The Right Place at the Right Time

A Retrospective for the Winter 2023 issue of The Torch, Lee University’s Alumni Magazine

“That’s going to cost a lot,” I said to the woman on the other end of the line. I was standing in the kitchen of my mother-in-law’s house in Oroville, California. The woman had just asked me if I could fly out the next day for an interview in Cleveland, TN. I was referring to the airfare from Sacramento to Atlanta with one day’s notice.

“Well, it’s the only day for the next few weeks when we’re all here, and President Conn says if we get a faculty member out of it, it’ll be okay.”

On June 30, 1995, my birthday, Carolyn Dirksen offered me the job of assistant professor of communication at Lee College.

On December 31, 2022, twenty-seven and a half years later, my time at Lee University drew to an end.

The following brief retrospective is a bottle in which the genie of all that time will have to fit.

So many memories, so many pivotal moments, so many amazing colleagues, and so many fascinating students over the years…these cannot be fully captured, even were I to write a book-length memoir for those years.

I think of working with Joel Kailing and Michael Laney almost from day one to stitch together a coherent Communication major with which a growing host of seniors could complete their degrees. The three of us had maybe three years of full-time teaching between us, but we managed with the help of more experienced colleagues in the Language Arts Department. And a backlog of seniors walked across the commencement stage the following May.

I think of the first year of the Communication Arts Department and serving as its chair the same year. The communication major was, for several years running, the fastest growing academic program at the university. Now there’s a beautiful Communication Arts building and so much more to work with than we ever even dreamed of in those early days when we moved programs from house to house one step ahead of the bulldozers.

Robert Herron, Paul Conn, and Matthew Melton admiring the new design of the student newspaper

I think of the close-knit ranks of student editors during my decade of running intense editorial meetings. “What needs to be on page one? Why do you think that merits being there? What’s your design concept for the issue? Who’s going to care and why?” Over and over again. I think of leaning over the shoulders of yearbook page designers as they nervously showed me their latest spreads. “Do you think those images play off of each other well? Is the text too overshadowed?”

I think of the Kairos Scholars Honors Program and 13 years guiding those extraordinary students, most often just nudging them here and there, introducing them to mentors and the best that Lee has to offer, reading books alongside them (unpacking them in sometimes irreverent ways), taking students to conferences, concerts, and plays and even to other countries. One dark night driving back from an event we got so heavily engaged in a topic that none of us in the vehicle realized we had been sitting at a stop sign in the middle of nowhere for several minutes.

Those and other alumni from the many classes I have taught, thousands of students in all, have become attorneys, entrepreneurs, PR/marketing/communication professionals—at least two of them are highly published journalists. Two are on Lee University’s Board of Directors. Others became city council members, school board members, public servants, diplomats, legislators, radio personalities, bankers, financiers, corporate executives, data scientists, artificial intelligence technologists, medical professionals, insurance providers, non-profit executives, directors of orphanages, elementary and secondary school educators, higher education administrators and faculty members (some at Lee), artists, actors, musicians (I’m looking at you, Jordan Smith), ministers, therapists, and intrepid mothers and fathers investing the bulk of their lives to their growing families. For some of these our time intersected in just one class, but even in those comparatively brief moments lasting relationships can and did develop.

In one capstone class we were talking about some of the issues facing Christians living in a complex and sometimes corrupt world. One student raised his hand and said, “I see what you’re saying, but how do these things get fixed? How can these things ever change?”

I paused for a second, then looked around the room. “You. You go out from here and you change things. That’s how it happens.” And that is exactly how it is happening as they fulfill their callings with the gifts God gave them. It’s a beautiful thing.

Graduating students have their lives before them. For many faculty at Lee University, the festive day when students turn their tassels and toss their caps in the air is a day of mingled joy and sadness. We hide our sadness in order to wish them well, but in many cases, those mentoring relationships we value so highly move into mutual respect and friendship. We cannot but privately grieve a little. But we say farewell three times each year after having shared a journey that typically lasts more than a thousand days. It’s not as easy as it may appear to push their boats from the collegial shore to sail away on their own.

I think of the Global Perspectives Program, with which I was involved for 25 of my 27 years, supervising it for 16 of those years, working with people like the program’s redoubtable architect Richard Jones, with a wonderful faculty committee, and with the supremely competent director, Angeline McMullin.

I think of Ecuador in the year 2000 with José Minay, my wife Leslie, my son Nicholas … and 42 students. On that five-week odyssey, some of us were tear-gassed, some were shot at, some saw a bull win a bullfight. Our tour bus got a flat tire switch-backing up an Andean mountainside; we were hurled breathlessly from the same mountaintop by a sudden fierce downpour; the bus then crashed on the way down, raining shattered glass over half of us (no injuries). My five-year-old son was attacked by a monkey in the rain forest. Many of us got food poisoning, but our perseverance was rewarded as we rushed gloriously down the turbulent Napo River atop balsa rafts fashioned by native guides on the spot. I think fondly of a long conversation in a sun-drenched courtyard with Glenn Bolin on that trip. Glenn was tragically taken by COVID on the last day of 2020.

With UK Semester students and the Mayor of Bath

I think of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, which I visited many times, showing students where C.S. Lewis did this or that, said this or that, tossing in a Tolkien reference here and there, guiding night walks through deserted streets, our footfalls loud in the lamplit, cobblestone back alleys flanked by stone walls older than our nation. I stop the group: “Listen for a few heartbeats. That quietness … it’s Time standing still. Soak in it for a bit.”

I think of hundreds of miles of highways in company with hundreds of students and the inimitable Andy Sinclair, of thawing out with him and his wife Cath beside a glowing hearth, hot drinks in hand after seeking refuge from a driving snow, or of watching a Premier League match with them at St. James Park in Newcastle, or of enjoying a quiet Mediterranean meal in Milan. Three times I have trudged the windy Hadrian’s Wall with the man whose office is located in a tiny town called Haltwhistle.

I think of the many icons at Lee University who had such a profound impact on me, legendary figures like Paul Conn, Ollie Lee, Don Bowdle, Bob O’Bannon. I think of swapping funny stories with Jean Eledge, Penny Mauldin, and Evaline Echols in the back of a horse-drawn wagon in rural Tennessee. Those eminent women taught me so much.

Carolyn Dirksen mentored me as an administrator, and we partnered on so many great things that became part of the fabric of the institution. And her husband Murl Dirksen taught me what it was to be a Christian.

In my 17 years as a dean with its six departments, as many as 90 full-time faculty, the general education core, a few dozen major programs, and well over 2000 students, I came to realize that Lee’s College of Arts & Sciences was larger than most private colleges and even some universities in the Appalachian College Association. And while working with students brought me the greatest joy, even in my capacity as dean, the sheer pleasure of teaming with great colleagues brought great personal rewards. Over the 17 years I worked with a dozen different people in the role of department chair and a great many faculty in a host of different roles. My office assistants have all been wonderful, each in their own way, keeping me on task and saying things like, “Are you skipping the meeting on your calendar right now on purpose?”

My time with my colleagues is the kind of ordinary time I will miss most as I move on, and my memories with them are the most poignant.

How could I forget that conversation about our favorite students with Cliff Schimmels in the baseball bleachers or the random chat with Charles Beach in a forgotten upper corner office of the Walker Building?

I dined on cuy (guinea pig of unusual size) high in the Andes with José Minay. I interviewed filmmakers of the Chinese cultural revolution and walked the Great Wall with Xiaoxing Yu in Beijing. I navigated the Circus Maximus in Rome and watched dance rituals in the Cherokee Qualla Boundary with Randy Wood. I pulled apart screaming travel guides in Bruges, Belgium with John Simmons. I gazed in silent awe at the Peace Wall murals in West Belfast with Eric Moyen. I discovered a revered former professor’s burial site with Jared Waelfaert in catacombs beneath the Basilica di San Clemente. I crested Mount Subasio in Assisi with Jordan Holt. I delved into the tunnels of an Olmec pyramid with Jason Ward in Mexico. I enjoyed the recitations of Lear, Hamlet and Caesar’s ghost in Atlanta and Montgomery with Susan Rogers. I searched for catfish po’boys in New Orleans with Jayson Van Hook. I escaped Alcatraz with Ron Gilbert and admired Red Rock Canyon with Jeff Salyer. I have enjoyed enough lunches with Paul DeLaLuz at Las Margaritas in Cleveland, TN to own part of the franchise by now.

I could easily mention so many more, but space does not permit. I leave Lee University enormously grateful for the freedom I was given to play in such a magnificent sandbox, to make so many lifelong friendships, and to feel that I might have made some little positive difference in people’s lives. What an honor it has been.

“This is the Way:” Moral Law and Selective Skepticism. Comments on The Abolition of Man, Chapter Two, by C.S. Lewis

February 22, 2022, UTC University Center

The delivered lecture (has some unfortunate audio issues) is available on YouTube here.

I want to begin by thanking the good people at the Christian Study Center in the person of David Beckmann for the opportunity to be with you tonight. It is truly an honor to be here, and I come to you, lo these many miles, from Cleveland, TN, where, as you’ve heard already, I serve in the unenviable capacity as a college dean, an administrator whose opportunities to dabble in scholarship, my first love, come few and far between. So, from my heart, thank you for this all too rare moment of liberation from the sometimes Promethean aspects of administration. I don’t mean to suggest that faculty or students are pecking at my liver, but sometimes, you know….

If you have not had a chance to see the first lecture in this series from last month by Dr. Kody Cooper, I believe it’s available on David Beckmann’s YouTube channel, and I highly recommend taking the 30 minutes or so to watch that one as well. I am looking forward to the lecture following mine on Chapter Three of The Abolition of Man by Dr. Hampton

Which brings us again to tonight and my presence among you. If you are wondering who the heck I am and why you’ve never heard of me, never fear, I’m over here asking myself the same thing (who is this guy?) I have a modest handful of publications in my academic career–none about CS Lewis–but I do have the distinction, if you can call it that, of having taught a course on Lewis every year, a couple of times a year, for the past twelve years or so. As part of that course, I have visited Oxford in the UK many times, paying almost annual homage to the shrine of The Kilns, Lewis’ Oxford home, which is where I met David, even meditating at the CS Lewis Nature Reserve, which is what they now call the pond where Jack and Warnie sometimes paddled about in a little boat, and sitting quietly in the “Lewis pew” at the quaint Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry. I’ve done all the Lewis fan-boy tours of Oxford and Cambridge, visited his colleges; I’ve even made the all-important pilgrimage to the Wade Center at Wheaton College where these very hands have handled (with gloves, of course) some of the precious volumes that adorned Lewis’ shelves. I’ve met, conversed with, had coffee, tea, and/or lunch with several well-published Lewisian scholars, but I dare not drop any names here.

By way of announcement, and the timing really could not be better, I will have a Lewis related publication as of tomorrow. I was asked last year to be part of a symposium on The Syndicate Network, which is dedicated to the introduction of new titles in Theology, Literature, Philosophy and Biblical Studies. One such new title, The Fame of C.S. Lewis, by Dr. Stephanie Derrick, is under discussion for the next three weeks, and my essay response will be published tomorrow, along with Dr. Derrick’s response to my response. Mine accompanies responses by Dr. George Marsden, the famed Notre Dame historian, and Dr. Alicia Broggi, a literature scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University. She also co-hosts a podcast on books appropriately called Literate. I do recommend Derrick’s book, which contains some fantastic new material regarding the astonishing phenomenon that is the C.S. Lewis brand, especially in the United States.

And, of course, it is exactly that brand that brings us to this series of lectures.

My task this evening is to take a look at Chapter Two of C.S. Lewis’ classic work The Abolition of Man. Here I must pause to say that, yes, I will indeed have reason to mention Disney’s The Mandalorian before the end of the lecture. So, if that’s the only reason you came tonight, hang tight. We will get there.

I’m not going to repeat the great information shared by Dr. Cooper in the first lecture on the standing of this book as one of the most influential works of its kind in the twentieth century. A simple Internet search of the title will show you a couple of things. One, as a text, it’s kind of a big deal. Two, scholars of all stripes are still weighing in on it, as we are in these lectures.

Another thing you might discover is that not everyone reacts to this book the same way. I have been teaching it for over a decade, and I can never predict student responses. Some love it. Some do not. And that’s fine either way.

Let’s begin with one very famous American’s reaction to the book. Not published until 1995, but probably originating in the late 1940s, we have the response of none other than Ayn Rand to Lewis’ classic text. Ayn Rand was a contemporary of Lewis’s and, you will remember, is often cited as the mother of American libertarianism. It’s possible that her ideas have leaked into that particular brand of individualism that characterizes many cherished American ideals. You will recognize her as the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, two monumental works of political fiction.

In her copy of Abolition, Rand underlined many passages and festooned the margins with exclamation points, question marks and illuminating commentary featuring such lines as, “The old fool!” “The abysmal bastard!” “The abysmal scum.” “The abysmal caricature posing as a gentleman and a scholar.” “The incredible, medieval monstrosity!” and “The cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity!” There’s worse than that, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that Rand did not much care for the book. Astonishingly, toward the end, she calls Lewis out for making an ad hominem argument, which, in debate terms, means that he was calling people names!

Now, I’ve read Abolition a half-dozen times, and have taught from it more times than that. I went ahead and read it again for this lecture. And I have a confession to make. I cannot say with absolute certainty that I fully understand it.

Many of my students have had the same response, and, like a good professor, I lead them to resources that may serve to illuminate them, and I provide such explanations as I can, but there it is. I doubt that I am alone. Many of us, even the scholars among us, when we encounter some of Lewis’ more academic writings, find ourselves in the same position as a young colleague of his, John Walsh, when Lewis first moved over to Cambridge University in 1954 after 29 years at Oxford. In trying to have a conversation with Lewis, Walsh noted that,

“Lewis seemed not only to have read everything, but to have remembered it as well; if one quoted – say – an obscure bit of Calvin, as likely as not he would continue or complete the quotation. He was the best-read man I have ever met, almost too well read…he would throw off lines of Euripides, not at all with the intention of displaying his learning, but in the simple, optimistic belief that everyone had ranged across European literature from Homer to Kipling as he had done.” (John Walsh, Reminiscences, Magdalene College Magazine and Record, 34)

One gets the same sense when reading Lewis, and you find yourself asking, “Is Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum really something I am supposed to have read? Or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas?” At moments like these, we can all be thankful for people like Michael Ward and Arend Smilde, who have put in so much time and energy making Lewis’s more or less obscure references accessible to the reader. If you haven’t had a chance to look at After Humanity, Ward’s wonderful new commentary with expansive notes on The Abolition of Man, I cannot recommend it to you highly enough. This is not a commercial or a paid sponsorship. We should all be willing to acknowledge hard work and solid research, and Ward never disappoints in this regard. If he should chance to hear about this, maybe he can treat me to some good old English tea and scones next time I’m in Oxford.

Let’s go ahead and summarize the chapter, after which I’d like to take a page out of Rowan Williams’ treatment of That Hideous Strength, also by C.S. Lewis, in which he discussed what he felt were some weaknesses and problems of the book, then concluded with what he felt were its strengths.

Lewis begins the chapter right off with a pretty damning statement for the authors of The Green Book, which, of course, we now know to be Messrs. King and Ketley and their villainous book was called The Control of Language, a text meant for high schoolers in 1939. Lewis’ lecture response was given in 1942. Note the years. They are squarely within the context of the eruption of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the subsequent war. Both the book by King & Ketley and the one by Lewis are in many ways products of their time, a fact that is important for us to remember. King & Ketley in the introductory material for their book are deeply concerned about the uses of propaganda in their lifetimes and earnestly wish to help high school students learn to detect and avoid the deceptive uses of language. Control the language; don’t let the language control you. That is their stated purpose.

But, in applying their purpose, they make statements about language, derived largely from the thought of I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden (more on them later), that over-stress, to Lewis’ mind, the subjective nature of the connections between language and meaning. And in doing so, they elevate the idea that language cannot really convey anything meaningful about values or virtues because, says Lewis of K&K, statements of value and/or virtue are statements about things that aren’t there. They aren’t real. Lewis says all this, as Dr. Cooper noted in his lecture, in Chapter One.

So then, in Chapter Two, Lewis begins by telling us what he really thinks. Imagine Lewis’ imposing, booming voice ringing against the walls of the physics lecture hall at King’s College in Newcastle: “The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.”

Okay. Wow, Jack. Thanks for coming.

He then proceeds to suggest, a little along the lines of Mark Antony calling Brutus’ an honorable man in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, that Gauis and Titius (King & Ketley) probably have the best of motives, and if they had just thought things through, they would realize that you can’t argue against the existence of values without having a sense of values. It’s one of Lewis’ favorite “gotchas,” used often, admittedly to very good effect. You’ll find the argument at the very beginning of Mere Christianity as well. Lewis goes on to elaborate that those who want to debunk something can often be debunked using their own tools. They are critical skeptics, but their skepticism stops when it comes to their own personal shibboleths, their own marketplace idols, their own ideals. Were they to apply their skepticism a little more broadly, they might see how inconsistent they are.

Lewis launches in at length about what happens if you apply K&K’s thought to the widely accepted virtuous ideal of sacrificing for one’s country, of laying one’s life on the line for one’s friends. If now you’re thinking of Star Wars in the person of Obi Wan Kenobi, you’d be on the right track. If you can hear the Mandalorian, facing a score of enemies to protect little Grogu and saying, “This is the Way,” you’re very close to Lewis’ mark. Lewis claims that you cannot praise the dying hero’s action with any integrity or even any meaning if the underlying virtue and value of the heroic has no connection to an objective truth, to a reality in which such crucial values see a reflection in our often poor attempts to express. For Lewis, this argument is open and shut, and it pretty squarely does for K&K’s nonsense as far as he is concerned. Like the samurai hero who has struck the mortal blow to his foe and kneels with his back turned, Lewis is ready to move on.

He moves on then to a discussion of why basic human instinct cannot be at the root of the human sense of values and virtues. He was responding to arguments being made in his lifetime about the possible source of values and virtues in humanity. But instinct, for Lewis, is part of the animal nature of humanity. Here is where his reading in Medieval and Renaissance literature shows through clearly. The classics across the board are all agreed on this point, and the Greek and Roman philosophers as well, that when the human behaves like an animal, bad things happen, man. Remember your Bene Gesserit gom jabbar scene in Frank Herbert’s Dune? Fear is instinctual, and fear drives humans to behave like animals. Instinct as an animal thing, is a visceral response to stimuli that might vary depending on other stimuli present at the time, even leading to contradictory behavior. No, Lewis says, we cannot locate values within human instinct.

Lewis then introduces the concept of the Tao, or The Way, borrowing a term from The Analects of Confucius, a concept that he claims delivers the only satisfactory answer to the source of human value and virtue—the existence of universal truths that humans have come to realize, over long centuries of practice, are simply, and perhaps not entirely explicably, true. “This is the Way,” means exactly that. It simply is. Lewis adds that one does not need to be a person of faith to acknowledge the necessity for a priori truths, truths that are, by definition, unassailable.

But does the Tao, or The Way evolve, or change, or get amended or revised? Lewis thinks not. Perhaps our awareness, our limited understanding, or the best application of the Tao does change over time, maybe (hopefully) even improve over time. He issues a warning. Those who choose to function outside the Tao won’t understand how this all works, so the most meaningful conversations about these things arise only if you embrace the Tao and do not attempt to begin from outside it.

That, in brief, is how Chapter 2 unfolds. If some of it leaves you scratching your head, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Let’s take a brief look at some possible weaknesses in this chapter. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read British philosopher J.R. Lucas’ wonderful 50^th anniversary retrospective lecture on The Abolition of Man, do yourself a favor and look it up. Lucas, like Walter Hooper, passed away at a ripe old age just last year. Like many who have read and thought about this book, Lucas largely affirmed its tenets, but he had a little inside info on the lectures that formed the body of this text, and he mentions that not all Lewis’ approaches and examples in this chapter are terribly clear, or perhaps very effective.

In keeping with Lucas, I want to note a few things that give me pause in the book in general, as well as in this chapter. Firstly, the question must be asked, and has been by others, is Lewis really after King & Ketley, or is there more to the story? Lucas felt that Lewis was playing to a friendly audience at King’s College, and so might have painted his Gaius and Titius a little too harshly, that he doesn’t really try to understand, or try to tell the reader, where they are coming from. Lewis was, to a degree, preaching to the choir, to use one metaphor, and scoring points for a sympathetic crowd, to use another. Michael Ward agrees with this assessment, asserting that Lewis was less making a persuasive argument than repeating to the already converted things they were likely to agree with—to which I must respond, that’s all well and good, but Lewis then published the lectures in book form for the general public, a much wider audience, the following year, and later confesses to a friend that while he himself thought highly of the lectures and book, its publication not only did not make a sensation, it was pretty much ignored. Perhaps a positive reception in Newcastle deceived him regarding a more general reception of the lectures. Not anymore, of course. American Christians, endlessly fascinated by pretty much anything Lewis had to say, have been parsing this book for decades now. And I have to wonder whether those who praise this book the most now are not, like the audience at Durham University’s King’s College in 1942, already primed to hear it, already in agreement with Lewis’s conclusions.

American philosophy professor, Gregory Bassham, another Lewis fan, charges Lewis with demoting King & Ketley to straw-man status as a conveniently weak dummy to make the points he wanted to make. Bassham reveals that K&K were men of faith who wouldn’t have dreamed of discarding values from the thinking of their students, and he felt that Lewis’s highly selective treatment of them is unfair. As an aside, Lewis implies that King & Ketley should “stick to their lasts,” as English grammarians—a wonderfully British way of saying, “Stay in your lane.” If you read their book, which I have done, they are certainly in their lane, but if we are using a foot race metaphor, the painfully constrained nature of K&K’s ideas about language are such that they appear to be running a sack race when others are sprinting the 100 meters. Like others in their day, King & Ketley wanted a tight, hyper-clear, unambiguous English language, a Holy Grail whose search was misguided, if not downright absurd. But for his part, Lewis may simply have taken them out of context. Ward notes from the marginalia in Lewis’s copy of the Green Book that he may have read about two thirds of the book, but that was still plenty for him to get the full impact of what K&K were driving at.

What seems more likely to be the case here is that Lewis wasn’t really speaking to King & Ketley at all. They may have been stand-ins for other, greater foes, foes whom Lewis did not feel comfortable addressing in such direct fashion as he does in Abolition. A fascinating 1999 piece by Brian Barbour in the journal of Modern Philology details Lewis’s intense running academic duel with the English Faculty of Cambridge University represented by EMW Tillyard, IA Richards, and FR Leavis, with famed poet TS Eliot serving as a kind of non-innocent bystander. The details of this academic feud are probably only fascinating to people like me who have lived most of their professional lives in academia, so I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account, but it lasted for the better part of ten years between 1934 and 1944, and Lewis produced a number of hard-hitting essays that, on the surface, have little to do with the topic addressed by The Abolition of Man. But Barbour positions Abolition as one of the pieces in this long-running feud because in it, Lewis uses Gaius and Titius as surrogates for the thought of IA Richards. Another character, Orbilius, or Ernest Biaggini, was a possible surrogate for FR Leavis. The plot thickens, as they say. Lewis does finally address Richards directly in his Chapter 2 Notes to the printed text, but not when he delivered the lectures.

We won’t spend any more time going down this rabbit hole, because it would involve trying to weave an intricate pattern that begins with criticism of poetry and ends with the intersection of language with human ethics, values, and virtues. For all these figures, these things are strongly connected, but Lewis disagreed sharply with the way in which the Cambridge English faculty was trying to make–or perhaps unmake–those vital connections. Ultimately, there is some correspondence between his objection to the critical emphases of the Cambridge English faculty and his arguments for universal values in The Abolition of Man.

My academic field, incidentally, is rhetorical criticism, and thus I am revealed as one of Lewis’ potential academic foes when it comes to the role, the methods, and the goals of criticism. That means, of course, that you would be wise to take everything I have said this evening with a grain of salt, as well as everything I am about to say.

Another potential problem that emerges lies in Lewis’ style of argumentation, especially in Chapter Two. Here Lewis relies on a somewhat dogged usage of Either-Or arguments. Lewis scholar James Como also noted this about Lewis’ argumentation style, perhaps less critically than I am. This is an approach Lewis might have picked up from reading GK Chesterton. I might add that Chesterton’s rapier wit and facility with words was such that, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said of Samuel Johnson “with no flourishing of his sword, he is through your body in an instant.” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson.) Lewis was known to refer to himself as an “itinerant prize fighter” by comparison. The “either-or” formulation leaves the listener with the urgent necessity to make a rapid choice, and in the speed and force of the Lewis’ presentation, one gets carried along, led by Lewis’ Socratic power, into the conclusions he has already prepared for us. The “either-or” argument often presents a drastic choice that easily privileges the more rational of the two, and while it is very effective, it may force the listener into a false dichotomy. In other words, there may be a wider range of options than what have been presented. Would the ideas of Gaius and Titius really lead to society’s destruction, to the undoing of the minds of the poor young schoolmen under King’s and Ketley’s charge? Assuming that Gaius and Titius themselves were not numbskulls, probably not.

Having addressed some of the possible issues, let me conclude by expressing what I believe to be some strengths of this chapter. I am with Lucas, and many others besides, who feel that one of Lewis’ greatest strengths was his prophetic gift, or perhaps his prescience, when it came to predicting the direction of the times. While, as a rhetorical critic, I tend to side just a little with Ogden and Richards on the malleable personal uses and meanings of language, I believe that Lewis was correct, in a way that may correspond with the skeptical thought of David Hume, that we ignore the possibility of ultimate Truth at our peril. As expressed so well by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Weaver, Kenneth Burke and others, all language is valorized, ideas have consequences; in other words, language and universal values are unavoidably linked, else we would have very little of importance to say indeed.

In terms of Lewis’ warnings of the danger of dismissing the Tao, we appear to be right there, right now, with a flood of competing narratives that are actually shaping alternate realities before our very eyes. One now despairs of being able to assert a narrative to which we can all agree. Even once widely-recognizable meta-narratives seem imperiled. This touches discourse in every locus of social interaction, from Twitter to the dinner table. Part of this may be connected to the dissipation of common cultural points of reference created by the proliferation of near-instantaneous algorithm-based consumer content, but part of it is clearly a result of disdain for The Tao. In this chapter, as well as in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University (Lewis’ ironic triumph over his former academic foes) he anticipated that the propagandists in their political and commercial forms would master technologies, not for purposes of liberation, but for control over others, possibly the single claim that infuriated Ayn Rand the most, but also the one that seems to be a very real and present danger today.

Also, Lewis’s call for the skeptic to turn their skepticism on their own idols is a good one. He attempts, unnecessarily I think, to indicate that the Tao must be immune to such scrutiny. Perhaps it need not be. Arend Smilde suggested to Michael Ward that a non-Christian reading of Abolition only gets us as far as cultural conservatism. Perhaps Lewis, like Paul at Mars Hill, would have been better served to acknowledge the unknown God of the Tao to whom he was really referring.

I end with Rowan Williams’ summation of his thoughts on That Hideous Strength:

“So, the overall balance on the sheet is still pretty favorable for the book; the great flaws are more than compensated for by the depth of insight. I read it and re-read it quite regularly, feeling not that I have to accept all the ideas in it, but that, as with much of Lewis’s work (to use a phrase of his own) it’s a ‘mouthwash for the imagination’ at its best.”

All works referenced are provided with links in the text above. The entire three lecture series is available at the Chattanooga Christian Study Center’s News and Events Page.

“This is what I came out to do”

Homily for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

Lectionary: Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11, 20c ; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39

Mark 1:38 “He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’” I want to focus today on that last clause.

I like to think of Mark as the “action Gospel.” I strongly recommend reading it at one sitting—it doesn’t take long, but it packs a serious punch, because it’s more cinematic than the other Gospels, and many Biblical scholars talk about the high-octane, event-driven narrative of Mark. Apropos of that, Jesus says in verse 38,” Let’s go… so that I can proclaim the message… that’s what I came out TO DO.”  

What sort of message is this, then, that Jesus brings to Capernaum and to the surrounding towns? Mark, compared to the other Gospels, seems to emphasize a message without words, or maybe with fewer words, a message of acts and actions, very much like St. Francis’ command to us, “Preach Christ at all times, and when necessary, use words.” We do find some excellent clues regarding Christ’s action-oriented message in today’s reading.

The ten verses of today’s reading mention Christ proclaiming the verbal message of the Gospel just once, they mention him healing the sick twice. And they mention Christ casting out demons three times.

What about demons? In some traditions today, like some of the ones in which I was involved for many years, demons and demonology are a lively topic for discussion, and even ministerial practice. I’m reminded of a situation I found myself in many years ago.

Christ casting unclean spirits out of the Gerasene man

In the early 1980s, I was an education major at a college in Dallas, Texas. As I rounded into my senior year, I was presented with the incredible opportunity of doing my student teaching at a faith-based primary school in Cali, Colombia, in South America. I jumped at the chance, and traveled down there in late August, and pitched right in helping with this little school that was affiliated with an evangelical church there in the city. Naturally then, I attended the worship services of that church during the eight or so months that I stayed there. I was in my early twenties, about as green as one can possibly be but pretending hard that I had it all together.

The church met in a large, two-storey house. They had removed most of the walls from the bottom floor, and they had built a little platform at the far end of the big room, complete with a speaker system, a drum set, a keyboard and a pulpit. They managed to crowd 50 to 60 people into the available space.

Being a charismatic church, the musical portion of worship had a lot of energy and motion, and the preaching, from a former crusade evangelist, was pretty big for the small room. But, on this particular day, all that was eclipsed by a woman at the back of the room. In the middle of the sermon, she began shouting, “No!” very loudly. “No! …. No!” Then, she launched up out of her seat, hurling curse words left and right, and you had people moving quickly away from her in in sort of concentric waves. Then she started throwing chairs, so several people stepped in to restrain her. And while she was being subdued, the congregation was engaged in a chorus of loud prayer, drowning out the woman’s words, so the whole scene was kind of deafening. I was up near the platform, at a pretty safe distance, just kind of observing, but with my heart pounding pretty hard, when something grabbed me by the arm, which made me jump pretty much out of my skin. I jerked my head around to see what it was…but it was only this poor church lady who was terrified and basically wanted to know what was going on. So, with a confidence I didn’t really feel, I patted her hand and told her everything was going to be okay. Which it was.

After they got the woman to calm down, they escorted her under her own power to a nearby room, where she claimed to be under the influence of the spirit of her dead boyfriend, who had been a drug dealer and had been murdered. In the course of the conversation, she indicated that she had invoked his spirit out of a mix of love, anger and grief.

I don’t mention this story for sensational effect or to censure the way things were handled. I mention it because our outlook on these kinds of stories is heavily influenced by religious and popular culture. We have many such influences, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, all wonderful Christian works. We also have films like The Exorcist (maybe not so wonderful). These cultural influences have conditioned us to think a certain way about what we read in Mark’s Gospel. The effect on me, if I’m being honest, is that when I read the Gospel lesson, I quickly identify with the bystanders who watched these events unfold, maybe with one of the disciples who’s trying to figure out what’s going on, or possibly even with one of the people who was being healed of sickness. But I don’t believe I’ve ever identified with the people being delivered of demons. In both the Gospel and in the story that I just told you, my attention tends to focus on the frightening phenomenon of the evil spirits … and not on the afflicted people. I might even be guilty of blaming the afflicted in these stories. But it’s evident when we read Mark, that Jesus doesn’t see things that way. Jesus sees the people very clearly, just as he sees the sick and other suffering souls.

Our viewpoint may be a little clouded by our conception of the word “demon.” The Greek word used in this text and in the other Gospels, is daemon “daemon.” Surprisingly, other than in the Gospel accounts, there isn’t much in the Bible at all about demons. The people who were reading this text in the first century and maybe even into the second century after Christ had a very different understanding of this word than we do today.

To Greeks before the New Testament was written, a “daemon” was actually a divine spirit. Ancient people thought that some divine spirits liked us and others really had it in for us and might therefore become, like our concept of Satan, lifelong enemies, always causing trouble. The ancients felt that such spirits could feed us lies, make us see things that weren’t real, or drive us to madness, or fury, or even despair. Daemons, therefore, were supernatural forces that helped to drive our fate or destiny. The Jewish concept of evil or unclean spirits was a little different because they didn’t believe in multiple divinities, but it wasn’t until the first century that this concept of an inhabiting spirit really coalesced. There are some near-contemporaneous Roman analogs for it, as in Virgil’s Aeneid with the “Sybil,” an oracle, typically a young girl, who prophesied when the inhabiting spirit took control. By the time Christ walked through Galilee with his disciples, being “demonized” was classified with diseases and sicknesses, and it marked the victim in way that, like leprosy, made it difficult for them to function normally. Demonized people were often outcasts, isolated from their communities, either kept shut away or abandoned on the outskirts of town.

The Greek word for what Jesus did with these unclean spirits is one of my personal favorites. It’s ekballw “ekballo,” which means to “throw out,” like tossing someone out of a football game or, nowadays, off of an airline flight.

Christ’s act of throwing out these spirits is an act of liberation from a harmful, destructive force controlling the victim’s mind, heart, and life. He restores Shalom—a spirit of peace and wholeness. And Jesus wants that to be the focus of these actions, not any kind of display, not any sort of magic trick, not even a convincing stamp of his authority. He tells the unclean spirits to keep quiet because it’s not about them. It’s not even about Him. It’s about restoring a soul to its right place.

As one commentator wrote on this passage, freedom from something, including from disease or afflictions of the mind and heart, carries with it the idea that we are now free to do the things we were meant to do, to fulfill our calling, to serve others, to be part of the communion of saints, to carry the blessings of the Gospel forward into the lives of those around us. Now that we are in our right minds, we are free to embrace a fuller meaning of Shalom—peace, which is exactly what the Word of Christ should bring to people—restoration, wholeness, a renewed sense of how we fit in this world, of our mission in life—peace of mind and heart.

Some would add, and have in fact said, that part of this mission, the mission where Christ feels compelled to go out into the surrounding towns, is not about enhancing his personal popularity, but, through the good news, through healing and through throwing out oppressive spirits, it’s about breaking systemic curses as well, one person at a time, as word gets around, changing the ethical fabric of society itself. As Jerome Neyrey, New Testament Professor at Notre Dame suggests, these acts of liberation make bigger statements than for the victim alone. In his excellent little book Meeting God in Mark, Rowan Williams says of the Gospel of Mark that Jesus is suggesting “to his disciples the daring idea that the way in which God changes things is from the heart of the human world, not by intervention from the sky. He transforms the world in that unique process that is human life, the life first of Jesus, then the life of those who have been called and commissioned by Jesus to be places where the work of God can blossom and expand in the world.”

There’s a wonderful German word—Zeitgeist. It means, “the spirit of the times.” As we look at the recent upheavals we have seen in our social and political life, as we reflect on Black History Month in this country, it seems appropriate to ask how our lives can be a part of casting out systemic unclean spirits, of giving power to the faint and strength to the powerless (Is. 40:29); of healing the broken-hearted and binding up their wounds (PS 147:3).

I’d like to conclude with a beautiful poetic prayer by Jan Richardson, a Methodist devotional writer.

And All Be Made Well
A Healing Blessing

That each ill
be released from you
and each sorrow
be shed from you
and each pain
be made comfort for you
and each wound
be made whole in you

that joy will
arise in you
and strength will
take hold of you
and hope will
take wing for you
and all be made well.

May we take heart from the delivering actions of Christ and, like Him, fully embrace what we, too, have been sent out to do.

“A Deep Fog of Misunderstanding”

As an elementary school kid in the late 60s and early 70s, my mostly white neighborhood was part of the “bussing” program that sought to racially integrate public schools and rupture the cycle of the so-called “separate but equal” status that had lasted for a hundred years between those of black African and those of white European descent in the United States. All I knew at the age of nine was that my new school was further from home … and more African American children were attending there. But they were still very much in the minority. My fifth-grade class had only three African American girls in it. They clung to each other and never spoke up in class. When we held a mock election in the fall of 1972 during the Nixon-McGovern presidential race, the vote went 21-3. We all knew who had voted for McGovern. I remember looking smugly over at the three girls, who simply looked down demurely at their desks when the vote was called. Though I was pretty well known in that class to just about everyone, I don’t recall ever exchanging a single word of conversation with any of those three girls.

General admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. had not really emerged yet. We all knew he had been gunned down four years before. It had happened when I was in first grade, and it was big news in our community, but not as big as the Moon Landing the year after. In our military town in Virginia, King’s name was rarely mentioned. If it was, it was often mingled with mistrust, reservations and stories of alleged complicity and corruption—a tarnished image at best. I can’t recall a single time hearing any unqualified praise for him, but that was probably because of the company we kept. In our home, we called African-Americans “colored.” Among friends and relations we heard the “other” word more regularly. Dad had married a brown Latina girl from South Texas. Apparently that was okay.

Just before my fifth grade year in public school, my family joined an isolationist, right wing, end-times sect, where any mention of MLK, Jr. would tend to soil his image even more. We took as gospel truth FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s mischaracterizations of MLK as  “a colossal fraud,” an immoral man, and communist sympathizer. Our little sect had its own hideaway school for the children of the member families where nationalistic Christianity blended with a mortal fear of an imminent Judgment Day. The only African American text we were asked to read was Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, which helped me feel satisfied that I understood what I needed to know about race in America. I felt pretty well-adjusted in thinking ol’ Booker T. had the right approach to racial tensions: keep your head low; emphasize the positive; develop inspiring success stories in your wholly separate, second-class ghetto; don’t rock the boat. Activist W.E.B. Dubois, by contrast, was painted in our curriculum as yet another communist and a hater of patriotic American values. It may sound as though I am blaming my teachers, and while I am blaming them to a certain extent, their teachers before them are equally culpable. There was no conspiracy, no malice, no maniacal scheming behind my profound ignorance. Just a lot of cultural inertia. In the end, it took teachers who simply exposed me to the facts to get me to change my views.

I am sad to say that I was 30 years old and in graduate school before I actually ever read anything MLK had written, and it was only because it was assigned in a rhetorical criticism class. It was his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

It rocked me to my very core.

Few things I have read in my life have had such an immediate, decisively attitude-changing impact on me. As a Christian, I was captivated by how undeniably Christian the letter was. As an academic, I was impressed at how educated it was. As a student of writing and of persuasion, I could only appreciate the beautiful flow of the prose and the elegant lines of the logic. As a political animal, I was deeply alarmed to learn things I had never known about the civil rights movement. And as a human being, I was ashamed to have thought the very thoughts and said the very things that King so desperately lamented in the letter. It didn’t change my thinking entirely over night, but, even better, it pushed me to go and educate myself. I hit the books, as I always do when startling new information comes my way. And in hitting the books, a rash of misconceptions and a manure pile of misunderstanding and misinformation moved out of my life. I learned that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermons were thoroughly Biblical, that his solutions were simply down-to-earth, immensely practical, and utterly humane, and that there was not one single unreasonable point to his crusade. I learned, as he said in his letter, that his goals were simply the same ones that had motivated the Founding Fathers and even the early Christians. He was a Christian brother who had been consistently and perversely misrepresented by haters who saw the potential mobilization of millions as a very real and potent threat. Over time, I learned also about the horrific record of racism, not just in the American South, but in northern cities as well—a despicable, generations-long vicious cycle of murder, terror, injustice, discrimination, and oppression. I had been completely sheltered from these objective facts growing up. 

With my growing knowledge came a growing sense of anger. The same would occur when I read more detailed information about Native Americans and the Trail of Tears, and yet again when I read about the historic mistreatment of brown people in the Southwest, my own ancestors. The sanitized, lily-white history I had learned and had believed as the “best” of America was nothing more than a clear attempt to write history in a way that simply erased what it did not wish to see. I had dared to call the emerging histories that contradicted a lot of that record “revisionist,” and scoffed at it. Yes, there are some questionable revisionist narratives, and from multiple sources. But applying ethical standards of historiography and review will hurt no one in the end and can only help us all.

No one likes being lied to. It brings with it a helpless sense of betrayal. And unfortunately, no one likes to find out that what they have believed for so long is founded on lies. It brings with it a sense of shame, especially if, like Saul of Tarsus, the buy-in leads us to be strong advocates of those lies, zealously contending with all who try to contradict us. I found myself in that position in graduate school, and the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was just one moment on the Road to Damascus for me. There had been and there would be other such moments. But in each case, no one tried to convince me of anything. No one tried to change my mind. No one preached at me or told me what a fool I had been. It was simply that I discovered, in the course of learning other things, that I had been looking out the rear window of the bus most of my life, thinking I was actually looking forward. King’s Letter was a gentle tap on the shoulder that got me to turn around.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. sits in a cell at the Jefferson County Jail in Alabama, November 3, 1967.

The Letter from a Birmingham Jail, resonates as loudly today as it did when it was first widely published in 1964. There are too many good passages to quote, but one that rings true to me today is this: “There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” And his conclusion: “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

If you want to read or hear the letter, here is a link to the original typescript as well as audio of an edited down version by Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s worth your time.

The Cereal Aisle

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Sermon for October 11, 2020

Lectionary for the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost: Isaiah 25:1-9; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

Today’s Scripture readings put me in mind of a story I heard from an international student at my university who came to the United States from a place where the standard of living was very different from ours, which is to say that his culture didn’t have access to the same level of abundance we enjoy in our country. He said that when he came to America, he naturally had a lot of adjusting to do, to our way of speaking in this part of the world, to strange Southern expressions like “I’m fixing to….,” to the fact that we don’t walk to very many places, we get in the car to drive just a half-mile down the road. You can imagine he had a lot to process. But he said that the tipping point for him was when he walked into the grocery store, that when he got to an aisle and saw one entire side stretching gleamingly into the distance, all of it dedicated to an almost infinite variety of breakfast cereals. It was too much. He broke down, sat on the floor, and cried. I think he was using a little hyperbole there, but he made his.

I want to focus today on an aspect of Philippians 4 that gets quoted a lot, but when it’s explored, tends to leave me wishing for more. I’m speaking of verse 8. “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

A little context is always helpful. The letter to the church in Philippi was written by the Apostle Paul while he was awaiting trial in a Roman prison. Theologian N.T. Wright, in his lessons on Philippians, remarks how the church in Philippi is clearly one of Paul’s favorites. The Christians in that city always supported him at critical moments, were always mindful of the needs of those in their community and abroad. In many ways they were the model of what it means to be Christian. But, as we can see in the reading, they weren’t perfect. Differences of opinion led to quarrelling, and that’s probably because the Philippians, like us, were simply human and found it as difficult as we do to always be their best selves.

The church that Paul and Silas planted there around 50 CE was in many ways the mother church of the West, because it was the first church that consisted mostly of people with little or no exposure to Judaism. And this explains why Paul, in this letter, makes little reference to terms from his own upbringing and adapts his language to a purely Western audience. He employs vocabulary that appears in no other part of the New Testament, terms that are clearly Greco-Roman. And Philippians 4 has a heavy concentration of that kind of language. I suspect that many of us in the West today resonate with Philippians because it may tap into our cultural subconscious.

Commentaries and sermons frequently dwell on other aspects of chapter 4, and with good reason. Like the rest of Philippians, there’s so much to reflect on, and each portion merits a sermon.

I used verse 8 recently in an address at my college in which I stressed that as Christian educators, we have a job to do. And that is to take what we get from this world and pull the treasure out from among the trash. I like to repeat G.K. Chesterton’s image from his book Orthodoxy. Chesterton says that the basic work of redemption is to save things from the wreck of the fallen world. He uses the story of Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a shipwreck on a deserted island. Crusoe’s work of survival began by pulling useful items from the wreck of his ship.

As we look again at Philippians 4: 8, we see this amazing list: things that are true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and praiseworthy. But here’s the thing. We can throw the list around all we want; we can place it over a pleasant landscape or flowery background; we can sew it onto a nice piece of fabric; or we can turn it into an Internet meme. And that would be totally fine. Nothing wrong with that.

But do we know what is true? Do we know what is just? Do we know what is pure and pleasing and commendable? Do we know what is excellent and praiseworthy?

Is it possible that a lot of what is really trash is being pedaled to us as treasure these days? Worse still, is it possible that we are the ones doing the pedaling? I’m not accusing here. I’m asking myself these questions and sharing them with you.

What is clear from Scripture is that part of our job as Christians is to transform our minds and assist in the transformation of other’s. In Philippians 2, Paul encourages us to let that mind to be in us that is in Christ Jesus. That implies that our thinking needs to change. It means that we will actually, and should, be willing to change our minds. It’s also possible that this changing is an ongoing thing, that it’s not a one-time deal, that it needs serious work and maintenance as time goes on.

In what ways should our minds change? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has done a lot of writing on this topic, especially as it relates to the letter to Philippians. He speaks often of something that has been of great help to me personally. He calls it “decentering,” and it comes from Philippians 2 which says Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on the cross.” Philippians 4:8 rests on this idea.

So long as what is true and fair is derived entirely from my own self-interest, it is of no benefit to anyone other than myself. So long as what is pleasing and commendable and praiseworthy is defined by how they benefit me personally, or enhance my prestige, or put more money in my pocket, or elevate my status above those around me, then they are, by Christ’s standards, worthless. You see where this is going, right? If we have the mind of Christ, the mind of He who emptied himself out for us, then the whole hierarchy of things that matter is turned on its head.

It is only when we are no longer centered on our own agenda that we can see and understand what is true, just, honorable, pure and pleasing. Decentering, according to Rowan Williams and others, is intentionally moving the self out of the center and putting the “O”ther there instead, something that is not as easy for us to do as simply saying it is. But if we are able to approach it, we discover some amazing things. Paul is trying to tell us that this is where we find peace, and freedom from anxiety, and the ability to extend hands of fellowship to one another in time of disagreement, something we need now more than ever.

But work must be done to make that kind of peace happen, work that isn’t the negative and legalistic toil of avoiding bad things, but the positive developing of good thinking habits. That’s where Philippians 4: 8 comes in.

Some of the commentators on this scripture define what is true and righteous as the active avoidance of wickedness, of impure thoughts, of the many temptations of society. That’s as much as to say that God planted the whole, magnificent Garden of Eden as an alternative to the one tree that Adam and Eve were meant to avoid. Today’s Gospel lesson in Matthew speaks of the incredible feast prepared, a feast that nobody wanted, and in that lesson, Christ was talking about our level of comfort with our own selfish point of reference and our reluctance to come to His table where there are treasures forevermore. We have to leave our selfish agendas at the door and put on his Wedding Clothes, clothes that say we are here to celebrate others, not ourselves.

Psalm 23 talks about the abundant table prepared before us, the constant Divine provision, in times of darkness and doubt and even defeat. This is precisely what Paul, from prson, is talking about in Philippians 4: 8.

The work of redemption is to develop mental habits that focus on that Divine abundance instead of our own impoverished thinking. Duke Divinity theologian Susan Eastman says here that: “Yes, there is the immediate reality of a world in which human beings are constantly at war somewhere, betraying one another, brutally suppressing each other…. Every day we hear and see a culture that focuses on what is false, dishonorable, unjust, impure, and shameful. We begin to think that to act hopefully in such a world is unrealistic. But Paul sees another reality, and it is the reality … of God’s redemption, already here and still drawing near. Training our minds to think of this reality, and thereby to act with hope, is a daily mental discipline.”

Practicing Paul’s list of excellent and praiseworthy things is not living in Lala Land. It’s a way of seeing things in a new and redeemed way. It’s our guide for transforming the mind. Things that are “true” are things revealed, truths expounded over the ages; “honorable” is better translated “venerable” and refers to the practical wisdom of life experience; “just” refers to words and behavior appropriate to circumstances, properly weighing what is needed; “pure” is free from corrupting influences; “pleasing” is better translated as that which is worthy of being loved, being admired; “commendable” refers to a high quality of reputation; “virtue” is interesting, because it’s the Greek word arete which means excellence as an ideal, as something to pursue, and it’s the only time it’s used in the Bible. It was a singularly Greek ideal, and Paul knew exactly what it meant, that its pursuit was seen as praiseworthy by his readers. But here again, Paul uses it in a thoroughly redeemed context, not in the vainglorious sense that one finds in ancient Greek literature and history.

Think on these things, Paul says—but more than just think. The Greek suggests analysis, close examination, meditation and application of that thinking. In other words, all of these beautiful things are Christ’s Wedding Feast, set before us. We are indeed standing in the middle of an infinite cereal aisle, folks. Let’s not just walk by. Paul bids us to pull things from the shelves and put them into our shopping cart.

I’d like to end with a terrific and related thought from Rowan Williams: “To be absorbed in the sheer otherness of any created order or beauty is to open the door to God, because it involves that basic displacement of the dominating ego without which there can be no spiritual growth.”

A Time for Grace

Addressed to the faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences at Lee University

Last week, ‘Christianity Today’ re-posted an article from 1996 by Mark Galli entitled “When a Third of the World Died.” It’s about the infamous Black Death of the mid-14th century. Galli poses the question—how did Christians respond in such a dark time when literally everyone was touched by the plague?

The answer is both heartening and disheartening. Many nuns, the forerunners of today’s heroic health workers, treated the sick and dying with little thought for their own safety. But there were others who called themselves Christians, people who enflamed the public with psychological terror, inciting oppressive fear and guilt and resorting to reprisals against the innocent, mostly the Jews, people they felt were to blame for Divine judgment.

Galli quotes one account from the times: “One man shunned another … kinsfolk held aloof, brother was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers.”

In brief, it was a stressful time!

Flagellants during the Black Death in the 14th C.

If you’re like me, you are consuming a lot of media, social and otherwise, these days. Our students are the same, maybe consuming even more. We have our share of “flagellants,” or people who are trying to lay blame to stir up our wrath, and we have plenty of people who prey on our minds and souls, pushing us to the edges of panic. It’s important for us to remember that these are not normal times, not normal for us, and not normal for our students.

Over and above the pervading atmosphere of alarm, one that almost makes us feel the very air we breathe is an enemy, there is a cascade-effect from real-world upheaval creating fault lines in so many families.

This is a stressful time—among the more than 10 million new jobless are parents helping to pay tuition, room and board. Others are our students themselves, many of whom work to help pay for school.

I keep hearing good things about how things are going, about how hard our faculty are working, about how dedicated we are to adapting, to delivering excellence in the virtual classroom, to course preparation and grading and interaction with students. I am so encouraged by all that I hear. Many students are plugged in and working through the obstacles. But I am also hearing from some students who share less than happy stories about their experience. Students are doing what they can, with widely varying access and success. If we listen, we can hear some cries for help.

If there was ever a time for grace, this is it. This has nothing to do with a pass/fail grade option. It has to do with connecting with students in ways that demonstrate grace, to offer a shelter from the storm as opposed to yet more turbulent seas. Grace to our students can have many welcome faces—an emergency reduction in workload, the dropping of a low grade, curving scores more generously, providing more time to get things done, allowing re-submissions for an improved grade, extending extra help—and each demonstration of grace can make the difference for a struggling student.

Academic (and human) grace need not threaten quality or standards of instruction. But this is also not a time to be unmoved by current realities.

Let’s be like the Medieval nuns. We often state, from ample student testimony, that we are an institution that enfolds our students with care, prayer and concern. We do not shun, hold aloof, or abandon our brothers and sisters in time of trouble. We have an opportunity to demonstrate just how true that is, even through the glass of a computer screen.

We will all remember this semester. I earnestly pray that among the things our students will remember is that we were there for them in ways they will treasure for life.

Thank you, more than ever, for fulfilling your calling in such dynamic and powerful ways at Lee University.

Purgatory in Paradise: A Review of Thomas Merton’s Autobiography

Wisdom drips from Thomas Merton’s pen in books like No Man is an Island. This once-lost soul slipped into a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky in the 1940s, just in time to avoid the draft in World War II, taking a vow of silence but spinning out book after book in the space of nearly three decades before his untimely death in 1968. He was only 53. In his last few years, he gained permission to leave the monastery from time to time to visit with others, some from his own Christian faith, others from Buddhist traditions in the Far East, including the Dalai Lama. He was visiting with Buddhists in Bangkok, Thailand when he was fatally electrocuted by a faulty fan switch in his sleep, a bizarrely merciful way to die. Had he lived another 30 years, he would have made it to the late ‘90s, this man who was a contemporary of so many other pivotal figures in world religion. One wonders what additional wisdom this not-so-silent Trappist might have imparted in those decades, had he lived.

While a mature wisdom in Merton’s works resonates profoundly, I found his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain to be oddly dissatisfying by comparison—even frustrating at times. This surprised me as I have heard this book mentioned by many as one they admire greatly. For me, the best thing about it is that it was definitely not his last work. Someone should make a rule that you aren’t allowed to write an autobiography before you’re 50. Merton was in his late twenties when he finished this one.

Biographers and students of Merton’s life have noted with some consistency that Mountain is an incomplete story, that the man who wrote this book became a very different person within a decade, and then again years down the road. This observation, if true, is as noteworthy as it is encouraging. St. Augustine is among the few who had an opportunity as an old man to go back and edit some of his works to make them more consistent with his more mature reflections. Others have clearly wished they could, but circumstances kept them from it. Merton may not have wanted to, but in his case, it’s clear that he provided sufficient detail of the evolution of his thought over the years to make it clear that none of his works should be taken in isolation, particularly this one. What we get, if we are patient, is a human pilgrimage, and one that serves as a lesson that we should remain humbly teachable as we encounter transformational truth along our way.

Mountain doesn’t, to my mind, show Merton at his most teachable or gracious, but as a person altogether too discriminating in his pursuit of a spiritual ideal. It would be wrong to judge him too harshly for it. Nevertheless, there are moments that break through his often overwrought sorting of experiences and soar into a splendid transcendence. What distinguishes Merton’s transcendent moments from those of many others is his recognition that these are anchored in the “ordinary;” that they should not be seen as some sort of magical other-worldly invasion–echoing George Herbert’s “Heaven in Ordinary” in his wonderful poem “Prayer.” Sometimes he simply catches a glimpse into a truer nature of things, and the result is that his thinking and his affections are transformed in undeniable ways. These experiences would serve as base to the alloys of his post-autobiographical epiphanies.

There seems little in the itinerant life of the young Thomas Merton with which rank and file people can directly relate. From his semi-bohemian childhood in France following his artist father to his young adult life among northeastern literati and intelligentsia, Merton’s story reads more like that of a dilettante poet, novelist or playwright, which, for a significant portion, is exactly what it is. His feet rarely intersect the well-worn tracks of the commoner or even the commonly educated crowd on either side of the Atlantic. When they do, as when he has to make his living, it seems more like character research than actual work. What kind of person flunks out of Clare College, Cambridge, UK only to land on his feet at Columbia University in New York? He possessed little in the way of relational anchors in family or mature friends. His genius and talent are evident to most with whom he comes into contact—even in an autobiography this bleeds through, though Merton is at pains not to make more of himself than he should. There is something decidedly F. Scott Fitzgerald about much of his narrative. For someone like me who grew up in the working-class American South, the entire story, including the litany of influences on his thought and art, reads like Gabriel Garcia Márquez in its exotic cultural orientation. None of this makes the events any less fascinating. But they do have a decidedly “foreign” aura about them.

For the pedestrian believer, Merton’s exclusionary pilgrimage that accumulates a growing catalog of rejected paths only to end, climatically, in the seclusion of silence in a monastery, in the radical embrace of the via contemplativa, has to strike a discordant note. That this is mentioned no more than it is by the book’s admirers, who themselves display no monastic tendencies, seems surprising to me. But the conversion trajectory is less to Christianity, though that portion is undeniably compelling, than it is to the Trappist fold. There is a similarity here, maybe even a conscious one, to the Confessions of St. Augustine. As such, it has a different kind of ring to it, one that left me, as a contemplative adherent to the via activa, more curious than inspired. The abundantly evident talent on display in the autobiography created more cognitive dissonance than resolution by its Trappist conclusion. It is not my intention to be overly critical or dismissive. I present these reactions merely as they came to me, and offer them as comment in the marketplace.

Photo by Kim Manley Ort (www.kimmanleyort.com)

Of course, the rest of the story, we know, includes Merton’s dramatic “Fourth and Walnut Epiphany” in Louisville, KY, in which he came to the stark awareness that complete withdrawal from humanity is, in some ways, antithetical to the Gospel.  But for those unfamiliar with Merton’s continued pilgrimage and the shifts in his outlook, Mountain can only be an incomplete text. Perhaps silent seclusion is the true and best way for some people. But it seems plain that it was not meant to be the end of the road for someone of Merton’s extraordinary gifts. Even his monastic overseers recognized this. And for that dawning awareness, we can all be grateful.

Zaccheus

Homily, November 3^rd, 2019 for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Lectionary Year C, 21^st Sunday after Pentecost:

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 and Psalm 119:137-144; Isaiah 1:10-18 and Psalm 32:1-7; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 1112; Luke 19:1-10

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
And a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree
For the Lord he wanted to see.

And as the Savior passed that way
He looked up in the tree and he said,
‘Zacchaeus you come down, For I’m going to your house today!’
For I’m going to your house today!

Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
But a happy man was he,
For he had seen the Lord that day
And a happy man was he;
And a very happy man was he.”

Standing as I do at five foot six, I’ve always identified with Zacchaeus, the subject of today’s reading in St. Luke’s Gospel. I even recall the first time I heard the story, Vacation Bible School 1972, with the venerable Betty Worthington who had a mane of red hair handling the old flannelgraph with all those colorful felt figures. Things weren’t very digital in those days, but we managed pretty well with our imaginations.

When growth spurts were being handed out in my early teens, I was somehow overlooked. I’m the shortest male in our family, among the shortest in my very large extended family. So, when I first heard the Bible story about Zacchaeus, I quickly related to his tree-climbing exploit. I have myself resorted to similar measures when circumstances seemed to call for it. I have been yelled at by any number of custodians and security guards for standing on benches, bollards, or some other convenient structure to get a look over the heads and shoulders of crowds. At commencement exercises at my university I have to tell graduates where I will be stationed after the ceremony, otherwise they will completely miss me in the press of people.

But being “short” in the story of Zacchaeus applies to more than just his physical stature. As the Gospel of Luke tells us, Zacchaeus comes up short in several other important categories. He is evidently morally and ethically crooked in his financial dealings with other people, defrauding them out of their incomes through his creative approaches to taxation. That means that, as far as his community is involved, he fails to measure up spiritually, religiously, and personally. As a tax-collector, he consorts with the hated Roman oppressors at the expense of his neighbors. In so doing, he has disqualified himself from the friendly society, not only of the more righteous and upstanding elements of society, but also of the vast majority of his fellow citizens. Rituals and customs of the times are very strict with regard to the society one keeps. Jewish food culture in particular, with its strict dietary laws, its ritualistic approach to the act of taking food and drink, who is included, and where they were allowed to sit where at the table … all these stood in very sharp contrast to the more libertine customs of the Greeks and Romans. Finally, Zacchaeus is not a low-level bureaucrat like Levi Matthew, he is a chief tax-collector, he’s the bossman, someone who works directly for the despised Roman government. There is simply no scenario in which he suddenly becomes a welcome house guest among his neighbors.

As many others have pointed out, the Gospel of Luke has many features that make it unique among the four Gospels, and this story is one of those unique features. It appears only in Luke’s Gospel. It comes as part of a set, if you will, that highlights Christ’s tendency to embrace The Outcast. Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, publicans, and now one of the most hated members of Israelite culture, a chief tax collector—these are all featured in Luke’s Gospel in very powerful and moving ways. The persistence of Luke in this regard is remarkable, and while we’ve lost some of the subtleties of Luke’s mindset in our modern outlook, this persistence of Luke to highlight The Outcast is in no way subtle. He couldn’t have been louder if he had used a megaphone. And just in case we haven’t been getting the point, 19:10 sounds a particularly emphatic note, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

What is so interesting about this approach of Christ’s in Luke is that we, today, can often be just as uncomfortable with Christ’s choices as the people in his own day. This lack of comfort with the way Jesus did things takes many forms, but the most common forms we can recognize in ourselves are the many, fairly innocent ways we choose to turn down the volume of the less comfortable stories, maybe even to mute them, so that we can create our own version that fits our sense of things a little better and make us squirm a little less. The Sunday School song and the Vacation Bible school approach to the story of Zacchaeus are evidence of this tendency. By making the story about a cute little man climbing a tree, eager to see Jesus, we convert the story into one of Jesus being touched with compassion for a misunderstood admirer. The celebrity headline would read, “Jesus hangs out with one of his fans.” It’s the sort of thing we might see in a grocery check-out counter tabloid and think to ourselves, “Aww, isn’t Jesus a down-to-earth dude? He’s not full of himself like other celebrities.”

Somewhere along the line, children’s versions of the Bible, like the ones we used be able to pick up in dentist’s offices, turned Jesus into a blond, blue-eyed, light-skinned male. They did this because artists in the West had been doing it for centuries in an attempt to represent a Christ that looked like one of “us.” Other cultures have done the same thing, making Jesus look Eastern, African, etc. One can argue that since we don’t really know what Jesus looked like, then we are free to represent him as Emmanuel, as just another one of whatever we are. Jesus is one of us, so he looks like one of us. That idea is okay as far as it goes. But it stops being okay when it begins to represent a pattern of molding Christ in our image rather than the other way around. When we get comfortable with our Christ, it’s safe to say he isn’t Christ anymore.

In this Gospel story, Zacchaeus isn’t just a “wee little man.” And he isn’t just any outcast. He’s not a beggar on the streets or a leper who has to keep his distance. He’s not a member of a marginalized ethnicity, or religious denomination. He’s not a sick or dying person. He is not without his sight, hearing or the ability to walk. In fact, the only reason Zacchaeus is marginalized … is because he deserves to be. He’s the villain of every corporate greed story we’ve ever heard of. If he lived in our town today, many, if not most, of us would feel the same about him as did the people of his own time and place. It’s likely that if anyone was nice to him outside his own family, it was probably because they were paid to be. He was not a good man.

So, when Luke tells us that when Jesus invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house, the locals are shocked, it might help to put ourselves in the shoes of those people. I have to confess that under similar circumstances, with the moral standards I teach and try hard to observe, following the kind of social custom we all employ of talking up the worthies and the unworthies in the community (you know, just simple dinner conversation in which we say good things about the folks who set a good example for the rest of us and say bad things about people who don’t)—I would have been among the shocked. I might have even been one of those helpful souls who grabbed Jesus by the elbow and said, “Um, you need to be careful who you’re seen with. It might just hurt your reputation.”

But one thing we learn quickly is that Christ doesn’t always see things the way we do. We do have some insight into the heart of Zacchaeus. Basically, this rich exploiter makes a somewhat humiliating public scene … for what reason? Much like the publican just a chapter away in Luke, we have someone who has come to know exactly where he stands in relationship to Divine justice, is under no illusion about what his wealth has bought him and especially what it will never be able to buy him. He also knows that this young rabbi has done amazing things. If he can change the life of a skinflint like Levi Matthew, if Christ can make a leper clean, make a sightless man to see, if he allows people of all stripes and walks of life to approach him, then maybe, just maybe, he can shed a glimmer of light into his personal darkness. So, the tax collector puts all this thought into a single act—we don’t know whether it’s out of a sense of desperation or impetuous curiosity—but he takes action, action that many New Testament commentators feel demonstrates the first fruits of repentance—he scrambles up into a tree so he can catch a glimpse of this Jesus.

In response to Zacchaeus’ act, Jesus does a couple of curious things. First, he calls Zacchaeus by name, and then he says that he needs—the Greek word “deo” speaks of a binding necessity—to stay at Zacchaeus’ house. The key word speaks of far more than a casual visit, as we are fond of saying here, “I was just passing through and thought I’d drop by.” It’s more of an urgent, “I really need to stay.” Again, the Greek for “stay” does not imply a short “hi and bye” visit, but a tarrying, a waiting, even abiding. This isn’t, “Hey, Zack, I need a quick private word,” it’s a full-on, public announcement, “You are friend and family. Let’s spend some quality time together.” None of that exchange, and the meaning of that exchange, is lost on the people who are watching these events unfold. They know exactly what Jesus means. And that’s part of why they are shocked.

Scripture tells us Zacchaeus hurried down and received Jesus “rejoicing.” The Greek text here in Luke also implies that Zacchaeus is very much aware of how things look. It says, “And seeing that all were grumbling…” Apparently the good citizens of Jericho were not bothering to speak under their breath. They were making their thoughts known, and not particularly caring who heard them. Zacchaeus was a prominent sinner. That much was fact. And his particular sins were not private, but very much in the local news. The man was hated. Yet Jesus indicated that he was obligated to linger with him, to spend time in his company, to eat and drink with him even. The scandal of it all was maddening.

Notice that Jesus didn’t preach at the man. He didn’t speak as he had spoken to the rich young ruler, citing the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself. He didn’t reveal anything stunningly special as he had with the Samaritan woman. He made no recorded commands or demands. He just called the man by his name, declared they had an important appointment, and then sat down at his table. The miracle here is a simple act of grace. And that act of absolute grace was all it took to open Zacchaeus’ spiritual eyes, to unstop his spiritual ears, and to heal his spiritual lameness. Zacchaeus stood and declared for all to hear that he was giving away half his wealth and making a four-fold restitution for any fraud he had committed. He pronounced judgement on himself, made right his many financial wrongs and brought justice for the poor. In response, Jesus said something that had to further astonish the already astonished audience. “This day salvation has come to this house!” And the word for salvation is the same word, in essence, as the one he used with the tenth leper, when he said, “Your faith has saved you.”

N.T. Wright, the eminent New Testament scholar, says that this story illustrates the dangers in thinking that there’s a formula for redemption, and everybody has to follow our formula. And that certainly is a great lesson to draw from the text.

There’s an additional two-sided application: I think one side deals with who we think is worthy of salvation. Sometimes an act of grace to someone we think is undeserving can make a huge difference. Withholding grace because we think someone unworthy would therefore put us with the grumbling crowd in this story, wouldn’t it, the crowd that saw things conventionally and not with the eyes of Christ. I remember one time in the 80s I got to attend a famous midwestern church, the biggest church auditorium I had ever been in. And the famous pastor stood up front, with his gruff preacher-style voice, and said in so many words that if anyone showed up to their church door in blue jeans, the ushers had instructions not to let them in. People needed to show respect for God’s House.

But, on the other side, here’s a question that maybe we should consider. I’ve suggested that many of us in this story might be part of the morally-superior crowd. But what if we aren’t? What if we are actually Zacchaeus? What if we are in the position of the publican in the Temple, the one who needs to beat his breast and say, “Be merciful to me, a sinner?” What if we are the ones who are unworthy, whose actions have defied justice, mercy and faith? What if we are the ones sitting as outcasts from the household of God?

Personally, that’s where I see myself, even at my best. But here is the Gospel. Here is the good news. Christ came to seek the lost. Christ has called each of us by name. He has said to each of us, “Hurry! Come down from your tree—it’s absolutely necessary that I stay with you. Let’s sit down at table together.”

And in a moment, that’s what we are going to do. We are going to break bread together, with Christ in the midst. And for each of us, it should be a time of recognizing the act of grace that it is. None of us has earned our place at the table. But Christ bids us join him anyway. May this act of grace inspire each of us to the kind of repentance that each of our hearts shows us is necessary. And may we all hear within our hearts,

“This day salvation has come to this house, for you are all children of God.”

The Work of Your Hands

Homily, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, February 10, 2019

Lectionary: Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 138; I Cor. 15: 1-11; Luke 5:1-11

The Prophet Isaiah in prayer, by Gustav Doré

The focus of the lectionary for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany is pretty tight. In Isaiah we see the pivotal vision of the prophet’s calling to action. In I Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul talks about his encounter with Christ and his calling, “as one untimely born,” and in Luke 5 we see the dramatic moment when Christ inserts himself decisively into the lives of Peter, James and John. All of these readings speak to the question of Divine calling. And that’s a topic that can either be really exciting or maybe unnerving, depending on our point of view.

There are some people who just like to be picked. We all remember that person in class who, like Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, always have their hand up, always seem to know the right answer. Or the people who somehow always manage to get picked as the helper for the magician or the comedian onstage. Or that person who, when volunteers are requested, always steps forward without hesitation, like the prophet in Isaiah 6, “Here am I! I’ll do it!”

You can probably tell I don’t fit into any of those categories. I’m the one who sat at the back of the class, balancing my chair on two legs, trying to keep as low a profile as I could. I’m that guy who never got picked first—always that compulsory last pick for neighborhood sports of football, basketball or baseball, the one that the team captain’s eyes just sort of slide over, like you’re invisible, until you’re the last one and there’s a moment of shock and surprise, “You still here?”

So, when we talk about Divine Calling, this powerful Biblical notion that God Himself approaches us, points us out and says, “Follow me,” we are bound to react a little differently depending on who we are. Some of us might feel that it’s about time someone thought to consult the expert in the room. And then others of us might feel that we were just fine the way we were, at the back of the room, not in anybody’s way, thanks all the same.

That brings us to the question we must always face when we bother to open the pages of Scripture. What are we supposed to do with it? The Bible presents us this abiding and thorny problem. Unlike a book on cooking, diet, exercise, business, biography or fiction, the Bible has the audacity to make serious demands upon us. When it comes to any other book, we can kind of take what it has to say under advisement, can’t we? You have the freedom to say something like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Get back to me on that.” Or, “Nah, that’s not really my thing.” Even a diet book, which gives us all kinds of information on what we should and should not eat, basically says, “If you want to be healthy, here is what you should do.” But the Bible doesn’t give nice little loopholes or wiggle room. It says, “if you want eternal life, here is what you should do.” The alternative, the result of going on our merry way, doesn’t seem like as much of an option as it does a ticking time bomb.

But this begs a question, a question I’m sure many of us have asked, and that is, do these passages, and many other similar ones, actually mean to say that this concept of Divine calling applies to me as much as it did to the prophets and apostles? Maybe they were special cases, maybe they are heroic figures whose lives are brushed by angels’ wings and that sort of thing is all over now. Maybe our job is just to get on the best we can without any assurance that the Almighty has any special plans for us.

I’m reminded of this one time, when the Lee University lacrosse field used to be the First Baptist Church parking lot, I used to park my car in that lot and walk across campus to my office. The route, as you know, passes the public library. And there used to be a public pay phone on the corner of the building there. One day as I was walking by the library, minding my own business, the pay phone started ringing. This is the truth. I stopped and stared at it and thought, who on earth would be calling a pay phone? My curiosity got the better of me, so I went ahead and answered the phone. “Hello?” I said into the receiver. There was a kind of breathy silence on the other end, followed by a very tentative, “Matthew?” I was stunned. For a second, I almost said, “Yes, Lord?”

It turned out to be a father who was looking for his son, and, sadly enough, that phone had been the last number the son had called from, which, when you stop to think about it, kind of fits with what we are talking about here today.

Without devoting a lot of time to exhaustive, and maybe exhausting, exegesis, if any of us is thinking, like the prophet Jonah, to dodge the call of God and skip town to escape it, we can be assured of one abiding truth, and that is that there is no escaping the insistent, loving, redeeming call of God. We may not have been knocked off a horse on the road to Damascus, but at some point, each of us has one or more pivotal moments, when we are confronted with a manifestation of the presence of God in any number of the limitless ways in which God chooses to be revealed, and we hear an undeniable call to Something infinitely beyond our horribly impaired way of living, speaking, thinking, and even knowing.

Scripture is equally plain that the Divine calling doesn’t end with repentance and forgiveness. Today’s Psalm, 138, speaks eloquently to this point. Verse 7 says, “You stretch out your hand and your right hand delivers me.” And verse 8 goes on to say, “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.”

This puts us in mind, does it not, of the prayer we often pray at the conclusion of the Eucharist: “And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do….”

Christian’s burden falls away–from Alan Parry’s beautifully illustrated ‘Dangerous Journey.’

There’s that wonderful, unforgettable moment in the 17^th Century classic, Pilgrim’s Progress by the early Baptist John Bunyan, when the main character, Christian, encounters the Cross of Christ and is freed from the crushing burden of his sins, symbolized by a huge bundle on his back. Many of us readily identify with that moment in the story, the moment when the huge bundle falls away. And as wonderful and genuine as that moment is, the call to the deliverance of the Cross is only one side of the bargain. The other side is the call to the Work of the Cross. That call isn’t always as wildly celebrated, is it? We like to fast-forward to Jordan’s Stormy Banks and talk about the passage across the River, onto those glorious streets of gold. And that’s fine.

But the work is vital. The work is what our life here and now is about. And that’s the kind of calling we get in today’s readings from Isaiah, the Psalms, Corinthians and Luke.

And what kind of work is it? It’s nothing short of the work of transformation.

Stained glass window detail–the Miraculous Catch of Fish, Canterbury Cathedral

In Isaiah, the angel places a coal of fire on the tongue of the prophet, cleansing his mouth and empowering it at the same time. Paul is transformed from Saul, the Persecutor, into Paul the Apostle. The transformation that occurs in Luke seems much closer to where most of us are. Peter says—and you can almost hear the “tone” in it–, “We have worked all night long and have caught nothing.” But Christ does here the same sort of thing he does again and again in the Gospels. He takes an ordinary thing, a thing like sweaty, smelly, unglamorous labor on a fishing boat, and he transforms it. He turns it into something astounding, something beyond anyone’s expectations. Our work becomes the work of his hands. And when it’s the work of His hands, things never stay the same. Things change.

When we take part in the Christian Eucharist, the bread and wine are represented to us as the flesh and blood of Christ, who says in John 6, “My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.” This is one of those semi-mystical statements that we sometimes chant without thinking. What if the force of this statement has to do with taking the body and blood of Jesus in such a way that they now animate our bodies, that Christ’s blood is now our blood, that the works that we do are the works that He would do, as He says we would do in John 17?

One of my favorite ways of thinking about this was presented by James W. Fowler, who taught Theology and Ethics at Emory University for many years until his passing in 2015. Fowler talks about this incarnational sense of the work of God, how we as the people of God are meant to go about fulfilling the call on our lives, the call to transformational work. Fowler calls it partnering with Divine Action in the world in one or more of three ways: God’s work as Creator, God’s work as Governor or Ruler, and God’s work as Redeemer and Liberator. As we accept God’s calling on us, as we allow God to transform our hearts, our thoughts, our souls and our very words, we discover that this incarnational Gospel not only changes us, but, begins also to leave its mark on the things and on the people with whom we come into contact.

So, for the creative person or builder, what we create and what we build will have Christ’s DNA in it, and like the water that became wine, our creative actions can bring light and life to someone who needs it. For those whose work helps to maintain law and order, puts food on people’s tables, trains other people, or provides for someone’s security, once again the transformational calling of God is there to fill an empty table, to help find those who are lost, to bring peace in the place of discord. For those whose work involves an encounter with other souls in the hope of improving them intellectually, spiritually, psychologically, physically or materially, the transformative work of the Holy Spirit can take our weak efforts and, like the loaves and fishes, distribute them to transform lives we may never meet in the flesh.

This is exciting work, isn’t it? Each of us, where we are, gets a call on God’s pay phone. And for the miracles to begin, all it takes is the surrendering of a tongue, a relinquishing of a tool, the offering of what is in our hand to God, so that he can take it and do something amazing with it.

“The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.” Amen.

Civility, Community and the Art of Being Right

There’s a celebrated story about Santa Claus, jolly St. Nick who wears all that red, wrangles flying reindeer and tosses gift-wrapped electronics at people on Christmas Night. You may have heard this story. Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, was very possibly a real person who lived around A.D. 300, about 1700 years ago. He was Bishop of Myra, a city in modern day Turkey. The story goes that he was among the bishops invited by the Emperor Constantine to the first ecumenical Church Council, held in the town of Nicaea. If Constantine picked the town in the hopes that the assembled bishops would be “nice” to each other, he was disappointed. A dude by the name of Arius, a priest from Egypt, kept going on and on about Jesus, doing his utmost to prove that Jesus, as the son of God, could not possibly be the same as and co-equal with God. Nicholas, who seriously differed with Arius on this question, apparently listened for a while, gritting his teeth, checking his watch, yawning loudly, rolling his eyes, until he could no longer contain himself. So Santa—a pretty beefy guy, right?—gets to his feet, walks over to Arius and slaps him … right across the kisser. The other bishops are horrified, of course. Picture now, Santa Claus, getting manhandled by a bunch of bishops, stripped of his bishop’s hat, his bishop’s robes and his staff, and thrown into prison for his rude offense.

But it gets better.  During the night, Nicholas receives a visitation. No, not by Rudolph, but by Jesus and Mary who appear to him and return all his bishop’s stuff to him, so that when the people open the door the next morning, they all gasp and say, “It’s a miracle!” and no one dares to punish him, much less question him further. He is sent on his merry way, justified.

St. Nicholas should be the patron saint for every self-styled social media crusader.

I was put in mind of this story recently when I saw a lot of posts on Twitter and Facebook involving one of the crazy tangle of recent socio-political controversies. In response to a call for civility in one seriously heated debate, some people were responding with, “[Expletive] civility. Civility is the luxury of privilege. The voiceless don’t have that luxury. Nothing’s going to change if we don’t call people out for what they are.” And a highly-respected Christian who was in the Twitter mix retweeted someone who said, “Remember when Jesus went to the Temple—he wasn’t civil. He turned over the tables and drove people out with a whip. What would Jesus do?”

When you know you’re right, you know you’re right. Right?

Here’s the thing. There’s a big problem with “Rightness” in the world today, and I’d like to make a few suggestions. I’ve got three brief points.

Point one: When it comes to being right, those who lug around a massive burden of higher education on their brains face special challenges. While the knowledge meter looks great, really high, two other meters are sometimes comparatively low—those of humility and patience. When our brains are so full of all the “right things,” we tend to want to share those things, especially with the people we think in all our wisdom would benefit most from them. And that places us in a top-down position, looking down on the unwashed and woefully uninformed masses. We pity the fools. We genuinely want to help them. And we don’t understand that it’s precisely this attitude that undermines any valid points we might want to make. If our “capital R Right” attitude screams more loudly than our statements, people will respond to the attitude rather than to our words.

So, it’s never enough to be right. We must first be human. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same Latin root: the word for earth, ground, clay. Scripture says we hold a treasure of knowledge in earthen pots (2 Cor. 4:7), these bodies of ours that are just so much pottery. None of us is made of silver or gold or diamond. We are all of us made of clay, and we should keep that in mind.

And we must listen—with a lot more patience than St. Nicholas. We must listen to the tones beneath, the sources of pain and outrage – ask ourselves first, “from what well-spring of blood, sweat and tears is this person coming?” And when the time comes for us to respond, if such a time comes, we should find a way to respond to those deep tones, not necessarily to the words that decorate the surface of life, sometimes as camouflage to hide the silent frustrations people may truly feel but find difficult to express.

Point two, which arises from point one: We should be wary of being right—without relationship. This is the biggest problem with social media brawls today, and with the meteoric rise of incivility in the marketplace. We all like to hurl blue thunderbolts, like some cyber-Zeus, from the Mt. Olympus of our smartphones and dual monitor displays, we even have a holy, electronic glow on our faces as we do it. And, like the ancient gods, we care not about collateral damage, about the ripple effects of our fierce strivings, because we are Right, Amen? And, by gum, people need to hear what I have to say! And so, I shall set my data-stream whirlwind upon the earth and let it wreak its havoc and woe betide those who try to stand in its path. Truth is Truth, and let the chips fall where they may.

There’s a beautiful passage repeated again and again in Homer’s Odyssey, a refrain that I really love. Whenever someone new arrives on the scene, the hosts, in making them welcome, ask the same almost religious litany of questions, “Who are you… where are you from… what is your city… who are your parents… how did you get here?” The reason is that hospitality requires context. Yes, strangers are welcome, but they shouldn’t remain strangers. If I am going to eat and drink with you and let you stay beneath my roof, I need to know you, to know what is important about you, to flesh you out as a human being. I would suggest that true discourse—meaningful, even transformational discourse—requires the same sort of community. Anything else is little more than electrons firing in the void. You can be right all day long, but never change a single mind. And what is that worth?

Point Three: There is a time and a place for anger. There is a time to throw down and make strong statements full of righteous indignation—maybe not like St. Nicholas, but certainly in defense of the defenseless, on behalf of the stranger, to right the wrongs inflicted by abuse and neglect and exploitation. This is precisely what Christ was doing in the Temple when he was flinging around the tables of people who were price gauging the poor, setting up a den of thieves in the House of the very God who welcomes the fatherless and the widow. There is a time, as St. Paul tells us, to be angry…yet do not sin (Eph. 4:26). We are not authorized to take the treasure of the Knowledge of Truth and do the same horrible things that others have been doing to people. The truth is not a weapon for revenge; it is meant to heal, to restore, to redeem.

But let me add a caution. The Newtonian Law that pertains to force and power, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, pertains also to the force and power of our words and declarations. Strong words rarely change minds and hearts. Maybe a few. But strong words, even when they must be said, often bring strong words back in reply, or worse. Recall that within a week of driving out the money-changers from the Temple, Christ was crucified. It was no accident, and it came as no surprise to him, I’m sure. He knew what he was doing and what he was getting himself into. But we often do not. We go charging in, like the Light Brigade against the Russian cannons, full of the Joan of Arc visions of rightness, and we are surprised and hurt and outraged that people dare to fire back at us. And sometimes they aren’t nice about it.

We should be angry when anger is called for. But we should also count the cost that our anger may exact—before we take up arms for a cause, even if those arms are “just words.” All the courage and superior knowledge in the world won’t save any of us from public vilification, insult, or even slander. If we’re up for those, at least we know what to be ready for. But we shouldn’t be surprised or dismayed if and when they come.

I end with this note. There actually isn’t a shred of historical evidence to support the celebrated story of the Slapping Santa. But the fact that Christians in the 1400s thought it was a great way to reinforce how we should handle doctrinal discussion is a valuable lesson of exactly the wrong way to handle our knowledge.

Let us instead redeem our knowledge, redeem our rightness, and in so doing, redeem one another.