The way to life - “mine” or His?

“Mine” was the first word my younger brother ever learned, thanks to the anxieties of his big brother, who had to draw limits on what toys he would share and what he would keep. That was a harsh lesson but not the ungracious (to be generous) response of the older brother to the return of his prodigal sibling, who, after all, had not starved to death or been lost in a foreign country. 

They had probably given up hope, at least hope is what his parents had in their hearts, as they had experienced a death before death from their younger child. 

We don’t know how the mother reacted but the father was overjoyed. His son had given him up for dead, prematurely, by asking for his inheritance up front; which he then spent recklessly (on booze and women or cars or fine dining for fast friends) before returning in desperation and humility (apparently) to his family home. 

Dad was happy, over the moon. “Kill the fatted calf” - as if the Pope was visiting or better yet the King. As if what he had saved for a burnt offering were no longer needed, now that what he would have sacrificed for - even more than he already had - was back safe and sound.

This is the background of the famous story of the prodigal son told by Jesus in the 15th chapter of the gospel of Luke. It is a reaction to the ungenerous jealous response of the self-righteous to people they disapproved of being welcomed inside the embrace of the kingdom of God that Jesus was proclaiming. ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ (Luke 15.1) They want to see justice done, man! Payback! How about it? They had it coming to them, they might say, of anyone humbly approaching the Heavenly Father as the younger son had approached his dad. 

But Jesus does not see much good in retribution. Are you any less sinful than those on whom this calamity has fallen? Jesus  asked, after tragedies were reported to him - a wall falling on pilgrims, or the cruel tyrannies of a brutal Roman prefect casually inflicted on others. No, he said, turn away from such vengeance-seeking, such jealousy, and see your own faults, your own sins, and turn toward God.

We are asked to do no less. We are asked, indeed, to answer such temptations with the most powerful of gifts:  love.

In the words of Saint Paul so often cited on a wedding day, love “does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people.”

As Paul went on to say, “On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails. Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.” (1 Corinthians 13: 5, 6-8a. Phillips trans.) 

The temptation to wish wrong on others, however ‘provoked’ we may feel, is not something we can abandon lightly. Indeed our own survival - of soul even more than body - may depend on this counter-instinct: to rise to the bait not at all but to rise above all the pain and grief we rightly - or self-righteously - may feel, and seek the grueling sacrificial path of the Christ who leads us to a glory beyond shame or resentment, hate or indifference. 

That is the way, the revolutionary way, of love. And it lasts, beyond empire - as Jesus faced - or collaborator - as Jesus faced too; beyond imperial domination or invasion, beyond our own false hopes or ideals that hold us back from following the way that will lead - long and hard as the road may be - to life.

Meet the Priest

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is ordained in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement, and has served as a priest in northern California and western Washington, and now serves in southern Arizona. 

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent4_RCL.docx

March 27th 2022

Fourth Sunday in Lent

https://hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digital-collection/04.+engraving/1266400

A version of this essay was published by the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday March 20th 2022. https://tucson.com/lifestyles/the-way-to-life---mine-or-his/article_48d49c56-a3d6-11ec-acef-ff839595afe4.html

Keeping the Faith: Patrick of Ireland

 

The St. Patrick statue pictured above was a gift to St. Matthew's Church in Tucson from Lenci Loring 

Patrick, a runaway slave, left civilization behind and returned to the land of his captors as a missionary bishop. There his crude Latin - an embarrassment in the civilized world - fit those to whom he wrote, notably Coroticus, a British slaver who called himself a Christian. No Christian are you, said Patrick, for you are a tyrant, kidnapping, enslaving, and slaughtering the innocent.. 

Patrick didn’t write much besides his letter to Coroticus but he did write an ‘apologia’ of sorts - an account of his own fitness for ministry and his credibility as a witness to the saints. It was rough and ready, more like something from the letters of Paul of Tarsus than the literary Confessions of Augustine of Hippo.

His feast we celebrate just a few days before the equinox in March. Saint Patrick’s Day has become a drinking holiday, like so many American days, but in an earlier century it was an occasion for Irish immigrants that had newly become American to proclaim their love for and loyalty to their new country. But now it is often an occasion for the wearin’ o’ the green simply to avoid being pinched, or buying the house a round.

And so we are more likely to associate the equinox with another feast of the Christian year, the Annunciation. If we celebrate the Nativity of our Savior on December 25th it is only sensible that we count nine months back to celebrate his expectation. “Here am I” says Mary, the angels let out a long held breath, and the redemption of creation begins anew. 

We nowadays seek to celebrate more than our own survival, our rescue from the pit of sin or despond: we want to mark a day in spring as a reminder of God’s creation of all things, and our place among them. 

Hence, a month after the equinox, Earth Day. This year that day falls just after Easter. And so we have some time between now and then so we can prepare with proper Lenten expectation, repentance, and humility to recall our place in creation.

Let us remind ourselves that among God’s creatures are the least of people, the forgotten, the invaded, the captive: those assaulted in their own homes and drawn away to a foreign land, as the people of Patrick were, and all those who have ached for release from captivity or relief from the oppression of violence, for the healing of wounds, and the balm of the Spirit Mary’s son bears.

From the Iona Community:

A Universal Prayer for Peace 

Lead us from death to life, from falsehood to truth.

Lead us from despair to hope, from fear to trust.

Lead us from hate to love, from war to peace.

Let peace fill our lives, our world, our universe.

Peace, peace, peace.

Amen

https://iona.org.uk/prayers-for-the-people-of-ukraine/

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is ordained in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement and has served as pastor in northern California and western Washington and now in southern Arizona.

JRL+ Mar 4, 2022 

https://confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_english#

A Letter To The Soldiers Of Coroticus

http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/p02.html

A version of this essay was published in the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday March 13th 2022 page E2 under the title "Patrick of Ireland. https://tucson.com/lifestyles/patrick-of-ireland/article_c74b8a6e-9e49-11ec-a843-a7153b926f82.html

creation care : an unfinished parable

There was a landowner who put his top employees in charge of his holdings. He said to them, “Take charge of it – and take care of the place. Bring your families to live on the land, and enjoy its produce. Serve it faithfully, and from its care you will live abundantly.”

So the servants came on board. They lived on the land, and raised families there. They were as fertile as the land itself and they grew in numbers. And it was theirs for the taking – to take charge of, to take care of, or to take advantage of – and with the land they served as their home they would live in hope and abundance, or in fear and scarcity – it was up to them.

What will they say when the landlord comes? How will they be with him? As servants entering into joy, or as sad stewards with empty fields, exhausted resources, and mistreated fellow creatures, to show for their stewardship?

We are familiar now with the data and analysis that have exposed to our concern the phenomenon of climate change. It is a transnational challenge that faces us on a global front. Many of the crises and problems facing humanity on occasional or local bases connect to this root phenomenon: we live in the Age of the Anthropocene. 

Human activity shapes geography, climate, biosphere – and even geology. We are making, through our collected and cumulative activities, a permanent impact on the landscape of our world: its ice and free water, its air and clouds, its land and growing things (including food for ourselves and all other animal creatures), and hence the sustainability of life for ourselves and our fellow beings.

Recently I attended a meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego. I met a  Turkish seminarian from Istanbul, an exchange student in the United States, who told me he’d polled his fellow students: If you saw a cricket in your room what would you do? Ninety percent said, I’d kill it. 

And these were seminarians!  he exclaimed. What became of compassion for all creatures?

Let us not make the Anthropocene the anthropocentric. Let us remember our special mandate as human creatures to care for the earth: not just to multiply and fill it – but to tend it. We are the stewards, the workers in the garden, of this green and gold, and glorious, blue white planet. It is our home, but not as owners – not as exploiters – but as chief tenants. We are the manager of the apartment house, so to speak, not the landlord. 

We look forward to the return of our landlord, with joyful expectation but also some anxiety. Our anticipation is mixed with feelings of loss and grief – and even guilt. In our Christian hope we turn to that landlord and yearn for his presence. 

As preparatory work for the hope that is born in us through faith, we must acknowledge our failures – perhaps irrecoverable, some of them – as stewards, even brothers and sisters, to earth and our fellow created beings. 

But our Christian perspective, even in the kingdom of anxiety that is this world, is that we can do something still worthwhile, small and large, in our collective identity and our solitary pursuits, to move toward the day of his coming with rejoicing – a welcome made possible only because we do not stand alone. 

God is indeed already with us – in our suffering and elation, our watchfulness and neglect.

What we face now with environmental catastrophe is unprecedented in scale, possibly, but not in moral quality or human impact. A famine up close is a hungry village, a starving face, and a child with no solace. A forest fire or a drought is in aggregate a great disaster. 

But, again, up close it is the tragedy of each creature swept up and away by destructive forces. Each of us has stories to tell, and promises to keep, on the human level – efforts token or tiny that help us forward as we confront the common foe. Together – as we band together – there are large things we can do even yet to make the world a better place.

Maybe the time of changing light bulbs is over, as enough. But the time of the Anthropocene, as geologists call this our human-fashioned epoch, has just begun. 

We too easily indulge in a self-delusion: self-delusion about the place of humanity in creation. We are deluding ourselves if we think our self-assumed pose of superiority to the rest of creation is something mandated in the Bible. 

Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.

In other words, we are both to cultivate the land and to take custody of it as servants of the Lord. We are stewards of the earth, caretakers and custodians. 

We are God’s representatives, or images, in creation, so exercising that stewardship is a servant role, subservient to the true land Lord of the universe. We have power to alter the world but we depend on the earth and its life for survival. 

Our “rule” is subordinate – submissive to God and God’s will for creation – God’s will, not our own.

Take care, take charge. Fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And delight in it.

May this day be holy, good, and peaceful.

May the creative spirit of the universe

enliven us with hope.

May the nurturing spirit of the universe

compel us to care for creation - and each other.

May the valiant spirit of the universe

imbue us with the fortitude

to see the truth,

and the wisdom

to act upon it.

JRL+  

The Rev. Dr. John Leech is Priest Associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson and is a member of the Creation Care Council of the diocese of Arizona.

The Episcopal Church Foundation posted a version of this essay on its Vestry Papers: Caretakers of God's Creation website https://www.ecfvp.org/vestry-papers/article/996/stewards-of-the-earth edited by Sandra Montes, on April 6th 2022.

Lenten Reading

I forgot what I was giving up for Lent. The first time. The second time, I remembered, a little bit too late. Oh well, I said to myself. Of course it was done and that’s no excuse, but it is an explanation. And, thanks to my Lenten reading, I am reminded that that is not what Lent is about.

Lent is about forgiveness. It is not, really, in its depths, about giving up, or taking on, something, some thing or practice.

And it is not even about screwing up when you fail to keep a holy Lent. If you don’t fail, even if you keep perfectly to your practice, it is not about that. Because life with God is not about screwing up or doing things or not doing things. It is about grace. 

I’ve just been reading one of Reyna Grande’s older novels, “Dancing with Butterflies”, which, spoiler alert, is about forgiveness.

Everybody screws up, fails, themselves or each other. Ultimately, though, if you reach out for it, undeserved, or even unearned, grace is there. 

We cannot be intact and holy in our own perfection. But we can receive the gifts of imperfection, of realizing we are sinners too - people in need of grace, always imperfect, but getting better. 

It’s about forgiveness. Give it a try. 

under the mercy

 

Medieval Map of the World with Jerusalem at its center, c.1250

Eternal God, your kingdom has broken into our troubled world through the life, death, and resurrection of your Son. Help us to hear your word and obey it, and bring your saving love to fruition in our lives, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!

Behold, your house is left unto you desolate: and verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. (Luke 13:34-35)

Once while she was at a table in a restaurant nestled among the vineyards of the Sonoma Valley, a winemaker looked out a window and saw kids running desperately through the rows of vines. Why were they running? 

She found out. These were kids escaping a dangerous situation. They had been incarcerated in the juvenile hall down the road and it was so decrepit, she discovered, that the cell doors would not even lock, and so the kids felt unsafe and afraid. And they ran. 

Her response was to work to get the situation changed. Eventually, a new more secure facility was built. 

And among those who brought some comfort and humanity to those children, for children they were, was a woman from a local church who would visit the detention center and read to the kids. They called her Grandma.

And so those children were gathered under a mother’s, and a grandmother’s, wings.

The motherly impulse to embrace and cover those exposed to violence or insecurity led these women to take steps to care for and protect people otherwise left on the edge of society, inmates of “juvie” - but now they were seen as people, children, even children of God.

“Luke saw a persistent intent on the part of Jesus to bring in those cast out, to raise up those beaten down, to bring those on the extremities of the social order close to the heart of God.” (Michael B. Curry, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2. Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. 71)

And so we realize that “... the infinite reach and eternal embrace of God’s reign was at the core of the gospel message of Jesus.” (Ibid., 73)

In the years 82 and 83 of our era - that is, early in the days of the church, a Roman governor - not Pilate, Agricola - led his troops north through Britannia to Caledonia, what we now call Scotland,  and attacked the local forces arrayed against him. The account of their actions, written by the son-in-law of that Roman general, put these words in the mouth of the leader of the last resistance to Roman imperial rule in those parts. 

“Brigands of the world, after exhausting the land by their wholesale plunder they now ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their greed, his poverty their lust for power. Neither East or West has served to glut their maw. Only they, of all on earth, long for the poor with as keen a desire as they do the rich. Robbery, butchery, rapine, these the liars call 'empire': they create desolation and call it peace." Tacitus, Agricola, 30. (Mattingly trans., Penguin, 1948/2009, p. 20).

 

And so it was in Roman Palestine, during the time of the Jewish revolt, that had taken place only a few years before Agricola’s advance - that is, from 66 to 70 of our era. And there too the Romans, led by Vespasian and then Titus, laid waste to the countryside - and imposed the famous Pax Romana. They created desolation and called it peace.

These events would have been fresh in the minds of Luke’s first hearers, especially Titus’ destruction of the Temple - the house of God - in 70 CE.

“Your house is left to you” - that is, “your house is forsaken” - would not only remind them of the work of the Romans but of the destruction of the first Temple, when the house of God was first destroyed. 

Indeed the prophets from Isaiah to Jeremiah first prophesied the judgment of God. 

But later there was both exhortation and consolation.

After the people returned from 70 years’ exile in Babylon they began to rebuild their city, and build themselves some nice houses. But the prophet Haggai exhorted them: ``How can you live in your comfortable houses when the house of God lies desolate?” And so they began the work of rebuilding the Temple. 

They were called to begin the work, a work that would last beyond their lives, of rebuilding not merely the physical temple building but the moral temple: the kingdom of God that lay within their hearts.

It was in 70 CE the Roman general Titus – cf. Josephus, the Jewish War, 6.5.1 – sacked the city. And in 70 CE, Rabbi Tarfon commented on Micah 6:8, saying: 

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” (Talmud)

We are called into the work of building and rebuilding the house of God.

As in the time of the return from Exile so many centuries before, so again after the destruction of the temple in the first century of our era, the people of God -both Jew and Gentile - were called into the shelter of the God who not only judges but redeems.

Indeed his mercy always prevails over his wrath. 

And the message is ultimately of hope. 

Hope outlasts fear. Hope lives beyond desolation. 

The house will be rebuilt. And there is room for all God’s children.

God’s promise is renewed. Remember the promise to Abraham. 

‘“Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”’ (Genesis 15:5)

As we have learned from the Apostle Paul those descendants are all the children of faith, not only the people of Israel but the people of all nations on whom God’s loving embrace has fallen - and that happens to mean everybody: there is room, there is room, for all the children of God in God’s house; everyone can find shelter in the Temple not built with hands, but with the love of God. 

“His steadfast love endures forever.” Ps 118: 1, 29.

God ultimately is a god of compassion not anger, of redemption not rage. And of a promise fulfilled, not broken. 

As often as the people of God strayed and have strayed, God has called them back under his protection, the shelter of his wings. 

In talking about the goodness of the God of creation, an archbishop of Canterbury writing about the year 1100 reminded his readers of this passage in the gospel of Luke. 

‘Anselm describes the consoling, nurturing Jesus as a hen gathering her chicks under her wing (Matt. 23:37) and suggests that mother Jesus revives the soul at her breast. . . .

‘“But you, Jesus, good lord, are you not also a mother? Are you not that mother who, like a hen, collects her chickens under her wings? Truly, master, you are a mother. For what others have conceived and given birth to, they have received from you. . . . You are the author, others are the ministers. It is then you, above all, Lord God, who are mother. . . .

‘“And you also, soul, dead by yourself, run under the wings of your mother Jesus and bewail your sorrows under his wings.

‘“Christ, mother, who gathers under your wings your little ones, your dead chick seeks refuge under your wings. For by your gentleness, those who are hurt are comforted; by your perfume, the despairing are reformed. Your warmth resuscitates the dead; your touch justifies sinners. . . . Console your chicken, resuscitate your dead one, justify your sinner. May your injured one be consoled by you; may he who of himself despairs be comforted by you and reformed through you in your complete and unceasing grace. For the consolation of the wretched flows from you, blessed, world without end. Amen.”’

His love endures forever - or shall we say, her love endures forever. Amen.

(Anselm of Canterbury, Opera omnia 3: 33 and 39-41. Quoted by Carol Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, University of California Press, 1982, p. 114-115.)

Sermon for the second Sunday of Lent 2022, for people of the Episcopal church of Saint Matthew, Tucson. JRL+

March 13th 2022 Second Sunday in Lent Genesis 15:1-12,17-18 Philippians 3:17-4:1 Luke 13:31-35 Psalm 27 https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent2_RCL.html

Last call for haircuts

Today I confessed to my hair stylist. As one does. Two years ago on Ash Wednesday I asked another barber to ‘reach for the three-eighths’ and mow my hair down to that length. (Pictures not available.) The next day everything shut down. Covid hair. A year later I got re-civilized. 

Minor inconvenience. Since then and before then I’ve been on call one night a week at a local hospital, to provide spiritual care on request. And usually it is not about a haircut. Or lack of one. It is about lack of breath or the hope of a longer life. Often though it is not about a lack of faith. 

Sometimes a whole family gathers around a bedside. Flying across the country to say farewell and thanks to a family member. Sometimes the patient is alone. And sometimes they have traveled a long way to get here. Walking, even, from Central America. Not without hope. Or faith.

Sometimes our hopes are let down. Sometimes our family lets us down. Or the prognosis is not good. And sometimes we have to go back home, desolate, mourning what was lost, a child or a chance. 

From one extreme to the other. Trivial, profound. Whatever was in my mind before the hospital calls, disappears. Nothing else matters at that moment. 

So it is also when the call is from a family member or friend if one of us, one of our friends or family, is in the hospital. Or did not make it there. All else drops away.

And we feel our own mortality on occasion, when death-defying surgery or ballistic luck preserves our lives from injury or disease, or stupidity on the road. 

Life is suddenly precious. It goes on, if it can. For a moment, the senses are more vivid. The feelings deepen. The sorrows lengthen. But so eventually may grow the joys. Of remembrance. Of new life. Hope and faith. And, finally, love.