to us as a community, through the in-spirited conversation between Holy Scripture and present context.

It is not that Episcopalians don’t have a body of belief. The Book of Common Prayer in the section titled Historical Documents identifies what Episcopalians believe. This is nothing more or less than a faith founded upon the orthodox consensus of the Early Christian Church articulated by the first seven Ecumenical Councils, beginning with the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Episcopalians are Catholic Christians who interpret the catholic faith of the first seven centuries through the lens of Anglican Tradition. Anglican Tradition emerges from 1000 years of the English experience of Christianity.

In this Tradition we speak of the deep formative influences of Augustine’s (Hippo) theology, of Benedict’s spirituality, and the events of the English Reformation that shaped the emergence of a spirituality of the via media, or the middle way.

This is an experience, which while holding firm to the ancient roots of historic Christianity allows a wide room for the tolerance of tension. Our emphasis on the equality between Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, referred to as the three-legged stool, encourages us to stay within the arising tension when Tradition interprets Scripture, and Reason questions Tradition.

This is not only the tension which inevitably results from the differences between individual world-views present in our communities, but in the fundamental tension arising out of each generation’s interpretation of the tradition we receive in the light of the challenges of the age in which we live.

Tradition and Experience

Herbert, and the Anglican devotional spirit he compellingly gives voice to, opens-up for us a way to comprehend what the Evangelist John is seeking to express in the way he constructs Jesus’ farewell conversation with his disciples as they linger round the table following that Passover meal in the upper room. In this conversation Jesus is preparing his disciples for what is to come.

In constructing the farewell conversation between Jesus and his disciples, John is not transcribing a literal recording of events. He is passing-on the tradition, in this case that of the Last Supper, in a way that allows him to speak to the crisis in his own Christian Community at the end of the 1^st Century. As with Mark, Matthew, and Luke before him, we can see how the tension between received tradition and current context is in play for John. This is the tension, which Episcopalians because of the accidents of our spiritual history, have come to value so highly.

In the face of the potential fragmentation over internal differences, John calls his community to hold together through the active practice of purposeful love (agape). Not only will the practice of purposeful love (agape) bind the community from within, but it will also commend the community to a hostile, external world. Purposeful Love operates at both community and individual levels:

Love one another; as I have loved you, by this shall the world know, that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 14:15-16)

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.  So I did sit and eat. (closing stanza to Love by George Herbert 1593-1633)

In Love Bade Me Welcome – Part II, I plan to further explore the dynamic of John’s purposeful love (agape) in the face of the challenges to Christian Community in our own time.

May 4, 2013 0