A Sermon in Nine Words

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Luke 4.21

Father Roger Allen, Rector of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, said that this very short sermon by Jesus is long enough to have all the qualities of a good sermon: authority, fulfillment, promise, and presence.

The other scriptures assigned for Sunday related in a strong way.

There's the story from Nehemiah of Ezra reading the newly found book of the law to the people of Israel - including those who had returned from exile in Babylon. Hearing the law as if for the first time, the people bow their faces to the ground and weep. But Ezra tells them to celebrate: "Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength."

Fr. Roger wraps "fulfillment" around the shame of the people when the authority of scripture has brought them to acknowledge their faults. There's the "promise" of God's forgiveness and "presence" - the joy and its strength is to be shared now, not in some future time.

Psalm 19, appointed for the day, is my new favorite:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another,
and one night imparts knowledge to another.

The psalmist says that the message doesn't need words to be understood. The sun comes forth like a bridegroom from God's pavilion and rejoices like a champion to run its course. The whole creation knows God and the sun serves God, and it's all very good. [Not thinking of Psalm 19, I expressed a similar idea of sunshine in a poem Solar Power]

The poem is so evocative and joyful that it could end here and be fully satisfying. The Oxford Bible commentary suggests that someone later may have realized that the song suggests you can know God from nature, and thought it wise to add explicit connections to the revelations of God to Israel.

The other readings are so positive that Paul, even while scolding the status-conscious Corinthians, sounds like a motivational speaker. Head and foot and hand are part of one body, he says, and God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension with the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. from 1 Cor 12.12-31. Bottom line, Fr. Roger said, "You are not alone."

The nine word sermon by Jesus is his response to Isaiah's proclamation of release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, the end of oppression and the year of the Lord's favor Luke 4.14-21.

So even in COVID church, even though it was Rite I, even without music, even though I was socially distanced, masked, and squeamish about sharing in wine -- I left feeling reassured for the long haul.

Memory as Spider Web: Rich Metaphor

"If history is a spider-thread...," then, what? This metaphor suggested so much about time and memory that I paused reading Adrienne Rich's poem "Towards the Solstice" to draw out some of its implications:

• memories stick to a place, and the place shapes the way I see the memories
• memories, like webs, connect things that are apart
• I see memories of different times at one time
• I can see my present self implied in my past, as I can see the day clearly through a web
• I'm not conscious of web or memory until something makes me focus
• as patterns make a web, repetition marks time
• when I follow a thread of memory, I feel I'm reaching back to my center
• I can get caught up in memory

Rich adds that a web is "spun over and over though brushed away," as memories persist. She seeks "rites" or "the right rune" to exorcise the memories:

to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past.

The poem is a kind of ghost story, as, referring to others from her past still present, she waits "for them to make some clear demand."

Earlier, the poet writes, "I am trying to hold in one steady glance / all the parts of my life." So, in present tense, she describes her property both barren under snow and green under rain. The merging of the seasons throughout this long poem is a funny, eerie conceit that sharpens our focus.

The spider web comes back at the end, when the poet, house-cleaning, brushes away a literal web. That's a playful touch that goes with her playfulness with words. For example, I enjoyed seeing thick snow as "a quilt of crystals" and the juxtaposition of "burdock" with "burden."

"Toward the Solstice" appears in Home, 100 poems on that theme selected by editor Christian Wiman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). I've not read much of Adrienne Rich; I need to add her to my list.

I draft a poem a week for another blog First Verse, hoping to grow as a poet while I absorb lessons from poetry pros every day.

Remembering Patty Mozley (January 6, 1947 - December 30, 2021)

An early draft of The Walker School's emergency preparedness handbook ended each page the same way: Call Patty Mozley. She was so steady, responsible, and resourceful.

I assisted her with numerous 8th grade plays, and learned from her to be calm in the throes of what looked like chaos.

She elevated hospitality to a ministry. She gathered diverse guests to her table, where choice wine and exquisitely prepared dinners engendered warm, friendly discussion.

Now that her illness has done its worst, we can remember just her many years of strength, character, and kindness.

On MLK Day: Andrew Young with Killer Mike

On this day when Martin Luther King, Jr. is being honored, I've spent some time listening to Andrew Young.

Ordained a minister in his 20s, close to 90 now, Andrew Young has been protege of King, a congressman, President Carter's UN ambassador, and mayor of Atlanta. Recently he spoke on camera with Atlanta rapper and podcast personality "Killer" Mike to remember King and other civil rights figures.

The little old man in his tweed jacket and sweater vest, pudgy and puffy, would seem to have little in common with the large man in red sneakers and Bears shirt, but they reminisced about Mike's time on Mayor Young's Youth Council at age 15. I've heard Mike on the NPR comedy quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, where he was flamboyant and jovial. With Young, he's deferential, encouraging the older man with regular nods and "Yes, sir."

Mike wonders if Young developed more as a persuader than a preacher. Young says he has always struggled to be reasonable and calm, despite practice.

Just because you're good and decent and want to be righteous doesn't mean that you don't have a pot boiling inside you.... There's a streak of violence in everybody, but you've got to know: that's not where your strength is.

Growing up a black boy on a street in New Orleans between Irish and Italian businesses and the Nazi Party HQ, he said he developed his chops for being an ambassador before he knew what that meant. He learned to be "aggressively polite."

In this interview, Young shared one story from his ambassador days, a visit to P. W. Boethe, the face of intransigent white minority rule in South Africa. Boethe pulled Young into his office by the wrist and slammed the door, as if to keep anyone from seeing him in the same room with the black American. Boethe quizzed him on black-white relations in America: How did he get white votes for Congress? How much interracial marriage is there? And, the most telling, How long do you think we whites have before all these black people rise up to kill us all? Young offered President Carter's assistance to begin a process of dismantling apartheid, and Boethe followed up within the month.

Mike asked about Malcolm X. Young knew Malcolm X before he met King. "I never saw Malcolm hate anybody. He was the sweetest, calmest man... he never lost his temper." X was there at the back door to give congratulations when King was awarded the Nobel Prize. He heard X give King "total support" but, "it's best for me not to be seen with you." When Mike expressed surprise that these two weren't at odds, Young said, "People caricatured them" and made differences from nuances.

I loved a story Young tells of a hot day in Savannah when he saw officers locking children under 10 in "the paddy wagon" when they were merely imitating grown-up picketers. The cops threw Young in, too. When Young spoke through the only air vent to ask the cops to please drive them to the jail because the heat was going to bake them, the cops closed the vent. So Young told the kids, "They want us to crack. We won't." He had the kids close their eyes and imagine a slow walk to the beach, slow immersion in the cold water. They were shivering, he laughs. When he led them in singing "Wade in the Water," the police got mad and drove them to jail.

It's what his father told him back on that tough street in New Orleans, and kind of what Jesus says, too: "Stay cool."

Superman and Pokemon in Advanced Middle Age

At 62, I'm still wearing the big red "S" around the house. I've made my nephew a Pikachu-themed self portrait for a birthday card, because Pokemon is still a part of his world as he turns half my age.

So, are we examples of the "death of the grown up?" My dad used to think so; he had me read a book with that title. But I've doubted that the adults of the 1920s or Frank Sinatra era were any more "grownup" in any important way. See Gerald and Sara Murphy: Muses of the Roaring Twenties (12/2007), Rat Pack Redux: Grown-ups ca. 1960 (09/2007), Updike's Couples: What's Adult in Adultery? (06/2016).

I've learned that the popular view of what constitutes growing up is actually an adolescent's idea. I digested ideas about true maturity in articles Richard Rohr's Falling Upward (07/2014) and Beyond Growing Up (06/2014), reflecting on Sacred Fire by Ronald Rolheiser.

Rather, I think the characters that appealed to us in our childhoods live with us in the way that mythological figures do. See my page Boomer Basement for links to many reflections on superheroes, witches, and other characters who populate a late-Boomer's memory.

Either way, it's a great excuse for me to throw in a couple of fun photos.

"Art + Faith" : Joy and Discovery in Making Church

"Well, duh."

That was my first reaction to artist Mako Fujimura's book Art + Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press, 2021). I've always experienced my faith through the arts. (see how)

My second reaction is, Fujimura's idea to integrate art-making with "doing church" might bring new seekers and new commitment to an Episcopal parish.

His idea might also alienate parishioners who've told me they're just not creative. Fear not! Here's what I know from teaching middle school:

• The difference between an artist and anyone else is not talent or creativity, but only the curiosity to see what emerges if they keep working on a project.
• That's why making art is a way to discover something.
• That's why making art is also (1) as hard for a pro as for a novice and (2) a joy.

Let's see what Fujimura has in mind, and then look at possible applications to St. James of Marietta GA.

[PHOTO: Quilt makers at St. James Church honored our change-ringers. Each color represents a different bell in St. James's tower; the sequence never repeats during this set of changes.]

Practicing Resurrection
Fujimura wants Church to appeal to his friends who, when asked their religion, check "none." These "Nones" find spirituality in art, not in church. At the same time, Fujimura doesn't want to alienate Christian friends who are suspicious of unbridled self-expression.

So Fujimura does not limit his idea of "art" to what's in galleries and concert venues. For him, the salient characteristic of art is that something be made, not for utility -- not just for utility -- but for love (18). He finds numerous examples of "making" in our tradition. In Scripture:

• God creates for love
• Adam names the creatures
• craftsmen make the Ark of the Covenant, their names recorded in Exodus for posterity, their work described with loving detail
• the woman at the last supper anoints the living Jesus for burial
• Jesus favors storytelling and metaphor to express his vision
• Poetry fills the Bible in psalms, prophecy, and Paul's letters
• Apostles are works of art in their transformation, Fujimura says

Our liturgy, its words and music, is art. I would add that the Eucharist, originally a pot luck "love feast," has become today a kind of musical drama that we all participate in. [See my short essay Liturgy as Theatre (03/2013)].

Fujimura also finds the Christian world view reflected by secular works of art. Seeing a movie or novel, he would have us ask, where is God in the world of this work? Sin? Judgement? Redemption?

Fujimura reframes "making art" as "practicing resurrection" (147). By "resurrection," he doesn't mean "resuscitation" but the "new creation" we read about in apocalyptic scripture. He explains that the word translated "new" isn't neo but kainos -- metamorphosis, like caterpillar to butterfly. He likens this to the Japanese art called kintsugi, "new newness," exemplified by a broken tea cup that's not just repaired but reimagined as an amalgamation of fragments with gold (ch. 4). Jesus says the kingdom of God will be as different from the life we know as the full-grown plant is different from the seed.

Fujimura finds that "practicing resurrection" appeals both to his evangelical friends and the Nones.

Art + Faith in an Episcopal Church
I know from parish surveys that music and the church's elegant liturgy are high on the list of what draws worshipers to the Episcopal church in general, and to St. James in particular. Can we build on this baseline of appreciation for arts? Might we draw a larger, more committed congregation through an emphasis on what we make?

Sadly, COVID-19 has given us a real-life experiment with what happens when there's no "making" in the church. While we've passively received prayers and sermons, whether online or sitting in pews six feet apart, attendance has fallen. That's not a knock on the preaching of our clergy, but a demonstration of what Fujimura believes:

[U]nless we are making something, we cannot know the depths of God's being....God cannot be known by sitting in a classroom, or even in a church taking in information about God. I am not against these pragmatic activities, but God moves in our hearts to be experienced and then makes us all artists of the kingdom. (7)

He imagines art not just for display or presentation to an audience, but about spiritual formation for the creators themselves. He writes that faith is like an omelette: you can read the recipe, but to get it, you have to make it (61).

Prior to the pandemic, a lot of us were indeed making things at St. James, Marietta. Every week, not just on Sundays, we would sing hymns and anthems, ring bells (hand- and tower-), sew quilts and knit blankets for the needy, guide children through imaginative responses to Bible stories, and set the chancel with linens and silver, candles and flowers, vessels of bread and wine for eucharist. Our church also practiced outreach through hospitality, offering Sunday breakfast and Wednesday supper, providing food and entertainment through the program we call Reach Out Mental Health, and hosting homeless families.

Two of my favorite pieces of art in our church were made by church members. One is a quilt that hangs in our stairwell that represents two communities of art-makers in our parish, the sewing group and the North American Guild of Change Ringers (NAGCR). Squares of different colors alternate in patterns that correspond to our different tower bells ringing changes, never repeating a pattern to the end of the series. (See photo above)

Another is a processional cross created for use during the penitential season of Lent by Bill, a woodworker in our parish. Elegant and polished, it's beautiful, but the wood at the center of the cross has a crack in it. Bill's choice to use that flawed piece at the heart of the cross suggests the suffering at the heart of the season.

How else could parishioners be involved in "making?" Do we envision art classes and rehearsals, concerts and displays -- at what cost of money and time? Would clergy have to vet every piece of work to be certain it aligns with our tradition? What if the work of amateurs isn't so good? Will parishioners be asked to sit through awkward performances during services or evenings? Will artists be offended if we don't hang their work in our halls?

If the Rector appointed me Director of Arts, I'm not sure that I'd do anything more than draw attention to the quilt and cross, the making we already do, and then proclaim: "Let us intentionally make 'making something' a part of whatever we do -- whether we are engaged in worship, study, socializing, or reaching out to the community."

It wouldn't have to be any scarier than when a fellow teacher challenged me to plan a collaborative "active experience" for our seventh graders at the end of every unit after the chapter test. She knew what Fujimura knows: once they'd learned the facts, our activities would help them to relate their knowledge to their lives.

We already do this kind of artistic thinking in educational activities at our church. Our director of children's education plans collaborative creative experiences with her Bible story curriculum, varying the activities to suit children of different ages.

Adults in EfM (Education for Ministry) practice "theological reflection," a process that might as well be called "thinking like poets" as they explore an event or text with imaginative empathy, memory, Scriptural analogies, and metaphors. Often, they draw all the threads of their discussion together into a "collect," a concise form of prayer that comes close to being poetry. [See Where Prayer Meets Poetry (05/2020)]

Even making a list is creative. I asked my adult EfM class, "What ministry do you imagine for yourself? How could the church be of service to YOU in this?" As they answered, they grew more animated:

• to provide a type of caregiver support group – “caregiver” broadly defined (illness, parenting, eldercare) -- that takes “me” out of the equation, helping the caregiver to REALLY see the person they’re caring for. Church? Bible study can help, but a group with activities that everyone does together is also important. (Art, music, poetry, conversation…)
• to create a program that might be called "The Inspired Retired" for retirees to find new ways to become engaged with (1) their own ordinary routines and (2) others
• to fulfill the 12th step, i.e., to work with others struggling with substance abuse.
• to make a deliberate effort to engage with people as equals -- especially strangers we encounter, in public, even at the drive-through -– a ministry one conversation at a time. Church could be a place that welcomes people in this way.
• to pay attention to students who need advising to get through myriad hoops and obstacles during this particularly difficult time.

"Making something" might be sharing participants' insights on video, or using software or art materials to create an image for what they've learned. The subject matter may not be Scripture, but about the church community, about traditions with food and decorations, about life experiences. For example,

• The most intense half hour I shared at a weekend retreat with EfM mentors was when we were given 30 minutes with old magazines to find images that represent elements of our spiritual lives, to cut and paste them into a circle (making a mandala).
• When I sent adults of in my EfM class to roam the church campus with their phones to bring back images that "spoke" to them strongly of our faith, they returned exhilarated and eager to share. (My images were the ones in this article of the quilt and the cross.)

No activity has to be shared beyond the small group, but, posted on the church's social media, such "makings" would show online scrollers that we are a church where people learn, search, wonder, think, connect "church" to their own lives, the larger community, and to popular culture.

Bottom Line from Self-Appointed Director of Arts

Art takes work more than talent; it's more a joy than a grind; it's a process of discovery that goes beyond the delivery of a message; it doesn't have to be about religion to be religious.

Fujimura writes what our experience at church bears out, that thinking like a "maker" is a way to "the deepest level of knowing" (Fujimura 72), an intensifier of our response Scripture and liturgy. In an interview, Fujimura says,

The arts are a cup that will carry the water of life to the thirsty. It’s not the water itself; it’s the vessel. What we are doing in the church today is we are just picking up water with our bare hands and trying to carry it to the thirsty. We can still do it, but the effect is minimized by not fully utilizing what God has given us. (Faithandleadership.com)

Our rector in his Christmas Day sermon this year had a message compatible with Fujimura's. He emphasized that we all should be living out our thanks for the gift of the incarnation. Teaching and debate are not the only ways to do that, he said.

Art is also a builder of community through collaboration, and a value in itself (17-18).

When we re-boot church after the pandemic, what additional "making" could involve parishioners, and how else can we make everyone aware of what we're doing?

Poets on Prayer: Mary Karr and Christian Wiman

Thirst is the truest knowledge of water.
  - Mary Karr, "Philemon: Notes from the Underground"

Mary Karr writes that in a poem about needing to pray. By serendipity, I opened to that poem on the morning after our EfM (Education for Ministry) class had discussed how spirituality is a thirst for relationship with the transcendent, and prayer is where God meets us in our need. It's doubly serendipitous that the class also discussed a whimsical poem by Christian Wiman that spoke to us about another aspect of prayer.

We had read an essay by Urban T. Holmes from "The Spiritual Person" in Spirituality for Ministry, The Library of Episcopalian Classics (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2002). We all appreciated Holmes's idea about prayer as a space where "our freedom meets God's vision," though we haven't lost our childhood notions of prayer as a wish list for our Santa in heaven. Holmes rates that kind of "petitionary prayer" at the lower end of a continuum. The upper end of Holmes's continuum is wordless communion with God. As a word guy who savors the lines in our Book of Common Prayer, I'd had trouble imagining that until Holmes likened that sort of prayer to the silence between a loving couple.

I got help with that idea of a wordless prayer when, procrastinating, I re-opened Mary Karr's collection Tropic of Squalor. I'd read all the poems except a few at the end of a series she calls "The Less Holy Bible," so I turned to those. One tells of mailing an ex-lover's belongings. "Leaving the post office," she writes, "I enter / the sidewalk's gauntlet of elbows" and she prays to "Christ, my Lord, my savior, / and my good brother," something like the "Jesus Prayer" that our class had discussed. Her foul mood shifts as she prays for everyone she sees. A toddler with a green apple "can become baby Jesus," and an ugly street incident is redeemed ("Petering: Recuperation from a Sunk Love..." 69-70).

Karr's line about "thirst" caps a poem in which the poet describes a dreary subway car. "And in the evil of my pride," she tells God, "I get / to forget I am You-formed" though she sits "among other similarly shaved animals." When she puts her hands together, she sees her fingers as "unlit tapers" that "burn" for God. She calls this one "Philemon: Notes from the Underground" (71), relating the epistle in which Paul asserts the brotherhood of a Christian slave and his owner Philemon to Dostoevsky's novel about a snob resentful of everyone around him. In this context, the poet's thirst for transcendence is itself an entry into knowledge of God.

After our discussion of prayer in EfM, we subjected a poem by Christian Wiman to a process of "theological reflection," a creative search for ways that our religious traditions relate to life experiences, including literature and movies. I brought Wiman's "I Don't Want to be a Spice Store," which begins with a snarky description of pretentious merchandise in an exclusive store in a town where shops don't open before noon and "even the bookstore is brined in charm." The poet writes that he wants to be open and available all the time (we thought of Buc-ee's and 7-11) and carry just the necessities:

Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet.
I want to hold within myself the possibility
of plugging one’s ears and easing one’s eyes;
superglue for ruptures that are,
one would have thought, irreparable,
a whole bevy of nontoxic solutions
for everyday disasters.
  - Wiman, "I Don't Want to be a Spice Store"
  from Survival is a Style (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

The poem ends with the store empty but "humming" at 4 a.m., door unlocked, waiting patiently. Several of us highlighted different parts of the poem before one man observed that, in this way of looking at a convenience store, Wiman had given us a memorable image for what prayer can be. From the list of necessities, to the intercessions for the mending of others' brokenness, to the patience that waits for God to enter in, it touches on all the points we made during our discussion of the essay.

It's a model of prayer in one other way: It doesn't have to say all that to say all that.

Blogposts of Related Interest Mary Karr writes that poetry is prayer in an essay that concludes her 2006 collection Sinners Welcome. She collects poems about how her son brought her out of her self, poems about the Incarnation of God that make familiar Bible stories uncomfortably physical, poems that express gratitude, and some that don't. See Discomfort and Joy (06/2020). Her afterword and a 1993 poem "Etchings in a Time of Plague" figure prominently in a piece I wrote about a form of prayer that comes close to being a form of poetry. See Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect (05/2020).

Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss (08/2013) concerns a book of essays by Christian Wiman, once fundamentalist, then atheist, now a kind of believer again. There's also my review (06/2013) of the poet's collection Every Riven Thing.

Song at Midnight for the New Year

[PHOTO: On New Year's Eve, Brandy and I are sheltering from tornado warnings in my newly refurbished basement. Here's a photo from October of the two of us in that same space.]

During 12 days of Christmas, to the puzzlement of my dog Brandy, this Episcopalian is singing a different Christmas hymn every day with the Morning Prayer service. This, the sixth day, I turned to one of the most familiar ones, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear." I've known the first verse for more than 50 years; the other verses were new to me. The message struck me as a good one for a new year.

I wonder how many of us know what "it" is? It's not the baby Jesus, but the song of the angels who proclaim peace and goodwill:

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, good will to men,
from heaven's all-gracious King."
The World in solemn stillness lay
to hear the angels sing.

The words are by Edmund H. Sears (1810-1876) a Unitarian pastor, author, and abolitionist in Massachusetts. The tune familiar to most Americans is by Richard Storrs Willis (1819-1900); the other tune is by Sir Arthur Sullivan of H.M.S. Pinafore fame.

The second verse tells us that the song still floats o'er the weary world, though we're too engrossed in our Babel sounds of conflict to hear it.

Verse three laments that the world has suffered long during two thousand years of wrong. He implores us, O hush your noise and cease the strife / and hear the angels sing.

He takes comfort from Scripture that the Lord will return and make everything right at last:

For, lo! The days are hastening on
by prophets seen of old
when with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendors fling

That's a pretty far-fetched image, of "peace" having to "fling" its "ancient splendors" -- did we have peace in ancient times? Nope. He continues

and all the world [shall] give back the song
which now the angels sing.

That is, one day, we'll all be in the same hymnal on the same page (which would be #89).

I've been reading work by theologian Verna Dozier and poet Christian Wiman who both pooh-pooh the idea that some day things'll be bad enough that God will just step in and make everything right. It's a pleasing idea, but Dozier would say, and Wiman, probably, would agree, "Naah, it's up to us."

It's an election year. It's a time of revised expectations because of the COVID "omicron" variant. I'm reading a biography of Grant, identifying with the feelings he had when family and friends were vicious in their divisions over slavery, partisanship, and secession.

My comfort comes from assurances in the Bible, such as this evening's appointed Psalm 90, and the knowledge that we've been here before, and somehow the people born in that time got through it and recreated the world I was born into.

Forget about "Happy New Year." I'll settle for a year of taking deep breaths and backing off.