Theology and Dancing with the Stars

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on May 25, 2008

Do not be anxious about your life – don’t worry about what you look like or have to wear. Don’t even worry about where your next meal will come from. I wonder how this sounded to the people that followed Jesus – many of whom were poor and didn’t always know where their next meal would come from. I would imagine that there was a lot of “That’s easy for you to say – I’ve got kids to feed” kind of murmuring.

Be like the lilies and the birds and know that God provides what you need. That would be really nice if only we didn’t have to pay for our food, but we can’t just sink roots down in the soil and draw nourishment from it, or swoop around in search of seeds and bugs that are just lying there for the taking. So once again, there goes Jesus, being completely unrealistic, just to make a point. And the point is what? Know who, or what, you trust. Do you trust to God’s criteria – what God has to say about you or do you trust what the world has to say?

We all have a ready cast of characters that do us wrong when we listen to them. They are the voices that will tell you that you aren’t good enough because…because you aren’t pretty enough, or tough enough or smart enough, rich enough, because you are not white enough or not patriotic enough or not Christian enough. The lilies of the field and the birds of the air don’t have to worry about those voices, blessedly simple creatures that they are. They are unencumbered by the necessity of having to live in a complex social system in order to survive. When was the last time you heard two birds conversing cattily about another saying “Did you see the size of those tail feathers!”? Birds don’t care what other birds have to say about them, in fact, they are not aware enough to have those kinds of thoughts. Only humans, being highly social animals, must carry the awareness of what other people are doing and saying about them. After all, being on the outside can feel like death. And unfortunately, it is also this very concern about conforming in order to survive that makes us the only species so willing to harm others who don’t conform, with our prejudices, our attitudes, our thoughtlessness.

Lilies are beautiful, wherever they bloom. It doesn’t matter whether they are in a beautifully planned garden, or along a peaceful country road, or pushing up through cracks in the pavement in a rundown part of town. They are beautiful because it’s what they are and that’s the underlying lesson here—bloom where you are planted and be beautiful!!! Just go ask any of those kids running around back there with Claire. God made us beautiful – it’s the world that tells us that we are not. I think when Jesus refers to the two masters in this passage that is exactly what he is talking about—you can serve the master that loves you and sees your beauty or you can fall in behind the ones that want you to doubt yourself and your holiness. Not both. You have to choose.

Reality TV came of age when I was in seminary and thus had no time for anything except readin’, writin’ and ruminatin’, so I was never on board with any of it. What little I did hear about sounded as though it were driven by manufactured conflict and animosity, and I’ve never had any interest in that. Imagine my surprise this year when I’ve found myself completely caught up in the battle of the Davids on American Idol as well as the other blockbuster “Dancing with the Stars.” Of course, now I get to claim that it was sermon research so I can absolve myself of any guilt in the pleasure.

The two shows are completely different – American Idol gives people the chance to do what they do, in front of judges and the audience with a pretty big payoff at the end – a recording contract and great publicity to launch a career. Dancing with the Stars, on the other hand, is all about taking people who are not ballroom dancers and sending them out to “play one” on TV. The payoff is a cheesy mirror ball trophy. I’d never really watched it before this season, and the first time I even turned it on Peter’s eyes rolled so far back in his head I thought he was possessed. But in the next second he said “Oh yeah, I heard Jason Taylor’s on this show!” Jason Taylor is a stand out defensive end for the Miami Dolphins and, as it turns out, one of the most elegant 6’6” imposing lineman you have ever seen – but could he DANCE? We were hooked. The precedent had been set a couple of seasons ago when Emmett Smith – former Dallas Cowboy running back—won the competition. But Jason had formidable competition in the mighty if diminutive Kristi Yamaguchi – the Olympic Gold medalist figure skater. That Kristi won the competition last week was almost no surprise, so it might have been easy to miss some of the extraordinary things that happened during the competition. There were several competitors who were clearly fish out of water, who illustrated the axiom “you can either dance or you can’t.” Monica Seles – tennis great but not a dancer. Neither were the magician – he couldn’t pull fleetness of foot out of his hat—nor the comedian, who kept them laughing only long enough to survive a couple of rounds. Most interesting were three women contestants, Priscilla Presley, the oldest competitor ever on Dancing with the Stars, Marlee Matlin, the Oscar winning actress who is deaf and Marisa Jaret Winokur, a Tony award Broadway star who is decidedly not a size 2. These three women received such enthusiastic support from their various constituencies. Marlee Matlin was held up as “isn’t it amazing that someone who can’t even hear the music can do that!” and the deaf community said “thank you Marlee for showing that we can do anything we set our minds to.” Marlee had a lot riding on how well she did – because in some way, every deaf person in America was out there on the dance floor, vulnerable to looking awkward or foolish. It was brave and she had a ball.

Priscilla received support from women over 40 and Marisa from those over a size 12. But they also were the object of some fairly vicious comments in the media and the internet. Priscilla was lampooned for the obviousness of her cosmetic surgery, and who really wants to see an old woman doing such sultry dances anyway. But I think it was Marisa who risked the most. In our “the thinner the better culture”, did people really want to see her plump self in a sequined dance gown showing lots of leg and moving her hips to a Latin rhythm? There were lots of people on the dance floor with Marisa, too. She made it to the semi-finals.

Marisa Jaret Winokur chose to ignore the voices that had no doubt called her fat girl and every other unkind thing they could think of. It was not easy for her to say yes to such an arena that is the realm of sleek, taut, agile people doing very showy moves. But she listened to the joy that she got out of dancing, the fun of learning, competing and improving and proclaimed, the week after she was eliminated, that nothing else had ever made her feel so beautiful or so sexy – two things that are inherently human. I think her exact words of advice were “Get out and do something that’s fun and shake what your Mama gave you!”

Belief in yourself as a beautiful child of God is not always easy to maintain in the complicated and mean streets that we inhabit so there’s a good lesson in the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Nothing that we could ever say to a lily or a bird would interfere with their ability to express the beauty and goodness that abides in them – nothing interrupts their embrace of their God-given extravagance in bloom and in flight. In their simplicity they don’t know much, but they know enough to serve the Master of Creation. May we be as wise as they are.

The Trinity by any other name

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal on May 18, 2008.

Last Sunday, Steve Lopez, regular columnist in the LA Times had a column that I enjoyed immensely. It was titled “Agnostic feels a tug after Sunday in church.” Mr. Lopez had been invited to speak to the congregation of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena about his three year journey with Nathaniel Ayers, a musician who slept on the streets of skid row. He said, “In describing the journey, the soul-searching and the rewards of giving, I used the words “spirituality” and “grace.” As I did, I saw people nodding as if I belonged in that room with them. But wait, I’m an agnostic, and quite content. So why did I feel such a connection? Could my stubborn resistance to faith be slipping?”

Disturbed by this potential shake up to his habitual approach to belief – which by his own admission was to do nothing about it at all, he sought out the rector of All Saints for a conversation. The Rev. Ed Bacon suggested that the moment of connection came for him as he was talking about giving, which releases the divine in all of us. One of my favorite formulas for expressing the mystery of the Trinity speaks to that directly, the Giver, the Gift and the Giving. God the Father as the Giver, God the Son as the Gift and God the Holy Spirit as the Giving.

There have been many such restatements of the traditional “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” vocabulary in recent years. The Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, The Lover, the Beloved and the Loving; the Source, the Wellspring and the Living Water, the One who was and is and is to come. My own formula which is helpful to me in how I think about who these three are is the Mind, the Thought and the Imagining. As you can see, all of these are attempts to address the three persons of the Trinity without gender and that in some way, try to escape using language and imagery that is personified. My old boss, the Dean at the American Cathedral was the only one I know who managed to mangle the genders. Of course that was because he couldn’t get the French right and so what he ended up saying, unintentionally, was “In the Name of the Father, and of the daughter and of the Holy Spirit. Not at all helpful except for a chuckle.

There was a time, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, that the doctrine of the Trinity was a hot topic. Apparently, those days are gone and it is really too bad because the Trinity, as an idea and as a model has much to recommend to how we understand the underlying purpose in our lives. The most exciting understanding of this three-fold mystery to have been elevated in the last two thousand years is that God – this three-in-one Divinity is a community. We do not believe in three Gods we believe that all that is Divine expresses itself as relationship. The Trinity gives us the image of God as community. And not only community, but a community that maintains the unity of its diversity. A triangle is the most stable shape because everything is equally related to everything else. In a triangle, each point is equally connected to the other two. In a triangle, there is no odd man out.

The image of Trinitarian community is a healthy model for the human community. Think, if you will, of our little congregation and the world outside of our doors – two points of a triangle. The third point is the relationship that exists between the two. If we have no connection to the greater world, we do not reflect the nature of the community that is God. The connection is dynamic, like the Holy Spirit, it is the charge of electricity arcing between two electrodes. It can heat things up or get them moving.

Another important aspect of triune reality is its stability. A three legged stool never rocks, it sits solidly with each leg bearing equal weight. The Trinity is described as a dance of equals. Relationships that are in balance are divine things.

This week, California joined Massachusetts in the position that marriage is for anybody that wants it. This is creating distress for many Californians, most of whom site scripture in support of their opposition to same-sex marriage. I will try to explain why I believe that the Cal. Supreme Court’s decision brings all relationships into the lens of Trinitarian thinking. This gave me the push to pull down a book I bought three years ago by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who spoke at our clergy conference. Rabbi Greenberg is the only openly gay Orthodox rabbi and his book Wrestling with God & Men; Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition is good Bible study on those passages that condemn men lying with men. He makes very clear that in Biblical understanding of sexual relations there is an inherent power component. One person is the actor and the other is acted upon. The actor is always the dominant one. I think that the story of the city of Sodom is one of the most erroneously used passages in the entire Bible. The sin of Sodom was not gay sex but being a gated community. Sodom was a place of great wealth and resources and the people there did not want to have to share. Jewish tradition has many stories about how evil the place was. One such story says that offering charity to an outsider was not to be tolerated and if you did it, you would be killed. Lot, the nephew of Abraham, settled in Sodom, he must have had enough money to make himself acceptable. The angels that had visited Abraham on their way Sodom to investigate the cries of distress heard in heaven by those abused in that city arrived at the gates and Lot offered them the hospitality of his home for the night. In the mind of the men of Sodom, those strangers had violated their defenses and therefore must themselves be violated. Rape as a tool of humiliation and power, the degradation of another, is what went on in Sodom and it is the text that informs Leviticus 18:22. “You shall not lie with a man, as with a woman, it is an abomination.” What this text is saying is that no man should have to be the one acted upon because that upsets the way the world was understood – the world in which men were the actors, the powerful ones. No man should have his power taken away from him.

The Greco-Roman world in which the apostle Paul lived and in which he built churches was rife with an understanding that sex was always between parties of unequal power. For an Athenian to give testimony in court they had to swear that they were “not a slave, not a woman and not a foreigner” Jewish men began their days with a prayer of thanksgiving, praising God for not having made them a slave, or a woman, or a foreigner. They were giving thanks that no one could use them as one would use a slave or a woman or a foreigner.

The California Supreme Court recognized that all relationships in which mutual concern, affection and respect are present are equal under the law. I maintain that they are also images of the Triune God – two persons and their relating in balance. Anatomy and mechanics have nothing to do with it. It is the character of our relationships that is either pleasing or displeasing to God. When it’s about love and not power, it is a dance of equals.

The good news for us on Trinity Sunday is that we exist and hopefully know ourselves to be participants in that dance of equals with God. We are loved, we are valued, we are creative, we are in important part of the divine life of all that is.

"He ascended into Heaven..."

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on May 4, 2008

“On the third day, he rose again, in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God.” These are three fairly fantastic statements that we proclaim every time we recite the Nicene Creed. The creeds are curious things whether one says the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed or the fantastically long Athanasian Creed found in the back of your BCP. They were meant to develop a shorthand version of the basic claims of Christianity. They were not, nor do they function as, great evangelism tools. Few people, if any, would hear the creeds and feel drawn to this faith. Indeed at the moment there are lots of people who refrain from reciting the creed because it seems hypocritical to stand up and say “I” or “We believe…” when one cannot in good conscience agree with the statements.

Dr. David Cunningham, who was one of my professors in seminary, wrote a most helpful book on the Apostles Creed, breaking it down into the twelve different statements and then illustrating them with literature, either a novel, a play or a short story. The book is called Reading is Believing. He claims that the creeds have three purposes; first, they are a summary of the narratives of the Christian faith; second, they are a resource for study and conversation among those who already know the stories well and finally, as a goal that encourages Christians as they try to live into the stories.” What Dr. Cunningham says is that the creeds make sense only if you are willing to dive into them.

The very first thing that we need to understand when we recite a creed is to understand the use of the word believe. Every time we say it in a creed we say we “believe in” something. We are not using the word as one might saying “I believe it’s raining” which means “I’m not sure but I think so.” Nor do we use it to mean I’ve pretty well made up my mind to do something, as in “I believe I’ll save room for dessert.” No, the use of the word believe in the creeds is about trust and relationship. There’s a great difference between telling someone that you believe them, and telling someone that you believe in them. The former says, “I think you are telling the truth.” The latter, which is the way we say “We believe in God” is that you put your trust in God. It speaks of relationship. You would never tell someone that you didn’t care about that you believe in them. Because when you believe in someone, you give something of yourself, it is language of commitment. So what we are saying when we proclaim “We believe in Jesus Christ, the only son of God.” We are proclaiming that we are putting our trust, our faith, our hearts in Jesus Christ, and not in any other prince of this world. Believing in someone or something is not a momentary thing.

Another important point is that the statement about Jesus is not an exclusive statement. It is not saying that Buddhism is not also a path to knowing the Divine nor does it say that about Judaism or Islam. It is our statement that this is the path that we have chosen.

So what does it mean when we continue on and proclaim that Jesus “ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God.” From the get-go, that’s one that we can’t take literally because God doesn’t have hands so there is no right one to be seat by. But consider if you will, the phrase that we use fairly commonly, to be someone’s right-hand man is to be the one trusted to carry out a plan or a vision. That’s a very good way to think about Jesus, indeed it is the phrase that is found in Clarence Jordan’s New Testament translation The Cotton Patch Gospels. “Jesus is God’s right-hand man.”

This whole Ascension thing is a difficult one for me. Dr. Cunningham points out pragmatically that it’s a plot device to acknowledge the fact that Jesus was no longer walking around among the believers, now here in our midst today. The story only appears in Luke and Acts which were originally all one book. The other writers didn’t touch it but it’s a very important question. So, where is Jesus now? The answer is that he is somewhere other than here…he is no longer immediately, physically present to us. As much as I’d love to be able to go to him and ask “Seriously, what do you think about gay bishops?” but we don’t have that option. His physical presence is not available to us. The most important thing that we can draw from the claim of the Ascension is that it’s up to us now to carry on without being able to run to him for advice and direction.

Luke makes another very important point about the whole purpose of the Incarnation – the Divine coming to dwell on earth as one of us. In Jesus’ resurrected state, he still bears the marks of crucifixion – he continues to carry the wounds inflicted on him, on us, by us. Now it seems to me that the power to resurrect someone is mighty enough to do so in that perfected form that Paul calls the resurrection body – so there must be a specific purpose in the presence of those wounds. They do not just prove to the disciples that it was really him. Those wounds say that all that happens to us, particularly the violent, damaging assaults on our bodies, minds and spirits, continue to be borne by one who loves us. And then on top of those wounds are taken to heaven. Our broken places are acceptable to God.

Dr. Cunningham puts it this way, “God’s willingness to “become flesh and dwell among us” is therefore not a temporary condition,now merelya short-term moment of unpleasantness that God must endure in order to set things right. On the contrary, by permanently taking on not only our intellectual and spiritual characteristics but also our fleshly existence, God redeems it and draws it up into the Trinitarian communion of the divine life.”

One of my favorites hymns is There’s a wideness in God’s mercy but I have never, until writing this sermon, really understood the second verse. “There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven; there is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given. There is plentiful redemption in the blood that has been shed, there is joy for all the members in the sorrows of the Head.” That is because “he ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

Despite the departure of Jesus, however you might understand it, Christ continues to be present in a variety of ways. We will celebrate the first way next week, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Secondly, as the church, we profess ourselves to be the Body of Christ and lastly and most elegantly in the Eucharist where we find the sacramental presence of Christ in the nourishment we receive in the bread and wine. We could only know these things in his physical absence. His not being here is our invitation to carry our wounds and the wounds of humanity so that they will continue to be redeemed It is our invitation to become him and to reveal the Kingdom that is hiding in our midst.