When I was in seminary we had a panel discussion in our class on rural ministries and it was comprised of retired Lutheran pastors who had served small churches. All of the pastors were male – not unusual given their average age. During the course of the discussion, the topic of clergy wives came up. Now given they were all men, the term “clergy wife” was exclusively used and wasn’t much of a surprise; however, for the female seminarians (who were the majority of the students in the class), it was a bit challenging. We heard all about how congregations have expectations of clergy wives: they will bake cookies for the bake sale, teach in the Sunday school, join the Lutheran Church Women, sing in the choir and, if she plays the organ, they even get an organist out of the deal! These pastors referred to this sort of thinking as the “two-fer” call – as in you get “two for one” when calling your pastor. Now in all fairness, these pastors did say that the expectations for clergy wives were often steeped in ridged gender roles and sometimes quite inflexible; however, they all went on to extol the virtues of their respective wives and all of the things they did in the parish to support their husbands – and they made it clear they could not have been effective in their ministry without the support of their wives. Upon leaving the classroom after that presentation, one of our fellow female seminarians asked me, “So what do you think about all those clergy wives?” I replied, “Are you kidding me?! I’m getting me one as soon as I can!! I don’t need a husband … I NEED A WIFE!”
That evening at home, Stuart and I talked about our days and I told him about this panel discussion. I said to him, “It was the consensus of the female seminarians that we don’t need husbands, we need WIVES!” Stu replied, “What do you think I am? I AM the rector’s wife … or at least I will be!” Now I laughed at that initially, but he called me out. “Who bakes the cookies in this house?” Oh … he had me on that one – I only do that at Christmas. “And who cooks most of the dinners around here?” OK … he had me on that one too – I’m a utilitarian cook … he cooks for the joy of it. “And if you open up every cookbook your mother ever gave us, to whom did she give them??” OK … that was three for three because all of them have “To my cooking buddy Stuart from Mom” written in the front cover. I conceded … I already HAD a rector’s wife (and someday when a church calls me to be a rector, then it will be official … right now he’s the Priest-in-Charge’s Wife). And I have to admit, he’s good at it. So much so that some of my male colleagues have said they will be sending their wives up so my “wife” can teach them how to care for a priest! “A capable wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.” This passage from Proverbs is probably one of the more well-known sections of this book. Proverbs is part of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Wisdom texts – which also includes Job, Psalms, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, and the apocryphal books of Wisdom, and Sirach. These texts are devoted on how to live a wise and faithful life and often are full of practical advice. The author of Proverbs is giving an extended lesson to his son. So we must begin by realizing this “capable wife” emanates from a position of male privilege and patriarchy. Ancient Jewish culture had strong gender role expectations for both men and women (not unlike what our pastor friends found in their congregations). And I don’t know about you, but reading this exhaustive list of what a capable wife does … well it made me TIRED! I was ready for a nap after just reading this list! She “seeks wool and flax” and weaves cloth; she rises while it is still night and provides food for her household; she considers a field, buys it and plants a vineyard (and probably makes the wine too!); she is a business woman who makes linen garments and sells them; her children and husband call her happy (I’d call her exhausted … but who am I?). This woman is doing all things, at all times, for all people! We call this … over-functioning, don’t we? And it is tempting to fall into this idealized standard which no woman, or man, could possibly live up to. It is possible that our poet author of Proverbs is ascribing to this capable wife the very virtues of Lady Wisdom which he extols. It is no small thing that wisdom is personified in both Hebrew and Greek as a feminine quality. We also need remember that the Holy Spirit is also personified in both Greek and Hebrew text with feminine names. So our Scriptures speak of God’s Spirit which imparts Wisdom as part of the femininity of God – even in the midst of a patriarchal culture. We still live in a patriarchal culture which affords particular privilege to men but at the same time also binds men into rigid gender expectations which limit their expression of what it means to be male. Patriarchy is a part of our sinful nature which hurts both women and men. God’s Spirit placed into our holy writings the seeds of respect and honor for both feminine and masculine and when we dig just a bit deeper into this passage, we find some things which address the patriarchy of our own day – especially in what Proverbs 31 does not say about the capable wife. First, nowhere does it say that the wife’s value and worth are derived from her husband. She is a woman of her own worth and value and although later Christian tradition would try to make a woman’s identity a consequence of her husband and her status dependent upon him, this just isn’t in the passage. This capable wife is her own person and, if anything, her husband’s reputation is dependent upon her qualities, not the other way around! This woman’s worth is a result of her own thoughts and actions – there is no indication of her being submissive and demur. She is pursuing her own ends rather than obeying orders and doing so for the good of herself and her household. The writer praises her for being purposeful – we might even say she’s being praised for her headstrong ways. Second, this wife is not extoled for childbirth and child rearing. In the ancient world, bearing children and rearing them was a key status credential for women. The writer only makes a passing reference to her children rising up and calling her happy – he does not say anything else about motherhood as her primary or sole identity. The passage has a lot to say about this woman’s generativity (she “seeks,” “rises,” “buys,” and “provides”), but her generativity is a result of her intellect and wisdom not her biological functions. Finally, this passage says absolutely nothing about her appearance. Not one word! It says nothing about her age, her body shape, her clothing, her make up – it says nothing about all those things with which our current culture is so obsessed. Our culture tells women and girls that their core value is based upon physical beauty – and a standard of physical beauty largely promulgated by magazines with Photoshopped images of models creating a standard of “beauty” no woman could ever achieve. We obsess about this. We have and epidemic of eating disorders because of it. We spend way too much money on plastic surgery and make up because of it. The world tells us that our worth is based on impossible images and that which will not last but the poet says rightfully, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain…” Our common life is woven with painful realities of the cultural expectations put upon us based upon gender as well as other aspects of our transitory and fleeting earthly nature. The good news is we are called to a different, and dare I say peculiar, way of life – one grounded in our real worth as God’s beloved children and not one based on our biology, what we look like or our social status. Our identity in God, who we really are, is something which cannot be taken from us – it is the one thing which endures forever. Mark’s gospel narrative holds two interesting things in tension. On the one hand, Mark’s vocabulary is quite limited compared with other gospel writers and with other New Testament texts. On the other hand, he does some pretty sophisticated things with his narrative constructs to link ideas and images together. One curiosity to me, is that Mark is the only gospel writer who preserves several of Jesus’ words in his native tongue which was Aramaic. Matthew, Mark and Luke all quote Jesus’ words from the cross in Aramaic: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?). In addition, Mark preserves two other Aramaic phrases: after healing Jairus’ daughter he says, “Talitha cum” (“Little girl, I say to you get up!”) and the phrase we hear in today’s gospel “Ephphtha” (“Be opened!”). Now when writers do something out of context, like quote foreign languages, it makes me wonder … why? Why these phrases? Could there be a connection between them? As I prayed with these phrases, it seemed as if they link together as part of the pattern of our Christian life.
The first Aramaic saying in Mark is Jesus’ words to Jairus’ daughter, “Talitha cum / Get up.” These are really the first words to anyone who begins the life of faith. They are the Aramaic counterpart to God’s words spoken to Abram in Genesis: “Lech lecha” – “Get up and go.” God called Abram to get up and then to go to the land God would show him. Likewise when we are called to follow God, we have to get up, get on our feet (literally and figuratively) and be ready to go where God leads us. The second phrase is from today’s reading: “Ephphtha / Be opened.” As Jesus opened the ears and loosened the tongue of the deaf mute man, this word is also one of invitation to us as we follow Christ: Be opened! The Christian life is one where we begin the journey to discover who we really are in God. This is different from who we think we are – that’s largely a construct of our ego, for good or for ill. The journey of our faith is to peel back the layers of our life experiences and beliefs in order to discover who we really are from God’s perspective. We cannot do any of this work unless and until we allow ourselves to be opened. There are Christians who have no trouble getting up and beginning the journey but being opened is hard. To be opened means to risk. And what we risk is being open to transformation: we call it conversion in the Church. Some folks have said the scariest word for Episcopalians is “evangelism” but I disagree. The scariest word is “conversion” because conversion means the death of one way of being so another way can be born. It is the cycle of death and resurrection. German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that when Christ calls you, he bids you come and die. That is conversion. Dying to our own selfish needs: our need to be right, our need to protect our prideful egos, our many and varied addictions (and we all have them … some are just more socially acceptable than others) – dying to all of this is what conversion means. But we cannot be converted until we are opened. We must be opened to the possibility of a greater life in the risen Christ than what we know today. If we refuse this call to be opened, especially to the change conversion brings, then all we will do with our faith is hide behind our religion and mistake religiosity for falling into the hands of the living God. Religion is only a means to move towards God – we dare not use it as a cheap substitute for God. Once we take seriously the call to “get up” and “be opened” we move into conversion. There are two places I find where we tend to resist being open. The first is right after the call to get up. We feel called by God, but we really don’t want to let God do the leading. We’d rather remain in charge of our lives and let our egos rule the day. The other time is right after conversion where we may be tempted to thing we’ve somehow “arrived” at our final destination. Conversion is a lifelong process of being made anew – over and over and over. When we experience a conversion and we find ourselves changed, we can be tempted to close down and defend our new position lest we be called to yet another conversion. Ephphtha! Be opened! It is a constant reminder of the importance of openness to God’s Spirit at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. As we engage in this process of conversion, we can often encounter the third of Jesus’ Aramaic sayings: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? / My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We find this in conversion because to change always means something about us must die. And death brings out Jesus’ cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christian mystics call this point the dark night of the soul. It is that place where the death brought about by conversion is very real, the grief is real, and we may not be able to discern the presence of God, and a way forward isn’t always clear. True conversion of the spirit will always take us there at some point and even life itself will take us there whether we want it to or not. There is a story told of a professor at Virginia Seminary who, upon the death of his wife, became extremely depressed. This professor and priest would come to the Eucharist at the seminary chapel and when it was time to stand and recite the Nicene Creed … he sat silently. For months on end he sat and could not bring himself to profess his belief in God. Finally, after many months, he began to emerge from his grieving process. One day, he spoke at chapel and explained that while he was in the despair of his grief, he found he could not stand and recite the Nicene Creed because he wasn’t sure if he really did believe in God. However, he found himself carried by the seminary community at that point. “You said the creed for me when I could not say it for myself,” he told them. In that space where he felt so abandoned by God and so alone, it was the Church through the seminary community, who carried him until he could stand on his own again. None of us can do this journey of faith in a vacuum. We are not independent, discreet entities of existence. We are a community where our actions impact the real lives of others. It’s been said there are no “Lone Ranger” Christians and I think this is very true. Our faith journey inevitably moves us from getting up to being opened to being converted – to dying and rising over and over and over in the course of our lives. Talitha cum, Ephphtha, Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? Get up; be opened; my God, my God why have you forsaken me? – all of us can connect with one of these Aramaic phrases right now. Wherever you are on your journey and whichever phrase speaks to you, know this: you do not journey in this life alone. You travel in the company of the saints here on earth, with this community here at Grace Church, and with those who have gone before who continue to intercede for you, in the company of angels, and always in the presence of the Living God. In my time as a hospice chaplain, I conducted many funerals and some were rather … colorful. I had a very interesting encounter at one of my graveside services with an evangelical lay pastor who ran a trucker ministry up and down I-81. The deceased was one of my patients and the family had asked me to do a graveside funeral; however, this lay pastor let me know that the deceased had “come to Christ and was saved” through his ministrations. Now I believe strongly in the “make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ” model of evangelism. I was glad the deceased, who had a very hard and painful life, had heard the word of the gospel and come to believe. This was all good.
But as our conversation progressed, the lay pastor began to lecture me about the scriptures and how the King James Bible was the only authoritative word of God and all other translations were of the Devil because “they took words out and changed the meaning of God’s word.” Well, at this point the lay pastor was showing his ignorance of linguistics and his own prejudice towards the King James Bible. Standing at a graveside really didn’t seem the appropriate venue for a theological debate, but that didn’t seem to stop him. He proceeded to point an accusing finger at me and said, “You ARE going to preach God’s word from the King James Bible, aren’t you?” I wasn’t going to argue, “Of course, I have no objection to that.” He continued to point at me and said, “You DO READ the King James Bible for your learning, don’t you?” … “Well … no,” I replied. He had a stunned look on his face. “I prefer to read the scriptures in Greek and Hebrew,” I told him, “I find the original languages to be rich and enlightening myself.” He didn’t know what to say to that … so he walked away. One of the things we humans tend to do is confuse the means with the ends. As I vowed at my ordination, I do believe the Holy Scriptures to be the word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation. But note what this does not say: it does not say all things in the Holy Scriptures are necessary to salvation. There is some really weird stuff in the Bible, if we're completely honest. The Scriptures are a tool for us, inspired by God, written by humans to instruct us and form us into Godly people. But when we confuse them with God or think God only speaks in Elizabethan English, then we have a problem! It is called idolatry. In today’s encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus takes them on for confusing the means with the ends. The presenting issue is the tradition of washing hands which, interestingly, is not commanded in the Torah at all. Now for us in the 21st century, eating with unwashed hands seems to be not just unwise but unhealthy too. But remember, this all happened long before germs and bacteria had been discovered! The washing of hands and other vessels as Mark describes, was a tradition that developed over time in the Jewish community. It came out of the oral tradition which was codified in the Mishnah and then in the Talmud … but it is not in the Torah. This tradition was born out of a desire to make all aspects of Jewish life holy. We often refer to this as the hallowing of time. The intention was to draw your mind and heart to God even through the most mundane activities – like washing hands or pots and pans. We have similar practices in our tradition: the use of the liturgical forms in the Book of Common Prayer, the practice of reading the Daily Office, the various pietistic practices like crossing yourself or genuflecting that we exercise in worship. All of these come from our tradition and can draw us closer to God. If we believe that only our outward behaviors are what make us Christian, we have mistaken the means for the ends. This is what Jesus is pointing out: one can do all the right outward actions and still have a sinful heart which unleashes the unholy. We all have sin in our hearts – this is the truth. This is why we cannot merely look within ourselves to save ourselves. If we could have somehow “evolved” our way into being better, don’t you think we would have done it by now? If our traditions are merely a pietistic show which allows us to dodge the sin within us and mask it in religiosity, we are perpetuating sin in the name of God and this is most dangerous. If, on the other hand, our traditions move us to unmask and confess the sin within us that it may be healed, then our traditions are moving us towards God and not a false religiosity. Jesus said, “… there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile.” It is important to note that the sin inside makes us unclean and confusing the means for the ends is sinful. But also note that what comes from outside us conversely has the power to save us – namely God’s very self which is transcendent and wholly Other. This God comes to us through Means of Grace: Bread and Wine/Body and Blood, the Scripture and the prayers. It may appear somewhat paradoxical to say that our outward traditions and behaviors both are and are not important. They are certainly not important if the behaviors and traditions are merely a false face on a corrupted heart. They are not important if they become litmus tests for who is a “true believer” and who is not. If, however, the behaviors and traditions are moving us to more honesty and shaping our hearts to be more inclined towards the true religion James speaks of – caring for the most vulnerable among us and keeping ourselves from the corrupting influences of the world – then the behaviors and traditions have a purpose: to draw us closer to God and shape us into more Christ-like people. It’s often been noted that behavior proceeds belief – we behave our way into new beliefs. This is captured in one of our Anglican traditional sayings: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi – the law of praying is the law of believing or “how we pray shapes how we believe.” So it isn’t whether we read a particular translation of the Bible, use the Book of Common Prayer, pray the Daily Office, cross ourselves or genuflect which makes us Christ-like. But if these practices help us be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, to be doers of the word and not just hearers, to care for the most vulnerable among us and resist the corruptions of the world, the flesh and the devil, then we will honor God with both our lips and our hearts. |
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October 2017
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Grace Episcopal Church
114 East A Street Brunswick, MD 21716 |
(301) 834-8540
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