Hills and Valleys

For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. ~Baruch 5:1-9

Building roads is hard work.  Building roads over valleys and hills and mountains is harder.    You have to blow up that mountain, level that hill, and make a raised highway through that valley.   It's hard work.  In the old days, it was dangerous work as well.  Before explosives, it was so hard that God had to do it because we couldn't.

Bringing the mountains low is not an easy thing to do.   Neither is crossing a mountain without it having been made low.   I'm a little strange in that I believe that when Jesus said the time is coming and is now here when the Kingdom of God shall appear on the earth, he didn't mean blow the whole thing up and start over.  I think he meant right here, right now, usher in the kingdom of God.   We have to get ready to be able to do it, that's what Church is for, and we have to do it in the world in which we live right now because that's the Gospel.

It's actually happening.

 Luke 3:1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"  

 And the harbinger's mother is old and barren when she becomes pregnant, and meets her young cousin, the Messiah's mother, who starts talking about her unborn child.   

He has mercy on those who fear him *
    in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

I'm pretty sure this is class warfare.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *

Yep.

    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
    and the rich he has sent away empty.

In plain English (translated from Aramaic to Greek to plain English)

He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

This is the Kingdom of God.  It works better if we all work together to fill the hungry with good things, so the rich don't necessarily have to go away empty, but that doesn't always work out.  Right here, right now, this is actually happening... so we should do what we're told and get to it.  God is going to make this happen... and he's doing it, right now, through us. 

A heart of flesh

Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

I saw a post from a new friend of mine today on facebook that made me think about what my life was like before I was baptized.   I was a teenager.  (that sucked)  I had been a solitary practitioner of Christianity for about five years at the time and being baptized was the first step in learning how to be part of a community vs pretending to fit in just to blend in.   I should explain that I was there at the church in the first place because a friend of mine had threatened to pick me up in my pajamas if I didn't show up on my own.  I should also probably explain that I had started serving as an acolyte before I was baptized because the interim priest had no idea I came from an unchurched background and didn't think to ask.   I should also probably explain that by the time Jerry Rankin brought it to my attention that I needed to do this I'd been taking communion for months.  

And upon finding out I hadn't been baptized, that I wasn't actually Patty's kid (my friend's mother who is now my friend too), and that my parents were not members of the church, Fr. Jerry asked me to do something I found rather unpleasant.   He asked me to get their permission to be baptized, either there or somewhere else, and to abstain from serving at the alter and taking communion until I did so.   I didn't know it then, but that was the first thing in a long list of things that I would find unpleasant but see the value in during my life as a Christian.

I conned my parents into it rather easily.   They were, at first horrified I wasn't going to be immersed, and suggested I go to their church.  I countered that they didn't have one.  I told them I would go with them on Wednesday nights after they picked one out provided they came with me on Sunday morning.   I never set foot in "their" church.  They ended up liking Fr. Jerry and my mother got baptized with me.   It was about three months between the time I got found out and the time I was baptized.   I found the whole process rather strange.  I didn't feel like it was a big deal while it was actually happening.   It was anticlimactic   Church often is.  I was nervous the night before, I felt like someone who had waited too long to marry their boyfriend.  Snicker all you want---but I had been a believer for years and years--I had a healthy spiritual life.   I loved Christ and I knew that he loved me.    I didn't need that priest to tell me how to pray, or so I thought, because I already knew.  Jesus and I were tight.  We are tight.  I didn't know back then how much I needed the beloved community.

I was sixteen years old.   I had taken a class before the event.  I had been a believer for five years.   I also had no idea what I was getting into.  I don't think anyone does.   The Episcopal Church may not have introduced me to God, God did that on his own in a very real and tangible way years before, but the Episcopal Church taught me how to love him.   I learned, through liturgy, how to put prayer into my every day life.  Not just rambling on and on like a schizophrenic (who knows?) to the Almighty but how to actually pray.  To the point where those prayers and creeds and songs are probably going to be the last thing to leave if I lose my crackers.    I learned, from relationship with other people, just how wide a circle God's love draws around the human race.  How much God loves everything he has made and has pronounced it good because of the lovely horrible wonderful awful group of people called The Church.

I'm not the first person who experienced something like this.   It came up in the gospels today

.   Mark 10:35 (NRSV) James and John, the sons of Zeb'edee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." 36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?" 37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." 38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

I don't think that conversation turned out exactly as they had planned.   I thought I was joining a church, I was joining the Body of Christ. I thought I was going to finished after I did this.   This is it, right?  You get doused with water, make a few vows, and it's over, done, you're good, you're perfect, you're fit for heaven and you've got a ticket to ride the train to glory, right?  Wrong.   This is the beginning, it's hard work, it'll cost you tears, and fears, and change your life in ways you don't care for at the time.  It will bring people into your life that you're afraid to associate it with.  It will bring people into your life you would have never have had the clout to associate with.  It will make you laugh, make you cry, make you tremble inside, make you do things you didn't know you could do and most of all, most of all, it make you more you.   Who would James and John have been if they hadn't met a certain wandering Rabbi and kept following him?  Who would we be if they hadn't had the big brass ones to ask the question they asked?    Who indeed?

It isn't something to be entered into lightly.   Think about it, long and hard, but know that you don't know what you're getting into.  You don't know.  Six months old or sixty, you don't know.   That's okay.   We'll be there for you.

I've never met that guy

I've been thinking lately about what makes my sort of religion--the sort of religion I practice anyway--different from other peoples.  I don't mean this in a superior way.  I'm not sure what way I mean it in, actually.  I just know it's different from the way other people approach it.

I'm not afraid of God.  I'm just not.  I'm afraid of being separated from God, I'm afraid of what I'm like when the connection gets shaky, I'm afraid of disappointed sighs from Jesus, but I am not afraid of God.  I don't like it when I feel like God is angry with me, but not because I'm afraid God is going to make me pick my own switch and beat me with it.   Don't get me wrong, God the Father has soundly, metaphorically, whipped my ass before.  I deserved it.  Deserved every single bit of bad karma that came down the pipe at me like a wave of pain in an ocean of 'you totally deserved that'.

But that's not what motivates me to do the things I do.  I'm not afraid of God because I know he loves me.  I know this because I've seen it.  Time and time again, I've been blessed.   I've also believed since I was teenager that perfect love casts out fear.  I believe that God loves us.   All of us.  The whole of us.  No reservations.   During Holy Week this year I had a friend ask me what would happen if she missed Maundy Thursday at church.  Will I go to hell?  I was shocked.  Go to hell?  Over missing a service?  Really?

I would like to say I was tempted to lie straight my teeth and tell her that little Baptist girls who miss Thursday night in Holy Week have a room reserved for them in the Seventh Layer of Hell  but I was in too honest of a mood at the time.   Truthfully I was horrified she even thought Hell was an option after taking a baptism and, being Baptist, having been 'saved'.  How can someone's faith offer so little comfort?  How can that be anything but a prison?   How can that be anything but a heavy burden that someone tied up and laid on one's back?

Sunday's gospel lesson provides an illustrated point in this.  The Pharisees point out, technically correct I'm sure, that the disciples didn't wash their hands that day before eating.  I don't know what kind of grime they had on their paws, I don't know what cruel woman didn't put out a wash basin for them to clean up before dinner in, (Pretty sure first century middle eastern men could absolutely NOT take care of themselves in this regard) or what possessed them that day to dig in without scrubbing up.  I have no idea.   I do know that it's bloody nitpicking.   In this case I actually mean nits.  I mean straining out a gnat and leaving a camel in the stew.  I mean, seriously, you guys called out their rabbi because they ate with dirty hands?   That's like posting a photo shopped picture of the President of the United States supposedly flubbing up flag etiquette--- It's not important in the grand scheme of things and is probably bullshit.

In the case of the flag picture, I know it is, because that's a white hand on a brown body but I digress.   I understand that ritual is important.  I understand that the Law is important.  I get it.  You're reading the ramblings of a woman who has actually gotten down on the floor and picked communion bread crumbs up off the carpet before vacuuming a church.     I fall down when a kid carrying a cross passes by.  I don't enter a church for worship without praying first thing and I bow EVERY TIME I pass the alter.  I get it.  I'm high church with a capital HC and a charcoal incense burner in MY HOUSE.  

Those things aren't the point though.   In the grand scheme of things, they aren't even important, they don't even matter compared to this simple truth:

Mark 7:6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. 'You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Why is he saying this?  Is he angry about people washing their hands?  Something tells me it's the picking of the nits...

 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

 It's not the things you do!  It's not the things you don't do!  It's you!  It's what's deep down in your heart.  It's the coldness, the anger, the things that send you through the roof for no good reason.   It's your INDIFFERENCE to the suffering of other people.  That's what makes you cold to the love of God.  That's what makes you cold to your neighbor.

That's what makes you worry you're going to hell for missing church.   There is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear.  It makes it go away.  Love conquers all.  It warms up cold hearts.    Fear piles up rules and defenses.  Fear takes things away because they aren't required.   Fear frightens people into chanting an incantation to make the bad go away and cowering beneath the steel gaze of a preacher who wants to scare them into salvation.  I don't want that religion and I've never met that God.  I don't know that guy.  I don't want to know that guy.   I'm saying this out of love:  God is not an asshole.  You can quote me on that.  You're not a rat in a cage he's set up so you can't ever get the cheese.   It's going to be okay.

Saying the Magic Words

Last night I encountered a horror previously unknown to me: Chick Tracts. I knew there was such a thing, but, well, this is a whole new level of crazy clown Christianity previously unknown to... well, me. Normally, I try to avoid criticizing other Christians for their particular brand of crazy because I have my own but this was too much.

Way too much. First of all, the topic rather strange. It's a tract about Masonry really being witchcraft. Something again, that I've heard before but largely dismissed because I know too many Masons. It's kind of fun to look at conspiracy theories, but let's get real: It's a fraternity. Nothing too darned weird about it. That aside, even if they were sacrificing kittens in basements to the basement rats this tract would still be uncalled for. It starts out with a couple hearing the news that their son has shot himself. Scary, right? Wait... it gets scarier. He could live, but he doesn't really want to. Why?

His dad is a mason---and he's brought witchcraft into their home by being one. Really? Seriously? You piss God off and he's going to make your kid hold a gun to his head? First it's Baphomet, then it's Baal, then it's Osiris, then it's Allah, and they're all Satan--- they can't even make up their little mind which god these people supposedly worship.

Then, after their buddy convinces them their friends have been duping them into worshiping a pantheon of gods completely unrelated to each other because of a series of unconnected interpretations of symbols that don't just mean one thing, they say the magic words and their boy gets better.

So what have we learned from reading this piece of garbage?

1. God is an asshole who is going to punish your children for sins you didn't even know you were committing.
   
2. Satan is every god under the sun that anyone's ever worshiped. (I'm sure he'll be pleasantly surprised at the promotion.)
   
3. The only way to keep God from killing your kids because you did something associated with something that was associated with something that was associated with something is to say the 'magic words'. If you don't say the magic words, then God will hate you forever because you didn't join his club of special people.
   

I'm calling bullshit on this sort of thinking.

1. If you actually loved God you would obey him out of love, not fear. Mowing the lawn because your father threatens to kick your ass if you don't isn't healthy. Mowing the lawn because it needs to be done or because he asked you too is a bit more normal.
   
2. Jesus points out that God makes the sun shine on the wicked and the righteous alike. If God were singling out assholes for natural disasters, Westboro, Kansas would be a gaping crater in the earth.
   
3. Christianity is a religion. There are no magic words. Baptism is not magic, confession is not magic, and no one translation of the Bible is the one that Paul carried. For one thing, he wrote most of the New Testament, in Greek, so I doubt he had a KJV in his back pocket. We were all 'saved' when Christ died and rose from the dead. Christianity is about recognizing that and working toward living into that promise.
   
4. If my salvation depends on me saying the right words, I am totally screwed. It also degrades Christ's sacrifice. If him dying for us poor sinners and getting up even when he was dead because there was work to be done wasn't enough then there's nothing that can be done for most of us. I'm not saying there isn't infinite good in recognizing it and continuing in Christian teaching and fellowship. There is. I'm saying that I don't and shouldn't have the power to nullify that sacrifice in anyway. I can't. You can't. It's over. He wasn't kidding when he said "it is finished'.

In short, God is not an asshole.

Please spread the word. Leave a copy of this in the bathroom at McDonald's.

Alleluia Sunday

Has anyone else noticed that the Sunday before Ash Wednesday always ends up being the liturgical equivalent of Fat Tuesday?

We don't get to act happy in church for the next eight weeks, so let's just get it all out of our systems. You won't find it on any official calender, but I've never even visited an Episcopal church that didn't call that weekend's service "Alleluia Sunday" and pull out all the holy stops for the event. I understand. I'll admit part of the reason I love being in the choir is that we get to "cheat" and rehearse Easter hymns in the "dead of Lent".

When I was a kid I always thought Easter was a strange holiday. I got a new dress and a chocolate bunny and didn't really understand why. I suppose if I had been going to church at that time I would have understood better. I think someone probably told me we were celebrating the resurrection, but I don't remember that. I just remember chocolate bunnies that were supposedly brought into the house by some burglarizing rabbit. It didn't mean a whole lot to me then.

Then came my first Lent. I was still waiting to be baptized. The priest had finally figured out I hadn't been and had asked me to abstain from communion (long story) and I was taking Inquirer's classes. I decided to abstain from caffeine for my Lenten fast. Little did I know this left out soda, chocolate (chocolate!), and most tea. Had I been a coffee drinker at the time, I never would have made it. No brownies, no fundraiser candy bars, no Dr. Pepper (oh horrors!), and no chocolate donuts. Are you getting the picture that CHOCOLATE was the main hardship in this? My 'friends' found out about and being in band, waved caramel bars under my nose every day at lunch just to test my resolve.

Church was suddenly penitential and dreary. Our priest, who at times could be said to have a real flair for drama, managed to find some rather large railroad spikes and a ceramic rooster to put at the foot of the alter---along with some fake doubloons--- just to see if we got the symbolism. Easter Vigil came and with it baptism---I had only one question---was Lent really over? It was. I immediately plowed into the the brownies waiting in the narthex.

I think my sixteen year old brain kind of missed the point. I have never again surrendered caffeine for Lent. I don't think I ever will. I also finally understood, really understood, what the deal was with the new dresses and the chocolate bunnies. I still haven't figured out why the bunny is supposed to burglarize our homes to get the chocolate in the house but that's okay. It was new life after death. Real life after death.

I hope you all had a good alleluia Sunday. I also hope we never get that out of our systems.