Category: Crossings


Crossings #57 – Love’s meaning

Filed Under: Crossings, Epiphany, Julian of Norwish, Love, Musings, Poetry by wfloyd — 1 Comment
January 14, 2007

LOVE was our Lord’s meaning. (Julian of Norwich, Showings)

The greatest Epiphany about God and ourselves that we remember during this season is the revealing of the person of  Jesus as the embodiment of God’s essential nature – love. As the 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich summarized the Good News: “Love was our Lord’s meaning.”

For in Jesus Christ we see to the heart of who we are – and to the heart of God. And what do we see? Nothing less than radical, risk-taking, inclusive Love that empowers all we do for justice.

Jesus taught his followers, saying: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:34-35).

Thomas Traherne, the 18th century English spiritual writer, said it well:

Let me love every Person as Jesus Christ:
Meet his love, and thine, O Lord, In every person . . .
O Learn me this, and the whole is learned.
Learn me this, the Divine Art, And the Life of God!

The Good News is that in the person of Jesus Christ, God re-words the world. Where the governing word is hatred — a new word, love. Where the dominant word is power — love. Where the tempting word is greed — love. This love is not just a fuzzy emotion. Love is the urge towards authentic relationships, communities of hospitality and justice. To be the church is to be formed in love. To act out that love. Whatever it takes. No matter what.

I’m not much of a romantic when it comes to the church. We can be among the most petty, prideful, pretentious, pompous communities imaginable. Seldom do we act like the Body of Christ, Love Incarnate in Community.

But sometimes, precisely there when we least expect it, true love breaks through – the love of God that we can find only in loving encounters with one another – especially those least like ourselves.

God, I believe, has a sense of humor richer than ours, a heart full of tender mercies deeper than we can even desire. For, after all, “Love was our Lord’s meaning.” And the world will know that we, the church, are disciples of that Love, as we love one another. It would be an Epiphany!

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Crossings #56 – Magi & ministry

Filed Under: Crossings, Epiphany, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
January 7, 2007

They went home not knowing, those three Magi. At our house they’ve been waiting in the wings all during Christmas – inching a little closer each day to the crib side of the Christ child. By now the Christmas tree is dead, the lights are about to come down, and the Eastern Establishment are just arriving to try to find out what the fuss has been about in Bethlehem. But they leave not knowing for sure what they’ve seen, and what difference it will make to who they each will become.

Epiphany is a reminder of the deepening enigma of God’s ways of taking flesh in the world – hardly ever in the ways that we expect or hope – and almost always in company that we would never have expected, or felt proper for the Child of the Most High.

Epiphany juxtaposes the bafflement of the Wise Men with that of Jesus’s cousin John – the one who eats bugs for food and dresses in animal hides – the one who watches Jesus that day at the Jordan when Mary’s baby, now grown, comes down to the river not to show off how special he is, but to ask John to wash him clean, to make him ready to claim as his own the future that God has had in store for him since even before the world was ever created.
Our whole identity as Christians, those who have been “marked as Christ’s own forever,” begins with baptism. Our future, and all that God has in store for our lives, too, begins here, as we allow ourselves to be called down into the water of baptism, and then out of the river and into the unknown tomorrows that God has in store for us.

Baptism begins the journey together that our ministries will take from cradle to grave – each one of us an essential part of Christ’s own ministries of love & forgiveness, compassion & hospitality, justice & reconciliation.

But we, like the Magi, go away from our baptism not knowing for sure exactly what God has in store for our lives – only that from now on the voice to listen for will be that voice that Jesus heard, as if from heaven, saying “this one is my very own, and I am so very glad about it” – that from here out the path to follow will be the one that leads us into the needs of our neighbors – and that the only certainty we can long for is that from this day forth and for forevermore, love has us in its grasp and will never let us go. Ever. No matter what. Everything else begins right here.

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Crossings #55 – a great light

Filed Under: Advent, Crossings, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
December 24, 2006

In 1945 a barely nineteen year old German captive in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland received a small Bible with a printed note in the front from a parishioner here at St. Thomas’ Parish. Having been ordered to the front lines in a Belgian forest only a short time before the end of World War II, he later recounted that he surrendered in the field, in the dark of night, to the first British soldier he could find.

Looking back at that same small Bible when he was my age now, 56, he said to a former seminary classmate of mine, Murphy Davis: “You know, sometimes it must be very, very dark before we understand how brightly the smallest light can shine. In the deep darkness, the tiniest flame can seem a great light.” That enemy in the field one night, and that small Bible, were the start of a great light.

This young prisoner of war was rehabilitated by the Allies, released, and went on to become one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the latter half of the twentieth century. His classic books, Theology of Hope and The Crucified God, began a prolific writing and teaching vocation in Germany, the United States, and across the Christian world. Juergen Moltmann turned 80 this past April.

The St. Thomas’ parishioner whose message was in the front of Moltmann’s Bible was none other than the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who prior to his election to our nation’s highest office had honed his leadership skills not only with a term as Assistant Secretary to the Navy but also as a member of the St. Thomas’ Parish Vestry!

The liturgical season of Advent — that ends today with our midnight service on Christmas Eve — is centered on images of darkness and light. For many of us it is the words of the prophet Isaiah that echo in our memories, words written to the Hebrew people facing defeat and years of exile at the hands of their enemies the Babylonians. They were words of hope spoken on the near side of suffering that had not yet ended: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined” (Isaiah 9:2).

Isaiah’s words must have seemed as small a light as the British soldier, or the Roosevelt Bible given to Moltmann as a prisoner of war. The words, the soldier, the Bible, didn’t end the suffering. But they remind those who suffer that God has not and will not ever forget them, especially in their suffering.

Christmas is for many who wrestle, as do I, with depression, a season of both “deep darkness” and “great light.” Any theology of hope worth having, Moltmann was to teach us, emerges out of the birth into our midst of the Child who will become the Crucified God. Our Christmas hope is worth only the plastic out of which our outdoor manger scenes are made, unless it speaks to those who walk in the darkness of depression and war and poverty and HIV/AIDS and violence and homelessness. They are the only ones who can tell us whether, in their darkness, our Christmas joy brings genuine hope, or only plastic promises. “Arise, shine!” There are many in darkness waiting for even the smallest light.

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Crossings #54 – The journey

Filed Under: Advent, Crossings, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
December 17, 2006

A gentle journey … this “following in the way of Jesus”. For me authentic gentleness is the hardest part of it. To begin with, I’m not very gentle with myself. Others forgive me long before I forgive myself. I hold myself responsible for things over which I have no control. I beat myself up for “things left undone,” even when I wasn’t lazy but just put more things on my plate than anyone could swallow in a day. I get angry at myself, instead of appropriately challenging someone with their own inappropriate behavior.

In family-systems-theory-language, I am choosing live reactively, allowing the world and other people to define who I am, to set the agenda, to state the terms of conversation or action. The world, after all, can be a demanding, frustrating, violent, abusive and uncaring place. And so I feel justified in reacting to the world’s failings with toughness and resolve, and in the process wind up mirroring them in my own life.

Angry people make me angry. People covetous of trivial things make me desire not less, but simply more appropriate things. I want to tell divisive people, “good riddance!”. I try to get back at vindictive people. Unreasonable people can make me so damned reasonable that I squeeze life dry of all its joy.

A day – much less a life – lived like that is not a gentle journey. It is spiteful, frustrating, anxious, and angry. Living in reactive-mode means I give up the ability to choose how to respond. When I let myself be driven by fear, I cannot be available as a non-anxious presence to others. When I get hooked by others’ self-righteousness, I find myself gloating over not being as sanctimonious as they!

Advent tells us stories, to the contrary, of people embarking on gentle journeys in a world that lived by reaction, not response, where people all too easily were defined by others’ expectations rather than by their own inner compass. Joseph thought about divorcing the pregnant unmarried Mary; but instead he responded to a dream calling him onto a path of gentle resilience and patient resolve. Mary could have reacted to Gabriel’s annunciation of her pregnancy by saying, “that’s what you think!!” She instead chose a gentler path of risk and uncertainty, willing to bear a mystery-child within her who it was said would grow up to be a Prince of Peace. The Magi could have reacted to Herod’s fear by helping him find the threatening infant King of the Jews; instead they turned and went home by another path.

The gentle journey of Advent is in fact the most demanding place to begin on one’s pilgrimage of following God. It is a path whose final goal is still to be revealed, whose course promises to be rocky, and whose itinerary will pass through repeated danger and deprivation. The gentle journey of Advent begins with the intentional choice to face life’s challenges without allowing ourselves to be defined and limited by them. Advent is about allowing God’s gentleness with us to be the measure of all of our own compassion with ourselves and others, meeting violence with non-violence, hatred with absolution, self-righteousness with self-examination. The spirituality of Advent will never be easy, and seldom will it be safe. It is, however, God’s chosen way: to go before us, on the gentle journey of the Christmas child.

A Ministry of St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC – www.stthomasdc.org

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Crossings #53 – Christ is missing

Filed Under: Christmas, Crossings, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
December 10, 2006

Friday Dec 1 | The Dallas Morning News | ST. ALBANS, W.Va. – “Christ is missing from Christmas in this small town. The community’s holiday display has a manger with shepherds, a guiding star, camels and a palm tree, but no baby Jesus, Mary or Joseph.”

Well that caught my attention! According to the Associated Press story, “The parks superintendent said Jesus was left out because of concerns about the separation of church and state. But Mayor Dick Callaway said it was done for purely technical reasons: ‘It’s not easy to put a light-up representation of a baby in a small manger scene, you know.’”

Then yesterday on the train to work in Herndon, I read the followup in the Washington Post saying the town had relented and put Jesus back in the Nativity.

Church-and-State issues aside, I was struck by the fact that for the manger and the shepherds by themselves to have become so iconic of Christmas that anyone would even consider leaving Mary and Joseph and Jesus out, our imaginations must really not connect Christmas very intimately anymore with childbirth and babies and mothers and husbands waiting in the wings.

So it’s no wonder that we really don’t connect the season of Advent with pregnancy – the literal kind that always precedes childbirth of real screaming, pooping, incessantly hungry babies. The Annunciation of Jesus’ birth by the angel to Mary was celebrated last March 25th. Her husband Joseph – who has a prominent role in the nativity story only in Matthew – is honored in the church calendar the week before (and then mostly forgotten). All those months of creeping spring, blooming into summer, swelling into the suffocating heat of August and the chill of fall and now the cold of winter (Christians in the Southern Hemisphere should reverse the order of the seasons) – Mary has been pregnant. And wondering, as only an expectant mother can. And Joseph has been by her side, wondering his own thoughts as well.

What will this baby be like? What does a child look like or how will he act, who has been conceived by the Holy Spirit? There were no sonograms, no pre-natal tests. We don’t know if she had any complications, or whether there were scary moments when she was afraid something was wrong, or that she might lose this child. We don’t know how uncomfortable she was, or whether Joseph rubbed her feet for her, or went searching for the home remedies her friends advised for morning sickness or all the other physical discomforts of pregnancy. This was a time of anticipation, yes, but also of wondering, and worrying a bit, about what it would look like to have God born in a person, a child. Were they ready?

In Advent, what do you anticipate — and wonder and worry about — if God really is waiting to be born in you this Christmas? What will it look like? How do you prepare for it? Maybe that’s why St. Albans, West Virginia took the parents and baby out of the manger. It can be a scary thing to leave them in.

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Crossings #52 – Advent & Hubble

Filed Under: Advent, Crossings, Hubble Telescope, Theology of Time by wfloyd — Leave a comment
December 3, 2006

If you’ve never looked at them before, you should, although these images can unsettle your world. Pictures of galaxy after galaxy of every imaginable shape and unimaginable size, as seen by the Hubble space telescope (hubblesite.org), provide an inkling of why the 16th century discovery by Copernicus that the planets revolved around the sun so upset the prevailing view of the earth’s centrality that it caused his follower Galileo even a century later to be brought before the Inquisition.

The Hubble’s images are a reminder that although our everyday perspective is earth-centered, the universe that is revealed from our vantage point clearly is not. It makes me wonder whether, as I sit here writing, there are not billions of sentient creatures in those far-flung galaxies who are at this very moment contemplating the unsettling possibility that they are not alone in the universe! The Hubble telescope allows us a voyeur’s peek at “all that is, seen and unseen,” granting us glimpses from a God’s-eye point of view, although we have become so blasé about such things that most times we just yawn and change channels.

What the Hubble telescope does for space the liturgical season of Advent does for time. Advent reminds us that we are as swallowed up in the temporal immensity of eternity as the Hubble telescope shows us to be swallowed up in the vast expanses of space. Our self-centered vantage point in time, the seemingly privileged present that consumes virtually all of our attention, is placed again between beginning and end, bracketed by the earliest memories of history and the completion of time itself in God’s unending Kingdom.

The lectionary readings in Advent take us on a whirlwind tour — from post-Exilic prophets, to the anticipation of Jesus’ birth, to his death and the church’s proclamation that in being raised from the dead Jesus has conquered time itself, opening up eternity. Our Sunday lessons place us into the long perspective of time — from now to “the end,” when Christ at the “second coming” is to be shown as the ruler of all things, for all time. Like Hubble, it should take our breath away.

Galileo was condemned for removing our world from the center of what people thought to be the Biblical picture; fundamentalists do the same with Darwin, condemning the dethronement of humanity from the pinnacle of the great pyramid of creation. So it is no wonder that Advent is so often neglected, for it is a season of unsettling realizations that a God’s-eye view of time, like that of space, requires a rethinking of most of our daily assumptions. In the long run, what is most important may not be what my computer calendar keeps reminding me about today. God may be far more concerned with the right time than with the precise time our atomic clocks say it is, down to the millionth of a second.

In the child in the manger on Christmas day there is shown to us what really matters from God’s view. At the heart of the universe is a love as fragile as an infant, as painful as childbirth … and later, as the cross. This love re-centers us to be able to view “all that is” the way that God does – as so loved by the maker of all things that it will take absolutely forever for that love completely to unfold.

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Crossings #51 – Thanksgiving Misgivings

Filed Under: Crossings, Musings, Puritanism, Religious Right, Thanksgiving by wfloyd — Leave a comment
November 23, 2006

It is movement within the church intent on purifying it from the worldliness of contemporary culture. Fallen through Adam and redeemed by Christ (spirit triumphing over flesh), humanity, they believe, must be converted from the passions of the body for the sake of a heavenly reward.

High standards of morality or outwardly visible prosperity in this life are signs that a person or community is favored by God and destined for the Kingdom of Heaven. The absolute authority for this is the Bible, rather than the established religious hierarchy of the official church and its officers. Each person has direct access to God through the Word, by means of which this movement aims to purify not only the church, congregation by congregation, but also all individual conduct and all the institutions of human society.

In such quests for purity, certainty, and exclusivity, there is no room for compromise. This at times leads to excesses of moral outrage that end in regrettable violence against those varying most from prevailing norms.

This, of course, is a portrayal not of the contemporary Religious Right but of 16th century Puritanism, which began in England. Later in New England — unlike other American Pilgrims who sought complete separation from the Church of England – the Puritans sought to stay inside the church while purifying or subverting its beliefs, forms of worship, and chosen leadership in the name of a higher morality.

The Puritans arrived in New England intent on establishing a religiously exclusive colony in which they were the majority and in which conformity to their beliefs was the enforced norm. Occasional excesses of violence, whether against native peoples or those accused of witchcraft, were only much later to be interpreted as inevitable outgrowths of the Puritans’ uncompromising quest for absolute purity, often expressed in the limited possibilities left for all others: convert, leave, or die. “Progressive Christians” today can thus be excused for our visceral uneasiness when modern Puritanism in the guise of the Religious Right again rears its head, dividing Church from Church, child from parent, neighbor from friend.

Although the Puritan Revolution, led by the “godly men” commanded by Oliver Cromwell, won the 17th century English Civil War, their victory turned out to be short-lived, lasting barely 12 years before the Restoration of the authority of the Church of England. So there is some precedent for simply trying to wait out such rigorist movements, hoping that in America as in England, though the modern day Puritans may have their day, in the end they will not prevail.

Yet — like women accused of witchcraft or indigenous peoples who welcomed the Puritan strangers to their shores only to have them turn on them with genocidal thoroughness — there are those in our own society who know that often by the time such tides finally turn, the damage can be beyond repenting. Gays and lesbians, liberals and democrats, Latinos and native peoples, all are left on Thanksgiving Day wondering whether this uniquely American celebration of our Puritan Pilgrim forebears is really for everyone after all, and what’s really Christian about it anyway.

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Radical Hospitality

Filed Under: Crossings, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
November 14, 2006

Marked as Christs Own.jpg

©Wayne Whitson Floyd – Ordinary Time 2006- #50

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord (Matthew 21:9)

The Benedictus is the Latin Bible’s translation of what Matthew portrays the crowds calling out as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and continues: “When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’ The crowds were saying, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’”

Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550), whose name itself means “blessed,” was a layperson who became “a hermit at Subiaco, near Rome, … moved to Monte Cassino [and] developed a … close-knit model of community life” whose written Rule has shaped monasticism and Anglican spirituality through the present day.

Chapter 53 of the Rule of St. Benedict concerns “the reception of guests”. Benedict wrote plainly: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” We’re not a club to join, or a tribe to belong to. We are on a journey, and today you are our goal. Roman Catholic writer Joan Chittester comments: “The message to the stranger is clear: Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.

Radical hospitality in the Episcopal Church has its roots here in Benedict. It is one thing for us to be inclusive and thoughtful and generous to others by allowing them into our lives on our terms. It is another thing entirely to practice hospitality in such a radical way that we expect to be disturbed and changed by those who come to our door.. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Radical hospitality makes us vulnerable to God. Who is this, we ask? Christ incarnate at our door.

Radical hospitality is not, however, to be misunderstood as an achievement reserved only for monks and saints; it should become an everyday minimum of the practice of our life together as followers of Christ.

Joan Chittester describes what is ‘radical’ about Benedict’s notion of hospitality, versus our own: Hospitality in a culture of violence and strangers and anonymity has become the art of making good connections at good cocktail parties. We don’t talk in elevators, we don’t know the security guard’s name, we don’t invite even the neighbors into the sanctuary of our selves. Their children get sick and their parents die and all we do is watch … from behind heavy blinds. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our hearts so that this generation does not miss accompanying the innocent to Calvary as the last one did. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our souls so that the God of the unexpected can come in.

Benedictine radical hospitality invites the stranger to have different values than our own, to intrude on the routines of our daily life. Radical hospitality first listens rather than speaks, offers rather than requires, surrenders to the reality of the other person rather than expecting them to be mirrors of ourselves.

Benedict didn’t write to make the monks guilty at what they didn’t do, but to remind them of radical possibilities in the ordinary things they did already. Like opening the door.

A Ministry of St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC – www.stthomasdc.org

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Crossings #50 – Benedictine Radical Hospitality

Filed Under: Benedictine Tradition, Crossings, Hospitality, Musings by wfloyd — Leave a comment
November 9, 2006

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord (Matthew 21:9)

The Benedictus is the Latin Bible’s translation of what Matthew portrays the crowds calling out as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and continues: “When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’ The crowds were saying, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’”

Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550), whose name itself means “blessed,” was a layperson who became “a hermit at Subiaco, near Rome, … moved to Monte Cassino [and] developed a … close-knit model of community life” whose written Rule has shaped monasticism and Anglican spirituality through the present day.

Chapter 53 of the Rule of St. Benedict concerns “the reception of guests”. Benedict wrote plainly: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” We’re not a club to join, or a tribe to belong to. We are on a journey, and today you are our goal. Roman Catholic writer Joan Chittester comments: “The message to the stranger is clear: Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.”

Radical hospitality in the Episcopal Church has its roots here in Benedict. It is one thing for us to be inclusive and thoughtful and generous to others by allowing them into our lives on our terms. It is another thing entirely to practice hospitality in such a radical way that we expect to be disturbed and changed by those who come to our door.. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Radical hospitality makes us vulnerable to God. Who is this, we ask? Christ incarnate at our door.

Radical hospitality is not, however, to be misunderstood as an achievement reserved only for monks and saints; it should become an everyday minimum of the practice of our life together as followers of Christ. Joan Chittester describes what is ‘radical’ about Benedict’s notion of hospitality, versus our own:

Hospitality in a culture of violence and strangers and anonymity has become the art of making good connections at good cocktail parties. We don’t talk in elevators, we don’t know the security guard’s name, we don’t invite even the neighbors into the sanctuary of our selves. Their children get sick and their parents die and all we do is watch … from behind heavy blinds. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our hearts so that this generation does not miss accompanying the innocent to Calvary as the last one did. Benedict wants us to let down the barriers of our souls so that the God of the unexpected can come in.

Benedictine radical hospitality invites the stranger to have different values than our own, to intrude on the routines of our daily life. Radical hospitality first listens rather than speaks, offers rather than requires, surrenders to the reality of the other person rather than expecting them to be mirrors of ourselves. Benedict didn’t write to make the monks guilty at what they didn’t do, but to remind them of radical possibilities in the ordinary things they did already. Like opening the door.

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