11 March 2020; Trinity Cathedral; Jack Hardaway
ON THE WAY TO SOMEWHERE
I have pedestrian habits.
I have always liked to walk, hike, run, jog. I like being on roads, walking paths, and trails, outside, moving around under the trees and the sky. I’ve been doing it since I was a child.
It is a habit.
Habits have that way of being an exterior expression of an inward compulsion.
That compulsive habit is written into the story of our faith.
Whether it is migration, exodus, returning, wandering or making regular pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Zion, the Mount of God, the compulsive habit is at the heart of God’s people.
We are always on the way to somewhere.
You know that saying, I think I had it on a poster at one point, “Life is a journey, not a destination.”
The biblical narrative has a more nuanced understanding of the journey, where the destination itself brings life to the journey.
Where we are headed changes how we travel, it changes how we are changed on the way, and the vision of that destination brings life to wherever the travelers pass.
Those who walk the pilgrims’ road have a destination, the presence of God.
At the same time, they carry that same presence of the holy with them and become a blessing to all they encounter along the way, carrying God with them, bringing water to the thirsty, dry places.
Pilgrimage is one of the ancient spiritual disciplines.
It is a very physical way of living in the Spirit, just as Jesus is physically God in the flesh, pilgrimage physically fleshes out the life of faith.
For decades I wanted to be a pilgrim, to literally walk one of the ancient pilgrim ways. About ten years ago I finally had the opportunity. My son and I walked it together, 500 miles across Spain, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the Way of St. James, the last continuously intact functioning pilgrimage route of ancient Christianity, for 1200 years people have walked this path.
Oh my. It was so far. 500 miles! What was I thinking? Ouch. That is the first lesson of the pilgrim road, it is an “Oh Holy Lord God Almighty have mercy on me a sinner long way.”
The pilgrims walk the path to be near God, to be in communion with God. They walk to be near the physical remains of the Apostle James, son of Zebedee, a physical witness of the physical resurrection of Jesus, the God incarnate.
A very physical way to be in communion with God, a physical way to be spiritual, a spiritual way to be embodied physical creatures.
For centuries, for over a millennium, the pilgrims, the peregrinoes, have walked this way to arrive at the end, to just be near these old bones that were present when God walked the earth, that knew the Lord as a close friend, the holy relic of the body of James.
The pilgrims arrived and rested near the bones. They camped out, and just stayed there, until it was time to leave, until they were healed, and well enough to turn around, and walk, and limp all the way back home. All this just to be near God, to be in communion with the Lord.
As a pilgrim I learned two things.
The first is that it is mostly about sweat and blisters, soar bones and muscles, it is about caring for this body, and being stretched in ways that hurt. Blisters and blessings. “An Oh Holy Lord God Almighty, have mercy on me a sinner” long way.
The second is that there is a lot of company, and a lot of tradition and habit and culture that the pilgrim is suddenly immersed and overwhelmed with.
We usually see or imagine these images of the solitary pilgrim on the road, most of the art work surrounding pilgrimage emphasizes a sense of the solitary and the alone.
But the fact is it’s like bar hopping, a pub crawl, or tail gating. It is really, really social, you are rarely alone, and you are surrounded by people from everywhere.
Being a pilgrim is like being part of this vast grand movable feast, a traveling circus, every day is filled with moments of encounter between the blisters and the long slow up hills, or sometimes especially in the care of those who are injured, in the sharing of band aids, and antibiotic.
To be a pilgrim is to be part of a community who share the common goal of being closer to God, of being in Communion with God, on the way to somewhere.
Along the way pilgrims encourage one another “Ultreya y Suseya!” “Onward and upward”, the graffiti is painted all along the way, words of encouragement. Keep on going. Keep on going. Just one foot in front of the other. Almost there…
Being a pilgrim is a very physical way of drawing close to God, a very spiritual way of being flesh and blood souls who bare the image of the Holy One.
Being a pilgrim washes away the illusion that physical life and spiritual life are somehow separate, they are rather indivisible, they are the same, there is no physical life and spiritual life, there is simply life.
The physical resurrection, the resurrected Lord burns away all our false divisions and dichotomies. Life in the Spirit, Communion with God, is a very physical way of being human.
The Christian Life is about being a pilgrim. Not necessarily on one of the old pilgrim ways, but all Christians walk the way of drawing close to God, of ever-growing communion. It involves more than just sentiment and feeling, more than just holding certain abstract thoughts and beliefs in our mind. It means we do something.
We follow the pattern of Jesus, the incarnate God, who is the Way for all who desire to become fully human, to have the broken image of God restored and redeemed.
Jesus did stuff. Touching, feeding, healing, walking, cooking, suffering, dying, rising.
He didn’t try to escape physical existence. He didn’t meditate until his soul shed off the restraints of the flesh. No. He did stuff. He did the stuff of being human, of being fully human.
God invading, and overstuffing the material stuff of existence. No abstraction about it. God is as abstract as a popped blister, and sweat stinging the eyes.
The Christian life, the pilgrim road, is patterned after his life, sharing in his humanity, and his divinity, collapsing the division, and feeling the raw abrasion that is faith.
This habit, this outward expression of the inward compulsion, of being on the way to somewhere. It isn’t what we thought. Our modern repackaging of the pilgrim road has confused it with the way of improvement, and progress, and self-help. As good and important as those things are, the pilgrim road is about something else.
It leads to the cross. The glossy brochures of the modern disciple brush over the history, the history that most pilgrims never make it, they die on the way there, or on the way home.
There are these two takes on the experience of God, one that is ecstatic, illuminating and joyful, always growing, and the other where we are stripped down of everything, until there is only the hunger for God, a darker path, of loss, of pain, of doubting God’s goodness, of sharing in the deep suffering of the world that will never improve, the way of endurance. Where Job begs God to leave him alone long enough to swallow his spit and die.
Too often we try to package the faith for the modern market, “follow Jesus and you will be blessed beyond measure”, and we leave out, “follow Jesus and sacrifice everything, lose everything.”
Walking the pilgrims’ road has moments and seasons of light, but it is mostly about being slowly stripped of everything, and trusting God anyway.
The glossy brochure of the modern pilgrim is misleading.
Our world covers over suffering, loss, pain, indignity, decay, grief, and abuse.
Pilgrims show us how to live with and walk with the stuff of life.
The way of the pilgrim. It is about walking with others in their pain, and staying with each other for a long, long way, for a long, long time. Being worn down, and changed, and discovering the abrasion that is faith.
We are on the way to somewhere. It is a habit. A compulsion. An act of faith and defiant trust.
It is a belligerent assumption.
We are on the way to somewhere. We are in good company. We help carry one another as far as we can, and we all end up being carried by others. We have a long, long way to go. “An Oh Holy Lord God Almighty have mercy on me a sinner” long way.
Ultreya y Suseya! Onward and upward!
Walking the Pilgrim Road part 2
Trinity Cathedral, 11 March 2020
Jack Hardaway
FALLING APART WITH STYLE
God is a chronic condition. I wrote that once. It was for one of those Lenten quiet days where I gave a series of reflections on the parables, and God, and everyday things.
The thing about chronic conditions is that they are always there. They are chronic. Always eroding. A tedious overwhelming inconvenience that won’t let us get away.
God is chronic.
The choice isn’t so much about taking, or leaving, but rather to cope, or more accurately, which way to flounder, like a child learning to swim.
Like Jonah and his getaway, doing the flounder, spat up by that fish. Then when he thought he was safe on dry ground there was that worm killing the one shade tree, and then that killer hot sun, wanting death, but no such relief.
The big fish and the worm, God’s one two punch in that theological parable that really nasty people are still “precious in his sight.” Poor Jonah. Having to love “those people.”
Parables take every day stories and show us God. Chronic is a good word for so many of our own stories. Our stories of coping, and floundering, and then finding so much even as everything familiar is washed and chewed away a bit at a time. A chronic condition.
If I had to choose a title for this reflection it would be something like “falling apart with style.” The Lenten theme of walking the pilgrim road, of being on a journey to somewhere, I would like to challenge the usual version that says faith is about progress and improvement and growth. There is truth to that.
But I think the long, long walk is more about learning to live with pain, tragedy, disappointment, decline and death. Great fun things like that. What do we do with suffering? How do we respond? Falling apart with style. Like when Buzz Lightyear in the movie Toy Story was told that he wasn’t really flying, he was only falling with style.
We as a society and church have bought uncritically into the idea of progress, and improvement that simply doesn’t prepare us for the contingency, and frailty of human flesh, and human communities. We miss the way of the cross, the way of letting go, of walking with others in their suffering. Somethings cannot be fixed. What do we do with that?
We treat God as the fixer of every problem. When the stories of faith from scripture, and the saints say something very different. God doesn’t so much fix things as interrupts things, refocusing our attention. God as the chronic interruption.
You may have heard about Saint Irenaeus and his quote about the glory of God, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Look it up. It isn’t what we have been led to believe.
A misquote of a sort. Irenaeus was habitually christocentric, more than Karl Barth, maybe even more than the Apostle Paul. The quote read in context goes more like, “The glory of God is a living man and the vision of God is the life of humanity.”
“A living man,” in this case is “the man” Jesus. It means that Jesus is the glory of God, and that to see the life-giving glory of God at its fullest is to see Jesus. See Jesus and live-in other words.
It’s not how most people use the Irenaeus quote. Being fully alive for most of us usually means some kind of physical and mental vitality. It means feeling really good and feeling very aware of the world around us, very connected, which is not a bad thing. But is that the glory of God?
Considering that the cross in John’s Gospel is literally Jesus being glorified, then this glory is something more than the java and gym suit vitality most of us hope to enjoy.
It has more to do with suffering. God’s glory when seen in context of scripture and the old theological writings has less to do with feeling good than with coping with suffering. The glory of God is a real blankety, blank, blank, blank. A chronic condition really might well describe the ongoingness of living with God.
On the other side God probably experiences us as a chronic condition as well. Much of the Old Testament feels like watching an on again off again romance between God and Israel, each blaming the other for not being faithful.
It is like those gatherings of old dear friends, each trying to outdo the other with their health problems, comparing bowel movements, and swollen joints.
“So, there go God and Israel, like two old men competing for bragging rights, comparing their scars and bent limbs, so in love with each other that they can hardly stand each other.”
So, God and suffering. What’s the connection? I am not really interested or capable of explaining suffering, of making it make sense, of justifying it or God for that matter. I simply can’t trust any explanation for this anymore. It is almost visceral. I won’t listen to it anymore.
It’s just that the connection is always there. Find one you find the other, God and suffering, suffering and God. Incriminating evidence of something, but what? It always seems to come down to trusting God anyway, despite the facts, despite the experience.
A belligerent contrary thing, our experience says one thing so believe the opposite. Shoot, we’re in South Carolina, we invented belligerent and contrary, it’s a chronic condition ya’ll.
Life is full of pain, therefore God can be trusted. That’s the faith formula. Most of the time it helps on the bad days. Denial can be a gift on the bad days. But it is deeper than that. God draws us in, the glory that sustains, that vivifies as Irenaues and his kin like to say, we find it on the bad days, the cross days, the trauma days.
Doing the flounder in the darkness again, and bumping into the glory, yet again. We have got to stop meeting like this.
I am a priest. One of those priests who somehow has just stayed put, a stick in the mud, in a seriously burned out mill village that is retooling itself and doing a really good job at it. Lots of history there, lots of contrasts, lots of generational stuff. And roots, and love, and hard living, and hard fun. It is a lush green overgrown mystical tragic city of sinners who try real hard to be saints with no illusions of ever getting there.
Our smoky bars are still very smoky.
You can tell a great deal about the soul of a community by how well the non-profit sector is developed and supported. Anderson has a very bright soul.
The parish has a long history of members with the gift of encouraging others, of saying thank you, the gift of what the Apostle Paul calls edification. Which I think is why the parish has always done better than pretty well, even during the hard times. Encouragement. It is a really good super power for a parish to have.
I have married, baptized and buried whole families. A rich life to live. Meaning seems to run me over rather than my having to go searching for it.
Apparently, I have become very good at preaching at funerals. Not something to put on your own tomb stone, but I seem to be stuck with that as part of my reputation.
To be fair, most of our funerals are for people that I have known and loved for years. All these amazing people who really write their own funeral homilies, which is the point of this reflection that we are wandering through together. I just call attention to their message, their truth, delivered across that wide chasm. It’s easy and hard. Like a gift I get to give back.
There are different theories, and expectations for funeral sermons. It is an easy time to manipulate people, and it is an easy time to miss the whole point. Some like to over eulogize, pull the body out, and drag it around.
This appeases many. We like to see, and remember who is gone, the memories connect us to each other, and to the one who has died. Memory connects. It’s a good thing. But faith calls for more. The temptation is to only offer the comfort, and the sentiment of memory, and then to cram the body back into the ground.
Of course, I was taught not to eulogize at all. It is all about the resurrection of Jesus, death calls us to that hope, and that action of living it out. At some point I realized that to deny the humanity of the memory of the dead is to deny the humanity of Jesus, a sort of liturgical Docetism.
Resurrection requires humanity, not some ghostly presence. Humanity is always very particular. Humanity always has a specific name and face, a portrait, a biography. It is a simple theology of death that I stumbled across through a deluge of pastoral grieving.
Each life is simply another book added to the four Gospels that reveal God in some way. A reading from The Gospel according Bill, or De, or Tom, or Barbara, so, so many books added to the chronic testament of God. The memory shows us the glory.
The divine image has been shown. Did we pay attention? So, we more than remember, more than grieve, more than celebrate, and give thanks, we look for God in the life of this person.
I don’t know, it works for me. People keep wanting their sermons before they die. It’s like we all desperately want to know how God touches the world through us, hoping, trusting, floundering belligerently despite the experience that says otherwise.
“I want you to preach at my funeral.” “But you don’t go to my Church. What about Pastor Dan? Shouldn’t he get to do it?”
It’s a strange adventure of faith to go with the dying as far as you can go, and to tell the tale of finding God there. I was recently given a book titled, Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?
What sermon is my life preaching? How is God being made known by me? Is it too late for me to correct my eulogy?
How is God connected to the hot mess of my life?
Our lives reveal God. There it is. The beginning assumption and presumption. How far down that pilgrim road have I gone?
We worry that we might be running out of time to get it right. When the faith is that the stuff of life is holy. We don’t have to make it more holy. This isn’t some cosmic self-improvement scam where if we do more, and do better then everything will be amazing.
God has done something amazing by taking on our flesh and bones, and pain, and meanness, our memories, and our forgetfulness. It has all been hallowed.
In the early, and medieval church, and even now the bodily remains of the saints were set apart. Earlier today I spoke about the remains of St. James at the end point of the pilgrimage walk in Spain. The pilgrims just camped out as near the bodily remains as possible. Over the centuries, larger and larger church structures were erected around the remains and the pilgrims had to camp out further and further.
Even though they were dead and gone, the dry bones and desiccated flesh were hallowed by the life that they held.
It is like the reserved sacrament, the remains of the blessed bread and wine from the eucharist that are set aside, reserved for being taking to the sick, and also as the real presence of the body of Christ hallowing the bones and bricks of our churches.
The remains of the saints are a reserve, set aside, reserving the dead if you will.
The stuff of life hallowed by the image of God, disposed of reverently.
What does this have to with the theme of the Lenten reflections -Walking the Pilgrim Road?
How do we get from that pilgrim road to this sacred grotesque of the bodies of the saints?
All the stuff of life, all the wonder, and all of the entropy, the relentless decline, and disappointments, the betrayals, and the hurt, the unfairness, and the smelly stuff, all of it is worthwhile, it is worth the trouble.
No matter how we mess it up, or how much it messes us up, it is hallowed, reserved, set aside as holy, revealing God, and in that revealing the world is made more complete.
That is the faith. Even when experience says otherwise, even when it wears us down, and we just cling to the edge of the cliff by the tips of bleeding fingers, it has been hallowed.
Even if there isn’t someone to preach our sermon, our life is the sermon that God is speaking through.
The pilgrim road is the journey to the grave, of falling apart with style, of slowly and suddenly collapsing back to dust, earth and ashes.
There is no good reason that makes sense of why it hurts so much all along the way.
Jesus’ last words on the cross, just before his breath left him, were to ask why.
The world shook after that, as if in agony.
But there was no answer. Just the aftershocks. Days of silence.
Then something happened. It didn’t answer why. It didn’t make it all better.
The body was hallowed.
The hot mess of it all was hallowed.
Not abandoned, not forsaken, not forgotten.
These bones, and sinews, ligaments, muscles and skin, these tingling neurons and quivering innards, they carry God into the world.
The frailness of our bodies and minds, the brevity and fragility of families, friends, and communities, they all carry so much, and they hurt so much, they reveal so much.
God and suffering. Suffering and God.
They are always found close by to each other. Incriminating evidence of something, but what?
Like a chronic condition.
Just keep walking the pilgrim road, just keep walking, keep falling apart with style.
Keep walking until you return to the dust.
I bid you a holy Lent.