The Evangelist Mark, tells of a period in Jesus’ ministry when he appears to be off-line or off the radar, to use an older expression. Mark relates Jesus turning up in the region of Tyre. Tyre was historically the capital of the Phoenicians, an area we would recognize today as Lebanon. By Jesus’ time, this region had become a melting pot of Phoenicians, Canaanite-Syrians and Greeks. Jesus has wandered into and area where Jews were not always welcome. The Middle East was always, as it remains today, a hotchpotch of diverse ethnicities and faith communities living cheek by jowl, not always in amicable terms with one another. Mark does not explain why Jesus journeys into foreign territory. Furthermore, it appears that Jesus is alone. Mark offers no explanation for this, either.

Jesus roams beyond his Jewish homeland into a borderland. I am interested in the term borderland not merely as a geographical reference, but as a psychological designation. The borderland is the place where our psychological references shift.

Within our habitual environment – our habitude, we become programmed to expect only certain things, and to interpret them in familiar ways. Our habitude, an old French word once frequently used in English is from a psychological viewpoint a construction, a mental space inhabited by familiar expectations. Our habitude is by its very nature designed to minimize the possibility of being surprised by the unexpected. Even when we are, there’s no guarantee we will even recognize it.

Mark relays an encounter in the borderland with the unexpected that surprises Jesus. What’s more, being surprised by the unexpected seems to bring about a huge shift in Jesus personal perspective on the world presaging a huge shift in the nature of his mission.

An encounter that changed the world

We all know Mark’s story (Mk 7:24-37) about Jesus’ encounter with the gentile woman who request healing for her daughter. Distance in time and culture insulates us from the tensions running through this encounter. We miss the fact that Jesus’ response to her is from his place of habitude. He rejects her request because as he puts it, it’s not right to give the food reserved for the children of Israel and feed it to the likes of her a gentile dog. Micah Kiel in his commentary on this text comments:

Mark’s Jesus here uses the Greek word for “dog” in the diminutive, but this does not mean Jesus is calling her a “cute little puppy.” A colloquial translation today might be: “little bitch.” Jesus seems unsure of the relationship between the Gentiles and the Kingdom of God. 

The reason Mark gives us this vignette is because it presents Jesus as a man, confronted by the unexpected, being jolted into a new understanding of his mission. The woman receives her request and her daughter is healed not because she has skillfully bested Jesus in argument, though this is clearly so, but because Jesus is confronted with a new understanding that expands his mission beyond the confines of his Jewish-shaped -habitual expectation.

What kind of Jesus do we want?

What I mean by this question is, is Jesus a prisoner of our habitude, or is he a figure that surprises us and jolts us into the hitherto unimaginable? So much of our traditional way of viewing Jesus pictures him as omniscient – knowing all things, seeing all possibilities ahead of their happening. This presents a curious picture of Jesus who knows his end and simply journeys towards its fulfillment. It is as if we see Jesus as the key protagonist in a play, who going through the motions knows, as we also know, the end of the story ahead of time.

Speaking plainly, I do not find this Jesus of much help to me. I see this traditional image as an expression of our human desire to put a wide blue distance between Jesus and ourselves. In raising him to a higher plain of consciousness – an omniscient being, Jesus earns our admiration, someone to look up to. Yet, we seldom notice that such an elevation also conveniently excuses us from the now so-called higher – as in beyond our reach -elements of his mission. Our elevation of Jesus gives us an excuse from following Jesus because it’s now a futile exercise in comparing apples with oranges.

The phrase Mark most often uses to refer to Jesus is Son of Man. Most of us seem to prefer Matthew’s more elevated reference Son of God. In Jewish etymology, their meanings are technically interchangeable, yet for us they nuance this question of what kind of Jesus do we want? Do we want a Jesus who unlike us, is omniscient, knowing all things ahead of time? Or do we yearn for a Jesus who like us, can be surprised? Mark presents Jesus as very much like us, a man who was confronted by surprise; a man who could be jolted out of his habitude of familiar expectations and learn. 

Learn is the key word here, for learning can be pleasurable, but is most often painful, arising out of a conflict between the familiar and the challengingly novel. The idea that Jesus learns comforts me because I too learn – usually painfully, and I can only imagine that it was as painful and initially disorienting for Jesus as it usually is for me.

A local implication of Mark’s story

At St Martin’s in Providence the Labor Day Weekend signals our entry into the new program year. We do so this year supported by the spiritual inventory program, RenewalWorks. Like many Christian communities we are powerfully confronted by the challenge to grow- growth measured across the board: in numbers, income, levels of engagement, but most significantly, measured in terms of our spiritual deepening. It’s clear to many of us that the key to drawing others, to attaining better financial sustainability, and levels of community engagement is completely reliant on the members of our community learning; learning more about our spiritual needs and the discrepancies between what we spiritually long for and our spiritual practice.

Key to this learning transition is our willingness to close the safety gap –mind the gap – keeping Jesus and his call to mission, at a comfortable distance. 

A global implication of Mark’s story

As we watch the agony of the flood of refugees fleeing the carnage of Syria and adjacent regions, as a citizen of the European Union I am appalled at the failure not simply of human charity, but of the amnesia that blinds the more xenophobic countries of the Union to the echo between the historical images of the holocaust and what we all see unfolding across our TV screens. The current crisis is a European crisis, and one that is challenging the EU at its core to learn from its own painful history. Yet, in America the lesson should not be lost on us either, for we are more than willing to look the other way in the face of increasing pressure on our own borders.

The mission of Jesus is not his mission, it is our mission also. Mark’s story is a pivotal point that shows Jesus being (uncomfortably) confronted to expand the boundaries of his mission to reveal the power and urgency of God’s love and acceptance for the entire human race. Let’s stop hiding in our habitude, safely insulated from the demands of too much accountability for one another and allow ourselves to be confronted by the message of Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman.

The problems of our world are huge, and the solutions always partial and incomplete. This does not excuse us from our need for a change of heart!

The seed of an idea

Scott Hoezee in his weekly blog The Lectionary Gospel refers to an incident in The River by the Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor in which a child drowns while trying to baptize himself in a river. O’Connor was heavily criticized for this depiction that seems to many grotesque. She responded by reminding us that within the symbolism of baptism is the notion of dying to the old self and being reborn in Christ. She noted that:

In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures.

The text

Last week in a piece entitled Bread  I asked the question: do we at St Martin’s come Sunday by Sunday with a real expectation of eating the bread from heaven?

The bread from heaven is the a phrase Jesus uses in his conversation with the crowd following the feeding of the 5000 in John 6. We’ve spent the last two weeks making our way in bite-sized chunks through this chapter.

This week’s gospel section opens at verse 51 where Jesus, again likens himself to the living bread that came down from heaven. We see that the debate with the crowds is now heating up, initially sparked by Jesus’ question: are you coming to see the signs of God or for a free meal? They don’t like his referring to himself as the bread from heaven. They know this man and because they know his family background the crowd objects when Jesus attributes to himself a phrase they associate with Moses and the feeding of their ancestors in the wilderness of Sinai. Such attribution amounts to a human confiscation of God’s qualities – in other words, blasphemy.

Not being a man to over explain himself in an attempt to avoid an argument, Jesus now ratchets up the level of tension by abandoning the historically significant and metaphorically rich bread from heaven image, an image that is already getting him into trouble with the crowd. Instead, he offers them a really big caricature: his very flesh and blood:

Very truly I tell you. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you … for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 

The power of big caricature

As with our instinctive reaction to Flannery O’Connor’s story of the boy drowning himself in a baptism seemingly gone tragically wrong, Jesus offers an image to his hearers, which for them, is truly grotesque.

It’s grotesque on two levels. Firstly, it’s cannibalistic, and secondly, it’s blasphemous. The first reaction is the instinctive repulsion human beings feel when confronted by cannibalism. The second reaction is the equally strong and socially programmed reaction of human beings to an assault upon cherished religious images and beliefs.

In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures!

Intuitively, I draw back from really big caricatures. They offend my need for reasonableness. We live in a political world where reasonable debate has been replaced by grotesque caricature and incendiary sound-bite.

If you are Episcopalian, chances are you have come to the Episcopal Church attracted to the reasonableness and moderation of its Anglican ethos. Anglican ethos has a tendency to smooth over the bumpy caricatures of more extreme and less reasonable forms of Christianity with a spirit of balanced and gentle moderation. Yet, it has to be noted that our great strength at the same time is always in danger of degenerating into a kind of nothingness that is so vanilla that no one can take offense at it. If you never make any demand of people then no one ever has to say no, and we can all happily jog along in the land of the nearly blind. 

Revelation is never reasonable

The fact is that the message of Jesus is not reasonable – it is revelatory. Jesus is not trying to convince his hearers of rightness based on the reasonableness of his worldview. In that sense, he’s not very Episcopalian. Jesus’s priority is to shock us out of our cultural and religious insularities in order to catch a glimpse of things from the perspective of a self-giving God. Jesus reveals God giving [his] life to the life of the world. How better to do this than to present an image of religious participation as the ingestion of his flesh and blood, with no apology for the inevitable cannibalistic overtones.

So what do we at St Martin’s think we are doing Sunday by Sunday? Do we really come expecting to eat the bread of heaven? Possibly, when understood as tasteful metaphor. Do we come with and intention of consuming the flesh and blood of Christ? Unlikely, not even if understood as a less attractive metaphor.

I believe that most of us attend compelled by an inarticulate desire for what Anglicanism traditionally has referred to as the awe and wonder of worship, or the beauty of holiness. What does this mean, and what might it look like?

In the land of the blind

In 1979, The Rev. Bruce Reed published his book The Dynamics of Religion. Reed was an example of that great English tradition of a priest deeply involved with a sociological and psychological engagement with wider society. An American focus might be: how does church serve an individual? The English focus finds expression more in the question: how is society served by the existence and practice of the Church?

Drawing from Durkheim as well as Freud, Reed described the process of worship in terms of oscillation. Psychologically, oscillation describes a movement between rational and non-rational states of awareness. Reed understood the non-rational not as irrational, but akin to dream or even psychospiritual states where the boundaries of time and space and individual identity, are in constant flux. Sociologically, oscillation describes the process of movement between individual and collective aspects of experience. Reed noted that a primary function of worship is to focus and then manage the process of oscillation in both senses.

Put most succinctly oscillation is the process of energetic renewal. Psychologically, we arrive at worship clothed in our right minds in order to experience without interruption to rational functioning the irrigation of deeper currents of energy. Interestingly, charismatic worship most clearly exemplifies a process, which for non-charismatic Christians operates mostly at an unconscious level. Charismatic worship allows for a more dramatic oscillation where the influx of the deeper currents of energy for a time, overwhelm the rational state of the worshiper. Charismatic forms of worship meet the needs of communities where the day-to-day experience of suffering rooted in the experience of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination, is more intense.

Similarly, in our relationship between our individual and our collective identities, we are empowered individually through our participation in communal or collective rites of passage, in order for our lives to become better shaped by a deeper and more energetic connection with the common good.

Eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ is a psychotic idea. What I mean by this is that to eat human flesh and drink human blood requires a serious alteration of rational consciousness. For example, the Maori of New Zealand practiced ritualistic cannibalism prior to European arrival. They consumed human flesh within a context of religious ritual. The Maori ate the flesh of their enemies only in the highly ritualized context of warfare where cannibalism expressed spiritual domination over one’s mortal enemies through ingesting their flesh.

The interplay within and between – getting to the nub

Jesus did not literally offer his flesh and blood. No one ate Jesus and he did not intend for anyone to do so. He was employing psychotic- non-rational imagery – a really big caricature – as a revelatory device to show that through him, God is doing a new thing. God, through Jesus, is entering into the very heart of created life as an expression of love for the world. Jesus embodies this love through the events of the cross and resurrection. The really big caricature of eating his flesh and drinking his blood is his way of driving home the message that nothing short of complete incorporation of God in the form of physical ingestion will satisfy our spiritual hunger.

I cannot overemphasize two points here:

1. Communion, i.e. participation in God’s self-giving is not an individualized, esoteric, spiritualized phenomenon according to Jesus. Communion with God requires ingesting real food – bread and wine transformed by collective memory and future hope into the flesh and blood of the Savior. This is the psycho-spiritual event of Eucharist.
2. Eucharist is also a community event, properly understood when we realize that no one individual can celebrate Eucharist alone. Through the ritual of Eucharist we are incorporated into a communal meal at which it is as a community we take God into ourselves, thus satisfying our need to recharge our individual batteries from the our communal charging station. This is the socio-spiritual event of Eucharist.

Psychospritually, the ritual of Eucharist weaves a complex interplay between the ideas of physical and spiritual hunger, spiritual and physical food. In both cases, ingesting is the way to satisfying our need of God. Sociospiritually, the ritual of Eucharist draws us as individuals into an experience of the communal, an entity greater than the sum total of its parts, also referred to a the Body of Christ. Eating and drinking is the most powerful expression of social solidarity. Consuming the bread of heaven is the most effective way of ensuring that there is enough bread of the world to feed the hungry.  

In the land of the nearly blind, this requires drawing a really big caricature!

 Individual Remembering

As a child, I remember buying bread at the grocery. I remember it came as whole loaves, either white or brown. That’s all I remember about bread until at some point a third option became available – sliced. The arrival of a slicing machine in the grocery meant that in our house bread now came presliced in a plastic wrapper.

A common saying in both New Zealand and the UK is: it’s the best thing since sliced bread! Maybe it’s a saying used by Americans as well. Being a denizen of all three cultures, it’s increasingly difficult for me to keep straight in which of the three cultures a certain aphorism originates. The saying means: wow, this [thing, situation] is a wonderful invention. I remember sliced bread as the staple of my childhood, for bread was not the specialty item to be savored and delighted over that those of us living in Providence find at Seven Stars Bakery. Bread was bread, white or brown, sliced or not, used as toast or to make a sandwich or a bread pudding –a great favorite of visits to my maternal grandmother.

I also remember a time when the eating of bread had little down side. The purity of the grain and the metabolism of youth allowed me to consume bread without regard to quantity or consequence. This is alas, is no longer so. The processed nature of much wheat used in making bread is making bread toxic and I now strictly monitor my wheat intake. The slowing of my body’s metabolism also means that bread is now a source of unwanted carbs, and unwanted carbs are the enemy of my aging male waste line.

Bread is the staple food in all cultures where wheat is the staple grain. Bread is the staple food, the fruit of nature’s bounty. Wheat growing societies dependence on bread as the staple food has led such societies to view Bread is also a symbol of divine generosity – an embodiment of God’s care and concern for human beings. Our own religious memory contains countless instances and references to bread as a sign of God’s presence, God’s communication with and involvement in human affairs.

Collective remembering

We read of the prophet Elijah (1Kings:19) at a point of despair retiring under a solitary broom tree to await the welcomed release of death only to be awoken to find God’s gift of bread, baked on stones heated by the merciless sun as a both a means not only of physical sustenance but also as a sign of God’s promise of a future. The feeding of the Israelites (Exodus 16) with manna (a form of flaky bread) in the wilderness has become the archetypal bread story. It’s echo sounds throughout the scriptural record where bread becomes a sign of divine deliverance at times of crisis and a promise for the future. This story finds a strong resonance in ministry of Jesus, who feeds 5000 with two loaves; again bread used not only as a real material expression of God’s care and concern but an action that has a huge symbolic significance, the meaning of which Jesus begins to unfold.

We continue in the 6^th chapter of John’s gospel with Jesus following his feeding of the 5000, expanding on his theology of bread. The crowds flock in increasing numbers to hear Jesus, drawn as he suggests not simply by the signs and wonders he performs but by the promise of a full stomach; the satisfying their physical hunger. We recall that hunger was the commonplace experience for the masses of displaced peasantry that flocked to hear Jesus. 1st Century Palestine was undergoing a commercialization of agricultural production with land being increasingly vested in powerful landowners who like the powerful in our own time were intent on the monopolizing of resources. Independent peasant farmers were being displaced and turned into itinerant day laborers, a story as old as time, and one alarmingly familiar to us as we view with a sense of increasing helplessness the trajectory of economic developments in our own day.

Jesus challenges the crowds to consider what it is they have come expecting. If it’s to be fed then that’s important but only a temporary fix. He pushes them beyond the familiarity of their boundaried imaginations and they don’t like it. They begin to challenge his presenting himself as the bread come down from heaven. Jesus is telling them he is the manna of God, which is much more than physical bread that temporarily satiates hunger. As God’s living bread, Jesus offers them the spiritual nourishment of transformation. If Jesus had read Maslow he would have realized that it is a tall order telling people about spiritual nourishment, whose bellies need filling.

I don’t imagine that Jesus as unsympathetic to the crowds drawn to him by the promise of a free meal. Yet, his purpose seems to be to lay out a much larger perspective, within which satisfying physical needs has a place, but cannot be the ultimate end goal. As human beings, we need spiritual nourishment that enables transformation, as well.

Bread the life of heaven and the life of the world

Bread is the fundamental element in Christian community. Christian community, to be Christian must be concerned with the need for real bread to feed the hungry. Give us this day our daily bread – extends bread as a metaphor for all of life’s basic needs: something to eat, somewhere to live, and someone to love and be loved by. Christian community is also concerned with the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger.

Every Sunday and in some communities more frequently than that, Jesus’ gift of the bread from heaven that feeds the life of the world is renewed in time and space in the celebration of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the central aspect of Christian worship. At the Eucharist real bread, the staple of life becomes the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger.

The celebration of the Eucharist must bear certain characteristics according to one of America’s greatest lay theologians of the 20^th Century, William Stringfellow.

In an essay entitled Liturgy as Political Action1 Stringfellow outlines three basic characteristics for liturgy that roots it in the integrity of the gospel. Let me apply some of Stringfellow’s thinking about liturgy more specifically to my task in hand.

Transcending categories of time

The Eucharist is where the Biblical story of creation is recalled and rehearsed in the full knowledge of the world’s redemption by Christ. In a modern world enthralled by the concepts of time travel and parallel multidimensional connections across time, the Eucharist, as action forges a conduit between past and future allowing the energies of the past and the promises of the future to flow into the present, i.e. into present time and the particularity of place.

This drama – dramatic action requires the full participation of all the people to prevent it becoming simply a spectacle to be observed. As Stringfellow puts it:

As a transcendent event, the [Eucharist] collects all that has already happened in this world from the beginning of time and prophesies all that is to come until the end of time. But the [Eucharist] is also a contemporary event, involving these particular persons gathered in this specific place and in this peculiar way.

In other words, the Eucharist is here and now and its effects are real in the here and now. It becomes for us a way of focusing our attention on our connections within the community – past and present, and between the community and rest of the world around it. [It] is the normative and conclusive ethical commitment of the Christian people to the world2

The Eucharist celebrates not only God’s gift of Godself in Christ as the bread from heaven given for the life of the world, it also expresses the involvement of the Christian community in the life of the everyday world through the acts of service and witness, i.e. real bread, necessary for real people as staple of life.

Eucharist is the central act of worship in the historicl3 tradition of Christianity of which the Episcopal Church as a Church of the Anglican Tradition is a part. This summer at St Martin’s we are deepening our understanding of Eucharist, which for many of us becomes rather routine and devoid of impact, cocooned within the familiar recitations on Sunday mornings. Eucharist becomes merely a matter of doing what we do without any real connection to the why. For the months of July and August, we are exploring Eucharist in instructional format at the different time of  5.30pm on Sunday evenings. In this format, the familiar cadences of the Prayer Book give way to reveal the skeleton of actions that undergirds Eucharist as one whole action.

Returning to an expansive vision

Since the 1979 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, we have sought to overcome the legacy of the arid argument as to whether at the Eucharist the bread becomes Christ’s real body or remains just bread. Today we transcend the controversy particular and peculiar to the 16^th century by reconnecting to a larger and more encompassing vision of sacramental action and sacramental authority.

Our current science fiction fascination with time and anomalies of time fuelled by the real physics of Quantum observation opens a way to revisit the historic concepts of anamnesis, i.e. the remembrance of things past made effective again through action in the present. Like the crowds that came to hear Jesus, what are our expectations as members of a community whose central action in the world is the celebration of Eucharist?

St Paul offered two tests for measuring our spiritual vitality. Can we allow ourselves to be part of community -something greater than ourselves, and can we engage with our individual calling through which we can make our distinctive contribution, bringing our skills, passion, and resources to the building up of the community?

For so many of us our membership of the community of faith has become perfunctory and at times can mean little more to us than belonging by habit to a club or association. This is not always our fault. It can be just the way life is at times. Yet, no matter how exuberant or lackluster we feel about church, I have yet to meet a person who is not spiritually hungry for something more.

Bread, the bread from heaven, which satisfies our spiritual hunger (John 6:35, 41-51) in the celebration of the Eucharist brings the nature of Christian community into sharper focus. Is our community a place where we can expect to eat the bread of heaven? Is St Martin’s a place where we can begin to distinguish between our emotional wants and moods and our spiritual needs? It can be only if we invest ourselves in its life.

Much of what we long for is not more happiness, but a more vital sense of purpose and connection beyond ourselves. We find that what we need as a community of seekers journeying together is to become a community where transformation is an expectation in everyday experience. We long not only for personal transformation; we also long to become transformed as a community, fit to carry out the mission of the being Christ’s body in the world.

The Book of Common Prayer tells us that the mission of the Church is to pray, worship, proclaim the Gospel, and promote justice, peace, and love (Pg 854BCP). Through whom does the Church carry out its mission? The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members, i.e. you and me gathered to celebrate and receive the bread from heaven.

William Stringfellow again: Eucharist is not any ritual such as the rituals of the Masons or any other secret society. It uses ordinary things that are the staples of life in the world –

bread, wine, water, cloth, money, color, music, words, or whatever else is readily at hand.

Using the ordinary things at hand to celebrate and make present the extraordinary gifts of God is a political event. By political event Stringfellow clearly has an event in mind that challenges and changes things.

The very example of salvation, it is the festival of life that foretells the fulfillment and maturity of all of life for all of time and in this time. The liturgy is social action because it is the characteristic style of life for human beings in this world. 4

[1] A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (1994) Ed by Bill Wylie Kellermann. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[2] The History of the Liturgy Pp 124-5

[3] Catholic and Apostolic

[4] Pp 125-6

Reverie

Cork is a wonderful material, a natural product of the Quercus suba or cork oak tree. I remember in the house I grew up in, there was a cook floor in the dining and sitting rooms made from large squares of cork arranged in an alternating pattern of honey and coffee coloured tiles. Because the ultraviolet rays of the sun are so intense in New Zealand, after a while the contrasts faded and every so often the floors needed sanding to restore them to the colours of the original pattern. It was a very 1960’s look. Cork tile floors are ubiquitous with the great movement in design called Mid-century Modern, a style common around the Pacific Rim but which seems not to have made much inroad into New England; a style I note, that is once again the rage in design magazines like CB2.

You don’t see cork as much as you once did. Even its last great bastion, the wine cork, seems to be on its way out. More often than not wine bottles are now sealed with the easy to open screw-top, or something, which interestingly we still refer to as a plastic cork. It’s ironic how cork now refers to a function, i.e. sealing or stopping, rather than the material of the seal or stopper itself.

Cork was for centuries prized for its buoyancy making it an essential material in the traditional fishing industries. Even here, or maybe especially here, cork has now largely been replaced. Fishing buoys made from cork are now hard to find. Universally, buoys are now made from a material I call polystyrene, which translate for Americans as Styrofoam.

My cork reverie was evoked by the passage in Ephesians 4:14-16 that speaks of being tossed to and fro, an image for me of the action of swimming in the surf, of being helplessly carried upward and downward, forward and backward, propelled by the action of the waves. 

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love. 

This passage offers two intriguing contrasts.

1. Being anchored

The first contrast is between corks and buoys, whether the latter are made from the material cork or not. In the image of being tossed to and fro, in my mind’s eye I picture the contrast between the image of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of the water, at the mercy of the ebb and flow of the currents, and that of the buoy rising and falling with the action of the waves but firmly anchored in one place.

Am I a cork or a buoy? Do I feel like a cork or a buoy? Are these even different questions? As I explored last week in the Illusoriness of Reality, these are different questions to the extent that feelings are not always an accurate indication of what is real. Yet, feeling states are what we have ready, conscious access to, so I guess there are times when I feel more or less cork-like. Yet, feelings are no indication of spiritual maturity.

There is an important distinction between spiritual and emotional states. Optimism, or pessimism, happy or sad, these are emotional states. They are not accurate indicators of spiritual vitality, because each is a reflection of circumstances in the external world. Things go well and we feel happy and optimistic. Things are tough and we feel sad and pessimistic.

Spiritual discernment has traditionally made a distinction between consolation and desolation. These are spiritual states that contradict, rather than reflect feeling states tied to external perception. For instance, things appear to going well for us. We seem to have all we could desire, and in the midst of our optimism we feel hollow and empty. This is the spiritual state of desolation and it alerts us to the illusory mistake of identifying spiritual vitality with material or emotional happiness. Correspondingly, consolation galvanizes us during tough times. When we face up against the large uncertainties of life, the seeming impossibilities that loom large before us, we experience a certainty of purpose and direction anchored by a palpable – felt but not seen – trust in God.

Spiritual states have an objective quality, i.e. an expression of something in us that is greater than we are, whereas emotional states are highly subjective, i.e. resulting only from inside ourselves. Yet, it seems both spiritual and emotional states involve maturing.Returning to my metaphor of the cork and buoy, the key spiritual question is: am I a cork cast adrift and vulnerable to the unpredictability of tide and wind, or am I a buoy, firmly anchored to the ocean floor with a cord strong and elastic enough to ride the turbulent current and hold-fast into the prevailing wind?

2.Growing up

In exploring this question I note the second contrast that Paul –whether it is actually the historical Paul or a later disciple imbued with his spirituality– makes in the Ephesians passage between spiritual immaturity, the state associated with being a child and maturity.

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro …. [But] we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ …

Here’s a nice theological question: does the soul grow up, i.e. does it grow and mature with the passage of life? Theologically, the soul has been seen as immutable or unchanging. This is somewhat the position held by transpersonal psychologies such as Psychosynthesis, which see the soul as a higher center of supraconsciousness, independent from, but contributing to our emotional development. The soul may be unchanging, but spiritual maturity, rather like emotional maturity is constantly forming.

Different languages

The theologian James Fowler, while not the only one to do so, has developed a schematic of spiritual maturity across psycho-spiritual formational stages, which he links with those of increasing emotional development. This is not the place to go into an analysis of his six stages of spiritual formation so visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fowler to explore further.

Without access to a modern psychology of psycho-spiritual formation, Paul and those speaking Paul’s message to a later generation had two core measures for individual spiritual maturity.

The first is a measure of a healthy capacity to participate in community and to strengthen the sinews that link individuals into a whole, i.e. a maturity that supports unity. The second is a measure of participation in one’s individual call. Spiritual maturity manifests differently in each of us according our discernment and acceptance of our calling, our vocation.

If the first measure of spiritual maturity is the capacity to participate in something greater than one’s self, the second measure is of a capacity to contribute our difference, something very individual to one’s self, to the building up of the greater whole. Paul often uses the metaphor of the human body to speak of this; one body, yet different organs. Ephesians takes up this metaphor and presents a process for building up the body through the promise of spiritual maturity.

Ephesians speaks of spiritual maturity, of growing up, in the language of:

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Fowler’s sixth stage of formation offers us a modern language for the spiritual maturation Ephesians speaks of. Spiritual maturity, while exhibiting a number of different characteristics is the capacity to treat any person with compassion, accepting them as a part of the same universal community, according to the Christ-centered principles of love, tolerance, and inclusive justice.

One image I easily have for myself is that like a cork tossed about, I feel vulnerable, at times child-like and ill equipped in the face of shifting opinions and conflicting worldviews. In the face of this turbulence, my overriding anxiety is to please, to fit in, to be included by making myself acceptable. This is an image of being adrift in a sea of fearful feelings. It’s an image for spiritual immaturity.

An alternative image is that like a buoy I ride the turbulent surface of living in the world with courage knowing that I ride the surface tempest anchored by a cord that is strong and elastic enough to hold me fast to God’s promise for me to grow into the full stature of Christ. Here, I am not afraid to express my difference and to tolerate if not embrace other’s difference as we grow together. This is an image of spiritual maturity in action. This is Christ’s promise and God’s gift.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 

Spiritual maturity is demonstrated in our ability to discern and take up our calling, and to realize that we do not do so not in isolation, but in the company of one another. Together we use our individual gifts to built the body, helping rather than hindering one another as together we mature into the full statue of Christ.

Like others I suspect, the reoccurring tension for me lies in my confusing what I can see with what really exists. I have two prayers that form the bedrock of my daily devotion that seem to help me with this.

The first is: Please God, show me what I have yet to be able to see. The field of my awareness takes shape from what I think I see in front of me. Yet, I know that what I see is actually the product of the interplay between an objective reality and my imagination that interprets what I see according to the available templates of my memory. I know this. Yet I live as if what I see and the way I perceive it is an accurate reflection of something objective, i.e. independent of my perception.

My second prayer comes from my adaptation of a line in the ancient Christian prayer known as the Salve Regina. This is a prayer of heartfelt intercession to Mary. It is a prayer I learned a long time ago and within my current spiritual practice it remains an artifact from the fervor of my Anglo-Catholic youth. It survives when many other aspects of this earlier spiritual phase have fallen away simply because one day I found myself unthinkingly changing the line that runs:

to you do we sigh, mouring and weeping passing through this vale of tears, to:         to you do we sigh, mouring and weeping passing through this veil of illusion. 

My adaptation reflects a shift in my spirituality away from a medieval notion of the plight of human suffering to a notion that suffering is a perception that is rooted in the tension between subjectivity and objectivity. Sometimes this tension reflects our imprisonment within the way memory confines imagination or put another way a reflection of being shackled by the familiar. However, this tension can also be a place of imaginative creativity when imagination breaks free an opens to new shifts in awareness.

*

There is a scholarly controversy over whether Ephesians is actually from the hand of Paul or from that of a later disciple writing in the style of Paul. The controversy over Ephesians is a modern concern and not one that would have made any sense to Paul, himself. Ephesians strikes a different tone with its focus on the qualities of an ordered spiritual life that indicates a less turbulent and more settled time than the one Paul lived through. Nevertheless in so many places it approaches the intensity of Paul’s vision. In the portion appointed for the epistle (Ephesians 3:14-21) on the 9^th Sunday after Pentecost, the author, whether Paul or not, articulates a powerful Pauline vision:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 

My heartfelt response to this passage is –if only. What I mean is, if only this expectation would resonate through my whole and undivided being. I long to expand my perception beyond the limitations placed by my need to stay within the security of what I already know. I so desire to comprehend beyond the limitations of what I think I see.  I long for this Pauline expectation to become my reality. I live in the tension between such a hope and my encapsulation within a small, limited, and overly self-referenced perspective; a perspective resulting from still being firmly on this side of the veil of illusion.

**

In John 6:1-21, the gospel appointed for Pentecost 9 we receive the miracles of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on the water. The feeding of the 5000 is one of those rare events recorded in all four Gospels.

John does not record many of the events that form the bedrock of the synoptic writers. Unlike Mark, Matthew and Luke, John is not writing a synopsis – general theological and chronological overview of Jesus life and ministry. John is constructing a theology of theophany i.e. God’s visible manifestation to humankind. He reconstructs the ministry of Jesus around seven signs, all of which focus attention on the nature of Jesus’ and God’s identity as intertwined. At the heart of John’s gospel lies his theology that in Jesus we see God; a God who reveals through signs or miracles.

Misapprehension, misunderstanding, rejection, are themes that run through John’s narrative of theophany because our ability to see reality is distorted by the veil of illusion constructed from our self-referenced and imaginatively encapsulated hopes and expectations. The crowds are firmly rooted on this side the of the veil of illusion, with Jesus on the other side. Interestingly, reality and illusion are often so close together, and can be likened to the opposite sides of the same coin.

The crowd is attracted to Jesus because of the signs he works, signs that make him a powerful target for the projections of their unrequited longing.  For the crowd, Jesus is Moses or Elijah come again. The prophet of old who will lead them from their current state of subjection into a new promised land. Ecstatic with expectation, they try to make Jesus a king – the Messiah who will deliver Israel from its bondage. These expectations are close to the truth but perceived from the illusory side of the coin.

On the other side of the coin, John tells the story of the feeding of the 5000 to create an echo between Jesus and Moses. In John’s version Jesus echoes God through Moses feeding the people with manna – limitless bread in the wilderness. After feeding the people John has Jesus go up onto a mountain beside the lake – a probable reference to the Golan Heights, but an echo of Moses ascending Mt Sinai to witness theophany.

It’s as if God’s self revelation is designed to actively trigger the people’s collective religious memory, creating an association between Jesus and Moses. God desires that the people see that in Jesus something radically new is coming to pass. Yet, then as well as now, humankind tends to limit itself to perceptions shaped by what it already knows. The need is for humankind to see something new. John sees in Jesus something new and he never seems to come to terms with the fact that most people around him don’t. Today, the danger is that we continue to construct God as a manifestation of our own self image – a kind of anthophany.

The feeding of the 5000 followed by the walking on the water are the fourth and fifth of John’s miracle signs. But, what is a miracle? Put most simply a miracle seems to be an event that on the face of it has no rational or logical explanation according to our expectations of how things work in the universe.

On one side we have the externalists, those who see miracles as events in time and space that are miraculous because they mysteriously and inexplicably suspend the Newtonian laws of physics. The miraculous becomes its own explanation. On the other side we have the internalists, those who believe the seemingly miraculous is a psychospiritual event – something occurring within the inner consciousness of individuals. Between these two positions is a profound theological disagreement. The externalists affirm miracles because God can do what God likes, that’s the function of being omnipotent. The internalists counter with, having set up the laws along which the universe seems to operate, God becomes confined by a self-imposed restriction to only operate as a good Newtonian.

***

For me, the question do miracles happen is the wrong question. Miracles are defined not by how they happen but by their consequences. Miracles change perceptions and the course of events. I am happy to be agnostic about whether they are external or internal events because I find this distinction to be an illusion. I have only my internal perception of any objective event in external reality.

I prefer to see miracles as those experiences that show us the more than what we are conditioned by memory-shaped imagination to expect. It’s not do they, or how do they, happen? It’s how is our sense of the possible reshaped by such events so that we make the imaginative leap into expecting more than we have dared to hope for?

The hypothesis that I have been at pains to articulate here is that the expectations of God’s KINGDOM are never limited to the possible or even to the probable. The expectations of the KINGDOM come to us in the form of a discovery that we are not limited by the boundaries of only what we can imagine.

The veil of illusion is permeable! Through courageous expectation and hope-filled action we are called to comprehend the breath and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge so that we may not only be filled with the fullness of God, but be those through whom God is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.

There is a deep chasm that lies between being sent and being received. Like the Grand Canyon, there is a huge contrast between the surface, which presents an unbridgeable span, and the base or floor, which is narrow and winding, across which a bridge can be made.

The visual metaphor of the Grand Canyon offers an image for an emotional and spiritual chasm within us. We find in the readings for Pentecost VI the echoes of that experience, an experience of the particular vulnerability we name as the unrequited. 

The unrequited spans the experience between being sent and being received. For some of us, most of the time, and for all of us, some of the time, the fear of feeling unrequited prevents us from taking the risks we need to take in order to plumb the depth of the chasm. For further down, near the fecund floor there is a span that is narrow enough to bridge our fear of emotional vulnerability lying between being sent and being received.

Even God it seems has the experience of the unrequited. Time and again throughout the long history of a relationship with humanity, which for God appears to be a slow torture, the possibility of bridging the experience we name as unrequited is always held out as a possibility, a risk worth taking or in the memorable words of the divine Miss M: It’s the heart afraid of breaking, That never learns to dance.

God invites and yearns for our response. In addressing Ezekiel, God declares:

Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them. 

Ezekiel, like all the prophets before and after is the one taken from among us, who embodies God’s risking – spanning the chasm of the unrequited in the relationship God invites us into and from which we pull back.

In his second letter to the Christians at Corinth, a city that ranked among the big apples of the Graeco-Roman world, Paul wears upon his sleeve his unrequited experience. He plumbs the depths of this chasm to discover a space narrow enough to bridge the span. In the paradoxical relationship between weakness and strength, which at the surface of the chasm appear in their polarity to be so far apart, Paul discovers nearer the chasm floor, that they are more like the two sides of the same coin – strength is weakness and weakness is strength. This is quite a risk to take in a culture where it’s only strength, particularly the strength of authority and leadership that is respected. The human dilemma, then and now, is that we long for strong leadership when it’s leadership strong enough to show vulnerability we really are in need of. The nature of this vulnerability is to let others see that we too can be hurt and still continue onwards.

It is Mark, who through the plain-speaking of his gospel offers us a glimpse of Jesus struggling with his experience of the unrequited. In the face of his neighbors insult to him: is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary …. and they took offense at him – Jesus is dumbfounded by – at a loss to explain their hostility. In Matthew the townsfolk exclaim: is this not Joseph’s son who’s mother is Mary? Matthew excises the reference to illegitimacy that Mark seems to feel is important to keep in. Yet, even in Matthew his neighbors take offense at him. Luke omits any reference to Jesus’ lineage, legitimate or otherwise, but has the townsfolk move beyond taking offense to attempting his murder.

Jesus’ response to what must have been a deeply painful experience of the unrequited, is to send his disciples out into the world. He sends them out, in effect saying: go out and risk being vulnerable – take only a staff, no bread, no money, only sandals and one tunic, and go and stay where you are received and where not, take your leave shaking the dust from your feet. As he himself is doing, Jesus instructs his disciples to go out and risk being vulnerable, armed only with the message of healing for a world that is broken.

Last night, I watched Bishop Michael Curry’s charge for the Episcopal Church to go out into the world with the message of the gospel as a healing for a world that is broken. Bishop Curry was elected in these last days as the next Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. I then watched President Obama’s message of grace, amazing grace in a broken world, delivered at the funeral eulogy for the Rev. State Senator Clementa Pinckney.

Viewing these two men, back to back on Youtube, each the first African American to hold their respective offices, brought home for me the reality that it is through our experience of vulnerability in the face of perceived weakness that makes us fearful of the chasm of the unrequited. Like, Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus, I heard bishop and president find the courage to risk plumbing the depth of the chasm, to risk the experience of the unrequited, there to discover God’s bridging of the chasm, not at its wide surface but nearer the floor, which remember is often a long way down from our preference to loiter at the surface, fearfully fixed upon our own self-protection.

The President reminded us on the eve of the celebration of the Forth of July, that we are plagued by our ignorance of history, and more significantly, that we are ignorant of one another’s histories. The President quoted the hymn Amazing Grace, the song of repentance of a former slave ship captain, no longer fleeing from his own history 

John Newton through his conversion and life-long repentance thereby embraced the call to live as one who is sent, regardless of the risk of not being received. For Barack Obama, in John Newton’s words there is clearly a personal poignancy combined with something Bishop Curry must also know well, the poignancy of being found by God despite rejection based on race.

Bishop Curry cited Julia Ward Howe’s words in what has come to be known as the Battle Hymn of the Republic. He took poetic license with her lyrics in order to amplify the meaning of his charge to the Church to go forth in the faith: that as Jesus died to make men holy, let us live to make all free, while God is marching on.

Whether it’s 1776, 1865, 1965, or 2015, the lesson of being sent and not received, which at each point is so painfully learned, seems to have to be relearned over and over again. Freud noted that what we can no longer remember we are destined to repeat.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise                                                                 than when we’d first begun.
One history   Another history 

Part I

Spiral Dynamics  is a tool for the analysis of the stages of societal evolution. The key concept is that human societies evolve through stages of development ranging from primitive subsistence to spiritually progressive systems. This, in itself, is not so remarkable an idea, but Spiral Dynamics offers us a very clear picture of what societal developmental stages, or memes, look like.

Each meme has an associated color and set of characteristics. Don Beck, it’s principal inventor draws on Ken Wilber’s theory of holographic – integral development. The key concept here is that development occurs in stages with each successive stage and expansion and inclusion of the previous stage. The characteristics of the previous stage or meme remain present in latent, form within the new expansion. By contrast, a hierarchical concept of development relies on each successive stage replacing and leaving behind previous stages.

In contemporary society, we are still largely wedded to hierarchical notions of development. This affects both our views of society as well as how we envisage our own personal social and emotional development at the individual level. This helps explain why we are so surprised to find elements of social and personal development, long since relegated to the past reemerging to ambush us.

Racism is a good example. Since the Civil Rights Movement, we have come to believe that American Society has made huge strides in eradicating the scourge of racism. Consequently, we are deeply shocked to discover that it is alive and still violently, kicking hard.

The Spiral Dynamic analysis helps to show how the characteristics of earlier memes of societal evolution continue to be retained within successive stages that appear to have moved beyond the limits of the previous stages. In fact, the transition to the next stage occurs when the social momentum breaks free of its hitherto constraints. This is not driven by the conscious choice of society members, but by the necessity of meeting new and different challenges.

In 21st America, the legacy of a slave-owning society continues within our national DNA even though we are no longer a slave-owning society. The very notion of owning another human being is incomprehensible and repugnant to us because our society has evolved beyond the key characteristics and values of a society, which at an earlier meme of development was dependent upon slavery as its primary economic mode of production. Yet, the patterns of discrimination and oppression that characterize the distinctions between owned and owner classes remain, latent within our collective unconsious. They continue underground, out of sight as it were, becoming located in subgroups within the larger society that still cling to the values and world views that originate in a slave-owning society.

Discrimination and attitudes based on race are complex. Some of it is an expression of an ethnic fear of those who are different. However, in contemporary America, we are finding that the most intractable racial tensions continue to complicate relations between a majority and the descendants of the formerly, enslaved section of the population. Slavery has gone, yet the systemic hostility remains. Only now, it is enacted through public policing and the criminal justice system. We are awakening to this sorry truth once again, that, that which we thought we had left behind- a hierarchical view of development – continues to remain uncomfortably present even though it remains in tension with the larger direction of our society’s development.

In the face of new challenges, as societies are pressured into more evolved social structures designed to better meet those challenges, the previous meme values continue to exercise a destabilizing effect through sub-groups who for whatever reason remain in tension with the necessity for new directions.

Part II

I remarked last week that we seem riveted by the unfolding stories that come to us in the lectionary readings from the 1st and 2nd books of Samuel. The book – one book later divided into two – of the prophet Samuel belongs to a genre of literature in the Old Testament known as the historical books, which comprise a major category in the Old Testament, 12 books in all. In Samuel 1 and 2 we see Israelite society hovering around, and finally achieving the transition from a confederation of tribes to that of a nation – from purple/red to blue memes in Spiral Dynamic terms.

Samuel himself, represents the passing of religious authority from priest to prophet giving Samuel an authority not seen since the days of Moses. Yet, politically, Samuel is the last of the Judges, those who since Joshua have loosely presided over the tribal confederation. The people confront Samuel with the demand that he gives them a king like the other nations. The demands of expansion and meeting new challenges require a new and more centrally organized form of government to enable the Israelite tribes to be more effective in war, against neighbors already organized as nations, led by kings.

Saul is the first king, but things don’t go well under Saul and in punishment for his disobedience in not slaughtering the whole of the Amalekite people, as God seems to have required, God withdraws his mandate from Saul. God instructs Samuel to anoint the shepherd boy David in place of Saul. Saul does not abdicate immediately and some years pass with Saul, insecurely holding onto power while David is the secretly anointed one to replace him. During these years of tension, when Saul tries a number of times to kill David, Saul’s son and heir, Jonathan, gives undying fealty to David, recognizing him as the anointed king in waiting.

David goes on the succeed Saul and becomes the king who unifies the Israelites into a formidable kingdom that becomes a major center of power along the corridor that buffers the great empires of Egypt from Assyria.

In the reading for fifth Sunday of Pentecost, David learns of Saul and Jonathan’s deaths. Jonathan is killed in battle against the Philistines and Saul is mortally wounded. The messenger who brings the news to David claims to be the one – incidentally an Amalekite – who at Saul’s pleading has dispatched Saul to prevent him being captured alive by the Philistines. David’s response to the news of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan is to compose one of the great love eulogies of all time in the form of a psalm of praise and devotion. David’s psalm is an ode to the love between men. Although he seems to equally praise and mourn both Saul his adversary, and Jonathan his friend, it’s Jonathan for whom he mourns.

It is clear from the numerous attempts of commentators over the centuries to deny any homosexual inference in the love that David openly declares for Jonathan, that to be Shakespearean about it: me thinks they protest too much! The anxiety has been how to interpret this love poem as merely fraternal and not also, connubial.David makes it clear that his and Jonathan’s love is connubial, not in the technical sense of being married, but in the natural sense of the feelings between them -they clearly are an emotionally bonded couple and there is something of carnal passion being given voice to here, alongside that of covenanted friendship.

Contemporary liberal commentators no longer deny outrightly at least, the possibility of a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. But most continue to take refuge in the suggestion that to say so is an inappropriate reading of contemporary relationality into David’s eulogy to the love of his friend. In contrast, Bruce Gerig is indicative of a growing body of commentators who no longer seek to deny the homosexual nature of the love between David and Jonathan.

I take the view that the love between David and Jonathan is homosexual in nature. However, in asserting so I am not reading a modern construction of gayness back in time. That would be an inappropriate anachronism.  David and Jonathan were not gay in the sense that I am gay.

Gayness is a contemporary construction of homosexuality that understands this to be a normal and natural position on the continuum of sexual object choice. The love between David and Jonathan is the sexually charged love common in intensely patriarchal-warrior cultures, evidenced in such cultures as diverse as those of Classical Greece and Samurai Japan. Deep blue water separates traditional tribal- warrior cultures, with a discrete tolerance for men having sex with men as an aspect of essential male bonding, and our contemporary construction of gayness. Each belongs to a particular stage or meme of societal evolution and should not become confused.

Part III

This week the Supreme Court of the United States recognized something of the distinction I am drawing. I doubt the decision extending same gendered marriage across the Union was informed by a reading of Spiral Dynamics. However, their decision is an implicit endorsement of the notion that societies evolve in an attempt to meet new challenges posed by changing ideas.

In essence, this noninterventionist court has in the course of a couple of days delivered two interventionist decisions as a recognition that the spirit of the law is as important as its letter, and that the face value of words of legislation cannot be used to confound the manifest intention of the legislators. In the separate rulings of on the Affordable Care Act and same gendered marriage, the court has upheld the presumption of equality for all before the law. In the case of the AFCA, the presumption can be inferred not in the letter of the law, but in the clear intention of the legislation as manifest in the Act as a whole. Their ruling on same gendered marriage enunciates a different approach. We know that the Founders did not have black men, or women, or homosexual persons in mind when they enshrined that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

We know that they could not have conceived of a same gendered marriage or of a natural homosexual state. Yet, the spirit of the statement is clear and cannot be limited by the meme – the stage of societal and cultural evolution of 18th century America.

The integrity of both the Bible and the US Constitution lies in their capacity to remain true within the ever-changing context of a society evolving in the face of new challenges and changing circumstances. Like the Bible, the Constitution (at least until it is replaced by another) exists to guide the nation through the ever changing tides of time. It cannot guide the nation to meet new challenges if its interpretation is enshrined within the understandings of a previous age.

Like Israel in the time of Samuel and David, America faces new and unheralded challenges posed by a revolution in social attitudes in the arena of sexual identity. The privilege of states rights in the area of defining marriage cannot remain an obstacle, to the equal treatment of all across the Union.

Our history reveals that God speaks most clearly to us through the separation of church and state. The gospel of inclusion, freedom from discrimination, and equality of all before the law, often so seldom heard in the church is now ringing loud and clear throughout the land.