Ecrozier #86

On April 2, 2011, in forgiveness, love, by bishopbenhase

Good Friday

Many times I’ve stood vigil with others outside prisons before executions. We aren’t there excusing the guilty or claiming the one being executed is a virtuous human being. We’re there to witness to the sacredness of life and to God’s providence over all life. There are others gathered who come to celebrate the death of one they despise. Their logic justifies an evil for an evil. But even if their logic didn’t justify it, I’m afraid there’s a tragic lust for such evil hiding in all of us. On this Good Friday, we remember another crowd at another time and place; a crowd motivated by the same evil. In that place, at that time, the cry was “crucify him!” But when he died, the whole earth shook. In that death, an amazing thing occurred. Death itself died and new life erupted. And God said, “Amen.” Jesus offered up new life in the midst of the evil of the cross.

When faced with the evil that emanates from a murderer, or from a neighbor, or even from the nearest dictator, we can choose to respond with those who desire to return evil for evil. Or we can choose to respond with Jesus who, acknowledging the evil around him, responded with such a demonstration of God’s merciful love that not even the grave could contain him. This is what Good Friday is for me. God’s love for us is more powerful than our own collective ability to destroy what God has created. The savage execution of Jesus on the cross holds up for us the fact that evil is very much a part of our human existence. But it also holds a more important truth, namely, that God is not stymied by evil nor stumped by sin: God defeats it by the cross of Jesus.

The reality of evil and the more vital truth of God’s love are both present in the cross. And we who face both realities of the cross must learn to respond to the savagery of evil with the mercy of God’s love. We who receive the mercy of Jesus by his cross and precious blood have no other choice but to practice such merciful love with others. This isn’t some minor point of the Christian faith. This is at the heart of the Gospel. Jesus tells us that if we wish to receive mercy, then we must practice mercy. If we wish to receive God’s forgiveness, then we must forgive one another.

In our worse moments, we’re tempted to give way to the violent impulses that reside in us. But we must remember that when we reach down in desperation to the evil within us, then we have chosen to dwell with the very evil we wish to overcome. God, in Jesus on the cross, calls us to reach, not down in desperation, but up in hope to God who loves us so much that he chose to dwell with us and die for us. Jesus loves us that much. God allowed people like you and me to spit upon him and mock him. He chose to allow his life to be savagely ended, so death itself could die, and eternal life could come forth.

Each week in the Eucharist as we come forward we’re counting on God’s forgiveness and that God will feed us with his Body and Blood. Last fall, as I was administering the Eucharist one Sunday, a mother and child came to the altar rail. I asked the mother if her toddler received the Sacrament. She said, “Oh yes, if you don’t give it to him, he’ll scream.” That child knew on a deep level the truth of God. Without God graciously forgiving us and feeding us, we have no life within us.

+Scott

 
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eCrozier #73

On January 14, 2011, in Body of Christ, epiphany, love, by bishopbenhase

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their souls. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Throughout this Season after the Epiphany we’re fed each Sunday from St Paul’s 1st Letter to the Church in Corinth. I don’t know about you, but I find strange comfort in reading about the conflict and factionalism in the church there. Times have changed, but human nature and sin have not. The Corinthians argued with one another and almost forgot that they’d been brought together by God’s grace for a purpose: to be the Body of Christ for a hurting world that desperately needed God’s love. God has so designed the fabric of the Church that we can only proclaim God’s love poured out for us on the cross of Christ through the frail, sinful instrumentality of one another. Now we can question God’s wisdom in entrusting such Good News to a group like the Church. Yet, God has entrusted us with it. We are stewards of God’s foolishness, as St. Paul might say.

So, let’s not be deterred by any disagreement. God requires a great deal from us as bearers of the Good News of God’s foolishness. God calls us to hunger and thirst after righteousness. God calls us to love kindness and mercy. And God calls us to do all that with meek and humble hearts. Fortunately for us, we do not have to do this alone. We’re to live such a life together as humble servants of the Lord Jesus.

Years ago there was an Episcopal priest in a rural, remote parish who desperately needed a community of sisters to staff his school. He had a promise from one group of sisters that they would come, but not for another two years. So in desperation he brought in a small group of sisters whose superior was, to say the least, eccentric.  When the priest reproached her for her peculiar conduct, she was offended and said, “I’d like you to know that I may have many faults, but I‘m strong as hell on humility!”

Jesus calls us to be humble, but not humiliated. He calls us to be poor in spirit, but not to sit idly by while others suffer the pangs of poverty. He calls us to love mercy and so we must speak up when we see others showing no mercy. Dr. King’s audacious call was addressed to our larger society, but he was first and foremost of the Church. The quote above reflects the Great Commandment’s focus on the heart, soul, and mind of each person: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

As the Church, we have the currency to call people to love God when we also work tirelessly to address their body’s need for three meals a day, their mind’s need for culture and beauty, and their soul’s need for dignity, equality, and freedom. Of course, working for such goals is the best way we have been given to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

+Scott

 
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eCrozier #72

On January 7, 2011, in love, by bishopbenhase

The Bible tells us we’re created in God’s image. But it also tells us that our sin has tarnished God’s image inside us. This messed up image explains both our longing for peace and our obsession with war; our ability to love and to hate; and our appetite for filet mignon as well as potato chips. We’re capable of watching a powerful drama on one TV channel and switch channels to delight in The Bachelor, a show with the moral judgment of a dog in heat. The human species has produced both the great Martin Luther King, Jr. and the pathetic, twisted Saddam Hussein. There are humans among us who understand the complexities of quantum mechanics, but some of these same humans aren’t able to have any meaningful interaction with their neighbors.

Because we’re these mixed bags of divine image and fallen sinner, we have trouble grasping and then trusting in a God who loves us. So how can we know that God loves us and calls us to live by the Great Commandment and to live out the Great Commission? That’s simple: we have to be told. But more importantly, we have to be shown by others.

Telling alone is not enough. A few years ago, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were presented with correct information they rarely changed their minds. On the contrary, they often became even more strongly entrenched in the misinformation refusing to acknowledge the truth. Truth, the researchers found, did not cure misinformation. It could actually make misinformation stronger. “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the study. Not exactly news to sinners.

That’s why telling someone that God loves them is not enough. If they are entrenched in their misinformation, even when confronted with the truth of God’s love, they will not accept it as true. Some folks are so beat up by religion in general or by the way in which they were raised or by their life experience that the truth of God’s love for them is not something they can accept no matter how many times they are told the truth. That’s why they need people like you and me to show them God’s love.

Brian McLaren in his book: The Secret Message of Jesus, tells a story about a pastor friend of his who was having coffee in a donut shop late at night. While there he talked with a prostitute who was taking a break between tricks. During their conversation, he discovered that the next day was her birthday. So the next night he came back with a cake and with people from his church and they threw a birthday party in the donut shop for the woman. She was deeply moved by their actions. So were the other people in the donut shop. A bystander asked the pastor: “Who are you people?”  “We’re a church,” the pastor told him. “No you ain’t. There ain’t no church that would throw a birthday party for a hooker at four in the morning,” the bystander said. “If there were, I’d join it.”

We need a church full of disciples who will embody God’s love. Even though this is misattributed to St Francis, it nevertheless has resonance: Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.

+Scott

 
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eCrozier # 59

On October 1, 2010, in Community, love, by bishopbenhase

Earlier this week, just a few blocks from the high school where my wife teaches in Washington, DC, there was gang-related murder. During a funeral procession for a young woman from the neighborhood who was murdered the week before, a rival gang opened fire on one of the cars causing it to crash killing one young man and others being critically injured. While police reports are still uncertain, they are pursuing leads related to rival “crews” (as they are called in DC) engaging in retaliation.

And less we mistakenly think that such violence is only an urban, minority problem, on the same day a 19-year-old sophomore math major at the University of Texas, Colton Tooley, opened fire with an automatic weapon sending students diving for cover. As he walked through the library firing his gun, thankfully no one was killed. Tooley killed himself before the police could get to him.

Yes, both of these incidents indicate that we have a public policy challenge as a nation when it comes balancing the right to own guns for self-protection and the right we also have to live free of fear from such incidents described above. But if we see this as only a public policy issue, then we will be horribly short-sighted. What we have is a spiritual crisis and my hunch is that it won’t be solved only by traditional conservative or liberal solutions (e.g., school prayer and stay-at-home moms from the former and more social workers and self-esteem training from the latter).

This spiritual crisis might be best summed up as the absence of what the Bible calls the “fear of God,” a profound sense of humility for our place in God’s created order.  If we place our faith in such a God; a God whose very nature is love, who commands us to love those who are nigh to us (that is, our neighbors, which literally means those near, or nigh to us); a God who incarnated that neighbor-love in Jesus who became nigh to us so that we might know God’s very nature, then such a faith would begin to change the world, at least our neighbor’s world.

What would it look like if our congregations began to fully practice such neighbor love? Well, one of my recent conclusions is that an “unemployed Mormon” is an oxymoron. That’s because, as I understand it, if a Mormon is unemployed, then on Sunday the Bishop stands and says: “We have an unemployed person in our midst. We’re not leaving today until he has a job.” You see, the Mormons believe it’s the whole church’s responsibility to ensure that person has a job so he can provide for his family.

Practicing such neighbor love would begin to address this spiritual crisis by infusing in us our responsibility for one another. We’re all part of God’s loving created order. The more connected we are to that, the less we’ll experience the disassociation that can result in someone shooting a gun to exact revenge or to randomly kill. Such neighbor love can’t be enacted into public policy nor can it be commanded by a theocratic state. It can only be practiced by communities like ours; communities who know we must practice what we preach.

+Scott

 
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eCrozier #57

On September 17, 2010, in culture, discipleship, love, by bishopbenhase

Descartes once whimsically concluded: “Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, because nobody thinks he needs any more of it than he already has.” Methinks there was a tongue firmly planted in the Cartesian cheek when he said that. Descartes was on to a common human reality. It is similar to the observation that everyone seems to think they are above average drivers. Like Yogi we think we’re “smarter than the average bear” (that dates me!).

Hubris is nothing knew. While the ancient Greeks did not invent it, they sure gave it a lot of play in their writings. We all, more often than maybe we care to confess, believe we are lot more reasonable, sensible, and right-thinking than those people (whoever the particular “those people” are at the time). “If they would just be reasonable like I am, then everything would be a whole lot better,” we might find ourselves thinking (bishops, especially, oh my!).

This is a growing malady in contemporary American life. In the clash of competing ideas, philosophies, and approaches to life, the malady is somewhat unavoidable. Of course, we hold the beliefs we hold. And of course, we live the way we do. We wouldn’t believe and live the way we do if we thought it was nonsensical, now would we?  So, how might we as Christians, while not retreating one step from our beliefs and practices, seek to address this persistent affliction? Well, by being more committed to our baptismal vows, that’s how.

To “love my neighbor as myself” I do not need to agree with him or like him. I can even think she is a bit crazy for holding the beliefs she holds. To “respect the dignity of all people” I do not have to buy into what I might believe is the snake oil they are trying to sell me. You see, our baptismal vows are not about what other people think or do. Those vows are about what we believe and do; who it is we “follow and obey as Lord.”

We must avoid falling into the trap that says: If I love my neighbor who is different, if I respect her dignity, if I pray for her well-being even if she remains different from me, then I somehow am wishy-washy on my own beliefs or a “relativist” of some sort. That makes our human experience way too binary. We make a dangerous bed for ourselves if we adopt such a Manichean worldview that sees only a zero sum between differences.

A Rabbi friend of mine once said to me: “You know, Scott, we Jews would never have to be afraid of you Christians ever again if you just did one thing: Take Jesus seriously and follow his teaching.”  He is right. Yes, we live in a pluralist society full of competing beliefs and truth claims. And it is perfectly appropriate for us to say we believe and act in different ways from Jews, or Muslims, or agnostics because of our particular beliefs and practices. After all, if we did not believe with all our heart, mind, and strength that Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life,” then we’d be something else.  If our discipleship is that serious, then our neighbors, whoever they are, will find peace in our midst. And who knows, that peace may extend farther out among more people.

+Scott

 
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