mat·ter /ˈmadər/

I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works for my salvation. I venerate it.

~ John of Damascus (6th century Father of the Church)

mat·ter

/ˈmadər/

noun: matter; plural noun: matters; noun: the matter

1. physical substance in general; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass.
2. a substance or material."organic matter” material substance; stuff; medium
3. an affair or situation under consideration; a topic."a great deal of work was done on this matter”
4. LAW  something which is to be tried or proved in court; a case. the present situation or state of affairs.
5. something that evokes a specified feeling."it's a matter of complete indifference to me” 
• the reason for distress or a problem."what's the matter?

verb: matter; 3rd person present: matters; past tense: mattered; past participle: mattered; gerund or present participle: mattering

1. be of importance; have significance.
• (of a person) be important or influential.

2. (of a wound) secrete or discharge pus.

Black Lives Matter.

This phrase is so bold as to need shouting in the streets, indeed painted onto the streets in giant script, bold reiteration, again, and again.

We are fatigued of this shouting and yet we will reiterate, reiterate until the oppressor hears - not just hears but changes.

I add bold font to the words and phrases in this definition which best illustrate the problem: situation, distress, wound, ~ of importance and significance.

Black Lives Matter.

St. John of Damascus spoke of matter as the stuff of God in the way that modern physicists speak of matter as the stuff of all existence. These two concepts are not separate, not two. Matter is God. God is Love. Love matters. All of life matters.

Black Lives Matter.

Idiots who argue against this bold, loud statement with counter phrases like all lives matter or even blue lives matter are not listening because they have been reared through history by the ignorant, privileged, discourse of hate which seeks to redefine the very word matter. They only see their own situation as worthy of mattering. They only live in their own bubble. They do not recognize the foul puss discharged from this wound of the world. They refuse to see the importance of anything other than their own fear and anger. They reiterate the wound we seek to heal.

We who see this fault and all the evil it has caused through that same history shout - out - loud. It is no longer a coincidence to me that the pronunciation is /ˈmaddər/.

Black Lives Matter.

Though eternally hindered by my own whiteness, I listen none-the-less. In my own listening, I hear a word that means wound, a word that means situation, a word that means significance. As a Christian, I hear a word that means the very essence of the Incarnation, Christ lives in us, works through us, in spite of us. If we but listen. All of life, all of creation, all of the stuff of the love of the living God - matters. But what needs shouting most - “I venerate it:”

Black Lives Matter.

Spring has never been so appreciated.

This year we longed for Spring the same as we always do after winter begins to ease its frigid grip. But it seems to have unfolded its beauty more vividly than ever.

Or maybe we’re just noticing that beauty more and feel more grateful for it.

The tulip has always been my favorite flower. You can find at least one or two in almost every yard and garden in the Southeast United States each Spring. But from the perspective of this Spring, it seems I’ve not seen any tulips in the past few years.

Last year it did snow and freeze the tulips in my neighborhood just as they were sprouting. Didn’t that happen the year before that? And the year before that? I can’t remember.

But this year I found tulips everywhere. And I brought them in the house. I picked them one or two at at time in order to ration them like I’m learning to do with food and paper products. This practice led me to realize the benefits of the practice of gratitude for enough, and the joy of appreciation for abundance.

This is my second Spring in the house where I live so moving around a lot makes it hard to notice the long term annual production of garden flowers. But my mother’s garden looks better this year too.

Or at least it seems that way. Maybe I just didn’t notice last year. And the year before that.

This might be because we notice beauty more when we are in the midst of crisis. Or maybe when we long for beauty more when we are afraid. Or maybe we are more grateful for beauty when we are grieving.

All of the above.

But I wonder if this wasn’t some sort of gift like the Holy Spirit called FTD because we were in the hospital(s). Clearly all of us who care are at least spiritually in the hospital, praying for the sick and the caregivers alike. Empathizing with those who die alone and their families, alike.

So, as the last of my tulips begin to fade in the last light of these Spring mornings, I turn more to hope than lament. Because seeing the beauty around me caused my heart to open to the shared hope of the world - even in the face of global pain.

Wonder what will fill my vase next? Perhaps some azaleas, or zinnias, or sunflowers. For the beauty of life goes on. The beauty of life sustains us.

Breathe.

Musicians know a lot about breathing. Like athletes, they work at awareness of their breath, but like singers, all musicians use the breath to enhance the music. It is called phrasing.

I have been touched this week by the musicians who, like the comedians, offered us online gifts for our comfort during this time of anxiety during physical distancing and social isolation. 

Chris Thile offered “Live From Home” and challenged many of his friends to sing and play for us. Yo Yo Ma posted several deeply beautiful pieces and James Taylor posted old footage of songs like “Secret of Life” at  #comfortsongs.

Ellen posted video of talking on her phone from her sofa with John Legend who later offered a full concert from his home #TogetherAtHome. Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert did bits from their homes too - really funny bits. It’s not easy to serve up good jokes like that to just your wife’s smart phone and no other audience. No big laughs.

From their homes! 

The sound was blotchy, they forgot lyrics, they played wrong notes, kids and pets and spouses were distracting, glare and sirens in the background were annoying. But this was the best medicine these celebrities could have sent to a worried and anxious world. It was even better than amateur footage of Italians and Spaniards singing from their balconies - well, almost.

They didn’t complain about losing all the gigs that were canceled. They didn’t complain about getting grounded. They went home. They sang and played for us, they laughed and cut up, they played games. And they raised money. Lot’s of money for the cause.

The world got a little closer this week.

We’ll get through this. Just breathe.

And thanks for all the comfort posts!

Here’s the Key: Just Moving Toward Home for the Holidays

These are the basic tenets of managing the year end holidays while grieving.

1. It’s O.K. to still grieve.
2. It is imperative to practice “holding complicated feelings simultaneously.”

I’ve just read a well written article in Elephant Journal (a mindful e-publication) that I found personally helpful in my own facing of these end-of-year holy-days with a heavy heart. Lynn Shattuck uses the usual steps to surviving the holidays. The reason Shattuck struck a cord with her readers here is that she told her own story. So,

3. Tell your story and listen lots to others’ stories.

But #2 is the most important life skill for self care at any time. Ambivalence is the key.

When I was in graduate school, single, young and driving a very basic Mazda, I drove 350 miles one way to get home. It took about 6 hours. I was usually alone. It was from Atlanta north through the mountains so the landscape changed dramatically as I went. This was always a therapeutic drive, though I was never sure why because I too dreaded going home for the holicays. Now I realize that this is where I first learned to live mindfully - with ambivalence.

Leaving the city was always difficult. I was usually tired from work and school and it seemed five million other Atlantans were trying to leave town on the same route. Especially at Thanksgiving. But once I got through that first hour or so and the traffic lightened, things would begin to settle and the rest of the drive gave way to a meditative journey - and this was long before I had an intentional meditation practice.

The first sight of a mountain peak would lift my heart. The further away from the city I got would open to vistas of drying grass, bare trees and sometimes snow covered fields. This seeming death of the earth in it’s mirroring of the dying places in my relationships had the capacity to threaten my peace of mind with the dread I felt for the facing of “home” - the family conflicts, the old issues left over from youth that would rise up like ugly heads, the ugliness too of a longing for a new home which seemed futile. But I didn’t go there. Somehow instead, I learned to embrace these stark feelings as part of the beautiful starkness of the winter of life.

Shorter days, colder winds, and leafless trees can cause more dread in most of us than the actual experience of difficult family visits, utter loneliness or having no home at all. I have several friends who begin taking on anxiety and depression during the best of autumn days when the days are still warm and colorful leaves ornament the view with that magical changing light that comes with the new angle of the sun. For them, these gifts of earthly beauty trigger the dread of late November as early as August!

Not me. While slowly climbing through the mountains, I put on my best ambivalence playlist (from cassette tapes through the years of CDs to bluetooth) and adore the annual experience of the changing seasonal dance. This is when I practice my best pirouette balance between the dread and the joy. That, I have learned, is where to live all of life. It is a place where there is no shame in angst or sadness nor is there a desperate, sentimentalistic, grasping of the joy side.

Just life.

Just simply both.

Right here. Right now.

Be a “not me” instead of a “me too” on this one. Learn to love the dark and the light, the stark and the bright, the dread and the joy in the strength of a heart that knows how to hold both without that old brain drive to fight or flight. Then you will find a new home within.

In a Sentimentality Mood - The Royal Wedding Sermon and What's Missing at Church

On Saturday, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry preached in St. George's Chapel in Windsor the liturgy of Holy Matrimony of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.  Sentimentality came crashing in. And Bishop Curry has something to say about it.

I have done a lot of thinking about sentimentality and the Church over the past few years and feel strongly that it is a major land mine for us.  We long for something meaningful in our lives so we go to church and then we try to turn everything about the Church into a sorority pledge song.

Or . . .

We leave the Church and hate the Church because it doesn’t give us enough of that warm-fuzzie-feel-good stuff we get from movies, pop songs, apple pie and popcorn.

So, I think the Church needs to step up to the mic and explain what the “love of Jesus Christ” is all about and differentiate that from gooey-feel-good kinds of love.                                                     

Oh, wait.  Michael Curry just did that.

And all the world is a buzz this week about his sermon and all that it meant to all who heard it.  Some have been fixated on their lack of understanding of his exposition on the images of “fire” and “raging flame” of the text on which he was preaching from the Song of Solomon (2:10-13; 8:6-7 ) which is one of the scripture choices for weddings in the Book of Common Prayer. The text the couple chose.

⁶Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. ⁷Many waters cannot quench love.

I’m not sure why he lost his audience there.  Or captured their hearts when talking about the “power of redemptive love,” a beautiful MLK quote, and clearly an easier topic to digest.

What no one is talking about however, is what he said about sentimentality, and I was struck by the many times he repeated statements like, “There's power in love. Don't underestimate it. Don't even over-sentimentalize it,” which he said in the sermon and later in an interview, “this is not just a sentimental thing, this is actually a          way of life” the latter in the context of his explanation that his sermon was simply about love, the love of Jesus Christ.  

I want to hear more from Bishop Curry about this.
I will be listening for it.

What follows is an excerpt from a paper I wrote in my doctoral coursework about sentimentality specific to liturgy and more specifically about our attitudes around the Holy Eucharist.  I have so much more to say about this and hope I find time to blog more on sentimentality and the Church soon.

The parish that formed me in my youth was a church of about five hundred active United Methodists who were struggling with the social issues of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.  We struggled with issues such as civil rights, feminism, disability, sexuality and prayer in schools.  We did this in small group discussions and Sunday School classes. We sometimes heard our preachers speak to these issues in the pulpit, though not very often. 

As a young person, I witnessed a certain silliness come over the adults on high feast days.  There was an added excitement with the increase in pageantry but the two did not meet, nor did either the mood or the liturgy connect with mission.  I did not understand this at the time.  I have come to understand it as a misplaced affection for the community itself, not motivation for faith in action.

Sentimental is a term first coined in the eighteenth century by Sterne in his book, A Sentimental Journey through France, in which he used the word to mean, specific to moral decision making, a “refined and tender feeling.” This is a description of the stature of a gentleman at the time, one who was capable of appreciating beauty and art.

Sentimentalism, since the early eighteenth century, has evolved from a description of the emotional side of humanity, “of persons, their dispositions and actions,” to a particular avoidable state of bing “addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion.” This change in meaning has been mostly due to philosophical arguments during the Age of Enlightenment.

During this era sentimentalism was a reaction to rationalism. While 18th-century rationalism corresponded with the development of the analytic mind as the basis for acquiring truth, sentimentalism hinged upon an intrinsic human capacity to feel and how this leads to truth. This was a somewhat different use of the term than describing beauty and art. The term became synonymous in the pre-Romantic era with sensibility, but other eighteenth century terms emerged like sentimentality in literature and Empfindsamkeit in music.  

Tanner points out that the most famous use of the term is of Oscar Wilde’s attack of Lord Alfred Douglas.

The fact is that you were, and are I suppose still, a typical sentimentalist. For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. . . . The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought - the Zeitgeist of and age that has no soul - and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in.

While admitting that Wilde’s use of the term was within a political attack and not academic, Tanner hails Wilde’s point as an exceptional use of the term. After defining sentimentality as either attached to a particular original object or dislocated from the same, Tanner states his belief that there is a tendency for us toward auto-generation of emotion. He contends that “it isn’t so much inappropriate strength or object that is in question, but a disturbing autonomy which retains the cachet, if any, of the emotion when it was in more or less proper relationship to its object, which may have been a perfectly worthy one.”  He furthers his argument toward a definition of sentimentality as more than some sort of seeking of solace through reenactment of foregone good experiences or of bleating with remembrance of bad experiences, i.e. unrequited love, or jealousy.

Sentimentalism, when joined with religion has throughout history ended in distraction from mission at best and, at worst, violence. This is because of a certain clinging to the good old days. From worn out phrases like, “we’ve always done it that way” to scripturally based arguments in favor of slavery and against the empowerment of women, and now sexuality, sentimentalism keeps us complicit in sins of power abuse and oppression.

While writing this paper, I stopped to check my Facebook page and wandered into a video of a wedding proposal between two young adult counselors at a Christian camp for adolescents.  I was moved to tears to watch these young people celebrate love in the dining hall of their summer camp.  This home movie and my emotional reaction to it caused me to ask if this is not what people expect from participating in Christian assemblies which celebrate the eucharist.  We long to be moved by the celebration of love in a familiar, perhaps verging on exclusive, shared place with people whom we assume hold shared interests.  We participate in liturgical assemblies seeking solace through nostalgia rather than seeking to participate in the full community of Christ, a community that is commanded to serve the poor.  We continue to segregate ourselves because of nostalgia into groups based on issues like sexuality, race, or guns.

Ian Barns, in his discussion of the threat of technology, suggests several “conditions for the development of moral selves capable of civic virtue.” One of these conditions is “embodied particularity.”  Quoting MacIntyre he says: “One of the deep problems of modern conceptions of selfhood is that they seek to transcend particularity and to adopt a stance of disembodied universality - the disencumbered self.” Barns goes further to define the need for placement in membership of a particular historical community through which one is able to become “self.”  Membership in such communities, he says, “produces the virtues of patience, courage, and resilience needed to navigate the passages of life that our mortal bodies are subject to.”

There is value in membership described here as particular embodiment. There is also value in understanding the disembodied self of post-modernity discussed here as a threat to the development of civic minded adults capable of moral decision making. I would add that Christian formation is at risk and, in fact, has been to some degree lost, because of such disembodiment. I find that overvaluation of such concepts of membership opposing any hope of oneness (John 17:21) for the church. I contend that the best way to form moral adults is through the imagination of inclusive practice of an eschatological understanding of the eucharist.

This eschatological eucharist is an embodiment of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ as the community of believers, the church, the people who partake of the sacraments. We can do this without aesthetic sensibility as Murdoch describes The Good and the embodiment of The Good as inseparable from the embodiment of beauty, but clinging to old or longed for experiences of the embodiment of the parousia in the eucharist is a refusal to inspiration.

What Farwell calls a complex presence, God simultaneously present and absent, both Alpha and Omega, is more than a liturgical emphasis or expression.  It is the sacramental moment.  It is the eschatological eucharist.

Saliers also touches on this in a discussion on liturgy as art.

Human beings are formed religiously, liturgically, and aesthetically at the same time.  Thus, any expression of religious faith in the gathering for praise of God requires a form of artistic embodiment, even if the plainest sort. . . . To put it bluntly, God is not adequately praised and adored with the showy, the pompous, the self-serving, the mawkish, the cleverly casual, or the thoughtlessly comfortable forms of art. . . . Liturgy is not a recital or for aesthetic enjoyment.  It involves the art of self-presentation, and hence the character of faithfulness counts as part of the ‘aesthetic’ of the action.

Sentimentalist liturgy is this sort of insincere attempt of aesthetic showiness.  So often well meaning Christians gather to try to recreate a feeling they had at some prior point in their lives, perhaps a childhood memory of Christmas eve or a mountain top experience from a spiritual retreat.  Or they attempt the opposite, to avoid a negative experience of liturgy like boredom as a liturgically uneducated child or contempt for a preacher expounding theological ideas with which they disagreed when in graduate school.  So they attempt to create a new and different liturgy that makes them feel right and in some way better about themselves. This is a failed attempt to imitate an aesthetic of the past.  To err in the direction of emphasizing the future is a type of religious expression that is like a liturgical expression of zealous attempts to get into heaven.

Both types of liturgical expression miss the mark by emphasizing past or future.  An eschatological understanding of the eucharistic feast as a meeting with the parousia, experientially in the moment would serve better to worship God in the art of self-presentation fully present and open to the presence of Christ.

Missional theology is a recent movement in the church that is espoused by many. Voices like Jones, Meyers and Koenig differ when discussing liturgy and mission.  Jones posits that we should do away with traditional liturgy and space completely and focus mainly on forms of personal prayer.  Meyers suggest we keep traditional liturgy but emphasize the collect and the dismissal over the eucharist as the center of sending forth. Koenig develops a poignant plea for us to renew table conversation away from electronics. Specifically trinitarian conversations during meals. Missional leaders are suggesting we form new and old Christians alike through relationship.

In our diocese we have focused on the work of Zscheile who argues that The Episcopal Church must move past enlightenment and establishment thinking into missional thinking. In order to do this, we must practice changing our language as means to changing our ideologies.

Rather than the church being focused on private spiritual needs, it can be a community of conversation and practice for the common good.  This means gathering around the important questions and challenges of the day and interpreting them together in light of the biblical story, the Christian theological tradition, and the best thinking from various fields of human inquiry.

In this way, Zscheile holds that we can move past sentimentality, as well as the pursuit of individual enlightenment or feel-good sustenance, by pursuing shared ministry through open conversation. He does not believe we need to do this outside traditional celebrations of the eucharist. He contends that this is the way to gaining an awareness of what we might leave behind when we move toward this sort of open and shared way of being the church. We must name what we need to leave behind and then leave it.

I propose that we identify sentimentality as the main attitude we need to leave behind.  If the church can return to inclusive common prayer then we might come to a place of true mission.  As Williams succinctly puts it:  “Sometimes, after receiving Holy Communion, as I look around a congregation, large or small, I have a sensation I can only sum up as this is it - this is the moment when people see one another and the world properly: when they are filled with the Holy Spirit and when they are equipped to go and do God’s work.” This is not a moment construed by our efforts to remain segregated to our own sentimental ways of worship and mission, it is a moment of openness to the Holy Spirit and willingness to listen anew to our calling as the assembly.

Here's an audio of our 2nd annual BlueGrass Mass! 

Laughing at Strangers, a Proper 6A sermon

Proper 6A, 2017

Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)

Romans 5:1-8

Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

The Rev. Kathy Kelly Dunagan

All Saints, Norton

I was quite taken by the story yesterday (6-17-17) of 35-year-old Patrick Hale of Murfreesboro, Tennessee who was called a hero for helping police arrest two Georgia fugitives on Friday evening. Did you see this story? The fugitives escaped from prison in Georgia on Tuesday and killed two law enforcement officers before leading police on an intrastate man hunt all week and at least one high speed chase which included shooting at police. The convicts had invaded another home in the area and stolen that couple’s car after tying them up and stealing food and a car from them. They threatened the couple as they left telling them they had nothing to lose and that they expected to be dead within 24 hours. I guess that meant they were planning suicide by cop if they got cornered. They took that couple’s car and police caught up with them ensuing the high speed chase. The fugitives wrecked that car on the interstate and ran onto Mr. Hale’s property. Mr. Hale said that he was home alone with his young daughter and saw the men approaching his house on foot.  He said he loaded every gun he owned in order to be prepared to defend his home and daughter but that he then decided to flee the house in a car.

Mr. Hale’s car apparently looked like a patrol car. So, when he backed out of his garage, he came face to face with the two fugitives. After a touch and go moment, the fugitives decided to surrender. Mr. Hale apparently had been listening to all of this unfold on TV or radio. He said later of that moment this: “I realized I had two ex-cons wanted for murder who had just shot at law enforcement who had nothing to lose, and for some reason they surrendered and laid down on the concrete in my driveway. If that doesn’t make you believe in Jesus Christ, I don’t know what does.”

Now, when I read that over my tea and newspaper yesterday morning I laughed out loud.  I’m not sure why, except that it seemed silly to me to equate faith in our Lord to luck - in this case the luck that these fugitives had left their weapons behind in the wrecked car, luck that they apparently mistook Mr. Hale’s car for a patrol car, luck that 45 other officers showed up 3 minutes later, a corner the fugitives knew they were in and luck that they decided to lay down and surrender, a last minute change of plan from suicide by cop. That’s all just luck, right?

I’ve been working on practicing reconciliation intently over the past year or so. In our national situation of great division, I have been working on listening to the other, listening to that opposite opinion or both sides and trying to understand. I believe this is what we are called to do by Jesus - to seek peace, to seek unity, to seek the love of God in, among and for ALL people. I’m a pacifist.  I don’t like guns. I don’t understand why some folks want to own arsenals. I also hold a personal faith that emphasizes Grace and mystery.  I am usually suspicious of Christians who practice a faith that emphasizes personal salvation and prosperity. But in this practice I have come to understand that these other perspectives are not necessarily bad theology nor are they necessarily bad practice. 

So I decided to listen to more of Mr. Hale’s story and to discern why his statement made me laugh. As I learned more about his story I came to think a bit differently about Mr. Hale’s statement in the long run.

The initial news story from the Associated Press said that Mr. Hale held the men at gun point during that 3 minutes of waiting for police and that made him a hero. That story went out fast and was all over the television news.  Mr. Hale held a press conference a few hours later in order to clarify some things. Primarily, Mr. Hale wanted it to be known that he did not see himself as a hero, that the press had put an untrue spin on his story because he did not hold those men at gun point. He had loaded all of his own guns, he had prepared, he had one weapon with him in the car. But he decided to take his daughter away from harms way instead of getting into a shooting match.  He was in that car backing slowly away from the men on foot hoping to keep his distance and flee to safety while keeping an eye on their next move. He answered some questions at that press conference and said that he had not thought of reward money only the need to protect his home and family. He talked about how he had prayed for safety as he made his get away and he repeated his sentiment verbatim that the way things turned out left him more certain of his belief in Jesus Christ.

His wife beside him, his little girl was apparently behind the podium as he made this statement. You could hear her inquisitive little voice and her parents gently hushing her as he set the record straight but you couldn’t see her. At his last answer, to the question of what he was thinking during his ordeal and why he made the decisions he made he lift up the toddler in his arms and said, “This is why.” 

This is a wonderful story. It is a wonderful story for Fathers Day. A wonderful story of a man driven to protect his family who prayed for God to intervene and keep them safe. In the end he was grateful that no violence came to his home or his family. There is nothing wrong with that.  This is also a story that goes well with today’s lessons which are at root about Father Abraham, the father of the Abrahamic religions, the prototype of all believers. These are stories of the beginnings of the multitude of God’s people, the blessings that come from being hospitable to strangers. But the theme here that I want to lift up is our identity as Christians. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? What does it mean to believe?

As we begin ordinary time this year, I think it is important to stop and check out where we are in our story telling, and in our story living.  At this point in the season of the church we have come from waiting on God in Advent through the joy of the Incarnation at Christmas, through the solemnity of Lent through the joy of the Resurrection of Easter and also through the mystery of the Ascension. At the beginning of Lent I challenged you to contemplate what it means to be this community rather than focusing only on our individual sins, to focus on our collective repentance, our collective discernment of God’s call for us to mission.  Remember that?

Well, today I want to challenge you to consider what it means to be Christian in the first place and to begin new ways of discerning what to do about that.

I laughed at this stranger’s story because he seemed to have an understanding of Christianity that seemed silly to me. One focused more on the prosperity of the individual than the mission of the community. But as Joe and I discussed Mr. Hale’s statement over lunch yesterday, we were able to name multiple times in our lives when we were frightened and feared even for our lives. At such times one is apt to pray for safety and when the crisis has passed one is also moved to pray prayers of thanksgiving.  Why not indeed praise God at such moments with clarity of belief in Jesus and belief in salvation?

I once counseled a man who told me that he was “raised in a very conservative Christian home and church.”  I’m not sure what that meant exactly, but it was something he went on to tell me that he wanted to leave in the past, something harmful in some way, something he wanted to “recover from,” as if his faith practice had been like an addiction.

He told me that the fathers of this past church experience told him that the key to faith is to be able to claim, on a personal level of faith the phrase “I know, that I know, that I know.”  Then he told me that he had come to believe, in his nearly thirty years, that he more values the mystery of Grace than a theology of certainty and that he was struggling to learn how not to “know” so much.

Well, I figured I knew all about what he meant by living into a faith built on God’s Grace and mystery. But I was left pondering what it would be like to personally claim the phrase, “I know that I know, that I know.”

I imagine for those first followers, who actually witnessed the Resurrected Lord and the Ascension of our Lord, those men and women who were so blessed, who didn’t have televisions, iPads, laptops, or Google. I imagine for them it was merely a memory.  They knew that they knew that they knew because they stood there and heard Him in person ask God in prayer “That they may know you, the only true God.”

At the beginning of his earthly life, when he was first conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ humbled himself by becoming fully human, without losing his divinity.  In the Ascension, when his life on earth came to an end (not in death, which was not the end, but in exaltation) Jesus Christ was glorified, without losing his humanity.  This has profound implications for the rest of us, for what it means to be a Christian but even more so for what it means to be human. (previous paragraph quoted from here)

But my question is not what to do in order to feel closer to a God who seems to drift away, but how it is that we experience the God who knows us – God, the God, who is and always was right there at home in our hearts.

Whenever I preach myself into this particular corner, I tend to pull out my favorite Christmas movie.  I know.  It’s hokey and there’s 190 days left until Christmas, but I love the story of George Bailey who get’s to live out for us the fantasy of the quintessential second chance of his Wonderful Life.  

George Bailey prayed, in a moment of desperation, that he wished he’d never been born.  He is awarded this wish.  He then spends the next few hours in the Scrooge-like hell of encountering all of his family and friends to whom he is now a stranger.  No one knows him.  No one loves him.  No one accounts for him and he ends up in trouble.  It is in the penultimate scene in which his second prayer – to live again – lifts this curse and he encounters his friend Bert the police officer, when George finally knows the gift of being known. Bert the cop finds the lost George on a bridge staring at the icy water below.

Bert: [shouts] Hey, George! George! You all right? Hey, what's the matter?

George Bailey: Now get outta here, Bert, or I'll hit you again! Get outta here! 

Bert: What the sam hill you yellin' for, George? 

George Bailey: You... [suddenly stunned]  George ? . . . Bert? Do you know me?

Bert: Know you? Huh. You kiddin'? I've been looking all over town trying to find you. I saw your car plowed into that tree down there and I thought maybe you - hey, your mouth's bleeding. Are you sure you're all right? 

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the rest.  If you haven’t seen the movie, you probably have at least seen the famous last clip of a joyful family gathered for their prodigal celebration.  You know the part where George holds his youngest little girl in his arms as she plays with the bells on the tree.

It gets me every time.  I watch this 60 year old movie every Christmas and cry every time!  But it’s not watching George Bailey run through the snowy streets of his beloved home town, nor the Christmas carols, not even the rejoining of all those relationships you’ve just spent ninety minutes watching break apart.  No, what I love about this movie is just this scene, when this lost soul hears a friend call him by name.  He is known, he is found, and so he knows, that he knows, that he knows.

In my retelling of this story today, I am thinking of fugitives running from past sins and wrecked cars and lost people desperate for some grace. And of Sarah laughing at the gifts of strangers. And of being sent out out “like sheep into the midst of wolves,” maybe taking on the risk of getting lost too. Maybe Mr. Hale was not the only one saved on Friday night. Maybe salvation and protection and mystery and Grace and even certainty are ours for the receiving.

On the other hand -  it’s not just through sentiment that we know and are known.  Faith in God comes out in action as discipleship, not sentimentality.  Staying home watching exciting news stories or sappy movies is not a celebration of the incarnation, resurrection and ascension any more than sitting here now without considering what to do when we leave here.  The reason I am so deeply moved by lost George Bailey shouting out the line, “You know me, Bert?” is because it is my connection, my hermeneutic, to the larger story and joy that God knows me.  What’s your connection to the story? Who are we as Christians? How are we best known?

We gather in this place to practice our faith in these sacraments and traditions. We long for others, for so many others to join us. We look for ways to join them. And in the end we find that we are all the same, all afraid of violence and all seeking safety and salvation. We are already one.

And we know, that we know, that we know.

Amen.