Wandering in the Desert

There is a true story of a man who wanders into the desert in Arizona and dies of thirst.  When he is found he is still clutching an unopened gallon jug of water that he has been hoarding to drink at the right moment, but in his disorientation the right moment never comes.

Our society is in many ways a spiritual desert.  Many people wander its trackless wastes only a short walk from well of the Water of Life.  The poet T. S. Eliot said: “The desert is not remote in southern tropics, /The desert is not only around the corner, /The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you, /The desert is in the heart of your brother.”[i]

We were born wanderers.  G. K. Chesterton says, “according to Christianity, we were indeed survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world”[ii] (Orthodoxy, Ch. 5).  Like the Wanderer of old we roam the turbulent seas seeking a lost band of brothers, and a home to call our own. [iii]   No place quite fits. I felt like a lost child of king that was somehow stranded in a peasant’s hovel amid the dank and gloaming hollows of druid wood.   Again Chesterton says of this discovery, “I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in the spring” (Ibid).    

To the wanderer in a spiritual desert a drink of cool clear water is a delight, and we are drawn by delight.  That cool clear draft of water is promised by Jesus who says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.  ³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”[iv]

“What does it mean, to be drawn by delight? ‘Take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.’ . . .  Show me a lover and he will understand what I am saying. Show me someone who wants something, someone hungry, someone wandering in this wilderness, thirsting and longing for the fountains of his eternal home, show me such a one and he will know what I mean. But if I am talking to someone without any feeling, he will not know what I am talking about.”[v]

In looking for those who are wandering, the Church seeks those that thirst, and offers them the living water of the Spirit of God.  There is a deep well of clear cool water in the liturgy and life of the Church.  There will come a time when, “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age.  And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.  Thus says the LORD of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my sight, declares the LORD of hosts?”[vi]

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[i] T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

[ii] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (London: Image Books, 1959), p. 80

[iii] Burton Raffel, “The Wanderer,” Poems and Prose from the Old English, (New Haven: Yale, 1998), p. 7-14

[iv] John 7:37-38  ESV

[v] St. Augustine, from A Homily on the Gospel of St. John, Tract. 26: CCL 36, p. 261-263

[vi] Zechariah 8:4-6   ESV

The Walled Garden

One of the gifts on our Anglican tradition is an appreciation of the beauty of God’s creation.  We pray for Joy in God's Creation:

O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works; that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We believe that God’s creation is good and that He intended that we enjoy the wonderful things that He has made.  On the Seventh Day of Creation, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).  At the center was the Garden of Eden traditionally understood as a walled garden.  The word “Paradise” actually refers to a “walled garden.”  It is a place of the generous grace and goodness of God, a place where he seeks to walk with us in the cool of the evening.  History and experience testify that we have lost the way to that earthly garden, but art and the pursuit of beauty tell us that we long for it still.  Written in the aspirations of our hearts is an eternal longing for Paradise; a longing that acknowledges both the sense of paradise lost and the hope of paradise regained. 

Every lovely garden is an echo of the walled garden which is Paradise, and with yearning and faith we reach out to that walled garden, which is not only in the past, but also future.  The very purpose of the Incarnation teaches us that God became flesh in Christ Jesus, to dwell with us, to suffer; we must not forget that Gethsemane is a garden.  In his incarnation he came to die, to be buried, to rise again from the dead, and in that rising to take us with him to the true garden, Paradise, eternal in the heavens.

We live lives of longing and that longing in in itself is a declaration that there is a reality beyond this present realm.  Our hope is a Resurrection hope.. We actually believe that we will walk in the flesh in that walled garden, and we pray with faith and joy;

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Saviour Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (BCP, p. 226)

Mortality and Time

The first thing to say about mortality and time is that I'm going to live forever. No kidding! I'm going to live forever! That obviously skews my understanding of mortality and time.

The second thing to know is that my time's are in God's hands. James is very realistic when he says, “You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that” (James 4:14-14). Only God knows when I'm going to get the final curtain call and so far He isn't telling. That's probably a blessing; at least it's not something I should be worrying about.

Third, our life span is “threescore years and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore;” (Psalm 90:10) that is 70 or 80 years, at least at the time when the Psalmist was writing. Now I'm already in my seniority and time's a wasting! One of the things that many of us in our seniority notice is the illusion that the older you get, the faster time seems to move. “Oh no! It's almost Advent again,” but that only a matter of perspective. If you view time from Eternity it flashes by faster that the flash of a firecracker. One of the great miracles was that the King of Forever humbled Himself to enter into the millisecond of time.

Having said all that, time is precious and needs to be spent wisely and in acknowledgement that there is “a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted: a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing (that one will get you in trouble with an airline if you fail to recognize it); a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate, a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecc. 3:1-8).

There is a time for everything from working to relaxation, but I suspect that there isn't much time for just mindlessly staring at a wall. How do you spend your time? Time is always spent, deliberately or carelessly, it doesn't just drift away like sand in an hourglass; even not deciding how we spend time is a decision. When you think about time always remember that “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man's mind” (Ecc. 4:11).

Remembering 9/11

The media is filled these days with special reports on the working out of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  We all were taken by surprise, but for some it was more of a surprise than for others.

 

Those of us who are familiar with the Middle East and the political and religious problems of that area, while shocked by the attack, also understood that it was an extension of what we already knew about the nature of terrorism.  In the mid-1980s we crossed from Jordan into Israel on the Allenby Bridge with the sound of bullets ricocheting of the rocks.  It took us six hours to get through the security check because a few days before a tourist’s hand was blown off by a bomb that had been planted in his luggage.  Ever since then we have realized that there is a reason for the security now in place.   It is too bad that it took 9/11 to make us all aware.

How do we understand the harsh events of current terrorism with our Christian faith?  Dame Julian of Norwich sets the evil deeds and harms of her time, and ours, in the context of a surprising confession of faith, saying “All is well, all is well, all manner of things shall be well.

“There are evil deeds done in our sight, and we experience such great harms, 
            that it seems impossible to us that ever things should come to a good end.

  We look upon this then with sorrow and mourning 
            and the result is that we cannot resign and rest 
            in the blissful beholding of God as we should do. 
  And the cause for this is that the use of our reason is now so blind,
            so low, and so stupid, that we cannot know that high marvelous Wisdom,
            the Might and the Goodness of the blissful Trinity.

She goes on to day that there is a Deed which the blessed Trinity will do in the Last day which will balance the books.  There is a time of judgment yet to come and she says, “Take heed now in faith and trust, and at the last end thou shalt truly see God’s power manifested in fullness of joy.  This is what He means when He says: THOU SHALT SEE FOR THYSELF that all manner of things shall be well.

The other part of the answer is perhaps an uncomfortable one.  Where was God on 9/11.  The answer is that He was where he is in every human tragedy, on the Cross, bearing the sins and pains of us all, and crying out “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

You Can’t Step Into the Same River Twice

Clergy Conference: Diocese of Kinkiizi

The Church in Uganda is a third generation church living in the afterglow of the East African Revival.  The Revival started in the 1930s on the hill in front of Namirembe Cathedral with two people who committed themselves to prayer.  One of the two went to Rwanda where the Revival began to spread rapidly entering Uganda through the Diocese of Kinkiizi and spreading throughout the country.  Today in Kinkiizi some of the grandparents of the current priests and lay leaders were directly affected by the revival.  The parents of our priests and leaders lived with the active memories and stories of that time; but there was another important event that marks the present church from that time, and that event was the history of the martyrdom of Christians in Uganda.


The history of the Ugandan Church began with the martyrdom of Bishop Hannington in 1885, and the subsequent martyrdom of 22 Christians.  From Universalis, a Roman Catholic Website providing the Liturgy of the Day Hours, we find the following description: “Many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, were killed by the Ugandan king Mwanga. Some of them were servants in the king’s palace or even his personal attendants. Charles Lwanga and his twenty-one companions (the youngest, Kitizo, was only 13) were executed for being Christians, for rebuking the king for his debauchery and for murdering an Anglican missionary, for “praying from a book”, and for refusing to allow themselves to be ritually sodomised by the king. They died between 1885 and 1887. Most of them were burned alive in a group after being tortured.”  In the second century the theologian Tertullian remarked that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  During the reign of Idi Amin, there was another wave of martyrdoms and the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, was martyred in 1977 by Idi Amin's henchmen.

The present generation of Ugandan Christians live with both the stories of the East African Revival and the stories of the martyrs.  Their faith is intensely personal and enthusiastic with many evidences of the power of God and direct experiences of the presence and anointing of the Holy Spirit, but some of the marks of Charismatic revival as it has been experienced in the American Church in the 1970s are not currently part of the experience of Ugandan Christians. There is a tendency among American Christians to attempt to revive old revivals, but you can’t step into the same river twice, nor should you try.  Instead of attempting to relive the past we should be asking, “Where does the Holy Spirit want to lead us today?”

What Do You Do When You Are Tired and Worn Out?

“…Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” ~ Bilbo Baggins

There have been times when I can identify with Bilbo.  He was a hundred and eleventy years old, and he had every reason to feel like butter that had been scraped over too much bread.  I suspect that most of us have been there at one time or another.

Even when you have doing your best, or perhaps, especially when you have been doing your best, that thin and stretched feeling can creep up on you.  There are several contributing factors.  Foremost among them is the fact that fallen humankind in a fallen world does not possess limitless energy.  Mind you, I think that limitless energy was part of God’s original plan in the Garden of Eden.  The curse Adam earned was, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread . . . for you are dust and to dust you shall return’ (Genesis 2:19).  We run out of steam because we were meant to be connected with Life Himself, and when that connection was impaired, death, and the potential for exhaustion, entered our world.

There is another factor that cannot be ignored.  At the very beginning, that Arch Liar, the Serpent, fed Eve a bundle of half-truths.  The central fib she was told was that she could be like God by doing things in her own way, instead of in God’s way.  The only safe thing she could have said to him was, “Be gone Satan!”  Make no mistake we are still in that same battle, a battle that will take its toll on our energy, and on our very lives.  Jesus said as much when confronting the Pharisees, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).  There is an Enemy who seeks to drain us of all life and energy.  He is the Murderer of life, love, and joy.

There is a solution.  That solution is to continually, repeatedly, return to active fellowship with the God who loves us.  Isaiah asks us, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable.  He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.  Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted;  but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28-31). 

The Hebrew word for “wait” also means “to hope, to expect, and to bind together.”  When we are bound together with the Lord by dwelling in His Presence in prayer, in listening for His voice in Scripture, in praise, and in fellowship with the saints, our energy gradually returns.  Experience teaches us that this restoration is positive, gradual, and energizing like the charging of a battery.

The Secret Keepers

The Church is a family with some basic similarities with any family, and an essential difference.  The parish church, gathered from many places and many backgrounds is generally a broader community than a single family.  Secret keeping can ruin families, and it can ruin churches, for secret keeping leads to loss of trust in the secret keepers.  Instinctively one knows that something is going on, and we have the therapeutic words of Jesus that what you do in secret will be shouted from the rooftops. Secret keeping in families and churches is a sign of dysfunction, and only a growth in transparency will move families and parishes towards health.

There is only one kind of secret in parish churches that should not be told, and that is the secrecy of the Confessional.  That leads to a potential priestly misunderstanding; you can’t extend the secrecy of the Confessional over the rest of the stuff in a parish, it simply doesn’t work.  Part of the reason is that people, without priestly training, sometimes are unable to handle the private exposure of the secrets of another; they simply have to pass the hot potato.  The more loaded the hot potato the more apt they are to pass it on.  But let me tell you a secret, not all priests handle this very well which is why the Book of Common Prayer advises that you find “a discreet and understanding priest”.

Secret keeping in Churches doesn’t work very well, and for several reasons, the first reason being the nature of the secrets one is trying to protect.  Secret keeping in parishes most often has to do with gaining and exercising power over others.  It automatically creates an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group’.  Withholding information from others removes the power of response, either of approval, disapproval, or action.  Incorporating unwilling people in the circle of secret keeping is an attempt to neutralize them under the bonds of secrecy, in effect saying, “Now that you know the secret, don’t talk about it.”

Because the church is a broader than an individual family, secret keeping doesn’t work very well.  If the secrets being kept hide actions that would not be taken if they were public, they contain an element of shame.  In that sense, shame is the fear of exposure.  If an unwilling person is placed in the position of keeping secrets in a parish setting they may have several responses.  Some people boxed into that situation will simply, as a matter of principle, just ignore the demand for secrecy.  Some can’t wait to unload the hot potato sometimes sharing the secrecy under the guise of sharing a prayer concern.  Some relish the power that secrecy sets up and the result is divisiveness, and yet others gloating over their power can’t resist telling someone.

Again we come to the old adage, when power comes in the door, love goes out the window; and love is the central business of Christians, especially with each other.  A wise friend of mine says that anything worth doing should be done in the open.  If you can’t do something in the open, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.