Sunday, June 10, 2012

Here are My Mother and My Brothers!

In another life, I had the privilege of studying American women missionaries in north India. After graduating from college I taught English for a year at a college in the northwestern part of India that had been founded by Presbyterian missionaries. So when I became interested as a scholar in women’s work during the heyday of American missions, i.e., from about 1870 to 1930, I naturally turned back to those intrepid Presbyterians. I learned to read the elegant handwriting of Midwestern teachers, physicians, and wives. I pored over miles of letters, reports, newspaper articles, and mission magazines. I was surprised when I read the missionaries’ condemnations of the Hindu and Muslim religious practices I had found so intriguing during my own time in India. I cheered when the writers opened clinics and dispensaries, taught girls how to read, and brought a breath of fresh air to the mostly secluded women of elite Hindu and Muslim families. And I shook my head in disbelief as one after another of the missionaries wondered why the women they visited, who seemed to find the Christian message so attractive, were unable to leave their families and be baptized. Didn’t they know anything about patriarchal families? Didn’t they realize that the patriarchal family was the basic social unit, for both Hindus and Muslims? Didn’t they understand that no one but the senior males of the family, and most certainly not the women, had any power or freedom? Couldn’t they see that if the women they befriended were to be baptized they would be shunned forever by their kin?

The hearers of the Gospel of Mark certainly understood the risks they had taken in becoming Christians in a world that despised them. Jesus too understood full well the power of the patriarchal family. Instead of following the family trade of carpenter, like all the other males in his family, he had gone off to be an itinerant preacher and healer. Even when he came back home, all the riff-raff and ne’er-do-wells, the blind and the lame, those possessed by demons, and the loose women – who knows where their husbands and fathers were – crowded around him. His family was sure he was insane, and they were moving in to silence him. At the same time, the scribes and Pharisees had begun to take notice of him, and they came down from Jerusalem to challenge and spar with him. When we catch up with Jesus in today’s reading, we hear the religious leaders accuse him of working hand in hand with demonic forces. But he roundly defeats them at their own game. He presses home the point that he is indeed from God – a running motif in Mark’s gospel – and even obliquely suggests that unlike the religious leaders, he has come to offer freedom to those who become his disciples.

Then Jesus turns back to that pesky family, those brothers and sisters and mother, who have joined the religious leaders outside the house and are trying to pull Jesus away from his mission. Surely their jaws drop when they hear what he says. Even though the hearers of Mark’s Gospel, forty years later, themselves faced persecution, perhaps what Jesus said even shocked them. Looking at the faces eagerly waiting to hear more of his teaching, Jesus declares, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” No more patriarchal family, no more domination by senior males or by religious leaders. Jesus declares that his followers, who have been released from demonic powers, are now part of a new and different family, a family united not by blood, nor by allegiance to the eldest male, but by faith in him. That was truly a radical declaration in the ancient world!

Does such a declaration shock us? Can we hear the challenge to patriarchal structures in such a declaration? Most of us no longer live in extended patriarchal families, with multiple generations in the same house or compound, all ruled over by the senior male. To be sure we still have extended families, especially in this part of Ohio. Not a week goes by without a five-generation photo in our local newspapers, though in our culture the senior members are more likely women. However, in contrast to the ancient world, such families are increasingly rare. Even nuclear families, father, mother, and children in the same household, are less common than they were a generation or two ago. Now we have single parent families, gay couples adopting children, grandparents raising grandchildren, and even unrelated people living together as family. In even sharper contrast with the ancient world, marriage in our culture has become more egalitarian, and women have full legal rights with men.

So does Jesus’ new definition of family – “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” – still shock us laid back, egalitarian twenty-first century Americans? It should! As Jesus’ disciples we are still called to be part of a new and different family. We are called to be part of a family not defined by blood ties. Perhaps to the dismay of some, we are called to put our commitment to Jesus’ family above our commitments even to our own blood families. We are also called to be part of a family not defined by geography. Our heritage from the Church of England is of village parishes about three or four miles apart, each with its own vicar and local congregation. In effect our county seat parishes, each with its own distinct community, reflect that same understanding. Even today, orthodox Jews still live in close communities within walking distance of their synagogues. By contrast, we are called instead, to recognize that our family ultimately embraces the entire world, and we are called to care about our friends, our Loaves and Fishes diners, and our sisters and brothers in Cincinnati, Columbus, and even Port au Prince.

We are also called to be a family not defined by race or ethnicity. The Episcopal Church never split apart during the Civil War, but we still had segregated parishes. In this very diocese, we still have historically black parishes, whose roots go back to the time when ethnically diverse parishes were virtually nonexistent. We are also called to be a family not defined by socio-economic class. It was perhaps only a generation or two ago, when the Episcopal Church in this country was the church of the wealthy, of professionals and business people, of the managers and owners, not of working class and poor people. Is that true for this parish? Who is welcome in our parish family?

And finally we are called to be a family committed to doing “the will of God.” In this green season of growth in discipleship, all of us – not just those of us wearing a collar – are called to deepen our relationship with Jesus, to listen more intently to his teaching, and to attend to the family into which he has called us. We are called to understand ourselves as irrevocably bound together with this family and with all other Christians through our baptisms. We are called to welcome the stranger, and to love and care for each other, whoever and wherever we are.

Perhaps some of those Presbyterian missionaries might have been less discouraged by the inability of the women they visited to break out of their patriarchal families if they had known of Pandita Ramabai, a Christian activist in western India. Ramabai was born in 1858 into a Brahmin family, i.e., into the priestly and highest caste. Unusual for the time, Ramabai’s father believed in women’s education and saw to it that she was educated in both Sanskrit texts and contemporary subjects. Independent and forward-thinking, Ramabai married a man of another caste, who died soon after their daughter was born. In Ramabai’s time, most Hindus considered widows to be extremely inauspicious, and even child widows were condemned to a life spent in prayer and fasting in the back corners of their families’ homes. However, Ramabai was fortunately befriended by women of another kind of family, English sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin who had founded a school and convent in the provincial city of Pune. Ramabai and her daughter thrived under the sisters’ gracious care. With their help she was able to do a lecture tour in the U.S. about Hindu women and to study education and social service in England. In 1885 she was baptized in the sisters’ mother house in Wantage, England. Just as Jesus and the CSMV sisters had welcomed Ramabai into a new kind of family, on her return to India in 1889 Ramabai herself created new Christian families. She established the Mukti, or Liberation, Mission in Pune, which serves to this day as a refuge and a Gospel witness for young widows deserted and abused by their families. She also established Krupa Sadan, a home for destitute women, and Sharda Sadan, which provided housing, education, vocational training and medical services for the needy, and she was active in the Arya Mahila Sabha, India’s first feminist organization. Ramabai died in 1922 and is venerated today by Indian Christians, who still seek to continue her work of inclusion of all into a blessed Christian family, regardless of caste, class, language, or ethnicity.

Can we do any less? Methodist scholar Will Willimon reminds us that, “every time the family of God gathers for Holy Communion … or a covered-dish fellowship supper or serves up soup to the homeless on the street corner, the world looks at this odd family and says, ‘Jesus is hanging out with the same reprobates that got him crucified.’ And we say, ‘Thank God.’”1

1. Day 1, preached October 24, 2010, quoted in Synthesis June 10, 2012, 3.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Here Am I, Send Me

“‘The swiftest horse cannot overtake a word once spoken’…. A Chinese saying … take it to heart.” So begins Tom Gordon’s story about Georgina, a student in Mr. Bannerman’s English class.1 The students all called Mr. Bannerman “Proverb Professor,” because of his frequent use of proverbs to drive home his counsel to them. That day, the subject was gossip. On other days Professor Proverb had expressed gratitude for a volunteer (“One volunteer is worth two pressed men”), noted when the class arrived at a similar conclusion from different starting points (“All roads lead to Rome”), or announced a new topic in the syllabus (“There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world; and that is an idea whose time has come”). Often he would challenge the students to search out the origin of a proverb. Of course, his advice went in one ear and out the other for most of the students, including Georgina.

Until the day that Georgina learned she had done badly in the practice exams for the A-levels, the final exams needed in the UK for high school graduation and university entrance. There were surely extenuating circumstances, but even so Georgina dreaded the proverbs Mr. Bannerman would fling at her (“‘You’ve made your bed, so you can lie in it’ … English – 16th century,…”; or “‘Sow much, reap much; sow little, reap little… Chinese’ – you understand what I’m getting at?”). She nervously stepped into his office. To her surprise Mr. Bannerman was sympathetic and helpful. He told her about someone who had visited a wise teacher. “You have to be born again,” the teacher had said. The visitor didn’t get it: he knew that no one could be born again physically. “No,” the teacher had said, “You have to be born again on the inside, you have to begin again from the inside out.” Mr. Bannerman then said to Georgina, “Of course the visitor was confused and had to go away and work it all out. And you can do the same. You can start again from the inside, you can get another chance. You’ll see. Now I know you students call me ‘Professor Proverb,’ and really, I don’t mind. I quite like it. And since I know that you were expecting a proverb, here’s one to help you remember that you can change, you can start again, ‘Fall seven times, stand up eight …’ Japanese – 7th century …”

Transformation from the inside out. As we enter the long growing season following Pentecost, today’s readings give us some clues as to how God’s transformation of us might happen. For some of us, God’s transformation begins with an overwhelming experience of God’s glory and transcendence, a mystical experience, if you will. Often such experiences happen at worship, at times and in places when we know instinctively that we are in God’s presence. Isaiah had a vision of the hem of God’s robe – about all any mortal could see of the incomprehensible, unknowable, mysterious God and survive. Utterly shattered by the experience, Isaiah was painfully aware of his own and his people’s sinfulness. In the twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen similarly experienced God’s presence in especially intense ways. Julian of Norwich, through her visions, sensed more deeply God’s love for us. Francis of Assisi was called to a life of holy poverty by a vision in the Church of San Damiano. The first time I knelt at the altar rail of an Episcopal church, I felt as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning. A friend of mine walked into an old church, breathed in the scent of the incense that had seeped into the wood there over the centuries, and knelt down in the pew, knowing he was in God’s presence.

For others of us, God’s transformation is more gradual. In a night of confusion and doubt, we approach Jesus, but, like Nicodemus, we don’t understand what he has to say: the message seems garbled – or lost in translation! We question Jesus and hear only more riddles, then perhaps even a long speech! Perhaps we may sense that inner transformation is possible, but we’re still doubtful and confused. Yet, through the work of the Holy Spirit, we begin to work things out. Jesus’ words take root in us, gradually begin to flower, and eventually bear fruit. Both ways of transformation are common and valid. In a lifetime, many of us will experience God’s presence in both ways, perhaps more than once. For, as the designation of this Sunday as Trinity Sunday reminds us, God is transcendent, wholly mysterious other, God is incarnate Word, i.e., God with a human face, and God is Holy Spirit, God living within us. Whatever way we need to encounter God, God will come to us – of that we may be sure. And we may be sure that God’s encounter with us will produce growth and fruit.

Growth and fruit: God’s working of our transformation, whether shattering or gradual, always has a purpose. Like Isaiah and Nicodemus, we may be disoriented by our encounter with God. But, God willing, we are also reoriented and ready to be remade into God’s instruments. Isaiah’s response to God’s commission is immediate: “Who’s willing to speak for me?” God asks. Isaiah doesn’t consult a soothsayer, or his family, or his financial advisor, or his discernment committee, nor does he ponder the pros and cons of responding to God. He just blurts out, “Here am I; send me!” Some of us have had that experience: we open our mouths and say, “I’m thinking of …” and off we go, led into a merry dance by the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, perhaps we are more like Nicodemus. It took Nicodemus longer to accept God’s commission. He disappears from the story we hear this morning, but he turns up two more times in John’s Gospel, first to defend Jesus against the charges of the rest of the religious leaders, and then to anoint Jesus’ body after Jesus’ death. We don’t know Nicodemus’s fate after that, but we can guess that his life was never the same after that first conversation with Jesus. Perhaps the same is true for some of us. After our first encounter with Jesus, we know that God has called us, but the Holy Spirit has to work in us a while before we can see what our gifts and abilities are, before we can understand just what God has commissioned us to be or do.

Today we have a God-given opportunity to let God continue our transformation as Jesus’ friends and disciples. During the coffee hour we will, through a very user-friendly, non-threatening exercise, ponder our spiritual gifts and the ways in which God might be leading us. The focus of most of today’s exercise will be on our individual personal gifts. But I’d like to plant a few seeds of a different kind. I’d like us to begin thinking about our transformation as a parish community. This parish has existed in this county since at least 1841. This building has stood on this spot since 1858. What should we be offering this county? How might we be distinctive as Episcopalians in Gallia County? Yes, we have a distinctive liturgy. On May 29th, those following the Church calendar celebrated the first Book of Common Prayer, which came into use on Pentecost, June 9, 1549. Largely the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the Book gave the English church, and ultimately the entire English-speaking world, new offices through which clergy and laity alike could enrich their spiritual lives and felicitous translations and paraphrases of the old Latin Mass. Might God be helping us to transform this gift, so that we may speak more clearly twenty-first century people?

We also have a proud tradition of service and outreach. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church have long histories of serving the needy. In England, nineteenth-century “slum priests,” moved by their devotion to Jesus in the sacrament of communion, went out into the poorest neighborhoods. In the East End of London, long a working class and immigrant area, St. John’s Bethnal Green still has a lively ministry to drug addicts and prostitutes. In this country at the turn of the twentieth century, lay people like Vida Dutton Scudder founded settlement houses. Religious communities like the Community of the Holy Spirit and the Community of the Transfiguration founded schools, nursing homes, and retreat centers. Parishes in this diocese minister to the homeless, provide worship services for those in nursing homes and mental hospitals, feed the hungry, support overseas ministries, care for the earth, and advocate for the poor. This our legacy too. Yet I wonder: is God transforming our heritage of service? Might God be leading us, as Episcopalians, to some new work in Gallia County? Into what kind of a Christian community is God waiting to transform us? Where do we need to change in order to become even more effective instruments of God in this place and time?

My brothers and sisters, the good news is that God continues to work in us, through us, and among us. God continues to work God’s transforming power on us. Holy God, holy and Strong One, holy and Mighty One, You give us life, you give us love, you give us yourself; help us to give our lives, our love, and ourselves to you. Amen.2

1. "Starting Over," With an Open Eye (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2011), 205-08.
2. David Adam, Traces of Glory (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999), 82