St. Stephen's Day --Prayer to a Guardian Angel

I had to share this for St. Stephen's Day (December 26, the second day of Christmas) when we remember the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, people living in the terror of war, disease and famine, people who are dealing with foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. St. Stephen was the first Christian martyr. It is where we get "boxing Day" from in British commnwealth nations and "Good King Wenceslas" who reached out to the disenfranchised. Particularly, I think of my own tribe of Lavander People, GLBT folks who are walking into a new year. With the recent spate of violence in Memphis toward the trans-community I call upon this angel. An Orthodox friend sent this to me and I found the iconography and prayer beautiful from the blogsite: http://jn1034.blogspot.com/2008/12/prayer-to-guardian-angel-of-human-life.html

Prayer to the Guardian Angel of Human Life

for protection from homophobes.

lHoly guardian angel, interceding for our souls and our passionate lives, neither forsake us nor leave us for our intemperance of mind, flesh, and heart. Give no place for the subtle demons of homophobia to harm us through the violence of their evils of thoughts, words, and deeds. Strengthen our poor and fragile hearts, and guide us in the ways of our Holy Tradition and the love of the Gospel. Holy angel of God, guardian and protector of our tender bodies and souls, protect us during the present evening and day, and guard us from every evil of those ensnared by the demons of homophobia. Release homophobes from their darkness of self-hate and misanthropy, and lead them to the glorious light of God's way, truth, and life. Pray for us that we're made worthy by the grace and mercy of the All-Holy Trinity.
+ Through the prayers of our holy mothers and fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.

Annunciation (Ευαγγελισμός της Θεοτόκου, Evangelismós tēs Theotókou)

But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God."

St. Luke 1



I love the greek use of "theotokou" in this story about the Annunciation. The news to troubled Mary was "you will be the God-bearer." Wow! How terrifying, overwhelming and seemingly so impossible.



Since such a recent Sunday I have been preoccupied with the Annunciation. Yes, annunciations! The Virgin Mary isn't the only one who gets messages out of nowhere. For those who are thrown by the terribly proper english, annunciation is not referring to , as my mother would say, "quit mubbling and speak up!" The meaning this time has more to do with an announcement or a critical message "you need to know about." Sort of like when the televison goes dead and makes this god-awful screeching sound and a voice out of a blue zone says, "this is a test of the emergency broadcasting system in your area." I wonder if that screech would come on the TV if a tornado actually touched down in our town. The screeching TV and apocalyptic messages seem to go hand-in-hand. I think if the angel Gabriel showed up anywhere in front of me, I would consider it an apocalyptic emergency. The TV may not screech, but I sure would scream. Poor Mary, you know that she was wetting her pants, let alone the fact that the news was not really that good for her. You think getting preganant out of wedlock was bad in the 1950's , well let me tell you about the sixth month, year zero!



As much fun as I would have in telling you about the life of a young peasant woman in first century Palestine, my blog tonight has to do with my recent preoccupation on the issue of announcements or "the annunciation." I remember the night that George Bush announced that he had launched a new war with an attack on Iraq named "shock and awe" in 2003. The President assured us that it was an altrusitic endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq all in the name of "freedom." Yep, the angel Gabriel said to Mary, not to be afraid...good one Gabriel. As we sat back in our arm chairs and reassured ourselves there was a just cause for this assault, I know that it must have been petrifying for Iraqis. The news wasn't good for everybody back in March 2003 as modern weapons went hurling everywhere over Baghdad.



How many people do we know who have received the very truthful announcement "you have a serious disease?" The doctor goes on to say, "I hate to tell you this." Or, "we are going to move you to east bum-f---- and this will be a good move for you?" I would tend to think, "are you nuts, what planet do you live on?" Another message that I have seen delivered this Christmas to some folks in our congregation, " In 10 days from today you will be evicted from this dwelling...this is a foreclosure." With such news, angels calmly say, with best intentions, "it will be OK, it will all workout."



Annunciations usually are earth shattering news. Whether they come across the world wide web or they come to us in a doctor's phone call, we know the information is going to change us. More assuredly, the others who live close to us will be changed by the news too and that can be a worrisome thought. The Christmas story gets romanticized and dolled up to accompany a winter holiday ideal. The fact is, annunciations are made of scary stuff, like the truth. Another adage that I love, "there is nothing stranger than the truth" comes to mind. In such revelations, I hear comments like, "you have got to be kidding?" or "my worst fears have been confirmed," or "what am I going to tell my family?" So that I am not a totally depressant Christmas goat, since there are such things as good annunciations. Well, a few like, "you have just given birth to..." or another one I like, " you have just won..." I can say on a brighter, more cheery note, comments like, "you shouldn't have!" or " you know that I will always love you," or "you were right all along."



Whatever annunciations that you have reckoned with these days, remember the final words of the angel Gabriel to the troubled Mary, "For with God nothing will be impossible."

Emergence

Ok, so this past weekend I attended The Great Emergence conference held at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis. I got there and it was like somebody turned a San Francisco coffee shop loose in a revival Anglo-gothic nave. I love St. Mary's architecture, yet it has an accessable and quaint sense like a doll house cathedral. The windows were glowing with heavy blue and red tones, people lounging in pews, sipping hot tea, munching on sweet rolls, noisy, messy, unfettered like cathedrals used to be. As Phyllis Tickle pointed out, who was the main attraction for the event, " In the day, cathedrals had no pews and did not have a seating arrangement. People were strewn everywhere like a town market awaiting the signal to pray."



This weekend did not fail to deliver. I was totally enamoured and challenged by newly ordained, "sarcastic Lutheran" Nadia Bolz Weber. Her gift of prose and uncanny ability to see the holy in our gritty culture drew me into the profanity of divine light. God, I have got to figure out how to get her to Holy Trinity. The talented and organizationally gifted Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt from Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis were conveners and emcees. The music was brought to us by the beautiful Celtic sounds of Stefan Walligur's works. There were angli-emergents, metho-emergents, plain emergents, and various curious denominational stripes represented. Clearly the conference convincingly identified that we are in the midst of another Reformation. It was weird that we were so self-aware of our time and movement. What seemed unclear was what exactly is "emergent"? From my view, I felt as if we were going through a convergence. Creeds, denominational peculiarities, recent cultural battles were melting away into a new consensus toward a new authority in the Church. From the middle ages we moved from sola ecclesia (church alone) to sola scriptura (scripture alone) and now we're headed for sola Deus (God alone) . "God alone" type of authority rests with a discerning community, much like the early church, pre-Constantine all over again. It made me think of the adolescence of our own Holy Trinity Church, how we moved from the gay bar to the storefront to the meeting house in sight of 15 years. I thought, in as much as Christendom seems to have a giant rummage sale every 500 years, I can see how Holy Trinity has shifted every 5 years. Our recent past five years of assimilation and validation seeking are coming to a close. The gifts of an emergent, queer affirming, warmly hospitable, musically eclectic, liturgically driven, diverse community based in the eucharist is already our past and is our future. We are a church from the get-go that is welcome to all, thoroughly messy and wildly unpredictable. Every Sunday we gather with words garnered from our experience, words given by our tradition and words broken over a table. We are an oddity in the United Church of Christ and a bastard to the Episcopal Church. The journey of Holy Trinity roams further into the great "rummage sale" of the church. Like we began back in 1990, we know that denominations will continue to submerge while the affinity in practice and belief will emerge. Once again, on a simply practical level, I see that the pews need to go and the coffee house needs to come back in. Liturgy matters. Beauty, metaphor, and fairy tales have their place in a binary world of ins and outs.



Gathered in the cathedral there we all were. When it came time for the body of Christ to divide up into it's distinctive parts like all conference meetings seem to do. There were no UCC emergents except us. And what exactly is an UCC emergent? More than likely the UCC would fall into a social justice category. Holy Trinity has some of that social justice stuff but that does not seem to be our center. Metho-emergents broke out in song singing, "blessed be the tie that binds." Presby-emergents planned for opportunities to influence their sessions. Emergents went and got another cup of coffee. Then, off we we went to join hands with the Angli-emergents and an affinity was confirmed. In unison, as we broke, we exclaimed, "Thanks be to God!"

Gratitude

Every time I attend a service at Temple Israel I walk away so fully nourished! Not only have I enjoyed many-a-great meal with this hospitable community, I am nourished spiritually so well. This bastian of Reformed Judaism in the South is well known for its acts of kindness and its mindfulness toward justice. From the swooning tones of my friend Cantor Kaplan to the thoughtful words of Rabbi Micah Greenstein I seem to find myself surrounded in communal holiness. Today I was at Temple to celebrate the Bat Mitzvah of Mimi Scheidt and Meagan Orgel. These two beautiful young women were surrounded by two loving families and a faith community who only want the best for them. The word for the day seemed to be 'gratitude' at Temple Israel.

After some recitation in Hebrew of Torah, prayers and songs the congregation was called to think about gratitude. In simple and poignant words, the idea of praying "after we are full" was introduced. Rabbi Micah remarked how we pray in times of trouble, illness and anxiety...and before meals, when we are hungry. He reminded us all of the prayers that broke out after the manna fell in the wilderness during the Hebrew Exodus. Mimi and Meagan both pointed to the necessity of praying when we are full so that we don't live in some sort of self-satisfaction only needing God in our desperation. In other words, instead of riding around thinking about what we don't have, what we are upset about, what we do not like and finally what is wrong with us and everyone else; what would happen if we lived in a sense of gratitude? What if we forsook the ways of being chronic complainers--only talking to God before a blessing, a want, a desire, and lived in a state of gratitude? Rabbi Greenstein said he saw a bumper sticker the other day that laid the proposition clear--"WHAT ARE YOU GRATEFUL FOR?"

Instead of focussing on what needs to be better, my first question is "What am I grateful for?" It is easy to fill the ears of a patient listener with our lamentations, but it is probably more of a challenge to offer 5 minutes of gratefulness. I think I will start praying after meals making sure that my own satisfaction somehow does not exempt God from my prayerful and heartfelt communication. I bet the Lord will notice, the people around me will too and I might even understand more fully that God has satisfied me in many ways and has not sent me away empty. God forbid if I understand that my many blessings do not need to involve God with the same kind of plaintive prayer as when I am whining. A prayer of plaintive gratitude could do wonders. Mazel Tov!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Wisdom

"It is better for a truthful person to tell a lie, than for a liar
to tell the truth." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, Vol. 16, Fortress Press.

Nearly every week, when I can, I devour every issue of The Christian Century. Whilst others await monthly issues of their favorite visual and literary aversion, The Christian Century comes to me like a delicious "liebfraumilch." The lastest issue marked August 12, 2008, rang my bell or rather evoked a chime in me long dead. I remember my days at Candler School of Theology sitting in on a class about the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was tragically executed at the hands of Nazis. My professor who was German himself, Dr. Sigfried Hoffman, taught the class like a contemporary of Bonhoeffer's. For some reason I always identified strongly with brother Dietrich.

Andrew Root a professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN wrote a fantastic article about Fox TV's show "Moment of Truth". The show features contestants whose response to questions are measured by a polygraph, supposedly revealing who is truthful and who is not. Root thoughtfully says that a polygraph measures doubt, but it does not measure truth. Roots article goes on to expose that the TV show has no interest in the truth since it does not have any interest in the human relationships that the show seeks to betray. In other words truth is not something that is non-contexual, but rather is rooted in relationships. At times our humanity is very vulnerable, our relationships are a far greater truth to be protected. To tell the truth out of context expresses doubt rather than truth. I know this all sounds so convoluted, so let me put it in a parable:

I learned today that my favorite neighbor, Margaret was told that the authorities in another city had found her sister dead. The report said that Margaret's sister may have been dead for a week. Margaret is very upset as you can imagine. Margaret would often have conversations with me about her sister who had a very serious addiction to alcohol. The family had been so concerned that they all had once participated in an intervention which worked to no avail. In earlier years when Margaret was asked about her sister by others, if she was an alcoholic--a "lost cause" some would say, Margaret would always say that "my sister is OK." Margaret always told the truth in that her sister's relationship with her was OK. In no way could Margaret dismiss her sister due to the judgements or the non-contexual "concrete truth" that overode the "situational/principled truth". Margaret was faithful to her relationship with her sister.

Ok, some of you may be asking, what has gotten into Tim's crawl? Well here it goes, over the span of my vocational life I have been privy to, sat in upon, been subjected to "truth-digging do- gooders". In as much as these very righteous warriors of the church would implement their causes with "inquisitions" they would leave divisive and bitter pain in their wake. When I sat before a committee of investigation in the United Methodist Church nearly 20 years ago, I was asked if I were a "self-avowed, practicing homosexual". My response to the question had nothing to do with my integrity, it had to do with "information as power" which would indicate certain death in the UMC world. As latter days would have it, you see that I am no longer part of the "bretheren" in the UMC. I saw that it was a context unsafe for me and my family. I guarded my secrets and chose to let others who love me handle those secrets. As Bonhoeffer would say, "a boundary was being crossed and liars use truth to violate boundaries in order to humiliate," and control. In another instance I had to sit and listen to the scornful words of an accuser who said that a person in leadership in our community is unfit due to being an alcoholic, even though this person was in recovery for many years. In the confrontation that I mediated, the accusers were constantly saying they were "only telling the truth." Somewhere through the unfortunate meeting I realized that there was no concern for the person by the accusers. It was an act of deception in order to gain power and to pay back this person for standing up to them.

I am always amazed at what happens in the name of the "truth". When truth is used as a weapon or as a means to betray the greater concrete truth of our relationships we only become flapping trivialists who know facts. St. James termed it as a "flaming tongue which sets many a forest aflame." Telling the truth is not a pornographic display of our inner most feelings and thoughts, telling the truth means living up to and into the contextual reality of our lives--as we live them in relationship with one another. As we struggle with literalists who distort our humanity in the Church, those "truth keepers" who protect the status quo in compartmentalized structures of power we forget that truth is contextual most of the time and factual less of the time. I know, I know this shakes another foundation in the centers of bibliolatry. I suppose, once again, it is the essence, the spirit of truth that reigns supreme even while encased in the messiness of humanity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer staked his life on living into this truth. He was an activist, he did break the law, he was fully aware of the frailty of his humanity, he loved his neighbors and undermined the liars who tried to dehumanize with propoganda millions of Jewish, Gypsies, and gay/lesbian people.

Sadly, the liars and the inquisitors lie outside my contextual circle of truthfulness, so what am I to do? My good ol' Evangelical preaching uncle would say, "evangelize and convert!" Oh no, here we go again. I think I will accept the messy humanity part and try to tell the truth as best as I can.

Join me August 17 at God Talk, 9:30 AM, Sunday and we can talk more about this and I'll bring the Christian Century with me. -TMM

Charter Blog

I suppose you could call this my "charter blog." Beginning today the sometimes world of Rev. Tim or Pastor Tim of Memphis, Tennessee will be in script for the eyes of the world to read. Most of the time in my 47 years of incarnation, and the only incarnation I recognize at this point, I have kept my thoughts to my own mind, musical lyrics and spirited extemporaneous preaching. Sure, I can admit to telepathic communication with the Divine in waves of mindfulness while driving down the road in a quiet car. But, like so much of this twenty-first century communication revolution the blog has been flirting with me to visit and offer my tangible thought in regular verbosity. So, this is a first for me. Even though I know I am among the millions who throw their words into the cosmos for all to see, like other bloggers, it feels good to let it all out.

As I write this charter blog, I have to say some things about Joy Booker who was a charter member of the church I have served for nearly 14 years. Holy Trinity Community Church, now a United Church of Christ was chartered in 1990. Among the thirteen who gathered that first Sunday in a storefront, was a tall, striking, thin, gender bending woman known by close associates as JB. At her funeral this past weekend, which was held in our beautiful sanctuary, she was labeled the "godfather of the gays." Joy was raised in the Roman Catholic Church and was well educated in Catholic schools. For her to attend Holy Trinity UCC was not only an obligation but was the fulfillment of a dream for her. Every Sunday that she could attend, and that was 85% of the services in a year, JB would come dressed in fanciful men's suits and an occasional fedora. She would approach the communion rail and kneel with tremendous dignity and would never partake of the host until after she had said "amen". While Joy fought a hard battle with Sickle Cell Anemia which exhausted her and caused her to drag a tank of oxygen along behind her, she never became disillusioned. She waged war on racism, sexism, and heterosexism with gentle finesse and iron-like conviction. She served throughout the same-gender loving community with consistency and intellect.

Her funeral or "celebration of life," as we termed it, was was with over flowing attendance allowing standing room only. Her mother, Toya Booker, insisted that we have the service in "Joy's church" and that we hide nothing about her life. So often I am called to officiate at funerals where the family has secrets about their departed sons's HIV status or their mother's sexuality. Life-long partners are left in the back pew crying silently and family members are suspended in fear of the "great revelation" of the departed. I walk out of those funeral homes wishing that I knew nothing about the situation, while I too, am suspended in the great deception. Pastorally, silent acknowledgements are made while all of us enter the mutually delusional closet of social decorum.

In JB's case, the celebration of her life was a very rare glimpse of everybody being "for real" and authentic in a way we can only hope for once in a single life-time. The largely African-American, Christian, and same gender loving people were together, gathered in a service of worship where the truth of life was spoken. We giggled knowingly at Joy's penchant for beautiful women. We were touched by her raspy voice calling us to get "outside of ourselves." And we respected her because she was true to her word and we could always count on her to be there. For a moment, I swore the veil between the realm of heaven and earth had disappeared. The crown of life we witnessed in JB, was an integrated life where indeed the inward and spiritual grace of her life was revealed outwardly and tangibly as a sign of a life fully lived. Joy Booker, "godfather to the gays," may be the last of the original 13 charter members of Holy Trinity Community Church. Holy Trinity is built on the lives of such genuine saints and hundreds have passed through those church doors. As the statuesque, proud and beautiful all female pall bearers carried JB's casket in and out of the church, I knew that the new creation that we read about in Christian scriptures was indeed at hand.