Calming the Storms

M15

Job 38:1-11
Ps. 107:1-3,23-32
2 Cor. 6:1-13
Mk. 4:35-41

“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea” (Ps. 107).

It was exactly like a bad dream of a dinner party in which you in which you couldn’t stop yourself from saying something thoughtless and insensitive. This morning I preached about suffering at the 8:00 a.m. service. I looked out at my friends there and almost everyone in the room had lost a spouse or child or parent in the last few years. My first story was about a man who committed suicide and none of us could recover from it.

In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her experience after her husband’s death and her daughter’s fatal illness. Like C.S. Lewis she describes the way that grief isolates us and destroys language. Grief creates distance and this morning at 8:00 a.m. we were lost in it.

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to handle the suffering I face in ministry. Often I do not handle it well. Harold Brumbaum our former rector and I have talked about how difficult it is as priests to fully empathize with people who are suffering without being overcome by it. Our readings today provide a way of talking about personal pain and Christianity.

1. Avoiding suffering. The physical act of preaching can be exhausting. I have it easy. I preach very short sermons, to a small, attentive and forgiving congregation. And I have a microphone. Still, watching and adjusting to your responses, thinking of the right word, planning what is coming next takes a lot of energy. Imagine what it was like for eighteenth century preachers like John Wesley. In his diary he guessed that he traveled 8,000 miles and preached 5,000 sermons every year.

After a similarly punishing schedule of sermons and healings Jesus feels physically and mentally exhausted. I love the way that the Bible puts it, “leaving the crowd behind him, they took him with them, just as he was.” When I first was ordained this last clause was a mystery to me. Now I think it means that he simply never had the chance to rest. Despite the dangers of a building storm Jesus falls asleep in the stern.

I remember surfing at Kanaha on the Northshore of Maui when winter waves higher than our house were draining a razor sharp reef. A set would come in and I would frantically paddle up these mountains hoping that I could just reach the top before the wave broke. There is nothing like this kind of experience to remind us how completely God’s hand sustains our fragile life. I’ve never been tempted to sleep at a moment like this.

But seasoned sailors guided the helm of Jesus’ boat. He trusted the expertise of these fishermen. He put his life in their hands. I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had not been with them.

I imagine that they would have used all their skills, made good decisions and somehow pulled through. Instead Jesus’ very presence on the boat gave them an odd kind of permission to panic. Rather than relying on their own inner strength and expertise they immediately look to Jesus to take their problems away. Jesus says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” I don’t think he says this to be cruel but to make explicit the temptation that we all feel to wallow in dependence when God calls us to exercise courage.

Parents constantly have to decide when it is appropriate to help their children and when to let them work out their problems on their own. A half dozen times a day Micah or Melia ask for help with something that they should do themselves. Sometimes it is hard to discern if and how to intervene.

When I was a child, three neighborhood bullies were working me over when my mother walked by on the sidewalk. As she went by she said that dinner was ready. The moment she turned the corner the boys continued humiliating me. I went home in tears because she hadn’t helped. She explained that she did help me by giving me the excuse to go home with her right then. She knew that by intervening more forcefully it would only have made everything worse during the next time they confronted me.

Our own personal security is a central organizing principle of this community. Too often secular suburban life teaches us to deal with suffering by avoiding it. The sad fact in this time and place is that sometimes when things go wrong people stay away from you as if your pain were somehow contagious. As human beings God made us to survive suffering. Walking with Jesus means having the strength of Jesus and facing pain in the way that he did, that is, with some measure of confidence in God’s love.

2. Sources of Fear. At birth a child is afraid of two things: falling and loud noises. Everything else that you fear is something that you learned to fear. Mostly you are afraid because the world taught you to be. Try listing the things that you fear most. At the top of that list are probably noble worries about people you love. Further down are some of the fears we have difficulty admitting to ourselves.

One of our deepest fears, in this ultra-capitalist culture, is the fear of failing. In so many ways we define what is good as success. Performance then becomes the way we define, identify and group people. Where we live, how live, what we do and most importantly how we regard ourselves and others arise out of our worship of success.

From college, I remember bumper stickers that said “Berkeley Engineering.” Maybe I didn’t get it but I thought that they implied, “it is not enough to be bragging about being smarter than all the people who didn’t get into Berkeley. I’m smarter than all the other non-engineers here too.” Perhaps I thought this because I was just insecure myself.

Of all the organizations that you belong to the church is one of the few places that doesn’t have grouping people according to their success at the heart of its mission. Yet even here I cannot stop evaluating our performance in thoroughly world terms.

If somehow through magic our worship of success could be deleted from our character, we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Would you have chosen the same major, career, friends, spouse or home? Imagine who you would become if fear of failure no longer motivated you.

The apostle Paul shows us what it might be like to replace our obsession with personal success with a passion for God’s Kingdom. Sometimes, I think that is why he is so hard to understand. To friends in Corinth he writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Instead of referring to the world, he sees his life in relation to God’s Kingdom.

You too could have nothing and possess everything. Like Paul you could be a person transformed by freedom from fear. You too could see that Jesus’ failure as a Messiah, that is as a kind of first century global dictator, represents a huge success for the human race. Because of his crucifixion we see failure as “both real and not final.” To put it in Rowan Williams words, “resurrection is the transaction in human beings that brings about the sense of a selfhood [that is] given not achieved.”

3. The Promise of Jesus. Christianity is not just a religion of ancient texts. In the catacombs and in early house churches we have images too. One of the most powerful examples of these are pictures which depict the church as a kind of boat awash in the storms of this life. Although we will all suffer, some of us will face tragedy far beyond failure, exceeding what we think we can bear. It threatens to obliterate our identity and even our existence.

For Christians this sometimes feels like we have fallen out of the boat of faith. One of the greatest blessings for me is that I get to witness how Christians reach out to brothers and sisters who waves have washed overboard. As Christians we never need to face our tragedies alone. We are never strangers to the world or to each other as the body of Christ.

In a very practical way, prayer helps me when the suffering seems overwhelming. I pray at all different hours of the day. I lift up all my concerns to God. When I cannot control my response to sadness, when my thoughts are thinking me, the Jesus Prayer gives me a deep peace in my heart. It is simple, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” After years of slowly repeating this prayer, it calms me and I feel the strength of Christ.

The church and prayer can help us but so can our faith. Death always has a certain kind of hold on our house. We pray for everyone at Christ Church who has died. Recently though our six-year-old son Micah has been very afraid of death. He asks when we, his parents, will die. Most of my answers have to be that we do not know what will happen to us or when. But most of the people who I have been with at death were by that time ready for it.

When I was a little boy like him I was afraid of shaving, of driving a car, of having children and adult responsibilities. But by the time I was old enough I was ready for all of these things. I expect that dying will be like that too for most of us. If we are not ready, God will help us to prepare. Just in the same way that we have faith in God to care for us every day, we have faith that he will continue to love us after we have died. In terrible tragedy faith may not be enough but it can help.

In conclusion, I hope this morning to remind us that we are equipped to handle suffering, that our life doesn’t have to be organized around the principle of avoiding pain. Second, I pray that your faith in Jesus will give you freedom in a society distorted by its fear of failure. Finally, when you face real tragedy I hope that the church, your habit of prayer and faith will draw you near to the Christ who says to all creation, “Peace, be still.”

_____________
John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesley’s Journal. Ed. Percy Livingstone Paker and Augustine Birrell (NY: Flemming H. Revell, Co., 1903), 392, 97.
Rowan Williams “Resurrection and Peace,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 273, 271.

Advice for Graduates

M13

1 Sam. 15:34-16:13
Ps. 20
2 Cor. 5:6-10, 14-17
Mk. 4:26-34

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away see, everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5)!

Our first years at Christ Church were marked by an invisible anxiety. I arrived here without having written a single word of my dissertation. I secretly wondered if I would ever finish. After spending every summer constantly writing the faculty approved my work in the fall of 2004. Heidi and I were so excited about going back to the Harvard Commence exercises. We had never both been away from the children. Some of our friends thought that it would be a weekend of romance.

They could not have been more wrong. To save money and because I had always wondered what it would be like, we stayed at a monastery on the Charles River – in separate cells, without air conditioning, eating meals with the monks in silence. I have wonderful childhood memories of Cambridge and everything was beautiful. But still our high expectations for our time there meant that we almost couldn’t help but be disappointed.

Almost all graduations fail to live up to our expectations. At their heart is a moment abstracted from both the past and from the future. In that time we regard what has happened with nostalgia and imagine the infinite possibilities of the future. At that time we want to be reminded that we are creatures of both earth and heaven, that we are more than a collection of nerve impulses or the product of our historical circumstances. But we are not.

During Bishop Swing’s Maundy Thursday sermon to the clergy he spoke about how even at Episcopal High Schools our youth are not taught about holiness or the depth of the human soul. In this season of graduations we all can bear witness to the higher life that we experience in God. You may be called to do this and I want to share with you three pieces of advice to graduates in this time between past and future.

1. Not Conformed. The Apostle Paul wrote a series of letters to a congregation he had never visited in Rome. His advice to them is simple “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). The world will distort who we are in order to sell us things and to manipulate our political judgments. It will shamelessly exploit our fears, faults, prejudices, our sense of superiority and our sexual desires in order to influence us. Billions of dollars will be spent each year and the most advanced technologies will be used to get your attention and to change who you are.

Advertisers will try to convince you that you can only be loved for your perfection. But Paul wants us to know that God calls to us in our brokenness. The novelist Harry Crew said, “Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

One example of this in my life was a kid in my Junior High School confirmation class named Mike Franti. Mike’s birth father was African American and his mother was white. Our neighbors in this mostly white town had adopted him as a baby. On his way to being six foot six inches, in every way he stood out.

Back in those days most people only saw Mike as a basketball player and he did win an athletic scholarship to USF. But there was far more to him. He loved music. When I went to college in the Bay Area I saw posters for his band on telephone poles. Now all these years later Michael is part rock star, part poet, part hip hop artist and a major prophet. His band Spearhead is recognized around the world.

Michael’s music is impossible to characterize. It didn’t exist when we were kids. Instead of writing songs about love and breaking-up he sings about prison reform, racism, AIDS and peace. He criticizes the violence of Gangsta Rap and the death penalty. Michael is the one who said, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.” Twenty thousand people attend his Power to the Peaceful festival each year in San Francisco. Michael’s success comes from being most truly himself, letting his rough edges leave a mark on society.

The apostle Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ - there is a new creation: everything old has passed away” (2 Cor. 5). Our work as Christians begins as we discover the absolutely unique way that God will transform the world through us. You are unlike anyone in history or who will ever be. No one has been called to precisely your ministry except you.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes every Christian alive as part of a global interpretation of the Bible (“billions of diverse Son-like, Father-directed lives… a vast living exegesis of the Bible”). If you want to understand what the Bible means look first at these people. Each is unique, each one transformed by God not conformed by the world.

2. A second piece of advice for graduates is, “learn to do it yourself.” My friend received a toolkit when she graduated from high school. She still uses it, but it is even more important as a symbol that she is the one who ultimately has responsibility for her life. It is important to acknowledge and benefit from the advice of experts. Doctors, plumbers, lawyers, engineers and priests can help you. But this expertise must be balanced against the passion of your interest. The high school guidance counselor may know a lot about different colleges, but you are the one who actually has to live your life. You are the one who decides what kind of person you will be and how to use your energies. God gives us freedom and it is tragically possible to waste our life.

It is important to take responsibility for your philosophical, religious and political ideas. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was probably the most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks. More important than all of his philosophical ideas, indeed perhaps the source of them, was his motto – Dare to think for yourself. Don’t leave it up to others to decide what you believe about God or to tell you what is in the Bible. Look at it yourself and form your own opinion.

Above all don’t let someone else be in charge of your prayer life. Don’t expect priests to “do” church for you. Make daily prayer a habit. Pray in the car, as you walk, in waiting rooms, before everyone wakes up or after they all go to sleep. Pray with your children. Pray when your faith feels strong and when God seems distant to you. Prayer is important when you take on the adventure of learning to do things for yourself.

3. My last advice is to pay attention to the little things. Who you are and what really matters arise out of small things. 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into a tiny spot so infinitesimally small that it had no dimensions at all. It wasn’t in space because space didn’t exist yet. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion miles across creating space and growing. Within three minutes, in the ten billion degree heat, 98% of the matter in the universe was created. My point is that everything started small.

Jesus says that the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed… the smallest of all the seeds on earth…when it grows up [it] becomes the greatest of all shrubs…” (Mk. 4). Jesus repeats this point in various ways, but even a small amount of faith can generate extraordinary results. Perhaps you are thinking that this is an easy thing for the Son of God to say but it is also exactly how Jesus acted.

Every week for me is filled with tremendous disappointment. All the boundless possibility I feel on Monday with its to do lists is inevitably is frustrated. I can’t help all the poor people, visit everyone in the hospital, talk to all the lonely people or minister to all who need it. I don’t even make a dent in the suffering that I see. Who gets helped and who is passed by seems maddeningly unsystematic. I constantly regret not having done enough. My whole life of ministry is filled with a few small things.

For years this bothered me until I began to realize that this was not so different from Jesus’ own ministry. In the twenty-first century we set goals like the total eradication of polio or the elimination of poverty around the globe. Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times about Jimmy Wales, a man my age who started Wikipedia and changed how we know about the world.

Jesus did not work like this. He healed a few people, cast out some demons. He talked to a few others about the love that God has for us. But Jesus did not go on television. He didn’t go to Rome or Corinth. In his life he wasn’t internationally recognized as an authority on religious matters. He simply did not act on that scale. He worked quietly in the obscure countryside with the people who just happened to be around him.

Jesus helped in small things. He taught a small number of people that the kingdom of God is a tiny seed within us, that only a little faith could result in extraordinary things. In doing this he changed the world.

I believe that it is the little things we do every day that matter most. I had only been a priest for about a year when a member of my church came up to me and told me that he was having an affair. He told me that his wife didn’t know it but that she was really a lesbian and that she didn’t satisfy him sexually. Since then dozens of people have told me about their extra-marital affairs.

Over all these years, I can’t help but think that by the time they have come to me it is too late. My experience leads me to believe that these large infidelities only follow from small, every day betrayals. We all have a thousand little opportunities each day to show our love or disrespect for our friends and family. John Lennon says, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” These little things that you teach your children and practice yourself are life.

In conclusion, through God do not be conformed by the world, take responsibility for yourself and live conscious of the little things.

Let us pray: “Give us grace o Lord, to work while it is day fulfilling diligently and patiently whatever duty thou appointest us, doing small things in the day of small things and great labours if thou summon us to any. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.”
_______________________________________
Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor June 7, 2006. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/06/05/index.html
In review by Jason Byassee, The Christian Century, June 13, 2006, 36ff.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), 9-10.
Katie Hafner, “Growing Wikipedia Changes its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” New York Times, 17 June 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=7f2dcfa9db8cc0ef&hp&ex=1150603200&adxnnl=0&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1150556959-kVQHxMQlrpjr1rugd/Q9Ig
Christina Rossetti wrote this prayer. This last section was influenced by Martha Sterne, “A Day of Small Things,” Day 1, 18 June 2006. http://www.day1.net/

What is the Spirit?

M12

Acts 2:1-21
Ps. 104:25-35,37
Rom. 8:22-27
Jn. 15:26-7, 16:4b-15

“No, this is what was spoke through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will send my Spirit upon all flesh…” (Acts 2).

Today we celebrate one of the four most important feasts of the year – Pentecost. It is the birthday of the church when we remember how the spirit descended upon the apostles. We wear red as a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s love and to represent the tongues of fire that were signs of its presence.

This morning I want to think with you about a question that is easy to articulate and difficult to answer. What is the spirit? Part of what makes this a difficult question is that we share this word and this idea with people outside and inside the church who misunderstand it. We know what Pentecost means because the group of people who use this word is restricted to a relatively small group who have largely shared values. But everyone uses the word spirit and spiritual to describe anything from cheerleading squads to business strategies to a sense of our own interior depth. Fortunately our readings give us strong direction in this question.

1. Imagine the birth of the church, when there was only a small group of scared people who had already shared everything together, who had sacrificed their families and work, who had found miraculous new life in Jesus. Their friend entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and only a few days later was executed as a political and religious criminal. These first followers felt no security. They had no plan, only a shared sense of disappointment.

Suddenly the spirit came down on them like fire and filled them. When they spoke, others heard their own native language. Even in our time we recognize that it is a miracle when we meet someone who really understands us. The puritan Jonathan Edwards emphasized that it is God’s nature to communicate (“God is a communicative being”). God has something to say to every person, to every living being. To us, God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” This does not mean all ministers, or all Episcopalians or all Christians but all of living reality will show the presence of God.

Other very different depictions of the spirit and the church exist. One example is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which sold 40 million copies and recently came out as a movie. To summarize the story very briefly a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work together to solve mysteries related to the murder of the Louvre Museum curator. These involve secret religious societies, codes in famous paintings and buildings and ultimately the search for the holy grail. The institutional church seems fiendishly intent on subverting any effort to discover the truth.

The novel is fun to read and it may make some people more curious about God. But there are two kinds of problems with it. The first concerns facts. The Christian Century magazine uses the word “truthiness” to account for the appeal of The Da Vinci Code. Truthiness describes the way that people insist what they want or feel to be true should be treated as true. Politicians and public figures constantly do this. This isn’t totally different than recent scandals around the question of how true a memoir must be to make it nonfiction. Brown’s novel fits in perfectly with this cultural climate.

We like to feel that we are learning something even as we read a novel and this is what The Da Vinci Code implicitly promises. The book cover describes the novel as “intricately layered with remarkable research and detail.” Immediately following the title page Brown includes something that looks like a dictionary entry which says, “Fact:… All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

According to the novel “the greatest cover-up in human history” was that, “not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father… Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel… that bore the bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). Also I should let you know that, “Walt Disney made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations” (261). Biblical scholars may sometimes say odd things but they have to offer some support for their findings and no one I have heard of has made suggestions like these.

Crazy statements and treating Christ as some kind of last name rather than as a messianic title made me completely distracted as I read this book. Being a serious student of religion and reading The Da Vinci Code is like someone who knows about baseball reading a novel about how the Chicago White Sox won the 1967 world series… by strategically running the bases the wrong way round.

The second problem with The Da Vinci code has more to do with the spirit of its depiction of Christianity rather than particular facts. Secret rituals, hidden symbols, bloodlines and magical powers are not at the heart of Christian faith and practice. As I said earlier, God is a communicative being. God pours out the Holy Spirit on all flesh. Christians have always made their claims in public where their ideas can be confirmed or rejected. Jesus says his followers will be distinguished by what they do in public not by secret beliefs. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that says, “God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.” The fruit of the spirit is love.

2. The second thing that scripture reminds us about the spirit concerns its connection to prayer. The apostle Paul suffered for his faith. Through prayer the spirit gave him great strength. In a letter to his friends he writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8). This week I met another Paul who helped me to understand this.

It all started with a magic carpet ride. On Wednesday night I flew with Will Price over the snow-covered Rockies to Montana in a small plane for one day of fly-fishing on the Blackfoot River. Growing up I played a lot of sports and worked outside in lumberyards, doing landscaping and out in the fields. In college I continued with sports and lived in a residence hall with 200 men. Although since my ordination I am almost never in all-male environments, I miss this. I enjoy spending time with men like our fishing guide Paul.

Paul is a powerful man in his sixties. He’s intelligent and strong, with a beard and piercing eyes that cut right through the surface of things. He tells the truth simply and humorously without exaggeration. You could depend on him in an emergency.

We pulled our boat out for lunch twenty yards away from a nest with two immature bald eagles and their mother. Will’s father was talking about the way that our failures can more powerfully shape our character than our successes. This led Paul to express his own regrets about his divorce from his wife of forty-one years. He also talked about marrying a woman who had never been married before and who was four years older than himself. “This time I am doing things differently,” Paul said. “My wife and I begin each day looking each other in the eyes and praying.”

If you pray you will become acquainted with the spirit. You’ll know yourself better too. Prayer is when I begin to be honest with myself about what I really want. I face my weaknesses and the narrowness of my vision. And the spirit takes our badly articulated prayers and “with sighs too deep for words,” makes God’s love known to us.

3. My last observation about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus. This is the hardest part to explain. At the Last Supper Jesus reassures his disciples that even though he will die he will never abandon them. The Greek word that he uses for spirit is paraclete. The dictionary says that this is literally the person you call to for help - like a doctor if you have chest pains or a lawyer if you find yourself in jail or a river guide if you are drowning. Jesus says, this “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment… he will guide you for he will not speak on his own…” (Jn. 15).

Earlier I approvingly quoted a Montana bumper sticker about religious nuts and spiritual fruits. The one thing that bothers me is the way that it suggests an opposition between bad institutional religion and good private spirituality. I want to say something about my friends who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

I think what they mean by this is an inner experience of depth, a “true self,” an authentic self free of all the roles we play, a self independent of how others perceive us. For them this is what spirituality is and because this idea is very powerful in our age Christians begin to mistake this idea of spirituality for the Holy Spirit.

The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes that this idea of the self comes out of a fantasy of perfect communication. We imagine “an ideal other,” “a listener to whom I am making perfect sense,” a sympathetic hearer who always gives us the benefit of the doubt and understands our often less-than-clear good intentions. Williams says that the problem with this is that the world is not filled with people who understand us perfectly.

One may go further and note that often we do not even understand ourselves very well. We lie to ourselves in order to justify our bad intentions. A private spirituality based on the idea of a true self may be a very deeply seated way of avoiding how God is drawing us to the holy.

When I am in an argument with my wife Heidi and I find myself saying, “that’s just the way that I am,” I know that I am on shaky ground. The spirit is not a deeply interior matter of being stubbornly true to yourself. The spirit works through other people, through all flesh. Our spouses and neighbors and colleagues and church family are the way that the spirit brings the world to God. They are the way that the “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin” (Jn. 15).

In conclusion, the late Roman Catholic professor Ralph Kiefer used to say, “The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God is what God says to the church when the Bible is being read.” Real people, not words on a page are the way that God calls to you.

This church has no secrets. It exists in and is constituted by the Holy Spirit revealing itself in all flesh. Like my friend Paul, in our weakness the spirit calls us into new strength through prayer “too deep for words.” The spirit working in others “proves the world wrong about sin,” not through an ideal imaginary true self but in the real people in our lives. On this Pentecost morning, I invite you to celebrate God’s spirit in all of us together.
____________________
The American Dialect Society named the word “truthiness” as the word of the year in 2005. Although Stephen Colbert reinvented the word as part of his political satire, this idea has been around since the nineteenth century. Rodney Clapp, “Dan Brown’s Truthiness: The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code,” The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22. See also Wikipedia “Truthiness” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness. In this last source Colbert in character says, "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s....'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Stephen Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.’”
Page numbers from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (NY: Doubleday, 2005).
“paraklesis” in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 239-241.
Richard Fabian from an unpublished lecture delivered at Sewanee on St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco