• 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
• Ezekiel 2:1-5
• Psalm 48
• Psalm 123
• 2 Corinthians 12:2-10
• Mark 6:1-13

Jesus. could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about among the villages teaching.

T’S Hard for me to read these verse without imagining the starting of our mission: not because all of these passages are about prophets and I think I might be a prophet (God forbid!!) but rather because all of these passages are about unbelief.

So I’m thinking about my own unbelief.

Unbelief is not about doctrine or creeds. Jesus wasn’t expecting the folks in his home town to run up and shout the Nicene Creed – or even to say “Jesus is Lord” (the earliest, and most complete creed of the Church) or to hail him as messiah. Nor is Jesus looking for people to ask him to do something.

The Greek for unbelief is apistia απιστια and it means, simply, lack of trust. Again, this is not about doctrine – what lack of trust are these people showing to Jesus?

What I mean about my own unbelief is my fear, fear that God can’t be acting in this way: a random bishop from out of the blue, a missionary priest in Buffalo, stranded here because of love. What do you mean “Start something”?

When I look back I have very few proper “regrets” about things. But I wonder sometimes what things might have been like if I had jumped the moment I felt the prompting of the spirit instead of waiting or dragging my feet over and over again.

These people in Nazareth are all standing around saying “Feh… this is Mary’s son. We know his family. Do you remember that time that Jesus was 3 and he got really sick in the Synagogue? Yea, right – miracle worker.”

So notice what they’re saying here…

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

There’s this guy that’s been walking abound the backwoods for a year or so – a lot of people probably heard of him without seeing him. Suddenly word comes that he’s on his way to Nazareth! And when he FINALLY gets there…

Whoa. it’s Jesus.

Mary’s Son.

You know: it’s him. We still don’t know who his daddy is…

Feh.

These people are objecting because Holiness didn’t look like what they wanted. They want Rabbis and Torah scrolls and trumpets and maybe a Red Sea parting and gold Ark of the Covenant. Or maybe Joshua fit the battle of Jerico and Maccabee children and swords!

Instead it’s the semi-homeless hippie of questionable parentage.

How many times did I drag my feet for good, solid religious reasons? How many times did I demand God too show up in exactly the predictable way that I want?

How many times does God show up looking like what we didn’t want?

How many times does God do something we didn’t want him to do? It’s not classy enough, not holy enough.

Next on Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”: Ants. While Jim is out there wrestling Anacondas, we’ll stay here, close to home, watching the ants that live under the stoop eat my popcorn.

Thanks to my buddy, Nate…

We gather in Christ’s name to do the things he commanded us to do.

Suddenly I understood it – in the saying of it. It’s not a doctrine or a credo, but it cuts past all of those things. It allows for inclusion or exclusion (I can imagine a group doing things that clearly are not what Jesus commanded) and yet… and yet… it seems to make the widest space possible around God’s table whereat each of us is guest and all of us are host.

The question really is, can one stand as Guest and Host at Christ’s table knowing that someone next to you or on the other side of the room, or somewhere, might or, indeed, does hold different ideas about this 1st Century Rabbi?

That is the issue there, “hold different ideas”. Even though I’m a big banner-waving sort for Nicene ideas about the Trinity and Incarnation, and even though I’m quite willing to draw direct lines from non-Nicene ideas to mistaken assumptions about people, things and God (and thence to bad actions in those regards), that stands not at the heart of the Christian life but rather at the furthest periphery. What we teach about God says more about who we are than about who God is. It is what we do in the name of that teaching is what counts.

Our doctrines about God, and the stories we tell about God say more about us than about God: show me the God you worship and I can easily infer the way you try or want to treat persons around you. I may be wrong in my inference – because you may be weak in your faith. But if the God you worship is a judgmental, punishing sort that has condemned the vast majority of humanity to eternal fire for no other reason than major or minor differences in theology, I can wager a guess about how you feel about them as well. If the God you worship gave birth to all creation from the waters of her womb, I can make a wager about how you feel about all creation.

If we tell stories of a God who loves us so much that, despite our divisions from him, he, himself, came among us as one of us to repair those divisions and bring us to a different end, then I can make certain assumptions about how we should want to treat our neighbour. Although we may fail through our own weakness.

And, of course, I’ve drawn these pictures to favour the image I prefer. Your mileage may vary. Do the stories we tell about God say anything about God’s ontological reality? If I may be excused from using a Cappadocian doctrine in a rather Palamite way, do our doctrines tell us anything about God’s essence or only about God’s energies active in the world? I’m going to wager only the latter.

It is our actions drawn from those doctrines and stories that are important. Hear the words of the invitation from the older Anglican rite:

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways; Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort…

Come to this table if you’re sorry for the divisions before and want to lead a new life.
Come to this table if you’re willing to follow the commandments of God (Love God, Love your Neighbour as yourself – feed, clothe and comfort them as you would your own self, your own family).
Come to this table if you seek strength to continue in that path all your days.

Yes, I know the irony of quoting those words – from a service when only Anglicans were invited to the table (not even “all baptised Christians”). We stand in a different place now.

St Maria of Paris rather famously said,

The bodies of fellow human beings must be treated with greater care than our own. Christian love teaches us to give our brethren not only spiritual gifts, but material gifts as well. Even our last shirt, our last piece of bread must be given to them… The way to God lies through love of other people and there is no other way. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked if I was successful in my ascetic exercises or how many prostrations I made in the course of my prayers. I shall be asked, did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners: that is all I shall be asked… Christ’s love does not know how to measure and divide, does not know how to spare itself. Our love should not be any different

Neither, I trust, will we be asked about our doctrines or our Orthodoxy, Nicene or otherwise. We’ve added traditions of men onto our faith – our trust in God – over and over again. Even St John, who wrote that you can not deny Jesus came in the flesh, gets trumped up into meaning “That means God, incarnation, theotokos, etc…” No, it means Jesus was a fleshy (sarx) human like you and me, nothing more, nothing less. Don’t read into it the theology of 500 or 2000 years later.

Can you stand at table in Jesus’ name with someone who does or does not hold that 500 or 2000 year doctrine? Can you do with those people the things Jesus commanded us to do – even if you disagree with those people at the same time? You know: love God, love your Neighbour as yourself – feed, clothe and comfort them as you would your own self, your own family.

I struggle with this. I want doctrinal purity so much that even the illusion of it (as in those Churches that claim to have it) is attractive. Even this last Sunday, visiting an OCA parish in Toronto, when the Archbishop started to hear confessions I knew all I’d have to do was go to confession… and say goodbye to fellowship with Christians whom I know and love. There is no way to go back down that road again even for the illusion of purity.

I firmly believe that the incarnation allows for the veneration of the Holy Icons. But it does not command such. Likewise I cannot demand such of my friends who seek only to praise God and feast at his table. Your errors about God annoy me far more than my own sins. Your mistakes in theology and liturgy drive me up a freaking wall. I mean, I know I’m wrong in some places, but I can name at least 7 heresies in your last sentence and I’d much rather judge you for them than feast together at Jesus table and figure it out.

I do believe the liturgy of the Church is there to lift us to doctrinal orthodoxy – again because it says more about us than about God. If the liturgy is changed to suit our petty feelings or individual desires, our theological meanderings, again – it’s more about us than about God. I firmly believe that Arianism (as common in many modernist liturgies) and the other heresies lead us to incorrect assumptions about the person and personhood of ourselves and others and our communal salvation.

Can we jointly work out our salvation in fear and trembling? Can we feast together at God’s table, dancing as Jesus leads us beyond the divisions of Male and Female, Slave and Free, Arian and Nicene, Protestant and Catholic, Iconoclast and Iconodule?

Again – the answer says less about the God we worship than about us.

Do holding those doctrines destroy the possibility of their salvation? I trust God that is not so, for I know no one who is doctrinally pure, even by their own, first-person standards. That’s not the issue, though, is it?

We fear that fellowship with those people will make us somehow impure. We fear that sharing Jesus’ table with a sinner will contaminate us. We are Pharisees, pure and simple – and we look at Jesus fellowship with drunkards and prostitutes either in envy or else in horror. We wish we could do that. We fear the consequences. We have no faith in the God who saves us that he can save us at all. So we better keep away from contaminants.

That’s what our closed table doctrine say about us.

What makes this – or any – church a Christian Community? We gather in Christ’s name to do the things he commanded us to do: we break bread and share it. And in the Breaking and the Sharing we find Christ in each other to seek and serve him in those around us.

Forget the doctrine. Hold the doctrine. Whatever. Jesus calls us.

Come to this table if you’re sorry for the divisions before and want to lead a new life.
Come to this table if you’re willing to follow the commandments of God: Love God, Love your Neighbour as yourself – feed, clothe and comfort them as you would your own self, your own family.
Come to this table if you seek strength to continue in that path all your days.

Do not fear, only believe.

HIS BUILDS ON LAST Week’s readings – The disciples crossing the water with Jesus asleep in the boat. They wake him up because the storm is getting too bad – Jesus calms the storm and goes back to sleep. They come to land and very first thing is this man’s daughter, then the bleeding woman…

I said at church last week (comments not published) that I was reminded of the way we all get on with our lives – Jesus might as well be sleeping – until some crisis hits.

This week there are two more crises. In fact, they are coming so quick that they overlap! Jesus gets off the boat and is met by a man whose daughter is quite sick. But before he can get there a woman touches him… and gets healed. Then he goes and raises the dead!

There’s a LOT going on here, I wonder if it has anything to say to us and how it parallels with the boat incident from last week.

First this underscores something about Jesus: another level of Jesus’ complete (at least as far as text goes) ignoring of the ritual purity laws of his people. While almost nothing about Jesus’ teaching can be called “non-Jewish” – nearly all of it is found in other Rabbis of the period – Jesus does have one major innovation to his credit: Jesus is never shown in the text to be following the laws of ritual purity. From not washing his hands before eating bread or, as in today’s text, not worrying about being touched by a woman, Jesus is very much an innovative Rabbi. Further, this text shows that it can’t be that important on a number of issues: having been touched by a woman who was bleeding he enters the house of a leader of the local synagogue and performs a miracle in his impurity.

No one seems to care.

I don’t want to imagine what Jesus thought all this meant. I don’t want to shove my own meaning down his Gospel. But his own actions speak very loudly about his attitude towards what were, essentially, the taboos of his people.

It would seem that Jesus wants us to see or, certainly, the communities that gave us the four Gospels want us to see that “taboo” was not intended to be a way to relate to God.

This seems as if it might have been important in the discussions of dietary laws in the early Church.

I *want* to imagine one thing further, but my available sources disagree on this matter: are the laws of ritual impurity as important as the positive and negative “moral” laws? If one spends most of one’s life in ritual impurity is that as bad as “being in sin”? Is the division between the ritual laws and moral laws (as understood by Christians – not by Rabbis) an important division in the law or something that we’ve made up to keep our cultural biases in place?

As I said, my available sources disagree on that last bit.

What is clear is that Jesus’ state of ritual impurity didn’t prevent him from performing a miracle in the house of a local leader. Nor did his evident impurity (and thus the impurity of everything in his path) prevent the Rabbinical leader from telling abroad the story of the miracle.

Where does this leave us?

How many of the “laws” of our Christian religion are simply taboos – ie superstition?

At one time it was suggested that if we spilled the consecrated wine on a man’s beard, we should have to burn off the beard. As a result of this superstition, the laity were denied the chalice in favour of a neater and cleaner religion. But the early saints wanted people not only to hold on the elements – but to daub the wine on their eyes and ears! Bits of the bread were to go home for home communion! We’ve since decided that the laity might somehow do damage to the consecrated things so we don’t let them out of our sight. And, while we accuse the laity of superstition, the church (ordained folks) can act with equal superstition.

When I was trained to be a Master of Ceremony at St Mary the Virgin church in NYC, I learned the ins and outs of Anglo-Catholic ceremony. My personal favourite content was “what do do if the chalice should ever spill after the consecration.” There’s a complex dance you do, involving when to step over the puddle and when not. When it’s over and the all-clear is sounded, everyone is supposed to turn away from the former-puddle in a show that nothing is happening now.

So imagine my horror, as we passed the chalice around the Altar at St Gregory of Nyssa Church one Christmas Eve, when the cup spilled all over a woman in a wheel chair! Imagine my horror one Sunday, praying some private devotions before communion, when I looked at my feet and saw there crumbs of communion from the early service – not just in one place, but all over!

Superstition is easy to develop: a practice arises based on need. Then we theologise backwards to justify the action. Suddenly no longer performing the action is a theological violation and an entire school of ritual and tradition evolves to support the action…

What would Jesus do?

Is there a difference between the purity laws of Judaism that he willingly (and often) broke, on the one hand, and the odd purity laws we, the Church, have developed over the last 2000 years?

Here’s a couple of theories:

I Eucharist:
1) Jesus’ meals of fellowship were originally repeated within his community – sort of a divinely inspired pot luck intended to share the wealth around the community in his name.
2) Very early on, the distribution got uneven and people who should have been fed were going hungry.
3) The *action* of feeding each other and seeing Christ in that got transferred to the sharing of bread and wine as a symbolic action. But soon the bread and wine acquired their own, special meaning.
4) Theologise backwards and it’s always been this way.

II Initiation.
1) In the days of Roman persecution it was important to make sure that a new member of the Church wasn’t, in fact, a spy.
2) The practice of “initiation” evolved, teaching, experience, trust evolving in the community.
3) Finally admission to the sacraments via an oath.
4) Over the course of 3 or 4 centuries, a specific theology evolved to justify this course of initiation.
5) When persecution finally ended it was clear God had *always* wanted it to be this way. Our theology clearly says it can never be different.

Why do I suggest this “theologise backwards” idea? Because we can see it now: in the Eastern Churches nearly every liturgical action is conducted under several layers of “myth” and “real meaning”. The idea of liturgy without an iconstasis can scandalise some folks – unless they know that Hagia Sophia (and earlier churches) didn’t have them. The solid, floor-to-ceiling wall in Russia is a mid-18th Century innovation. Sure it works, but it’s not the end all and be all of the liturgy – and the weight of all the theological silliness we’ve thrown on it – plus the evidence of our own history – nearly makes every such wall collapse.

Where I want to take this is to the idea that each one of these necessary (at the time) evolutions have become for us, now, superstitions. Religion by Taboo. You must not touch the bread until you’ve washed your hands.

Imagine my horror.

Do our superstitions help us or hinder us in the spread of the Gospel?

If we say “either way” is fine or if we pick one or the other, what does that say about our understanding of the Gospel, about our superstitious fear of violating Taboo?

What will God do to us if we keep breaking the rules that way?

Jesus, I note, does not answer these questions. He only does them. Although it is Gay Pride day in some places, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, I’ve not compared any of this to issues of human sexuality – and that on purpose. I’m more concerned with the superstitions of our faith, at this point, than with the doctrines. Or can we tell the difference? Does Jesus care that we come fasting to communion or that we have washed our hands, or maybe touched something impure?

I picked this set up in Kensington Market, Toronto.

The pictures from TO Pride are posted to my flickr now. We bought this cool toy for our cameras…. many facets of pictures.

Brodie’s pics are also posted.

t’s my sense that both these readings that we’ve heard today talk about healing of one sort or another. The Gospel speaks of an internal healing, and the Epistle talks about an external healing in the community.

In October of 1986 Rolling Stone Magazine published an article called “AIDS on Campus.” The idea was to discuss how the sexual culture on college campuses had changed in the three or four years that AIDS had been part of public discourse, at that time. At the end of the article was a section called “Strange Bedfellows,” where the writer was talking about how AIDS had created very odd friendships. And in that section was a paragraph about a gay man who was a member of a college fraternity. And the gay man shared the story of his straight roommate, who was concerned that he might “catch AIDS” as they shared a joint, back and forth.

Since my mother’s here, I’ll state categorically that I did not inhale!

Rolling Stone interviewed me because they couldn’t figure out what a gay man was doing in a fraternity. I had a coming out story that was, truthfully, very odd. I had almost no negatives to report. I had a loving family and a caring and supportive church community. And when you consider how bad it could have been – with a group of 20, post-adolescent, sexually frustrated males, living in a house with a common shower, and beer on tap 24/7 – I had an amazing fraternity to come out in!

The semester I came out, I was elected Secretary of my fraternity, and also Chairperson of the Gay and Lesbian Union and New York University. As a result, my fraternity went from being what ad copy called “the nation’s oldest continually active fraternity” – which I know Tim Smith has trouble with – to being poster children for multi-cultural diversity! That year we got $20,000 in funding from the university, which was quite a leap over the $3,000 we got the year before.

Actually, my fraternity loved me.

My fraternity and my gayness were only two parts of a contradictory picture. I was in the Protestant Campus Ministry, where I was the Episcopal Peer Minister. But I was also known on campus as a person you could call and ask questions about paganism. In fact, two dorm counselors paid me real money to go sit in the dorms and talk to their students about why that pagan roommate wasn’t a Satanist who was going to kill you when the sun went down.

I was known for going to church every Sunday, and yet during the two years when I was the only gentile studying Hebrew at NYU, worshiping on Friday nights at the Congregation Bet Simchat Torah, practicing my Hebrew and worshipping, right along with everybody else. When I went to church they wondered what I was doing with those pagans. And when I went to pagan groups – or gay groups – they wondered, “what is he doing with those Christians?”

Oh, and that fraternity! Oh my goodness!

For their part, my fraternity was okay with my religious backgrounds, but they really wanted to keep the gay stuff in the bedroom and not in the living room.

That’s one part of my patchwork quilt, sewn together at one point in my life, in 1985, 86, 87 – when I was in NYU. It’s not a “legion” inside, but it’s close. It seems at times all we can do is take out one facet of ourselves, one part of our legion, and show it to the people around us, in the hopes that they will like that. But the “legion” inside, even a small one: it’s as if we are filled, filled with a thousand points of very disparate light. And each light accents only one fragment of the whole. And sometimes one fragment of the whole, Christ pretended is “the whole.”

I’ve spent an inordinate part of my life – most of the last 20 years – being GAY! Big rainbow flags, big triangles, gay parades! I think I was all every bit gay. Gay owned and operated businesses and gay stores and gay jobs and gay employees and gay roommates and gay media and gay news. When I came to San Francisco I even worked for a time at gay.com!

It all seems very oddly imbalanced now, when I think about it, but I moved to San Francisco to be a gay pagan. (Indicating his vestments, the president’s chair in which he is seated, and the entire congregation) Evidently this is what gay pagans do in San Francisco on Gay Pride Day!

When Paul was writing Galatians he was writing to a community that was made up at the time – as were most Christian communities – of Jews who had come to believe that Jesus was the messiah, and of Gentiles who had reached that decision as well. And they were debating, arguing, fighting and praying about the question, “How can a Gentile enter into relationship with the Jewish God through the Jewish Messiah, if he doesn’t first become Jewish?” And Paul’s answer to them was very important.

It was a division in their society that was visceral. It was even felt in the prayers. In the Jewish tradition then – and still today, in Conservative and Orthodox tradition – the morning prayers include the lines, ” “Blessed are you Adonai our God, King of the Universe, for having not made me a Gentile.” “Blessed are you Adonai our God, King of the Universe, for having not made me a Slave.” “Blessed are you Adonai our God, King of the Universe, for having not made me a Woman.”

The prayers are phrased in that negative way: “thank you, God, that I’m NOT that.” A woman, by the way, does something I like. She gets to affirm: “Thank you, God, for having made me according to your will.”

So Paul’s answer: “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” There is neither Jew nor Gentile; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female. Paul’s answer was direct, to the point: divisions don’t count now. All are one in Christ.

The most heretical thing I ever heard preached in my entire life was in this very chair, by our Rector, Rick Fabian – and I don’t mean his questions about the Resurrection! He said Fred Phelps was a child of God and I had to love him. Fred Phelps – the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church. “God Hates Fags” Fred Phelps – is a child of God and I have to love him.

And the second most heretical thing I ever heard is on our liturgy video (that you can buy at that table by the door!) And Dave Hurlbert says, “I have found a church where it didn’t matter if I was gay or straight – where I did not feel gay.”

The first thing the demoniac says is, “let me stay with you.” And Jesus’ reply is “No – go home. Reconnect with your family. Reconnect with your community. Reconnect with your life.”

I can’t tell you my story without telling you about the pain and the division. It’s not a valid story without that. But it’s not a valid story either, if I leave the rest off.

Jesus’ Gospel doesn’t seem to be just about one person’s “holistic self-integration” but rather, it’s about a community of different and disparate voices, healing, coming together. Because in Messiah God reached out to us when we could not reach out to Him. It is, however, only one small step to go from “here’s my pain” to “you were never a demoniac; you can’t understand!” “You were never a gay man; you can’t understand!” “You didn’t have trouble coming out – they said to me – you can’t understand!”

All are one in Christ. As many as have been immersed in Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia! We sing it in our baptism, but there are many ways to be immersed in Christ.

When I first started coming back to church I wondered “how could I give my life back to this person I had rejected? There must be something I could do in public. And then came Holy Week last year, and the Maundy Tuesday Service, and the foot washing.

And after dinner Michael Barger got up from our table and went to the kitchen to get one of those huge bowls and the towels, and he came back to our table. He came to me, and I saw Christ kneel down and wash my feet. And then Christ got up out of my chair and turned around, and knelt down, and washed the feet of Christ who was sitting right next to me. All are one in Christ. I ran from the room, crying. I couldn’t cope.

The divisions are real. The pain of our division and our sense of separation is real. But all are one in Christ. What changes? Our divisions, our pain become our gifts. And we are gathered together
like so many grains on so many hillsides into one loaf that’s placed on the altar, and we feed each other, and when it comes back to us, it is Christ. And every hand has a nail print.