“Come, O Spirit, Holy Longing”

Come, O Spirit, holy longing    in our work and in our play,
In our silences and singing   where we learn how best to pray.
Stir simplicity within us,   from our doubts and fears release;
Lure us in your web of justice,   lead us forth into your peace.

For these waters which anoint us   in our death as in our life,
We give thanks and ask for courage    to endure the pain and strife.
O sweet Jesus, how you seek us   through immensities of space!
Root your presence in this gath’ring,   your indwelling of this place.

Come, O flame of deep compassion!    Light our way in every hour.
Lift us toward your radiant future,   shine within us saving power.
Heal your broken-hearted people   with the gift of Gilead’s balm.
Seal us by your healing welcome,   blessing waters wild and calm.

Now let one hand touch another,   linking lives in living praise.
Teach us how to do your justice,   loving kindness all our days,
Walking humbly in your Spirit    ’till we see your shining face:
Birthing us into the passion   of your life transforming grace.

Tune: Nettleton (8.7.8.7.D); intended to be sung with the hymn melody for "Come, O Fount of Every Blessing" (New Century Hymnal 459).

A new hymn by Mark S. Burrows, ©2009; written in celebration of the
Pilgrim Church of Lexington, UCC for a festival jazz worship service

IN PRAISE OF CONTEMPLATION

We have not always closed our eyes to pray.

Why do we, anyway? Is it because we assume that prayer involves deference – and thus, we “bow our heads” and close our eyes? Hard to say. But the practice of closed-eye praying is a relatively recent innovation in the long history of Christian devotional practices. Do we imagine that the One to whom we address our prayers hides in the darkness? Mystics have often wondered about this, and some of the most daring of poets. Do we assume that, because God is “invisible,” we should not open our eyes to the see-able world? Or is it that we have a more difficult time concentrating on the one we call “God” with open eyes?

All interesting questions to consider.

This may appear a small matter at first glance, but as is often the case such questions often usher us into a much larger and more interesting horizon.

But what about prayer with closed eyes? Before the Protestant Reformation, the notion of praying with one’s eyes closed would have been exceptional. Peculiar; perhaps even a bit bizarre. Early Christians raised their arms to the heavens, often looking up – with their eyes open, of course. And throughout the Middle Ages, prayer was often visual, at least if done inside the church, focused by a meditative gaze upon a painting on an altar. Further, the medieval liturgy was a pageant more than a “service” as we understand it: it was an event that happened in space and time. It was here: “Hoc est corpus meum,” the priest intones at the high point of the mass. “This is my body.” And, note well: the pronoun “hoc” signifies a spatial reference. It is a way of saying here and not there. This and not that.

It points to a place, a real event. Something happening; visible; tangible. Something we see. Presumably with our eyes open.

In the medieval period, people gathered (when they did) in the churches not primarily to hear; they came to see. At the moment the priest intoned these words, standing before the altar and facing away from the people, he lifted high his hand to reveal. . .the place where Christ had become present. Here! Now! Look, and see!

Medieval religious culture in the Christian west was primarily a culture of seeing. Religious life involved the sacred place of churches, and these always were saturated with images: on the walls, in the Romanesque basilicas; in the stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedrals; and, of course, on the altars where the sacrifice of the mass was celebrated.

But things didn’t stay that way, as you know.

It was the Reformers, and most particularly those of the Reformed heritage – that is, our heritage – that “stripped the altars,” as one historian has described the impact of the age of reformation. They destroyed the sacred images, cleansed the churches of every image of the divine, tore out organs, destroyed the statuary. Wreaked havoc, in other words, with costly and treasured “things.” The aesthetic of a New England meetinghouse might be understood as the inevitable gesture at the end of a long trajectory of iconoclasm – that is, the destruction of images.

And so, the early reformers encouraged the practice of prayer with closed eyes, carrying on a much older tradition – cultivated by St. Augustine, among others – that the eye was trustworthy. There is a gospel saying about this: “If you eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell” (Mk. 9.47), and, “Whoever looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away. . .” (Mt. 5.28).

The reformers turned the attention of the human senses from seeing to hearing, not trusting visibility and turning rather to audibility. Their watchword became the text from the apostle Paul: “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard from the preaching of Christ” (fides ex auditu; Rom. 10.17). This was an abrupt and even drastic change: henceforth, the church was understood no longer as the site of theatre, of a great and dramatic pageant – “making” Christ present in the humble form of the Eucharistic host. No, the church became an auditorium, a place to hear. . .preaching. And this meant, primarily, a place to instruct, to exhort, perhaps even to delight – the ear, not the eye. This favored preaching, above all, and music – at least, among the Genevan purists, scriptural texts chanted a cappella. No instruments, of course, but certainly also no choir; the congregation was to become the “choir” singing biblical songs in unison.

And when these early reformers prayed together, the practice emerged that they would do so with closed eyes, shutting out the distractions of the visible world, the visual world, the world of image and movement, of bodily life with all its beauty and banality.

What I am suggesting thus far, of course, is little more than an interesting historical lesson. The Reformation, at least in the Reformed tradition, shifted the religious experience from something visual to something auditory. The eye was still important, of course, but primarily to read – again, an experience known to relatively few in the pre-modern period, not least because of the relative scarcity of books. Why would you learn to read if you had nothing to read? What advantage would it have? And, if Latin was the spoken medium of the mass, what advantage did hearing have for those without any access to the meaning held in this particular language? Seeing, not hearing. And, note well: in English, as in Latin and in Greek, the verbs for “seeing” and “understanding” are interchangeable. When we say, “I see what you mean” we are saying, “I understand what you are saying.” Seeing is understanding.

The Reformation may well have been shaped by theological change, at least for the learned theologians who stood atop the mountainous learning this required. But at a deeper and more far-reaching level, it was an ecclesiological revolution. And, for most, the revolution had a quite specific shape: it privileged speaking and hearing over seeing. What a change this was from the medieval liturgy, where the people did indeed hear “religion,” but always in a mysterious tongue they – and usually their priest as well – could not understand. “See!” the mass suggests. “Look!” Here – hoc – is my body. Receive this miracle first, and often, with your eyes. It is here, and now, in this “place.”

Early Protestants, of course, no longer had much to look at. They now “heard” religion in their own tongue, in the “vulgar” or “common” form of everyday speech. And, of course, they came into church buildings now stripped bare of images, with “regular” services no longer building as a crescendo toward the consecration of the Eucharist.

This is quite strange, for at least two reasons: first, because seeing is a much more developed sense in humans than hearing, which may suggest a genetic hard-wiring within us that privileged vision as the primary sense required for human survival; and, second, because seeing has to do with what used to be thought of as contemplation (from the Latin contemplari, “the act of looking at” – from cum + templum, a “place for observing auguries”). In the long tradition, this mode of seeing was understood to be a passive act. We might call it attentiveness. Letting in what is “there,” in the “place” we are looking.

Final reflections. We have largely lost this practice of contemplation, meant here as a particular form of attentive looking – not only in the church, but surely also in the church. Indeed, we might go further than this: attentiveness generally is on the skids in a distracted culture like ours. We live immersed in images, but these are generally moving images. The “movies”! But one attends to something that is constantly shifting, changing, in an altogether different way than one attends to a still image.

Much was gained in this auditory revolution. But something important was also lost: the experience of the gaze, which we only experience when we give ourselves over to something with a full attentiveness.

Only the contemplative act brings us to the inner depths – or what Frederick Buechner calls “these hungering depths” – ours, of course, but also and perhaps just as importantly the “depths” of those “others” with whom we share this earth. It is thus a moral act, not simply a formal gesture of the eyes. It is a Sabbath, a “Shabbat,” for us – which means, in its root, a ceasing, a turning from our relentless need to manage the earth, our lives, to order time and control space.

Contemplation. Giving ourselves over to the “temple” where we might be changed; our hurry interrupted; our panic subdued; our self-importance challenged. And, yes, the gaze by which we honor the presence of beauty all about us, recognizing it as the presence that rises from the “hungering depths” within us – and all others.

Open your eyes. Look hard and long at this world that is creation happening still among us. Pray without ceasing.

Mark S. Burrows
Faculty Director of the Program in Worship, Theology, and the Arts and
Professor of the History of Christianity

Sacred Time: Sacred Mind Journeys of Spirit

Sacred Time: Sacred Mind Journeys of Spirit

An exhibit of paintings by Robert M. Sarly
at Andover Newton Theological School
in the Wilson Chapel and the Meetinghouse Gallery

2 September – 31 December 2008

The difficulty of paintings, Plato once lamented, was that they “stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.” Of course, the philosopher was not so simple-minded as to imagine that texts, once written, behaved any differently: “You might think that [written words] spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know more about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing” – which is to say, they remain silent. Is this sufficient as a way of thinking about the “voice” of paintings, and particularly abstract paintings? Do they reveal a form of meaning to us not in discursive language but through the quite different language of the image itself? In other words, do images have their own kind of voice, one closer to that of a poem which reveals its meaning slowly and in a tongue we know not as the poet’s but as our own?

Such questions are unavoidable when standing in a gallery filled largely with abstract images such as those comprising this impressive and wide-ranging exhibit of Robert Sarly’s paintings. Gathered under the ambitious theme, “Sacred Time: Sacred Mind,” this collection invites us into what the artist calls “journeys of spirit,” with a deliberate emphasis upon plurality. If we ask what it is that we might encounter in such paintings, we might initially wonder whether we are to make meaning by reading something into such images, or expect that we are to take some meaning from them. But such approaches miss the deeper truth of such paintings which, precisely in their formal abstraction, ask of us an altogether different vulnerability: they invite us to encounter, precisely in the depth of their form, a deep meaning Wallace Stevens points toward when he wonders, “Is there a poem that never reaches words?” They remind us, in the same way a good poem does, that what is at stake is not what words – or images – say but how they speak, which is to say how they gesture in their silences and in our own.

How do these images “mean” for us, and gesture in our silences? If we are patient with them, if we learn not merely to look at them but to gaze upon them, they might begin to speak from a depth that touches something “other” – not only beyond but within us, that “Gestalt” or form which Mr. Sarly refers to as “the soul’s inner landscape.” In gazing upon such images, in discerning the shape of this interior “landscape,” we begin to see that outer and inner, surface and depth, form and meaning, are not finally two things but one. In such a unitary encounter, we begin to find within ourselves a presence which does not reveal itself to us ordinarily, given the frenetic pace of our living. And yet such awareness arises, when it does, primarily within the cradle of the ordinary. It reminds us that the way that we look determines what we see. Call it attentiveness to the silent voice that “speaks” within the image. Call it a sense of the numinous held within and revealed by a painting’s “Gestalt.” Call it prayer.

Mark S. Burrows, curator and
Professor of the History of Christianity
Andover Newton Theological School

Café L’Aroma, Boston

Some days I wonder
when and where they’ll happen,
the epiphanies.
One August morning
I found myself leaning into
a book that wanted to tell me
why poetry matters –
how it makes visible
truths we can’t see,
and sings us beyond
the long et cetera of small virtues.
I knew all this, but was still
strangely glad in the reading.
And then I noticed them:
a family of sparrows
all brown and bustle
and hop, looking about
nervously with
their soft, swiveling
heads, intent on their work
with what seemed
a reckless glee
or gratitude.
One by one
they stalked
the flowerboxes over-
flowing with
petunias pink and
purple and white, plucking
their silky heads petal by petal,
tasting a beauty we’d seen
only with our eyes.

1 August 2008
M. S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity

Quo vadis?

There is something in us that doesn’t like to be lost. We want to know where we are and, when we’ve wandered from the proverbial straight and narrow path, how to find our way home again. Becoming disoriented not only confuses us; it scares us. At such times we wonder if anything good can come of such experiences. The Bible seems to agree, telling a story of the "fall" – which I like to imagine as an act of original "disorientation" – near the beginning of the creation drama. Indeed, stories of getting lost are one of the classic patterns in literature and film, perhaps because of the archetypal depths of this fear. Think of Dante’s great epic, The Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost and Regained, or the film familiar to us all, the first of the "Indiana Jones" series: "Raiders of the Lost Arc." Or, to name another, Dan Brown’s contribution to fantasy fiction, The Da Vinci Code. All of these stories find their shape around a great loss, and an ensuing quest – whether for Beatrice, paradise, or the "ark of the covenant." Without the loss, there would be no story, no drama, no suspense, and finally no purpose.

Of course sometimes we’re lost and we don’t even know it, because we don’t really know where we’re going. A familiar episode from the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recounts such an experience. You will recall it, perhaps. The scene opens with the image of the grinning Cheshire-Cat sitting up in tree, as Alice wanders by. She has lost her way, and implores the wise feline for help:

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, rather timidly . . . "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where –" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"–so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

There it is. If we don’t know where we’re going, we are indeed "lost," and it doesn’t matter much which way we go: we’re sure to get "somewhere," if only we "walk long enough"! Facing such a quandary, accurate maps won’t help us. Not even GPS devices will be of much use, since they can only tell us where we are and how we can get to some specified location. What they can’t do is tell us where we should go. That still depends upon our initiative and sense of purpose – or, in the old-fashioned language, our mission.

Disorientation captures something of the predicament many of us find ourselves in as a progressive church. We’re not necessarily lost; we know where we are. But we don’t know where it is we want to go, and aren’t always sure what to tell others. For such churches as ours, the Cheshire-Cat’s advice is provocative. Where do we want to get to? Is it that realm where justice and mercy meet? Where light "shines out of darkness," as the apostle Paul puts it? Where we come to know something of the mystery that summons us to gratitude to God and generosity toward others? Will we get there if we try the same familiar things more earnestly, or try out new ones – but still without a clear sense of why, or toward what end? Probably not.

This wondering finds expression in the celebrated question Peter posed to Jesus: "Where are you going?" (Jn. 13. 36). In its Latin form, "Quo vadis?", it became part of a wider cultural vernacular when Sienkiewicz used it to name his 1895 novel, subtitled A Tale in the Time of Nero, which inspired at least five different films during the 20th century as well as episodes of the television series "ER" and "M*A*S*H". But is it our question – and, if not, how could it help us to find our way?

We do well to remember that discovering the centrality of such a question in our kind of goal-driven culture requires that we relinquish our control in the matter. "Mission" long meant not what we decided to do, but what we found God calling us – or "sending us forth" – to do. This may mean turning toward the wilderness where we surely will lose our way, where becoming lost is unavoidable – and, in any case, not always the worst thing. As the poet William Stafford once observed in his poem "A Course in Creative Writing":

They want a wilderness with a map –
but how about errors that give a new start? –
or leaves that are edging into the light? –
or the many places a road can’t find?

Entering the wilderness requires losing our way, letting go of control, relinquishing the demand to grasp and even understand. It is about giving ourselves over to what Stafford goes on to call "a world. . .under the map," the one we can only know about when we abandon our attempts to order the world, our world, in manageable ways. It is about yielding to a deep beauty and goodness that underlies all that is – the "real Real," as a poet I know puts it – and finding there the path that leads us in the darkness and asks that we be light and salt and "the way" in our world. Even if it means first getting lost.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

Reviving and Surviving Election Day Sermons

Election Day sermons represent a venerable but long extinct New England tradition. What are they, and might we dare to preach them today? And, if so, how might ministers do this – and still keep their jobs?

In their day – and this stretched from the early colonial period through the later 19^th century in Massachusetts – such sermons depended on assumptions that no longer make much sense to us. Ministers could still presume that the Scriptures were the authoritative text governing how the “public” discerned its way. These occasions also displayed the gendered nature of authority among elected officials of both church and state: male minister stood before a gathering of male elected officers together with male citizens having the right to vote. These sermons presumed that the “public” of the colony and later nation, while eventually tolerating a minimal pluralism, was understood to be exclusively Christian. Toleration and inclusion were unheard of virtues at this time, at least in the political arena.

But what were these sermons, after all? The name is somewhat misleading. These were not occasions for the clergy to inform citizens how to vote. The great themes that weave their way through preaching in this genre emphasized how those governing should fulfill their duties in office. Imagine the scene: the gathering in the Meetinghouse included those holding or aspiring to office together with citizens with voting rights. These sermons focused on how communities were to fulfill God’s mandate of public faithfulness. As one contemporary observer remarked, these sermons gathered “the heads of our tribes together in a solemn assembly to give thanks to the God of heaven for the many great and distinguishing privileges, both civil and religious, which we are favored with; and to ask direction and a blessing from on high, upon all the administrations of government in the land.” It was a time to rehearse public responsibilities as were inspired by and expressive of a properly Christian (and public) witness.

This pulpit tradition reminds us that our responsibilities as Christians who are also citizens involve engaging political issues as these give public expression to our faith. They call us to invigorate the corporate discernment of congregations and wider church bodies in this calling. In the long and rich trajectory of Reformed theology and polity, this remains one of the core commitments: religious life presumes the appropriate need to engage political issues in order to safeguard the individual and promote the common good. What Thomas Jefferson famously described as a “wall of separation” between church and state did not presume to divide religious life from political convictions; the question is not whether but how we are to shape such commitments, not individually but in communities of discernment.

Many ministers might find the notion of an Election Day sermon distasteful or impracticable. For good reason they might avoid taking explicit political stands in their congregations, at least in controversial matters, because of the fear that their views might offend – and, if carried too far, unsettle the fragile consensus within their congregation on which their professional credibility (and salary!) depend. But Election Day sermons were not about the specifics, and were generally not prophetic utterances in concrete terms. They focused on principles related to matters of public justice and peace, and left the legislative particularities to those charged with governing – who, after all, faced regular (re)election and could be ousted from office if in the public mind they failed to discharge their duties. Politicians, too, know of the importance of this “fragile consensus.”

What might we learn from this particular tradition of pulpit oratory?

First, that our faith is a public matter, and not a private opinion. This is easier said than done, at least within congregations that increasingly mirror the pluralism of the wider society. But what we can say is that believing in the God of the prophets and of Jesus, and committing ourselves to their ways of justice and compassion, has much to do with the kind of society we wish to live in – and secure for generations to come.

Second, how we express our views should always be seen as part of a broader discernment. We may make resolutions within the gatherings of the wider church, but these become the arena for conversation and enactment within our congregations. We are, for better or worse, a church of debate and decision, and not simply one of pronouncement and enforcement. This is to understand our witness, the shape of our proclamation, as process rather than product.

And, third, how we engage political issues requires an attention to multiple authorities. We continue to read and interpret the scriptures within our churches, of course, but we do so in order to discern how God is still speaking to us – sometimes in ways that further complicate the long conversation between humanity and the divine to which the Bible bears witness. Within a pluralistic society, we also need to learn how our contribution is to be offered for public conversation, and how we are to receive others whose convictions, authorities, and opinions differ from our own.

What would an Election Day sermon look like in our time?

It would honor the various spheres of influence within which we live out our vocations, and give body to our faith and substance to our piety. In this sense, it would refuse to divide the religious and secular, and uphold the integrity of our political commitments as expressing our faith.

It would invite conversation and action regarding what living in a “commonwealth” entails, to recall a central idea inherited from our Puritan forebears, a model of society where sharing by all might come to mean scarcity for none.

It would remind us that the primary covenant governing Christian life in community extends Christ’s hospitality as an expression of his extravagant welcome of outsiders and his call to love even our enemies (cf. Rom. 15. 7; Mt. 5. 43 ff.). Our congregations and wider church are contexts to live out the difficult burdens of such a covenant, as a witness to the wider political community of the nation.

If we were to revive this venerable tradition, Election Day sermons would offer instruction to all candidates, not seek to support one or another. They would challenge those committed to specific political platforms to rise to the high responsibilities of office – as if they were, as happened in Puritan New England, sitting in the front row. As such, these sermons would be about much more than an election. They would explore the responsibilities falling to all of us in the conduct of public life, and how such things give concrete and political expression to the church’s faith.

The revival of this sermon genre would emphasize what it means to live this faith publicly, and suggest what it means to believe in the God who “so loved the world.”

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

The Wisdom of Ants

In my ongoing reading adventures with the five-year-olds at Old South Church, we found ourselves this week thinking our way into the tiny world of ants. They’d just been to the Franklin Park Zoo, where they delighted in the big animals – “lions and tigers and bears – oh my!” To find our way into the ants’ lives, and the story I’d chosen for the week, we tried together to imagine what it would be like to be an ant – including what kind of houses they lived in, what they liked to eat, and the dangers they faced in their lives. The kids know a lot about ants; perhaps you do, too, though most adults don’t notice ants as more than the nuisance they can often be.

Some years ago, I was amazed to discover Pulitzer Prize-winners Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s remarkable book, Ants, in which they remind us how sophisticated these insects really are: as they suggest, these tiny creatures “run much of the terrestrial world as the premier soil turners, channelers of energy, dominatrices of the insect fauna,” and “employ the most complex forms of chemical communication of any animals.” Indeed, these researchers argue that ants represent nothing less than “the culmination of insect evolution,” just as we humans do in the vertebrate realm. But most of us, scientists included, don’t know much about them. There are fewer than five hundred “myrmecologists” (i.e., ant scientists) in the entire world, a puny number alongside the estimated one million-trillion ants living on the earth at any given moment. Did you know, for instance, that the cumulative size and weight of the ant kingdom is roughly equivalent to that of humans? Amazing things, these hardy insects.

The children I read with are clearly on the way to an intimate acquaintance with them, as I discovered, and they were adept at entering into the ants’ world in their mind’s eye. Before reading the story, we tried to imagine our way into their life: we thought about where they lived and what they ate, as well as the dangers they faced – such as the predators which might eat them, like spiders or termites (well, I’m not sure about the latter, but they surely were!), and what might smash them, like flat-bottomed shoes (“because ants aren’t flat; they’re round!” one insisted) or tennis rackets (one of the children confessed how she’d gone after a bunch of ants with such a weapon) or cars or trucks driving indifferently across their paths. I didn’t tell them about observant Sikhs, and their habit of brushing the path before them to avoid injuring these God-given beings, but they had their own worries for ants’ safety and told various stories about the trials and tribulations they imagined ants to have.

What was fascinating to discover as the story unfolded – Two Bad Ants, written by one of the better known writers and illustrators of children’s books, Chris van Allsburg – was how an ant’s world and our human world intersect. And, yes, most of the children spoke with a pride that parents and homeowners might not share that they’d seen lots of ants in their houses. And why? Well, one explained the matter in simple, Darwinian terms: “Because they’re hungry, and they need to eat!” and then admitted that ants always found things like pieces of potato chips or cookie crumbs she’d ignored cleaning up. Our neglected throw-aways can be an ant’s treasures, to be sure.

Van Allsburg’s ingenious story is about two particular “bad” ants who decide they won’t follow the lead of all the others and take a single crystal of sugar back with them to their underground ant house. Instead, they prove irresistible consumers and gorge themselves recklessly of the abundance found in the kitchen sugar bowl. In an exhausted state, they fall asleep, only to be awakened in the morning by what was for them a huge silver “shovel” (a.k.a. spoon) scooping them up and throwing them into a lake of hot, brown liquid (coffee). You can imagine how dangerous the journey was from that point on, as they found themselves carried on an English muffin into a hot toaster, and then thrown down the garbage disposal, and finally almost electrocuted after seeking shelter in an outlet. Quite a day of travail! Fortunately, this story has a happy ending: these “bad” ants see the light and reform their appetites, joining the returning line of pillagers who came that night for more sugar, this time taking only what they needed – a single crystal – and returning with the others back to the ant hole.

What was so interesting in the children’s running exegesis of the book was how easy it was for them to imagine their way into an ant’s lives, with all its attendant dangers and hopes which seem at first glance so different from our own. But are they? Perhaps, finally, our lives and theirs often vary only in degree. The proverbist thought so, and wrote eloquently of their wisdom: “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise!” (Prov. 6. 6). We like the ants have to learn a proper diligence. With them, we must interpret properly the signs around us in order to remain safe. We also need to know when enough is enough, with food and with sleep. (“How long will you lie there, O sluggard?”) And, like the crafty ants, we need to remember that, great as adventures often are, home is what we’re finally made for.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence, Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity

Fears that Bind and Blind

Each week during this sabbatical year, I’ve led the “Friday story circle,” reading a picture book with the five-year-olds at Old South Church’s preschool. They are a group still articulate with wonder, and vulnerable to the unexpected, unclear about the boundaries we finally learn as we negotiate adolescence between the imagined and the real. They want to know, every week, if the stories “really happened,” budding critical historians as they are. And yet they still know to “dwell in possibilities,” to recall one of Emily Dickinson’s felicitous phrases as “a fairer house than prose.”

This past week, I read a book based on a true happening. The “facts” of the story are told in many newspaper reports from the time, about the sighting in the waters off Gloucester in 1817 of an enormous sea serpent. People came from all around to observe this creature – curious onlookers from nearby towns and villages and even zoologists from as far as Boston. How does one take such an account and make it into a story? Ah, here’s the magic: M. T. Anderson creates an account of this event as told from the vantage point of a young boy of seven or eight years old, and illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline captures the feeling of the times with marvelous images. The book is entitled The Serpent Came to Gloucester (2005).

What happens in the book is that the young boy comes to realize that the serpent is not a threat, but really just playing in the water, and the townspeople, at first apprehensive, overcome their fear and come to enjoy watching the great beast cavorting in the harbor. But over the long, cold winter, when the serpent had gone in search of warmer water, the men decide they would have to kill it if and when it returned in the spring – which, of course, it did. The final episode of the story tells of their hunt.

While they gathered to go out in ships to try to kill the serpent, the little boy went, too, following them out in his little rowboat so that he could try to warn the playful beast to dive into the depths and avoid their hunt. As he tells the story, “I whispered, ‘Beast, sink. Stay down in the drink.’” But his warnings come to no avail: the men finally harpooned the serpent, but after a furious fight found that they’d only landed a huge mackerel by mistake.

The story ends many years later, when the boy had become an old man, and found himself reminiscing about the great serpent and its mysterious and beautiful ways with his young grandson. This of course is how stories live best – not on the printed page or lost in old books but in imaginative and colorful retelling that carries them from generation to generation. “And when your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of [these things]?’ then you shall say to your son. . .” (Deut. 7. 21). Remembering stories is one of the ways every culture renews itself, and conveys the meaning of its life to those whose experience is shaped by such memories. In religious communities, we call it “tradition,” and it is what family reunions are made of: the inevitable embellishing is part of telling the “real” truth that cannot be known by fact alone.

I talked with the children as we read this story about how it is that we are sometimes afraid of things we don’t understand – like a sea serpent that appeared suddenly and without precedent. Such things that are different than what we are used to, or that come from unfamiliar places, things that may seem to us wild and unmanageable, can worry us. And it takes courage to find out whether they really are threatening, or just different than what we are used to. How we learn to live together, creatively and constructively, depends on just such wisdom and trust which refuses to vilify what we do not understand or cannot control. We know this in our personal lives, and see it acted out in the rituals by which tribes and nations maintain unity through shared fears and hostilities. Fear like love is what binds – and sometimes blinds – us.

This story reminds us that curiosity about the unknown is often what opens new doors for us, leading us to meet unexpected challenges and experiences with creativity and compassion. Such mysteries may often seem menacing, but they may also be the opening to adventures we’d never imagined – if we remember that new circumstances call for new empathies.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton

Disorientation and Hospitality

There is something in us that doesn’t like to be lost. We want to know where we are, and how we can get “home” again. We’re afraid when we get disoriented, which in its literal root means: “un-east-ed,” confused about the oriens or “rising sun.” Can anything good come of such experiences? We all remember times when we were lost, and I mean really lost. Where we lost our bearings, and couldn’t find the right path. Of course, sometimes, we’re “lost” without even knowing it, simply because we don’t really know where we are going. A familiar episode from the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recounts such an experience. You will perhaps recall it. The scene opens with the image of the grinning Cheshire-Cat sitting up in tree, as Alice wanders by. She has lost her way, and implores the Cat for help:

“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly . . . “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

There it is: if we don’t know where we are going, we are in one sense “lost” and it doesn’t matter which way we go. We’ll get “somewhere,” if only we keep pressing on. For this quandary, accurate maps or even the newest satellite-guided technology, a GPS device, won’t help us. A map will be useless if we don’t know where we are and can’t orient ourselves. And a GPS device can only tell us where we are and how we can get “there,” but can’t suggest where we should go. That still depends upon our initiative, our creativity, our sense of purpose, our mission – which is to say, our understanding of the destiny toward which God is calling us.

I have the feeling that this is something of the predicament we find ourselves in as a church. We’re not necessarily lost because we’ve become disoriented; we have maps that chart the territory, but we don’t necessarily know where we are, and we’re often quite unsure in such a quandary where we ought to go. And, for those churches that have something like a GPS device, telling us exactly where we are, the question is still whether we know where we’re heading. In such a case, the Cheshire-Cat’s advice is provocative: yes, we’ll surely get “there,” wherever that is, if only we “walk long enough.” And so we try the same familiar things more earnestly, or we try any number of new ones – but still without a clear sense of why, or toward what end.

Pentecost is a long season, the season we have come to call “ordinary time” in the church’s liturgical calendar. It is the time when we hear the ancient question Peter asked of Jesus, “Quo vadis” (or, “Where are you going?”), as one asked of us. Where are we going? This will necessarily “disorient” us, as it did the first gatherings of those who followed the Prince of Peace in Jerusalem two millennia ago. It may even call us to turn aside from the path we find ourselves treading, in order to find the way through that “straight and narrow” gate. And sometimes, this is the nudge we need to discern in the signs of these times where the unsettling call of God might be leading us. Disorientation is sometimes nothing more or less than a confusion; sometimes, however, it leads us into the realm of creativity – reversing the plight of Babel and opening us to engagement with others we’d not prepared for or expected.

In the United Church of Christ, this season marks the beginning of what our church leaders have called a “sacred conversation about race” in our nation. For those remembering the story of the first Pentecost, this will seem a familiar tale: these early disciples found themselves gifted with an ability to understand and speak the languages of those “others” gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, so that together they might together testify to the Spirit’s presence. And this means for us, as for these first followers of Jesus, abandoning the safety of the familiar, a holy disorientation. It will mean coming out of hiding in the “familiar” places where we live separate lives, and bearing witness to the Spirit’s urging to do a new thing. It will mean listening to others tell of their own experiences of mercy, and opening ourselves to finding their hospitality as the sure gift of the Spirit’s presence.

These times call for nothing short of courageous and humble hearts in going forth on this journey in which it does matter which way we go – at least, if we hope to follow the Spirit’s wild and faithful ways, which call us into the creative disturbance that marks Her presence. On this way, we will surely come to know the risks involved in sharing life with others whose languages and ways are different from our own. In the hospitality we receive and offer, may we also know the Spirit’s blessing of creative and adventurous communion.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

The Place Where the Spirit Erupts

"The call of beauty – of the sort of beauty that grips our sight to the point of sometimes closing our eyes shut – summons our voice to speak, that it may be heard within our voice as a call and therefore actually be seen. This voice, our own, the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world."
Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response

Pentecost is almost upon us. In my early years of ministry, this festival meant enduring the good intentions of a director of Christian education, who always arranged for a large pan cake to be baked for the occasion – “HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHURCH!” – though we never punctured it with the thousands of birthday candles needed for historical accuracy. Imagine trying to light such a multitude, an act the local fire marshal would have scorned. And the task of blowing them out would demand something akin to “the rush of a mighty wind [which] filled all the house” where the earliest followers of Jesus had gathered in the Acts account!

One year, this director organized a dozen doves to arrive in cages, and they coo-ed through the entire service until the benediction when we released them from their forced captivity. We all stood on the front lawn of the church and watched, spellbound, as these gentle birds rose like white streaks high into the sky before gladly escaping over the horizon. Most years, though, the sanctuary was filled with clusters of helium balloons, meant to be launched at the end of worship; of course, some inevitably escaped prematurely, to the evident delight of the children, rising to the ceiling of the sanctuary where they lingered awkwardly for a few days before slowly descending. We always had birthday banners and clowns and . . . well, you get the idea. Perhaps you’ve been an accomplice to such crimes of frivolity, too.

The up side of the giddy party atmosphere was the delight it brought to the children, whose faces shown with excitement and wonder that church could be fun. The down side was that, given the festivity of it all, the radical, dangerous, and even subversive nature of the church’s origin and mission was lost in clouds of confetti and the cavorting of clowns.

This is not to say that Pentecost should be a dreary day marked by ponderous sermons and humorless worship. But I wonder what might happen if we paused, as congregations gathered to celebrate this day, and considered how these ancient stories might call to us with an invitation of another sort. What would it mean to take seriously the witness from the ancient prophet Joel whose words Peter spoke among those gathered in Jerusalem for this Jewish festival, remembering God’s promise to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” such that the young shall see visions and the old dream dreams, an outpouring that led female and male slaves to prophesy that “the day of the Lord” had come? What would happen if we listened to the voice of the poor, the disenfranchised, speak to us of what justice requires in these times? How might we hear the visions of the young who are calling us to risk change for the sake of this and future generations, and the dreams of the old who warn against what they know of war’s reckless violence? Such pressing themes hardly lend themselves to the frivolity of birthday cakes and balloons, clowns and doves.

In fact, scientists among us who are reading the “signs” of these times are prophesying in their own way and with an equal solemnity, meaning to awaken us to the dire ecological threat we face – together with all living creatures and things sharing this vulnerable planet. In their own way, they bear witness to the psalmist’s refrain, “Thou hast made known to [us] the ways of life” (Ps. 16. 11, cited in Acts 2. 28). Theirs also is a voice responding to the call of beauty, in all its sanctity and vulnerability.

When Peter’s long sermon was finished, full as it was of warning and invitation, those who were listening asked of him and the apostles a simple question: “What shall we do?” Will we, too, gather to consider how to live faithful to this “call of beauty,” recognizing how our shared future with all living things calls us to see that we hold “all things in common” (Acts 2. 44)? How might this Pentecost be a day, in our churches, when we commit ourselves to heeding “the call of beauty” that rises from creation, which “summons our voice to speak” – to see visions, to dream, and to prophesy for the sake of future generations?

Balloons may awaken us to the delight we long to hear in children’s laughter, and the release of doves remind us of the freeing power of wind and spirit. But this Pentecost, cake and clowns alone will not do. Alongside celebration, the earth’s fragile and vulnerable beauty calls out to us, asking of us a different response than acts of frivolity. With those first followers of the risen Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, will we find that “the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world”? Will we see the church as the place of this eruption, heeding the Spirit’s call, and becoming Her voice? What shall we do?

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

Solitude and Revolution

“No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being very careful not to say what he does not mean, not to let himself be persuaded to say merely what another wants him to say, not to say what his own past work has led others to expect him to say. The poet has to be free from everyone else, and first of all from himself, because it is through this ‘self’ that he is captured by others. Freedom is found under the dark tree that springs up in the center of the night and of silence, the paradise tree, the axis mundi, which is also the Cross.” (Thomas Merton, “Day of a Stranger” [May, 1965]; in Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 5 [1963 – 1965], 242)

Is it surprising that a life shaped over years of monastic prayer in the long arc of sung call and response might become poetic, or that a person living in this regimen of art and emptiness might write poems, yielding to what the old monks called the “visitation by the word”? This is the story of Thomas Merton, known among his confreres at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky as Father Louis. From his monastic cell and later hermitage, Merton devoted himself to study and writing. Silence may have been the outward shape of his life, but words seemed to be his constant companion in an outpouring of letters, journal entries, essays, and books. And, in the course of his life, he became one of the most outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and the devastating blight of poverty and racism.

That Merton became a writer is not surprising; one could already anticipate as much from his early attraction to literature, a passionate interest that he did not leave behind when he took monastic vows. But this hardly seems the context for the making of a revolutionary, as it turned out to be true in his case. I was struck by this in the collision of news from the Middle East, heard on a Kentucky NPR station as I recently drove through the hills toward Gethsemani Abbey where Merton lived out his monastic life: news of more killings in Iraq, of violent unrest in Jerusalem and Gaza, of the continuing torture of detainees sanctioned at the highest level of government, stories laden with the anguish of death funded in large measure by US tax dollars.

I don’t know what others were watching that evening, though almost every house huddled along the road’s dark edges flickered with the eerie blue light of television sets. I’ve no idea if they were gathered in solemn remorse as the stories played in an apparently unending elegiac mode, or whether they’d flicked the channel from such “bad news” to find the relief of a “Jeopardy” installment or some version of the current crop of so-called “reality” shows. “Distracted from distractions by distractions,” as the poet Eliot put it. It’s hard to make much sense of this, but the hope that such diversions might establish the foundation for an informed electorate seems unlikely.

What does it mean for us to “keep alert” for the Word of God in such times? How will we attend to “the signs of the times,” as Merton was wont to do? This will require that we listen for the traces of a truth often buried beneath the surface of distractions, and hidden by calls to defend our “peace and security,” the classic defense of empire, which the apostle Paul knew about – and scorned (see 1 Thess. 5. 3). What would it cost us to trust the beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and heed Jesus’ admonitions to “love [our] enemies and do good to those who hate [us]” (Lk. 6. 27)? What would the national agenda look like, if we took such words seriously? Merton wondered – and thundered – in his day; will we in ours?

Right Prophets and Wrong

What a strange twist in this year’s celebration of political carnival. Now that a Democrat has emerged as a front-runner who is a person of passionate faith, evangelical in fervor and progressive in vision, it seems he isn’t quite right after all. Not for what he believes (or doesn’t), but for what his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, said in a sermon. If you missed hearing about this, you’re probably among the very few in the nation: it’s been the subject of every possible talk show on television and radio in recent weeks, and parts of the sermon are readily available on YouTube clips, many posted by his detractors and some more recently by his supporters.

But what did the Rev. Wright say before proclaiming the stinging words, “God damn America”? His sermon focused on the fact that “governments change – sometimes for the good, and sometimes for the bad,” as he put it. To make this point, he turned to the prophetic text found in Malachai 3. 6: “God does not change” and went on to say that “God was against slavery yesterday, and God who does not change is still against slavery today. . . God was a God of justice only yesterday, and God who does not change is still a God of justice today.” Surely there are many among us who might dissent from such a view, just as the majority of (white) Christians in the US condoned slavery before the Civil War – either through silent acquiescence or by turning to biblical texts to justify their stance. One has only to read through some of the online blogs associated with the YouTube clips to see how virulent racial fear and hatred remain in our time. This, sadly, is not news.

What is news for some is that Pastor Wright dared to denounce the policies of the US government when these were used to enslave, oppress, and discriminate against some of its own citizens. It might startle these critics to discover that Rev. Wright stands with the long tradition of the prophets in his denunciation: it’s in The Book, after all, if they bother to check. In concert with these difficult voices, Rev. Wright opposed the policies of this nation when these were found to disregard justice for some of its citizens. In the speech that precedes Malachai’s claim that “God does not change,” the prophet had voiced a thunderous word of judgment against the Israelites for a list of crimes which included unfairly oppressing wage-earners, disregarding the needs of the most vulnerable in society (orphans and widows), and holding sojourners (read: immigrants) in contempt. In this denunciation, is the prophet right or wrong?

What came as shocking news for his critics was the sharp word of judgment Rev. Wright leveled against our nation. But there is nothing “new” here, at least for those familiar with the biblical prophets. Rev. Wright simply named the atrocities committed by a nation that – among other less than just acts – enslaved millions of Africans who had been brought to this land against their will and, even after “emancipation,” subjected them to political, social, and legal disempowerment by the forces of racist segregation and discrimination. Would the God of the prophets bless any nation that perpetrated such deeds?

What came as news for some of his critics, but not for readers of the Bible, is that this pastor dared to denounce America for acting unjustly toward its people. He might have said, in agreement with the biblical prophet whose name he bears: “This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips” (Jer. 7. 28). He might have spoken against the wrongs of those false prophets who “. . . healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6. 14). He might have turned against the false comfort of religion, echoing the same Jeremiah, “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (Jer. 7. 4). He might have joined the prophet in crying out against false righteousness: “Behold, I bring you to judgment for saying, ‘I have not sinned.’ How lightly you gad about, changing your way. You shall be put to shame by Egypt as you were put to shame by Assyria. . . .For the Lord has rejected those in whom you trust, and you will not prosper by them” (Jer. 2. 35 – 37).

All that his (white) critics heard was the strong use of the “d” word, enough in their minds to condemn him without a more patient hearing. We do not have to wonder how the God of the ancient prophet Jeremiah would view slavery, discrimination, and injustice. It’s in the texts, like them or not. But many continue to denounce Rev. Wright as unworthy of being an American, and dismiss his legitimacy as a Christian minister. And, of course, the blame spills over to Mr. Obama, a long-time member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the vibrant church Rev. Wright honorably served for more than three decades.

Why this fear of hearing a strong word of judgment? One might say that this is simply one gauge of the lingering racism that defines our nation’s soul. This may be true, as Rev. Wright suggests in his sermon. But he did so in order to call us to higher ground, to remind us that “governments change,” and can turn from doing what is evil to doing what is right and good. Is this un-American? Hardly. Is it a hard word to hear? Yes, apparently, for many. Is it a fair measure of the biblical witness? Of course, for those who know the ancient scriptures that Jews together with Christians and Muslims honor as sacred. Such words echo in line with the faithful rhetoric that came to be called a “jeremiad,” after the name of the prophet of old and his stinging lamentations against his nation – in his case, the “chosen people” of Israel.

What Rev. Wright was doing was calling us to adhere to nothing short of this vision, and to stand with the prophets and, yes, with the founders of our nation in adhering to the principles of equality and justice, above and beyond the apparent fickleness of human governments – ours included – and their often ill-fated policies. What he was doing was exposing the idolatry of nationhood that embraces injustice toward some in order to secure peace for others. What he was speaking against was the false prophecy that refuses to tolerate criticism of the nation and makes of patriotism an obedience that is blind to the principles of equality, freedom, and justice on which this nation was founded.

They will not like the whole Bible that Rev. Wright based his sermon upon, and especially those difficult prophetic parts – including the stories of Jesus in his Not-Nice-To-Power-Brokers moods. They’d prefer a leaner version, trimmed of such unpleasantness that sounds extreme, radical, troubling of the peace. Of course, we all have our own edited version of the Bible, the texts we privilege and those passages we ignore. Even if few of us would be as brazen as Thomas Jefferson – good “deist” that he was! – in actually producing an edited version, we come to recognize this tendency in the song some of us sang during the 60s: “A man he hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

But we should be clear about one truth: Rev. Wright stands with the prophets of scripture, with Isaiah and Hosea, with Amos and, yes, with Jeremiah. He also stands with the founding fathers of this nation, who declared as “self-evident” the truth that all people “are created equal” and deserve equal justice under the law. And, I am proud to say, he stands with the leaders of the church he and I serve as ministers of the gospel, the United Church of Christ, a church committed to living out the word of Jesus and the prophets faithfully, a church seeking to serve the God of justice and of peace, a church bold enough to bring a word of judgment when necessary and mercy in all ways.

Rev. Mark S. Burrows, Ph.D.
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity

A Story that Rhymes

Each week during my sabbatical, I’ve been leading a story circle with the five-year-old preschoolers at Old South Church in Boston. We recently began our time together by talking about what makes a poem what it is. One of the kids hit it right on the head: “It’s a story that rhymes!” Of course not all do. But many do tell stories, and they often rhyme. We practiced some rhyming words to their great delight, and they had all kinds of ideas – sounding out real words they knew and making others up because the sounds were right, which is one of the ways language evolves through the generations.

The story we read on this particular week was from a book I received as a gift when I was about the age of these children. The poet John Ciardi, who in the 1970s and 80s had a five-minute spot on NPR “On Words” (now, Garrison Keillor offers it as “The Writers Almanac”), was a friend of my dad’s, and during a visit brought along a copy of his recently published book, John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1963). I vividly remember sitting on the sofa in our living room with him as he read it, with great delight, and seeing my enjoyment gave it to me – autographed, of course! – before leaving. I’ve treasured it ever since.

What I love about this story – and what the children delighted in when I read it to them – is the playful way the poet makes the lines rhyme. One of the children astutely suggested, in fact, that rhymes make our words sound like they’re singing to each other. Which, of course, is exactly right! This one is a fable about a workaholic ant named John J. Plenty, his sister, and a grasshopper named Fiddler Dan. But as a fable it tells another story: beneath the surface it is about the joy of song and the durability of music. It reminds us that we need play as much as we need work, delight alongside duty. Of course, John (Plenty) has other ideas: as he puts it over and over again: “More! Get more! No time to play! Winter is coming!” And so this busy little ant devotes all his energies to hoarding food, while his sister falls in love with the fiddler named Dan, and they make music together through the autumn until winter’s arrival. In a sense, the fable reminds us that we do not “live by bread alone.” The poets know this, as do those creating in other media. We seem to be made to make beauty, in any way we can – with our hands and mouths; with our eyes and ears. In fact, as Nietzsche once put it, we need to dance at least once every day, because “there is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.” Precisely. The artists know this, and remind us when we have forgotten.

The story is predictable, I suppose, which is what makes a fable work as it does: John J. has stored away mounds of food, but refuses to eat any of it for fear he won’t have enough to make it through the winter; his sister and Fiddler Dan, who’d spent the summer and fall making music, do just fine without such provisions. When spring comes, John can’t believe his ears when he hears the sound of music rising from Dan’s fiddle, since he had never stopped playing and was “still singing for time to turn. . . .”

The morals of the story – every fable is written toward some bit of wisdom for life – are these:

Say what you like as you trudge along,
The world won’t turn without a song.
And – Fiddlers grow thin and their hands turn blue
When winter comes, but they pull through.
There’s this about music – and, oh, it’s true! –
It never stays stopped. Just listen, and you
Will hear it start over, as sweet and new
As the first pale leaves and the first spring dew.
And that’s what John J. never knew.

Happy listening to the music of resurrection, not only from the choirs at church but also as it comes forth singing from the earth. Because even during these often wet and dreary-dark-days of March, the music “never stays stopped.” Never. Perhaps our laughter and song – and all the rest of the “reason” in our bodies – tells the rhyming story of Easter more effectively and eloquently than all the rationality our words can manage. It all seemed to end, after all, with the disciples’ fear and confusion; only in the silence of a garden and on the long road home did confusion give way to recognition, despair to hope. Resurrection is probably often like this, a rhyme that comes to us at the places where we learn to sing – and, perhaps, even to dance – again! Amazement in the ordinary: the delight of unexpected touch upon our weary flesh; the opening of an forgotten truth by a stranger who walks among us; the meeting of our hunger with an unhoped for breakfast on the beach. Rhymes that make meaning at unexpected places! It might begin this way yet again – in the church that knows how to voice this “story that rhymes,” and in this world that still “won’t turn without a song.”

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton

Art, Metaphor, and the Politics of Revival

To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now –
   Our problem world –
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered, free – help me!
All you who are dreamers too,
   Help me to make
   Our world anew.
I reach out my dreams to you.
   - Langston Hughes

Reading stories with very young children can bring us face to face with the most primal dimensions of understanding. Their minds – and I am thinking here of the four- and five-year-olds I’ve been reading stories with each week in the Old South Church preschool – are complicated by the inherent tensions between language and experience: at this early stage in their cognitive development, they are at once intensely literal and animated by a fantastic imagination, a tension they do not always gracefully negotiate. Last week, reading a lovely story about Emily Dickinson with these children (Michael Bedard’s children’s book entitled Emily, illustrated by Barbara Cooney), I encountered all this anew. At the outset of the story, a little girl living across the street from the Amherst poet discovers a note left in the mailbox by this elusive neighbor. Carefully tucked in an envelope together with a handful of dried and pressed bluebells, it read: “Dear neighbor, I am feeling like these flowers. Revive me with your music. It would be spring to me.” We’d only just begun the book, the children and I, but already I felt their confusion at this use of non-literal language. What could it mean to “feel” like flowers of any sort, pressed or living? How could music, or any other art, be “spring”?

Such playful language is metaphorical, of course, and metaphor is one of the basic building blocks of human language. Aristotle wrote extensively about this in his Poetics, defining metaphor as “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” Metaphor constructs a relationship between two otherwise unrelated things: we say one thing, but mean something entirely different – as, in this case, “I am feeling like these flowers” or “[Your music] would be spring to me.” Through such a simple device, the reader comes to know that this is a story set in winter, one well suited for a New England February, and that the poet is longing to escape the clutches of melancholia that often set in during this cold, dark season. She yearns for music to “revive” her spirits.

Art can have this effect on us. In its spell, we often find ourselves awakening – in ways that either disturb or delight us. Art calls us beyond the familiar. It invites us to imagine something else, and dare to reach for it – “the world outside our world of here and now,” in the words of the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967). And this is the profound function of metaphor: it enables us to imagine something that is not (yet) present, to announce the way the world might be. Metaphor is in this sense a sort of revolution in nuce, calling us to think differently, to imagine more generously, and even to live more authentically. Metaphor embodies this essential work of the arts, “carrying” us from one place to another. In modern Greece, in fact, metaphorai is the word designated for vehicles of public transportation: in Boston, one rides the “T” but in Athens, one takes a “metaphor” to travel from “here” to “there” – to reach across the distances!

Hughes captures the importance of this reach in his little gem of a poem, “To You.” Here, he invites us to live beyond the limits of “our problem world” toward “dreams made whole, unfettered, free” – which is to say, to live into the power of the root metaphors of freedom and equality not for some but for all. Astute readers will notice Hughes echoing Jesus’ call to be “born anew”: “All you who are dreamers too,/ Help me to make/ Our world anew.” And it is his use of such metaphor, the cradle of prophetic imagination, which opens us to this world-birthing work. Poetic vision of this sort calls us beyond the safe, familiar, if often also small world of our experience toward dreams of a truer world, a nobler culture, a more just society. Such vision calls us to “reach out [our] dreams” to others, and open ourselves to their dreams.

This is what democracy looks like, when it is on the way toward enactment, a journey that depends upon the power of dreams promising to “make our world anew.” But this requires communities like the church where citizens are willing, as the poet suggests, to “sit and dream, to sit and read,/ To sit and learn about the world/ Outside our world of here and now.” This will require of us that we learn to reach for dreams that draw a wider and more inclusive circumference of dignity within our society, pledging ourselves to “liberty and justice for all”: for our friends and for those we either distrust or fear; for those like us and for those quite different; for neighbors and yes, even for our enemies. Some in our nation, in and beyond the churches, are settling for smaller and less noble dreams than this. But many are rising with disaffection from the familiar politics of fear and retaliation. They are looking for change, longing for the coming a new spring. They too, with the poet in Emily, are yearning to be revived by the music of audacious dreams.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian in Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

Six impossible things before breakfast

Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as Spring
     Emily Dickinson

Sometimes, a poem is worth more than a long sermon, both those we hear and those we preach! I thought of this when reading a story to a group of preschool children recently at Old South Church. They are so ready, these four- and five-year-olds, to be enchanted, to make believe, to fashion sometimes outrageous stories into their lives. I give them a simple opening, asking whether they’d ever seen a real owl, since I had brought one of my favorite story books, Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon, to read with them. As soon as the question had settled in their minds for a flicker of time, their story-telling began. “Oh, yes,” quipped one bright-eyed five year old with an utterly serious look on her face. “An owl once flew into my house and sat right on my head!” She pointed out the exact place among the curls as if I’d missed the story, looking to me for reassurance that I’d understood what had happened. “Oh, you’re lucky,” I said, “I’ve never had an owl come into my house.” She gave me a curious look as if to say, “Well, why not? What’s wrong with your house?” And I knew in my own way what she did in hers: that magic can happen everywhere if you’re ready for it – if at times in an imagining that carries us beyond the only real toward the truly important. And which is better? The children don’t wonder, even if we adults are often hard-pressed to say.

We critical thinkers and hardened realists make the crucial work of imagining harder when we ask, “Really? Could that really have happened?” The children’s answer in such cases is usually “But it did happen; I just told you so!” And we begin to realize what they seem to know naturally, which is that it did somehow happen; it all depends on our readiness to risk “making believe,” our vulnerability to story. In our maturing years, we unlearn our natural capacity for the risk that imagination entails. We convince ourselves that the “real” is what is verifiable: we believe – and it is finally a matter of belief – that only the things we can touch and taste, see and hear, are truly real.

It is probably no wonder, then, that Jesus seemed to prefer children’s company to that of the stubborn, uncomprehending adults around him. For the children came to him as they always do with bright questions and an often absurd willingness to believe. After all, they were after the truth of story, story that mattered, story that made them larger and truer and more real. In their susceptibility to enchantments of one kind or another, they delight us, allowing us to indulge in a share of their fantasy. We delight in their capacity to make believe, these natural storytellers, without assuming them to be liars. The children in Jesus’ life and in ours are quite unlike Lewis Carroll’s skeptical Alice who regretted that “one can’t believe impossible things,” and more like the Queen who quipped that Alice must not have had “much practice”: “When I was younger,” she recalled, “I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The imagination always stretches “the real” for the sake of some larger and, we might even say, truer truth. It lures us to see our world, to frame our lives, in more generous ways. The real question before us as adults is not whether what we believe is impossible, since the things worth giving our lives to are generally impossible or at least improbable – like love for the enemy or generosity toward the stranger. No, the deep question is a different one: whether our beliefs finally matter for the sake of others, whether they are true for the life of the world.

Jesus chided the disbelieving disciples: “Let those who have eyes to see, see.” The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas captures this point in a different way: “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” he suggests. That is, what we see depends upon how we look, and how we look has to do with what we desire to see. Our desires, like our beliefs, are the cradle of our morality, the heart of ethics. They invite us toward the good like wagers that call us to risk what might seem impossible – like mercy for wrongdoers, and forgiveness for our debtors – but is the only real path toward the greater good for all. Like “winter under cultivation” which, the poet reminds us, is “arable as spring.” Of this truth, or their imagining of it, the children are quite sure.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian in Residence, Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity,
Andover Newton Theological School

The Dream of a King

The New Year is now upon us, and this year the news is full of commentary, predictions, and broodings about the presidential primaries. Even in Europe, where I spent the last few weeks, the papers and television news programs have been saturated with this story: first with Iowa, which the Germans describe as the state with "more pigs than people," and then New Hampshire, with "Super Tuesday" waiting in the wings. I cannot remember this level of interest, excitement, and fascination in the early stages of the primaries. In point of fact, I’ve become accustomed to facing a high dose of cynicism or indifference in myself and among friends and colleagues upon entering this season, which usually seems closer to carnival than debate. But this year is different. There is a note of expectancy in the air. The taxi driver who picked me up at Logan airport, despite the late hour of night, wanted to hear my point of view, and offer his, about what was happening. He was as surprised to learn that Europeans – among others in our world – were so attentive to this story. I told him that beneath the buzz of interest guiding the “wise men” and women who had come "from the east" to find where this story was leading was not the light of a single star, whether in the skies or among the candidates, but rather the desire gathered in a single watchword: hope. The hope for change; the desire for a different path of leadership; and, yes, the yearning for deliverance from the grinding burden of war.

Now, the biblical text that probably will not be read in these post-Christmas weeks, one that rarely makes an appearance in pulpit sermons and is kept out of the lectionary cycle by those in charge, is the terrible story of Herod’s rage as reported in Matthew 2. 16 – 18. As Matthew recounts these events, Herod, ever the astute tactician, schemed to kill Jesus in order to assuage his political fears. As earlier in this account, Joseph finds guidance for his path in a dream: an angel warns him to flee to Egypt in order to avoid the wrath that was to come. And come it did: Herod had all the "male children in Bethlehem and in that region who were two years old or under" killed, thereby fulfilling the ancient prophecy in Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation. . ."

I thought about this scene when confronted, in a German newspaper last week, with a photograph of an Iraqi woman carrying a child killed in an episode of roadside violence. Her grief, immense and overwhelming, needed no commentary; her face told the story of the tragic and devastating effects of this war. With Rachel, she wept for her own child and for the other children, "refusing to be consoled, because they were no more." Who among us would be less distraught, in such a case – whether in the streets of Baghdad, Dorchester, or in our own neighborhoods?

One can only hope that Jeremiah’s poignant prophecy might get a rest in the years ahead. That we could find, as a nation, the moral courage to address violence without recourse to vengeance. That we could overcome our cowardice in the face of the national gun lobby, and enact legislation to ban handguns from the streets of our cities and towns. That we could invest as much energy and resources in genuine peacemaking as we do in sustaining the vigilance of our war-readiness. And, yes, that the moral and political commitments of the current crop of presidential candidates might remember that retaliation is not leadership, and vengeance no way to address the very real fears that have been cultivated in the current political climate of the nation – even if such strategies offer an immediate promise of security, whether real or imagined.

I suspect, though, that the image of mothers weeping over lost children killed in the path of war and street violence will continue with us. Our human appetite for killing is a perverse habit at least, an obscene addiction at worst.

Most of us will not have the gift of such timely dreams as Joseph’s to keep the children out of harm’s way. But we have other public dreams living in our memory, and in these weeks we will once again give our attention to those voiced by one of our nation’s wise men: a prophet named King, whose voice still rings in our national consciousness. As we celebrate his legacy and speak of his dream again this year, may we discover not only the burden but the blessing of what it means to live in communities of respect across the textures of our differences. Perhaps even finding ourselves emboldened to action by the ancient story of Rachel and the "slaughter of the innocents" in Bethlehem, as the story is called – or, in one of the many updated accounts of violence that our world continues to offer as "news," when we see the faces and hear the anguished stories of the many grieving mothers who still weep for the lost because "they are no more."

Professor Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

Christmas Presents or Presence?

What is becoming of God these days? One might well wonder. When asked in a recent Advent children’s sermon I heard what Christmas was all about, one bright-eyed little boy sounded forth immediately: “Presents!” Or so we adults all thought, and laughed as we are often wont to do in such moments – because of the candor, the simplicity, and the innocent joy with which children express themselves. As the name of an Art Linkletter television show from ancient times put it, “Kids Say the Darnedest Things.” Of course they do, and just as surely this is the heart of wisdom, one of the “darnedest” things we ever encounter.

Now, it could be that the eager child that Sunday morning knew more than our adult minds allowed. Maybe what he was really saying, without knowing anything about homonyms, was: “Presence!” which, in a certain sense, comes to the same thing. After all, we give gifts – at Christmas, and otherwise – to offer some sense to others that we are there with them, not only in the act of giving but in all that precedes it: in the deliberation over the gift and in the care of choosing, in the sacrifice involved in the purchase, in the patience of seeking and finding; and, yes, in the hope of giving delight and happiness. All of these are marks of the presents we give. But they are also vestiges of presence, which is what every gift finally strives to offer for those we love.

And so, what is becoming of God? The little guy that Sunday morning got it exactly right: presents, which we celebrate in simple and familiar stories: about an unexpected and untimely pregnancy; about a father’s generosity in seeking to shelter his beloved from shame; about dreams that offer generous solutions to such human quandaries; about shepherds at their posts being summoned by angels as witnesses to wonder, and magi guided by a star to the cradle of a “king.” Herod of course, an unreconstructed literalist, will get it all wrong, as we also will if we forget that the greatest gifts are often what we least expect, and that generosity is the most powerful force for the good.

At the heart of the tales we are about to hear in the days ahead lies the simple announcement Joseph receives in a dream: “Don’t be afraid!” and, when it’s time to say what it all means, to name it quite simply: “God-is-with-us.”

Presents, or presence: does it really matter after all? Aren’t these finally one and the same, if we have a poet’s eyes to see and a lover’s ears to hear? This Christmas, in our giving and in our receiving, that little boy’s outburst of unintended wisdom might guide us, as will the ancient stories we’ll soon read and hear again. As with the gesture of a child’s birth, which ministers from pulpits all around the world will again proclaim as the most unexpected and desired of God’s presents (presence), we too might be offering “Jesus” in our giving. You know, the one whose name is the best of gifts, the presence that means: “I’m with you.” “Don’t be afraid!” “I’m sorry!” “I love you!” Incarnation: God be-coming among us, again and again.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School

Advent vigil

Advent is a season when we pray for God’s coming among us, with an audacity that borders on the absurd. God, coming here and now? It all seems a most unlikely expectation, now as "then" in a forlorn corner of the Roman Empire, Bethlehem. What is it that this season re-minds us of, in its call to watch and wait, to keep vigil? What does it mean, in Advent, that we find ourselves as a people shaped by the hope of this may-be-coming? It means at least this: that Advent invites us to discover once again that primal posture of receptivity, to open our hearts and minds to a coming we cannot know how to expect – and one that may interrupt us inconveniently, as happened to the simple shepherds in the ancient story we will hear once again this year. Keeping vigil? Waiting and listening for God’s be-coming among us? Could we find a posture of heart more out of keeping with the frenzy of this season, more counter-cultural than this?

But perhaps this is precisely the point.

T. S. Eliot once wrote that "time and the bell have buried the day." But the problem facing us is of a different magnitude, taking forms of busyness the poet could not have imagined. Most of us hardly hear the sound of bells anymore, though we are hurried (and the day buried) by other sounds: mostly the electronic music of cell phones, with their exotic and enticing rings sounding from our pockets and purses. The crowd of people pushing through the store aisles, vying for coveted parking spaces near the mall, haggard in their hurry, often with phones pressed to their ears or "Bluetooth" devices strapped to their ears; workers and tourists and shoppers crowding the busy sidewalks of Boston, as in every other city I suppose, their eyes glazed with purpose as they set themselves to the task of buying and preparing for the relentless coming of Christmas: is this an appropriate cradle for a season of waiting, of quiet expectation? Hardly imaginable, and usually far from our experience.

The carols of this season, perhaps more effectively than the fervent and sincere pulpit oratory of pastors and priests, interrupt the madness and call us toward a different vigil. One line of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" often sounds in my mind this season, re-minding me that whatever else incarnation means, it has to do with how "the hopes and fears of all the years/are met in Thee." With poetic license, we might learn to sing these lines another way: “The hurry and the worry of all the years” – including this one – “are met in Thee” O Christ! Such songs invite us to celebrate Advent as a time of vigil, re-mind-ing us of what it means to wait and to hope for God’s be-coming-among-us.

O holy child of Bethlehem, descend on us we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.

Be born in us. . .today: we await God’s be-coming-among-us as a “presence” we long to know in the hopes and fears, in the hurry and worry, in the waiting and in the wondering of our years, all of them and this one. And so we keep vigil in this season, praying that God’s advent might happen not only then and there, in some past or future scenario, but now and here in the ordinary texture of our living – in our hopes as in our fears. Which is to say, in the absences that call forth our desire, and invite us toward this may-be-coming-of-God again. Emmanuel: God’s goodness revealed in our ordinary flesh; God’s beauty veiled in our broken human love; God’s truth found in the hurried pressures of this season and in the interrupting joys of song and of silence. Advent vigil even here, even now. Audacious? Yes. Absurd. Surely so. And, too, as true as the deepest arc of our longing.

Mark S. Burrows
Professor of the History of Christianity and
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church, Boston

[A longer version of this Advent meditation can be found in a longer article of mine, published as "Vigils and the Rest" in the current issue of the journal Weavings (November/December, 2007); it can be ordered at: www.weavings.org, or found in the ANTS library.]

Political Faith

A few days ago, I received a discount coupon from a vendor for use in their store. I’d not asked for this coupon, mind you, and was surprised to discover that it offered me a rather large discount on a future purchase – one I’d not intended to make, but now might. Such is the lure of a bargain! And it came from a bookstore, for Pete’s sake; they knew my weakness, no doubt because they are compiling a computerized record of my monetary sins of commission with each new transaction I’ve made there over recent years.

For some reason, I decided to read the fine print only to discover what I already knew: that the exclusions would take a long paragraph to enumerate, since it was invalid for “all electronics,” periodicals, gift cards, and even comics. (All of these must have a smaller profit margin than the standard book purchase.) But then, at the very bottom, came a curious piece of information: “Cash value: .01 cent. Not redeemable for cash.”

What was I to make of this, that something could have cash value, if admittedly of a negligible amount, and yet not be “redeemable”? What could have a stated cash value but be at the same time irredeemable for cash? It all seemed like a twisted logic which my small mind could not manage to decipher; numbering the angels dancing on the head of a pin made much more sense.

But perhaps that is the very point of it: that in the marketplace, something could have a value but not be redeemable for that value. This monetary fallacy seems a clear enough indictment of the current economy, since much that has some stated financial value may not be redeemable “for cash.” One thinks of the perilous housing market, or the rising mountain of national debt we are creating in order to fund (among other good things) the violent madness of war – all based on assumed values for which there may be no immediate or even foreseeable return of cash.

Anything theological here, I wondered? Is it plausible that God is in the business of making things that have a value – if, in this case, an admittedly unnoticeable one – which, however, are not finally redeemable? Perhaps this is an absurd analogy, and one that finally collapses under the weight of trivial comparison. But it did provoke me to think about redemption, and wonder if our inability to imagine it coming to some “other” – our enemies? those who threaten to hurt us, or have already done so? – has more to do with our own deficit of holy imagination than with the one we claim to be the giver of all life.

Perhaps we cannot imagine, in theoretical terms, putting a value (however small) on life and then claiming that it is not redeemable. Our toleration of “death row,” looking away from this administration’s public sanctioning of torture under the ruse of calling it “alternate methods of interrogation,” our building of walls to keep future immigrants out: these tolerations, at least, give the lie to such a presumption.

And, perhaps, such incongruities should encourage us to resist, as an act of faith in this all-redeeming God, such measures – if, that is, we trust the “minority report” in scripture and in the church’s tradition, one that will not give way to the louder (majority) voice calling for vengeance, punishment, and even annihilation for the “enemy” (see Deut. 20. 17 ff. – and, for Canaanites, read in the updated parlance: Palestinians). “You have heard that it was said. . ., but I say to you”: yes, faith is this unavoidably political, or it is not faith in the God of Jesus but in some other deity (the god of national security, executive privilege, or convenient greed).

The choice is ours: we can choose to succumb to the market madness, accept the violence undergirding the global commodity exchange, and support – in action or inaction, by sins of commission or omission – the revoking of even the stated value for those who have little enough to begin with, at least, in our eyes. Or we can choose to stand with Jesus and the prophets, with Julian and the mystics, and, yes, with Martin King and the activists, and remember the moral and political obligation for the vulnerable among us that calls us to love our neighbors with the same love we have for ourselves. One Love, in this one world.

Can we live in such a way that, with Jesus, we presume the redeemable value of every human being –friends and enemies alike, gifted as all are by the one God with life? And bearing, as we hear in The Text, nothing less than the divine image itself? And, if so, what else can we do but commit ourselves, in and beyond our churches, to incarnating this One Love rooted in Jesus’ vision of a new empire (“basileia”) – which is to come on earth as it apparently already is in heaven?

Faith is just this political, as is the question of redemption – which is to say, it has to do with how we relate to the real lives of all created in God’s image, enemy and friend alike. And, last I checked, there were no exemptions stated in The Book.

Mark S. Burrows
Professor of the History of Christianity and
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church

"Thy Kingdom come . . .on earth"

“. . . as it is in heaven”:  it is strange that so little is said, these days, about heaven, a theme that lies at the heart of the prayer we call “The Lord’s.”  At least, this seems to be so among the mainline churches, remaining a staple of the religious vocabulary in the fundamentalist churches as the meek counterpoint to the strongly leveraged threats of hell.  But in our sort of churches, heaven rarely makes an appearance, aside from the occasional hymn, the creeds if we are in places that voice these, and the wandering diet of the lectionary readings.  Despite such mentionings, heaven is a theme seldom heard from the pulpits, swept into the silent margins of the generally unspoken.

But there is something in the human imagination that refuses this silence, and poets among us seem not to have noticed our dis-ease.  They continue to think and write about heaven – along with those other boundaries where words fail and the imagination must finally rise to do its work.

So it is in one of Czeslaw Milosz’s poems, “How It Should Be in Heaven,” included in a marvelous collection entitled Unattainable Earth (1986).  It begins with a bold claim:

            How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there.
            By its river.  Listening to its birds.
            In its season:  in summer, shortly after sunrise.
            I would get up and run to my thousand works
            And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination...

The poem goes on, enticingly, but this first sounding of what it means to create our lives through the lure of imagination should not go unnoticed – and not least in the pulpit, since it is one of the hungers that brings many of us back week by week into the silent, waiting pews – avid to hear a word that lifts us from the unimagined ordinary, one that might lure us to abandon the flat and merely managed world.

A century earlier, Emily Dickinson envisioned redemption as a life of dwelling “in Possibility,”

            A fairer House than Prose –
            More numerous of Windows –
            Superior – for Doors –

and went on to speak of the poet’s vocation as one of

            . . . spreading wide [her] narrow Hands
            To gather paradise.

Indeed, heaven is a steady theme in her verse, which often yields to such “possibility” against the rational arguments against.  We hear her working this out in a poem which begins with a question:

            Which is best?  Heaven –
            Or only Heaven to come
            With that old Codicil of Doubt?

By which she means, in the first line, the “heaven” already edging into our lives, an epiphany of the possible for those with “eyes to see” what is already among us and not defer to what may (or may not) be beyond death’s margin.  Is this simply the confused wonderings of a housebound recluse who rarely strayed in her latter years into the public view but kept to her room and the enclosure of her garden?  She goes on:

            . . . I cannot help esteem

            The “Bird within the Hand”
            Superior to the one
            The “Bush” may yield me
            Or may not –
            Too late to choose again.

Or, again:

            Who has not found the Heaven – below –
            Will fail of it above –
            For Angels rent the House next our’s,
            Wherever we remove –

And, in another:

            Heaven is so far of the Mind
            That were the Mind dissolved –
            The site – of it – by Architect
            Could not again be proved –

            ‘Tis vast – as our Capacity –
            As fair – as our idea –
            To Him of adequate desire
            No further ‘tis, than here.

She seems to be saying, with the allurement of art’s invitation:  don’t wait to choose until it is too late.  Seize this day, in all its yet unrevealed ordinariness.  Look around, and especially at what lies close to hand.  Choose to inhabit your life by paying particular attention to what you can see of beauty, mercy, goodness – and offer this as a gift for others.  The alternative may not be hell exactly, but it may well be experienced as an indifference to the possibilities of change and growth, for us and for others, and result in a lethargy no longer capable of living into or out of a larger imagination.

For us her readers “of adequate desire,” there is still time, she is saying.  It is not too late to inhabit our lives as if it they were vessels of the sacred, as if we could like the children live from enchantment precisely in the midst of the ordinary.  How might we live in “Possibility”?  By opening ourselves to wonder in the face of the terrible burden of our own inhumanity; by refusing to be silent in the face of fear; by finding the courage to keep pointing to life against the forces of death.

Our “capacity” is what lies in question, not some metaphysical geography we can neither locate nor finally prove.  Heaven is still for us an imaginable world in our midst, at least for all who know – as the Belle of Amherst put it in one of her exquisite two-liners – that

            Not “Revelation” – ‘tis – that waits,
            But our unfurnished eyes –

Where are we to look for heaven, then, but “on earth”?  The poets keep telling us this, in echo to Jesus’ words and ways.  And perhaps what the Nazarene calls the kingdom of heaven may be just like this, here and now, a reality “owned by the imagination,” one which is ours to choose (or not).  Given the alternative, even if “the site of it” cannot be proved, I’d say living as if it is already among us is worth the wager.  For as Milosz puts it,

                                    . . . how could the mind
            Stop its hunt, if from the Infinite
            It takes enchantment, avidity, promise?


            Mark S. Burrows
            Professor of the History of Christianity and
            Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church

Fire

Jeremiah 23:29: "Is not my word like fire?"

Luke 12:49: "I have come to bring fire to the earth."

Have you heard about a book called "The Gospel of Thomas"? In 1945,
archaeologists found a copy of a text in Egypt that goes by the above title. The Gospel of Thomas consists entirely of proverbs by and teachings of Jesus; there are no stories in it. Did Jesus actually say any, some, or all of the sayings recorded in the Gospel of Thomas? I don't know. I wasn't there.

Some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are identical to things attributed to Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But there are many sayings in the Gospel of Thomas that do not occur in the canonical Gospels. Did Jesus say any of them? I can't say. But one of the verses unique to the Gospel of Thomas seems so true to the Jesus I carry in my imagination that I can believe, or want to believe, that Jesus said it.

Gospel of Thomas, verse 82: "Whoever is near me is near the fire."

What is the difference between sentimentality and love? Love knows it will have to do through the fire.

What is the difference between wishful thinking and hope? Hope takes into account the fire.

What is the difference between good intentions and good faith? Faithfulness hangs in there through the fire.

An authentic encounter with the Divine burns.

Because an encounter with the truth exposes what is fake. An encounter with beauty exposes what is unseemly. An encounter with deep reality exposes what is shallow about so much of our lives.

Spirit of the Living God, stir us, seal us, and sear us for service in Jesus' name.

Gregory Mobley
Professor of Christian Bible

Academic Convocation Prayer, Fall 2007

Hidden Singer,
who teaches the birds their melodies
and whispers tunes into the ears of musical geniuses,
Come by here.
So that we might hear your harmony and live with hope.

O Creator of the world that is "very good"
and from whom everything that is beautiful and true issues,
today you might hear us use the word "best."
O Ancient of Days,
today you might hear us use the word "oldest."
O You who morning by morning renews with world with new mercies,
today you might hear us use words like "latest," "greatest," and "avant
garde."

Look with compassionate indulgence upon our enthusiasms,
upon our outlandish academic robes and exaggerated rhetoric.
They are merely expressions of our gratitude for being alive and for
having a mission.

We ask only
that you teach us to grow in love,
and that you teach us how to live even a single day without oppressing
someone else,
and that you help us do some little thing in the spirit of Jesus,
in whose name we pray.
Amen.

Gregory Mobley
Professor of Old Testament

You Are What You Desire

. . .which is the message, implicit or brazen, that drives the advertising machinery of the modern "surplus" economy. But what it if were also true that our identity is essentially shaped, for better or worse, by the nature not primarily of our desires but rather of our desiring? As we grow older and perhaps wiser, we come to see that the most important existential questions * despite our untutored moral instincts * are generally not about what it is that we desire, but rather how we desire * which is another way of saying, toward what ends we desire as we do, and how these ripen and "grow" us if we practice becoming accurate readers of our lives, faithful interpreters of ordinary attitudes and deeds as the pathway toward nobler aspirations and acts.

This afternoon, I found myself sitting at a trendy café on Newbury Street. It was one of those magnificent late summer days, and I had an hour to spend over a great coffee with a fascinating new book on aesthetics * the bliss of sabbatical, when one has time to read and think about new things! But as often happens at such places, I found myself the unwitting partner in the flow of conversations at tables near mine: at one, an older woman was telling her friend, in breathless delight, of her adventures of being pursued by a young artist during her recent vacation in France; at another, two young women chatted with studied nonchalance about their prowess as shoppers amid the allure of late-summer sales; at a third, a gathering of disgruntled men were voicing the fragile hopes of Red Sox Nation. All were speaking, unknowingly, of what Plato described in his dialogue Symposium as "eros," that ambivalent force of desire that lives in us as the offspring of Plenty and Want. The god of love who shapes, through our desires, who it is we are and who we are becoming.

The poet Sappho put it this way: "Some say a marshaling of horsemen, others, soldiers on the march, and others still say that a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth. I say it is what you love." Such a claim seems reasonable enough, if the "object" of our love has an essential nobility, or ennobles us and others as a result. But could one say this of erotic adventures in the dark alleys of Marseilles, the exploits of affluent shoppers at Gucci on Newbury Street, or the October aspirations of the Fenway faithful? Such a claim seems inappropriately intended, if not outrageously wrong.

But perhaps we should think again, and consider Socrates' discussion of eros more closely. Our desires usually do begin with the mundane, with the ordinary pleasures of attraction to what or whom we think of as beautiful, and from these we might work our way up: toward seeing beauty in things or persons for whom we have no claim of possession or affection, and on to the pursuit of a life devoted to "birthing in beauty," as Socrates puts it, thereby learning to give ourselves to those virtues that nurture greater wellbeing for others. In so doing, we outgrow the limits of our immediate and unformed desires * for designer jeans that might appear to some as a bargain at $200, an unexpected tryst with an amorous partner, or the delights experienced in the demise of the Yankees * and recognize these as possible means to nobler personal and, yes, political ends.

Jesus seemed on to what Socrates is all about in this dialogue, embodying in his actions as in his words that the "least" as well as the greatest are "pregnant" in the capacity to create beautifully in this world * but not all are equally aware of this, and it is often enough the "least" who seem most susceptible to accepting the outrageous invitation of such a claim. What, after all, do they have to lose? We see it in Jesus' refusal to disdain ordinary things or marginal people; in his courage in accepting the embraces of a woman bent to anoint him with costly ointments; in his changing water into wine when the barrels had run dry; and, in all such occasions, his radical vision in seeing God's reign on earth as having everything to do with embracing the realm of everyday desires as the occasions for imagining and embodying the creative work of God * on earth, here and now, in the ordinary texture of our lives. Jesus' servant life reminds us that desire is rarely simple, and never simply what it seems to be. His words and acts suggest that it may also be the place where we * and, others * confront our essential capacity for acting nobly toward others, even if this means breaking the "law" (Lk. 14. 1 * 6). This radical insight structures his upside-down, inside-out ethics, and explains not only why but how it is that the "last" rather than the "first" are often better able to embrace the pressures required for such change. Nothing less than conversion of soul lies at the heart of Jesus' aesthetics.

Perhaps the beautiful is constituted by what it is that we love, if we come to understand love as a journey that invites us to bring healing amidst the broken shards of despair and desire, loneliness and longing, within and all around us. At the beginning, it is surely true: we are . . . what we love. Yet as we grow in the grace we find in following this Jesus, we might also learn to change and grow, not only for what it is that we love but particularly in the how of it all.

Professor Mark S. Burrows
September, 2007

Buried Bibles

May 31, 1934: On that day, seventy-three years ago, a group of lay persons and pastors gathered in a city in northwestern Germany named Barmen, and signed a statement of faith drafted by the young theologian Karl Barth. In the opening lines of what came to be called the "Barmen Declaration," this confession declared obedience to Christ as the standard requiring resistance to Hitler and the National Socialist Party (Nazis). In some ways, it was a day like any other: many people shopping in the outdoor market near the church, others going about their work, perhaps noticing a gathering of Christians for a "Synod" meeting in the Gemarke Church.

But this was a gathering that was to have momentous importance for the resistance struggle: In the first article of this "confession," the signers declared their faith in "Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, [as] the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death," and went on to "reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God's revelation." The battle lines were clearly drawn, such language being a clear renunciation of Hitler and the "Third Reich". In the months and years that followed, most of the leaders of this "Confessing Church", as it came to be called, paid a heavy price for this allegiance: harassment, imprisonment, and in many cases execution. A seminary was born that year, to nurture future ministers in this church movement; although eventually closed by the Nazis, it reopened in 1945 as the "Kirchliche Hochschule," the seminary I have the privilege to serve as Guest Professor during this "Summer Semester ".

On the same day this year, I found myself invited to join a group of Christians to meet the President of the "new" synagogue in Barmen, built five years ago on property given by the Rhineland church and adjoining the Gemarke Church which had been the site of this synod. The two synagogues in Wuppertal, or "Valley of the Wupper River," the larger city encompassing the towns nestled along this river, were destroyed as were almost all the synagogues in Germany, on November 9, 1938 (by German reckoning, the infamous Krystall-Night of "9/11" since Europeans reverse days and months by American standards * when they hear Americans speaking of this date, it inevitably recalls this obscene incident of Nazi terror). A small group of Jews who returned to the city having escaped the Nazi death hunt established a synagogue in the mid-1960s, with some fifty members by 1990. In the last ten years, the numbers have grown exponentially because of the significant immigration of Soviet Jews to Germany in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with a membership now exceeding several thousand. The situation is not without significant complications, of course, since many of these recent immigrants brought with them only dim memories of their religious faith because of generations of Soviet suppression and persecution. But it is an inspiring story of religious renewal, and a testimony of human courage in the face of evil.
The president of the synagogue took special pride in showing us this beautiful new building and was particularly keen to bring out two old Torah scrolls, the only artifacts from the original synagogues to survive the Holocaust. "When the Nazis took power, we buried them in the Jewish cemetery, in a coffin," he told us, "hoping they would escape notice and survive the violence." Only after the war did a group of survivors return to Barmen in order to exhume the coffin and recover their treasured scripture scrolls. With a twinkle in his eyes, he suggested that the story reminds us that even Jews know something of the resurrection of the dead * and these scrolls, together with the life and vitality of this reestablished synagogue, seemed to me something of a miracle of biblical proportions. As I left, I could not help but reflect upon Jesus' brooding promise, as recorded in John's gospel: "Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (Jn. 12. 24) * a resurrection harvest, indeed!

3 June 2007
Professor Mark Burrows
currently guest professor at the "Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal"

Prayer of Dedication for the new Wilson Chapel

May 18, 2007

(People spread out from ends of rows to touch walls and hold hands with others)

O God, this hour we call upon you anew
In this place:
Father, Word and Holy Spirit;
Mother, Wisdom, Breath of Fire;

You who spoke in light to frame the worlds,
And meet us in their wonder,
wonder at what we understand and wonder at what we do not;
You who dove to the depths of manger and of cross
To bear the world of those you made,
And meet us in the face of Christ;
You who dwell by every heart,
The promised guest of every gathered two or three,
And meet us in our neighbor;
Who remake us in communion by communion,
You who are communion,
Draw near to us,
who have made this place to draw near to you.

Holy One, who dispose of every manner of appearing--- in earthquake, wind, and fire, still small voice and vision dreams---- keep the many appointments you have already made for this place, beginning now. Make us the first who will not leave these walls the same as we entered.

With our hands we touch the future,
This building that will be here when we are gone,
That will witness what we will not,
That will hold what we cannot imagine.
Blessed are those who will see what it will see.

Send your spirit to us, through us, now.
Send your spirit to us from that future.
Give us a foretaste of your glory.

Give us unity with those who will come,
That we may dedicate this place for their blessing
And the blessing of all those they will serve.

In the sweep of your time and your purpose
This place is but a passing tent of pilgrimage,
An arc of refuge.

But this we pray:
May your name always be hallowed here,
May the gospel of Christ always be heard here,
May the hope of your justice always be kindled here,

May the open face of this building be a window to the world you love,
that we may never turn away from seeing its suffering,
its need, and your tears.
May these walls be aged by prayer,
Steeped in song,
Tempered by grief and anger and joy,
Until the practice of your presence is a habit here
That bends the time, and space, and hearts of all who enter.

May everything that comes out of our classrooms, and studies, and homes and churches, everything in our school, be brought into and through the fire of this place,
Tried, refined, perfected and renewed to grow up into the fullness of your purpose, so in our generations we shall see yet much more of your wisdom, power, goodness and truth than we have known before.
Take this place. Make it yours. For Christ's sake. Amen.

S. Mark Heim
Samuel Abbott Professor of Christian Theology

Faith

When I was a child, we often visited our grandparents in the country. A river divided their mountain town into two sections. A swinging bridge united the two sections of that town, Oneida, Kentucky.

That swinging bridge terrified me. That ramshackle, jerry-rigged construction of cables and boards, swaying from side to side and undulating up and down in the wind above the South Fork of the Kentucky River, intimidated me. I tried to cross that bridge many times, but my knees always became paralyzed about the same place, five steps in, that the bridge commenced to sway.

Still, I dreamed about the other side of the swinging bridge. I imagined there a country store with exotic flavors of soda pop and varieties of penny candy that the vendors on this side could not supply.

I also dreamed that in that store a child was waiting for me, a child just my age: my ideal, best friend.

I know now what it is that spans the gap between my dreams and ideals and their realization. What is the risk, the price, the cost?

To get to the other side, you've got to cross a swinging bridge.

What is faith? Faith means having the courage to cross a swinging bridge.

Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament

A Reflection on the Book of Psalms as a Whole

I want you to imagine the entire Psalter as a single narrative, divided into 150 chapters.

It is the story of a human life. Maybe not any human life, but a particular life, a life in tune with the peculiar contradictions of life with God.

It is a life dominated by petition early, by request, by neediness. There are more psalms of petition and of lament in the first half of the Psalter than in the second half.

Throughout life, there is the rhythm of complaint and thanksgiving, the beat, in Charlie Rich's words, "of life's little ups and downs." Throughout the Psalter, the beat alternates between sentences of praise or thanksgiving, on the one hand, and of lament and petition, on the other hand.

There are big moments in the Psalter and in a human life: the breakdown of Psalm 51 ("For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me"), the crisis you brought on yourself; the wedding of Psalm 45 (bride: "You are the most handsome of men"; bridegroom: "[You are] bedecked . . . with gold-woven robes . . . with joy and gladness"); the bitter collapse that you didn't bring on from Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept").

Somewhere in life there is room for the joy of Torah, expressed in Psalm 119, but it takes a while to get there, and it takes the Psalter one hundred and eighteen poems to get there, to realize the joy of instruction, of a script, of the disciplines and structures that enable us to live in harmony, of the wise restraints that make us free.

Throughout there are moments of paranoia, as in so many of the psalms that express paralyzing fears of some enemy.

But how does the Psalter end? In the same way that we hope and pray our lives will end, in delight and praise, in, as Walter Brueggemann says, an affirmation, a "yes" to God that goes beyond thanks for services rendered.

The Psalter ends in a crescendo (Psalms 146-150). Some say that it is false, hyped, over-the-top, over-compensating. But I do not think that it is merely hollow musical dramatics, tinkling brass and clanging cymbals. You do not get to all the praise of these final psalms until you've lived through all passion and agony of the previous 145 psalms. It is the praise and delight and joy of those acquainted with grief, an autumnal, reflective, bittersweet joy and praise, a sober, clear-eyed, anything-but-naive "Yes" to life.

Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament

Love

This scientist had this theory, that there is a force in the universe that binds things together: proton to electron, moon to globe, and solar to system. It is a kind of cosmic gravity that pulls everything together. If there is an energy in the universe that impels separation, then the energy mentioned above is the elasticity that allows the accordion of our expanding universe to stay intact enough to make its music.

This scientist called this force "connectivity."

Connectivity hits every note on the scale of life. We have different words for it. Connectivity between peers we call friendship. Connectivity expressed genitally we call eros. Connectivity between mother and child, father and child? Call that maternal love or paternal love.

Connectivity between our physical bodies and food we call hunger.

On every level - physical, astronomical, social, biological, chemical - connectivity operates.

Alongside all these ties that bind the universe together, isn't there something else? A yearning and a pulling and a longing at the heart of everything for wholeness and harmony and union? The scientist didn't talk about this force.

I think we would call it Divine Love.

Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament

Gracenotes on Virginia Tech

Tuesday night, American Idol began with a somber word of condolence from Ryan Seacrest to the grieving members of the Virginia Tech community and to a nation baffled by the violence that took place there. He used the expression, "tragic events," without further explanation. That is all well and good: it is a family show, after all. And it's Ryan Seacrest, for heaven's sake.

But one is left to wonder about the best way to categorize and characterize such acts of inhuman cruelty as Sunday morning looms ahead of us.

Should we call the murder of 32 and the suicide of one "tragic" when the event was not accidental? Are words like "horrifying" or "unspeakable" too soft? Are combinations of such expressions*"unspeakably horrifying tragedy"*too hyperbolic?

What we have before us is a case where a person who was diagnosed to be mentally disturbed, and known to be deteriorating psychologically, gained access to weapons that never should have been within his reach. He did something so terrible that words do not suffice. We must, at times like these, rely on symbols that come from our traditions: Symbols that transcend words and capture our emotions so that we might begin to see the light of healing.

People look to churches and other faith communities to provide them with words, but words are not what we most deeply need in times like these. As Gilbert Bond stated in his Jonathan Edwards Society lecture here earlier this month, in the midst of trauma, we find recourse toward new life through the symbols that capture our pain and help us to break the cycle of trauma's silencing.

The prayer I pray for Virginia Tech fails to arrive at words. Therefore, I offer:
Cross.
Tomb.
Displaced stone.
Wonderment.
Scars on hands and feet that do not, will never, disappear.

Editors note:

Two members of the current ANTS student body, Andy Edwards and Debra Dunnington, are graduates of Virginia Tech. Keep them in your prayers.

Sarah B. Drummond
Assistant Professor of Ministerial Leadership & Director of Field Education

Prayer for Yom Ha-Shoah

The following prayer was used in an ANTS chapel service on April 17, 2007 where we remembered the Holocaust. Following this prayer, the assembled group from ANTS walked in silence to Berenson Hall of Hebrew College where we joined their community in a joint worship service.

"The Holocaust confronts us with unanswerable questions. But let us agree to one principle: no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."
Irving Greenberg, "The Shoah and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism, pp. 25-36 in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. (Boulder. Colorado: Westview, 2000).

(worship leader; congregation)

Let us pray,

Our Father, who art in heaven:

Remember the burning children.

Hallowed be Thy name,

Even if this blessing we direct toward Thee is voiced by the tongues of moral cowards who remained silent while they were burning children.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Among the many mansions of our Father's house, there is no crematorium for burning children.

Give us this day

The very day that was denied to the children and grandchildren of the burning children.

our daily bread.

The very bread that was never tasted by the children and grandchildren of the burning children.

And forgive us our trespasses

against the ancestors and descendants of the burning children.

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In the ledger book of atonement, there are no entries for those who did not live long enough to express the divine gift of freedom through trespass, such as the burning children.

Lead us not into temptation,

The temptation of imagining that we belong to a family that did not include, and would not participate in burning children.

but deliver us from evil.

The unspeakable evil of burning children.

For Thine is the kingdom,

"No earthly Reich or Reign or Empire has the authority of life and death," so echo the silent screams of the burning children.

and the power,

"And the power, die Macht, that makes free is surely that of love, not of work camps," protest the unheeded cries of the burning children.

and the glory forever.

Still: We dare to blend the strains of our praise, the faint embers of our faith, and the best of our feeble love in solidarity with the prayers, pleas, and laments of the burning children.

As we make now sacred pilgrimage from this holy place to another, let us walk in silent fellowship

with each other,

and with all our sisters and brothers on Institution Hill, Jew and Gentile,

and with the companions we vow to never forget, never again,

the burning children.

Gregory Mobley

Associate Professor of Old Testament