Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson
My preaching was very specific,
I was sure my words were terrific,
But the folks in the pew
Had a much different view:
“Your sermons were all soporific.”
ANECDOTE FROM GORDON:
While preaching a sermon I thought was at least passable, a worshiper with dementia let out an audible “Ho-Hum” during what was meant to be a pregnant pause. It has the makings of a Mr. Bean skit.
Protecting the Homeland by Donnie Trump (2nd grade)
Statue of Liberty plaque with Emma Lazarus’ poem “The Colossus”
You don’t get to come here –
“you tired, you poor,
You huddled masses,
yearning to breath free,
you wretched refuse of
your teeming shore,
Stay home, you homeless,
tempest tossed,
my lamp’s blown out
beside the golden door.”
[Simpleton Press, NY, NY, Dec. 8, 2015.]
Click Cartoon a Day for cartoon by Bryant Arnold.
“Pack some heavy heat, Boys,”
said Jesus to the Apostles
on his way to pray in the
Garden of Gethsemane
and off again to the Mount
of Olives – that liberal
haunt with olive branches,
doves, and sh-t like that –
“Conceal and carry, Boys,”
he’d said, in the Upper Room
where that sissy John
laid against his breast –
“Get your guns, Boys,
the Fags, Commies, and
Mohammad-lovers are
comin’ to kill our faith.
“You have heard that it was
said, ‘love your neighbor’,
but I say, take ‘em out, Boys,
we’re ‘the home of the brave’.”
by J. Feelwell, Re-imagining Jesus, Crusaders Press, Lynchburg, VA, Dec. 9, 2015
INTRODUCTION: Every few years a sermon knocks my socks off. This unusual sermon by The Rev. Devon Anderson was heard last Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church in Excelsior, Minnesota. The text is Luke 3:1-6. Disclaimer: the sources for the sermon are listed at the end; the text itself does not include footnotes and does not always include quotation marks.
___________________
A few weeks ago I was in Baltimore at a church meeting held at the Maritime Institute of Technology’s conference center. The institute teaches how to pilot everything from a tugboat to the biggest of seafaring barge. During our meeting my friend Ernesto discovered that the Maritime Institute boasts two “full mission, ship handling” simulators. With a bit of sweet talk, he finagled a tour.
The simulators are housed inside huge 80X30 feet curved projection screens (kind of like an iMax theater). Inside is constructed an actual bridge – the literal steering wheel, radar, and control panels that any barge of that magnitude would have. We stepped onto the bridge in darkness. But after our guide punched some buttons and threw a few switches, the lights came on and we were – in an instant – ship captains, navigating an industrial barge through Baltimore harbor. Ernesto and I took turns serving as captain and first mate.
At some point our tour guide started to mess with us. “Hmmm…,” he said, “it looks like it’s about to rain.” A few buttons, a few switches, and the sky began to darken, as virtual raindrops misted the windows. “Hmmmm…,” he said again, “I think we’re heading for a bit of a hurricane,” and all of a sudden we were in the open sea gazing back at the Maryland coastline, as the waves swelled, and the barge dipped and rocked deeper and deeper. “Oh no,” said our host, clearly enjoying himself in the face of our growing panic, “it looks like the hurricane knocked out power in Baltimore.” As he said it, the control panel, too, flashed and went cold as the sound of the engines cut out. In an instant everything went black. I mean, really black. Out of the darkness came the voice of our guide, “Hmmm…what are you going to do now?” We drove the barge around in the dark for a while – which was terrifying — as the hurricane subsided. Eventually the click click click of buttons and switches cleared the night sky, and from the darkness emerged a million sparkling stars. “When everything goes dark,” our guide told us, “a good pilot slows down and watches for what can help him.”
Hmmm….I’ve been thinking about that virtual darkness out on the virtual sea these past weeks. Advent always happens in the darkest of days, as our little place on the planet moves further and further away from the sun. This time of year, we know a lot about darkness. Our Advent scriptures reflect that. So much of what we read in Advent is about darkness and our thirst for light. “The Lord is my light and my salvation…(Ps 27:1)” writes the psalmist, “the fountain of life in whose light we see light (Ps 36.9). “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.” (Is 9:2). And even today John the Baptist calls the people out into the cold, dark, desert night so they are ready for the light that will save them all. In so many of our Advent stories, the message is the same: the light of the world has come to put an end to darkness, to be a lamp in the hands of those who believe. Like myself, I know so many people whose lives depend on that promise – when we can’t see where we are going; when the bottom drops out; when our prayers go unanswered and we’re marooned in the kind of darkness that makes us afraid to move – we cling to the promise that if we can just keep our minds focused on the light of the world then sooner or later God will send us some bright angels to lead us out.
And yet – deep in our holy scriptures there lives an equal and opposite truth that almost never comes up in church: that God dwells in deep darkness. God comes to the people in dark clouds, dark nights, dark dreams and dark strangers in ways that sometimes scare them half to death but almost always for their good, or at least, for their transformation. God does some of God’s best work in the dark.
We have been conditioned to view darkness as a negative, symbolizing what’s sinister, or dismal, or tragic or wrong. It was a really dark film. We’re in a really dark place right now. He’s gone to the dark side. No one ever asks God for more darkness, please. Please God, come to me in a dark cloud. Give me a dark vision. Please eclipse the sun and throw life as I know it into complete shadow. Put out my lights so I can see what I need to see. Then, send me a dark angel on the worst night of my life, please.
And no one asks for darkness in the Bible, either, but it happens. Once you start noticing how many things happen at night in the Bible, the list grows fast. God comes to Abraham in the dark, instructing a series of desired sacrifices then sealing the covenant with the people Israel forever. God comes to Jacob in the dark not once, but twice – the first in a dream at the foot of a heavenly ladder, and the second on a riverbank where an angel wrestles him all night long. The exodus from Egypt happens at night; God parts the Red Sea at night; manna falls from the sky in the wilderness at night – and that’s just the beginning.
The cloud and the glory always seem to go together – not just in the Hebrew Scriptures, but in our Gospels, too. Ask Jesus’ disciples Peter, James, and John who entered another cloud on another mountain where they too were overshadowed by the glorious, terrifying darkness of God. Ask Saul the ferocious who was blinded on the road so he could be led by the hand to a hard bed in a rented room, where he finally became soft enough to welcome a dark angel named Ananias. Ask Mary how her life – and the life of the whole world – changed when the savior of the world was born in that scary, darkest hour just before dawn. Ask Mary Magdalene who, in her insurmountable grief, discovers the risen Christ. “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…” the discovery of resurrection begins.
It’s not a popular truth, but there it is: God dwells in deep darkness. When we cannot see – when we are not sure where we are going and all our old landmarks have vanished inside the storm – then plenty of us can believe we are lost and forgotten. But what I am asking you to consider is an additional theology – that when we find ourselves in darkness, we may be the exact opposite of lost and forgotten. Based on the witness of those who have gone before, we know that darkness is where God most often restores us when our lives have broken apart. It is the cloud of unknowing where nothing we thought we knew about God can prepare us to meet the God who is. It is in darkness where new life, no matter how shattered, is born.
There are real benefits to this kind of faith, though they may not appeal to those for whom God can only be light (and in whom there is no darkness at all). The first benefit is that we have to slow way, way down when we find ourselves in the dark. When the kids were little we took them to visit Crystal Cave in western Wisconsin, right off I-94. It’s campy as all get-out, but it’s been around as a tourist attraction for a long time, first discovered in 1881. Just like any cave or mine tour, visitors must walk down flight after flight of industrial stairs, down, down, down – 70 feet in this case — into the damp, drippy earth. At some point the guide flips off the lights so everyone can get a feel for how dark the dark can be – like, can’t see your hand in front of your face dark. Anyone that’s been on one of these tours knows – the minute those lights go out, everyone freezes. There’s just no running around in dark like that. All the things we pride ourselves on in the light outside – our speed, our agility, our ability to talk fast and get things done – they don’t help us one single bit in that kind of darkness. Darkness forces us to slow down and use senses we don’t use when our eyes are working in the light of day. Darkness like that sharpens our senses, hones our awareness, makes us hyper-sensitive to God’s light touch.
Another benefit of faith in darkness is teaches that none of our outside navigational tools can, in the end, really help us. Just like when the power went out in the virtual Baltimore harbor – when we hit real darkness, external things we depend upon in the light of our normal lives to keep us safe and secure, no longer work. If it’s not already inside us, then it’s of limited use to us in the dark places. Once we enter darkness we find out what our primary resources are: love, hope, vulnerability, openness, and what insistent, sacred whisper we can learn to trust when we’re navigating by faith and not by sight. We learn in that place to trust more supremely what only God can do for us, over what we think we can do for ourselves.
And finally, inside darkness with everything slooooowed waaaay doooowwn, depending on what’s inside ourselves to feel our way forward, the good news is that God has room and time and enough of our attention to bring forth new life – an entirely new thing that didn’t exist before dark descended. One of my favorite paintings of all time is from Van Gogh’s olive tree series, housed in the permanent collection of the Minnesota Institute of Arts. A light, lavender punctuates the painting in rows between trees and in the background mountain scape. Apparently Van Gogh considered the lavender a color of “consolation” (his word) in that he felt the color was not its own entity, but created by the stormy confrontation of darkness weakened by light. The new creation only possible because of darkness.
I know my defense of darkness will never, ultimately, sell. Endarkenment is never going to appeal to anyone the way enlightenment does. But for those who are already sitting in the dark, and for those of us who know that at some point we’ll be there, too, to consider the possibility that God dwells there with us is Gospel Good News indeed. And, in the end, I do know this: the thing about the cloud of unknowing, which even the saints take on trust is that it’s not there to get through like a test or a fever. It is God’s home. It is the place where God dwells. To be invited in is a great honor, and to stay awhile? Better yet. When sitting in darkness, we never feel that it’s a great honor – it’s the last place any of us want to be. But I do know this: that for those who make it out the other side, while they may not have a lot of words to describe where they have been, and they’ll tell us they never would have chosen it in a million years – they do have a great story to tell and more than not it’s a story that includes redemption and healing, regeneration and a new wisdom. They might just tell us that now that it has happened they would never give it back. AMEN.
Sources:
The brilliant idea and direct quotes about God doing God’s best work in the dark are excerpted from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark (2014), an excellent read that I highly recommend.
The Maritime Institute of Technology’s website (click HERE) has interesting information about its simulator-based training programs.
Van Gogh’s approach to the cover lavender is commented upon by Goethe in the book Goethe’s Way of Science by David Seamon: “…this reciprocity between darkness and light points to the ur-phenomenon of color: Color is the resolution of the tension between darkness and light. Thus darkness weakened by light leads to the darker colors of blue, indigo, and violet, while light dimmed by darkness creates the lighter colors of yellow, organize, and red. Unlike Newton, who theorized that colors are entities that have merely arisen out of light (as, for example, through refraction in a prism), Goethe came to believe that colors are new formations that develop through the dialectical action between darkness and light. Darkness is not a total, passive absence of light as Newton had suggested, but, rather, an active presence, opposing itself to light and interacting with it. Theory of Color presents a way to demonstrate firsthand this dialectical relationship and color as its result.”
As readers of Views from the Edge (VFTE) may know, Steve Shoemaker, my poet colleague on VFTE has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His sense of humor remains strong. This verse recalls a moment with Steve and four other seminary classmates following a rare Cubs’ win at Wrigley Field in Wrigleyville, Chicago.
BENDING DOWN, LOOKING UP
A towering 69 year-old figure standing
six-feet-eight, Steve saunters slowly
through the post-game crowd outside
“the Friendly Confines” of Wrigleyville
like a watchtower on skates, looking
far and near for who knows what.
A very happy young woman as high
as he is tall pulls on his sleeve, asking
a question only he, bending far down,
can hear. He smiles but shakes his head
to whatever offer threatened to bring
him down to a lower happiness high.
Two years later at 72, he might be
looking again for the Wrigleyville fan
for something to ease the pain, settle
his stomach, give some relief from
the newly diagnosed cancer, a pill
or toke or two to raise him back up
to the watchtower, now six-feet-seven.
We who couldn’t hear the question
now smile, bend down low, and look up
beyond Steve’s lofty height with prayers
for courage, strength, whatever will keep
him tall in the game where everyone wins
and loses, and quite unexpectedly,
feels a gentle tug on an old shirtsleeve.
– Gordon C. Stewart, Dec. 8, 2015
Donald Trump proposes a travel ban on all Muslims. We invite Mr. Trump and those who applaud him to read the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the establishment of religion, and to pray for these things posted several weeks ago on FB from an anonymous source.
In 1969 I started Duke
to get a Ph.D. They gave me ten
long years to finish, but for me it took
a bit more time… I had a job, and then
two kids, and boy, could I procrastinate.
A great new novel to be read, a cause
to join, a film to see, a verse to write…
I hired two friends, good Joe, who failed because
he was too kind believing every lie.
But Jackie, who seemed sweet, looked in my eye
and gave me hell. And so I worked and wrote.
The Duke degree I finally earned, I note
four decades later, came because of two:
one nice, one mean–and finally I was through.
Click “If Unchecked, The Growing Mob Mentality in the United States Will Lead to Our Self-Destruction” to read Mark Karlin’s piece today on Moyers & Company.
When the president of “the largest Christian university in the world” in Lynchburg, Virginia urges every student to buy a gun and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, for whatever reasons, it seems a little oxymoronic and moronic. It’s neither Christian nor smart. It’s not what people do in college. They buy books, not guns. It’s not consistent with the traditions and standards of higher learning. Real universities don’t talk like that.
At one of the world’s first universities, the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), way back in the 13th century, a young Thomas Aquinas was a student of philosophy and Christian theology. His professors introduced him to great critical thinkers like Aristotle, Plato, and Maimonides in their original Greek and Latin languages.
Lynchville, Virginia in the 21st Century is long way from Paris in the 13th Century, and that’s too bad for all of us in America where what Aquinas later called “willful ignorance” has become the order of the day.
It is clear that not every kind of ignorance is the cause of a sin, but that alone which removes the knowledge which would prevent the sinful act. …This may happen on the part of the ignorance itself, because, to wit, this ignorance is voluntary. … For such like negligence renders the ignorance itself voluntary and sinful, provided it be about matters one is *bound and able to know.” [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 76, a. 1, a. 3.]
Today’s Catholic World, an online encyclopedia, adds these footnotes to Aquinas’s text:
*Catholics are bound (required) to learn and know their Faith. A sin against faith (often caused by willful ignorance) is the gravest of all sins according to St. Thomas Aquinas.
St. Augustine, cited by St. Thomas, characterizes sin against faith in these words: Hoc est peccatum quo tenentur cuncta peccata. “This is the sin which comprehends all other sins.”
Liberty University is not a Catholic university. It’s not big on Catholics. It’s fundamentalist protestant. It prides itself on its knowledge of the Bible.
But don’t we have to suppose that somewhere in that auditorium in Lynchburg, there was a professor who cringed? Someone there who resonated with the old student at the University of Paris? Someone who thought that telling young professing Christians to arm themselves was a deliberate act of willful ignorance, a sin against faith, the sin that comprehends all others?
“Put away your sword. Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword” – Jesus of Nazareth to Peter after Peter had cult off the High Priest’s servant’s ear at Jesus’s arrest, 1st Century, according to The Gospel of Matthew 26:52.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock) host of Views from the Edge. Brooklyn Park, MN. Originally published 2015. Re-posted here June 13, 2022.
President Obama speaks from the Oval Office during prime time, seeking to calm a jittery nation following terrorist attacks abroad and in California. I questioned the wisdom of devoting so much of a speech on national security to domestic relations with our own Muslim neighbors …until this morning I watched Jerry Falwell, Jr., President of Liberty University, urging his students to apply for conceal-and-carry permits so that they could “end those Muslims.”
The media describe Liberty University as “a leading evangelical Christian college” in Virginia. It’s not. It’s a poor excuse for a university or college, a right-wing fundamentalist school led by the son of Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, an arch-conservative fundamentalist religious-political movement to take back the country from liberals… you know…people like Jimmy Carter.
Three days after telling his students to buy guns and on the eve of President Obama’s Sunday evening address to the nation, Falwell tweeted that his reference to “those Muslims” was meant only for those Muslims who commit acts of terror. But Jerry, Jr. is not stupid. The deafening applause from the Liberty auditorium was still ringing in his ears.
President Obama and President Falwell both know we are shivering. Only the non-preacher President represented the spirit and ancient counsel of Baruch: “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God” [Baruch 5:1-9; 2nd Century BCE].
We can freeze ourselves to death wearing living in the garment of sorrow, affliction, and fear. Or we can take it off to put on the warm garment of beauty – the glory of God shining in mutual consolation, hope, and steadfast determination to live in peace with our neighbors.
If you can imagine Jesus telling his students (disciples) to apply for conceal-and-carry permits, pack some heat, and put an end to anyone, you’re making that Jesus up. You don’t get to make Jesus up in your own image.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemies.’ But I say to you, love your enemies. Pray for those who hurt you. If you do this, you will be true children of your Father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on good people and on evil people, and he sends rain to those who do right and to those who do wrong. If you love only the people who love you, you will get no reward. Even the tax collectors do that. And if you are nice only to your friends, you are no better than other people. Even those who don’t know God are nice to their friends. So you must be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” – Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, Gospel According to Matthew 5:43-48, NCB.
Views from the Edge 