Archive for 2001
The Maps Library offers nine genuine generic container classes. Just as TStringList lets you keep lists of objects indexed by a string value, Maps let you keep lists of just about any type, object or atomic, indexed by whatever type you like.
The nine different kinds of map have different performance characteristics allowing you to choose the perfect container for your application, whether you need fast insertion, super-fast searching, random-access, or whatever.
The library is quite compact and surprisingly efficient given its generic nature. A simple demo is also available. Caveat! It is some years since these components were developed and they probably won’t function beyond D5 without a lot of tweaking. They are–regrettably–also unsupported. Nevertheless I hope you find them useful in some way.
June 18th, 2001
Every so often the Delphi IDE (from D2 until at least D7) seems to get confused about its line numbers: errors are reported in places there is no code; the debugger jumps about with no apparent relation to the code that is being executed. The Delphi newsgroups propose many diagnoses but, in my experience, the culprit has always been code pasted into the IDE from another source. The Delphi IDE flags line breaks with the characters $D$A but some other editors use $A$D or even just $A or $D. The IDE understands such markers enough to format the code correctly but not enough to mark errors properly. The solution is straightforward but awkward: filter out any improper codes. FirstAid does the job for you.
(more…)
June 18th, 2001
Did you ever see a triptych, one of those altar pieces or icons with three panels? Well I’ve got three images to look at today. One is a photograph of the first moon landing. Second is a painting. It’s a naked man with an IV in his chest and purple lesions over his body. The title is “Christ with AIDS.” The third image is a kind of composite, I guess, a video monitor showing clips from a bunch of films—there’s Pearl Harbour, there’s Shrek, there’s Moulin Rouge. I’m not sure quite what happens when you put these three images side-by-side but let’s see.
The films first. Nothing more obsesses us as a culture than love. You can’t sing a song or make a film without romance. But no one ever sings songs or makes films where love is straightforward. There must be obstacles. The course of true love must run awry. There must be a fly in the ointment. Every Ben Affleck has his Josh Harnett. Every Shrek has his Lord Farquadd. And though Ewan McGregor sings his silly love songs to Nicole Kidman there has to be an evil Duke to ruin the day. Our perfect image of perfect love is one-on-one. Two’s company and three’s a crowd. The dreaded love triangle! Somehow we have to get rid of the third side. Find a dragon to swallow it whole. A war to heal it or a death for its dissipation. Is it any wonder, then, we have trouble with Trinity? As love goes, one-on-one won’t do for God. There has to be a third. What we view as a fascinating evil, God sees as essential.
Second panel. 20 years ago this week the plague came upon us in confusion and horror and fear. And, while tens, then hundreds, then thousands of young men were dying and a new public horror of blood was being born, an ancient vision of God was being roused. How do you name God when the plague is raging? Enemy or friend? Consoler or nemesis? For some it was clear: God is God of the pure. Everett Koop, who was Surgeon General, couldn’t even talk about AIDS at the White House because the Christian Right saw it as God’s punishment for being queer. It is an ancient idea. Bad things never happen without a reason. You must have deserved it. It’s your own fault.
Which is just the same thing they said about crucifixion 2000 years ago. It’s your fault. God has cursed you. No one mocks God. But, cross or sickbed, you can only keep that up if you can keep your distance, can keep compassion at bay, if you do not know. You can only name God destroyer if you can keep God distant, at bay, unknown.
But Jesus could never keep God at bay. He knew the name of God, knows where he belongs. God has AIDS.
…
Paul Monette, in his AIDS memoir “Borrowed Time,” calls his experience of coping with his lover’s diagnosis as “living on the moon.” Lonely, distant, cold and hostile. That’s my third image, that epic photograph from the moon with the flag that pretends to fly even though there’s no wind, the everlasting footprints in the dust, and the man sealed in a spacesuit to keep him from the hostile, airless, cold grasp of nature. That picture is such a scene of triumph and wonder but it’s also a perfect parable of what we’ve done to ourselves as we’ve conquered the world.
There’s a kind of knowing which has to step back to get a good view, best of all to be outside whatever it is we wish to know. It is a kind of knowing that is fair, and honest, and in most ways accurate. Impartial. Just. Unbiased. It’s a way of knowing that pretends that it is possible to withdraw yourself, the one who knows, out of the picture entirely. Science knows that way. Schools tell us it’s the only way to know. But it is a fraud. Imagine you want to know about the whole of creation. Where do you stand to get the perfect view? How can you stand outside everything … without being nothing yourself? That’s what this kind of knowing has to do—pretend that human beings like you and me are nothing. Or imagine again you want to know about human beings, about a wife, or a lover, or a child, or a friend with AIDS. How far away do you have to get to see them properly? And when you get that far can you see them at all?
What is essential is invisible to the eye. But it is real. What is real about a wife, a lover, a child, a friend is the fact that we are part of them, tangled up with them in relationship, in love, in nets of feeling. And that’s a kind of knowing too, a kind of knowing from inside, from up close—a very partial, unjust, involved way of knowing. We call it wisdom. You cannot love without getting involved. You cannot know from a distance. There is no safe viewpoint.
Same with God. God knows this world but not because God has stayed safely outside. If that were true God could not care, could not even see what is essential, that we are alive. God knows you and knows me with wisdom not science. God knows the world from the cross. God has AIDS. God has the best seat in the house and this is the kind of theatre where the audience participates. This is liturgy. God is tangled up with us. And we call that entanglement the Spirit.
Our so called love triangles aren’t triangles at all just angles. There isn’t really a third side. But what makes God God is that the love between Parent and Child is so complete, the knowledge they have of each other is so intimate, their entanglement so profound that it is as real as they are. So real and so entangled that three cannot describe God at all. God is one. But one won’t do either because right in the heart of God there is love, there is self-revelation, there is community, there is entanglement.
Is the Holy Spirit here this morning? Where is she? Not in any of us. The spirit is here between us, in the gaps. The spirit is our entanglement. In so far as we love one another, know one another, suffer with one another, then the Spirit is here. And we, in that same measure, are not many but one. And, in that same measure, we are God.
I think that’s what we celebrate today.
June 10th, 2001
“Why are you standing there looking at the sky?” Don’t you just hate angels with attitude?! Angels are like email—they may be an efficient way to send a message but subtle they are not and tender is beyond them.
Because there has to be something both tender and subtle about what we ponder today. It is subtle. Only Luke really notices it. And he raises it up and makes it this hinge on which his message turns. Volume One ends with it. Volume Two opens with it. Today, just to render the subtlety as confusing as possible, we begin with the end and end with the beginning. And there’s something right about that too. We are in-between. We are waiting. We know we have to go back to the city and wait there —literally sit still. But not quite yet. We are still standing here looking up at the sky.
And there’s the tender part. What kind of witnesses would we be if we could leave so easily the one who has left us?
My mother has a friend. Once upon a time when they were young couples, newly wed, they were a foursome. Alma and Jim and Jean and John. I’ve seen the seaside photographs of cotton-candy and sand castles, of windblown hairdos and held hands. Later, of little ones in pushchairs, wide-eyed, with them parent-proud. But somewhere along the line I understand there was a falling out or at least a falling apart. Distance, silence, little hurts not made up, that kind of thing. And communication cut down to Christmas cards and anniversaries. Yet somewhere along the line that changed again as four became once more two. My father dead and Jean’s husband lost to another woman. And Alma and Jean became again fast friends, united this time not so much by the open future as by memory—by memory and compassion for each other’s loss. But—and I’ve heard them—what they wonder from time to time, in a kind of oneupmanship of grief, is whether it is worse to be widowed or divorced—worse to have the once-beloved taken away or have him leave of his own accord.
“Why are you standing there looking at the sky?” Which is the greater grief: when we lost Jesus through death or when he left of his own accord? What kind of witnesses would we be if we could leave so easily the one who has left us?
Well what kind of witnesses are we? Just exactly what are we witnesses of? What have we seen and what can we tell? How much does Jesus matter to us? How has he changed our world? If the only gospel was to be ours how would it read?
…
“Stay in the city,” he says, “until you are clothed with power from on high.” For this is about power, this waiting, this witness, the power from on high but also the low-down and dirty power of this world. Who has it. How it works. And how Jesus has destroyed it—even though we do not often see the results.
… Maybe I’m just bearing the grudge of his going a little too heavily but Jesus is a big disappointment to me. His death was a disaster. And though his resurrection kind of makes up for it, it doesn’t put any damn thing right. The rich still oppress the poor, religions still think it is a holy thing to kill for God, bureaucracies still crush the soul, the work of our hands still wounds the world. What the hell has changed with his coming and going? Aren’t the principalities and powers, the dominions and thrones, aren’t they all still in place, brooding over this bent world with their dark wings?
But don’t you think that Jesus asked himself the same things? At home there in Nazareth. “What good have all the prophets been?” I hear him wonder, hear him accuse, “All the history of this chosen people and here we are strangers in our own land, the rich still fatten themselves off the poor, religion still crushes the soul, and the fields blow dry as dust.” But, as Luke tells it, Jesus ups and leaves the life he loves, following his questions to the Jordan where he is drenched first in water and then in Holy Spirit. And there, as he waits, words are whispered in his heart, “you are the child I love.” The rest we know. So began Volume One. But here we are at the beginning of Volume Two. Asking the same questions and waiting the same way. Waiting for that same spirit. Waiting for that same whispered words in our hearts.
Luke needs two books to tell his story. Two books with parallel plot, of oh so very human beings full of questions and soaked with spirit. Witnesses to the words whispered in their hearts. Jesus’ journey comes to an end in Jerusalem. But, picking up where he left off, another journey begins there, in Jerusalem, and spreads out through Judea and Samaria, out to the ends of the earth. Peter and John, Mary and Magdalene, Paul and Barnabas, Lydia who traded in dye, Julia the deacon, Felicity and Perpetua martyrs, Francis and Clare, Ignatius, Francis de Sales, San Lorenzo, and all the martyrs—the witnesses—of Vietnam, of Japan, of El Salvador, even of Oakland.
“Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of your faithful and we will renew the face of the earth.”
May 27th, 2001
A new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem—maybe even a new Oakland too! And John, the dreamer, means new. The old order—all the things we know, all the things we hate, all the things we love too—has passed away: “Behold,” says the Voice from the throne, “I make all things new!” New! Not just gussied up a bit. Not just re-upholstered. Not “previously owned.” Brand, spanking new!
Isn’t that a dream we want to share? Because the present—for all it’s joys, for all it’s loves—sometimes just feels old, feels like last year’s gift, feels like it’s been worn too long.
If you feel that, if you’re a dreamer too, John has quite a dream for you. Of a new heaven and a new earth. Of a future full of hope. A world drenched with newness, the feeling like clean, crisp sheets to your aching limbs. Like the smell of a new car. Like the eyes of a new-born. Because, says the Voice, God has chosen, at last, a dwelling-place among us. Taken a house in the new and holy city. God is our new neighbour. No longer a stranger.
What would it be like if God really did pitch in with us? John knows! For a start, no more tears. No more dying, no more crying, no more pain, no more mourning, no more false starts, no more loose ends, no more regrets, no more hurting, no more bleeding, no more broken bodies, no more aching hearts. All because God is living with her people and making all things new.
And do you know what is also gone from this new city along with pain and death and tears? It’s a few verses on from our text so we don’t hear it today … but the New Jerusalem has no Temple. No synagogue, no church, no mosque, no ashram. None. Our brave new world doesn’t need a Temple because God is present in person. No more distance and no more religion. You don’t need religion when God is living cheek by jowl with his people. The whole city is a temple. So no more sacred space. And no more secular, either. No more death and no more taxes.
You can’t accuse our John of stinting on imagination. And if there’s anything he’s left out you can add it yourself. Anything you personally would like to see come to an end? Anything you think the world would be better off without? Just add it to the vision of the new world. Let it be the world of our wildest dreams. Let it be all we’ve ever hoped for. Don’t hold back—paint the canvas of the imagination with every new thing you need, the world needs, the poor and hungry need. Hey, forget need and think hope, think desire, think big. Dream dreams.
I let myself get a little carried away with that yesterday. I imagined the world of my wildest dreams and, as I did, I realised, with a shock, I can’t imagine living in it. Well could you? I mean, really? I mean what do you do in such a world from day to day? Do you still get up in the morning and go to work? Do you still sit down to eat? Do you still get to watch “Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
And God living right next door sounds good but what kind of neighbour would God make? Something tells me all that glory shining over the fence could keep a guy up at nights.
And what do you do in the morning when you bump into God, stumbling, bleary-eyed, out the front door to pick up the paper? “Hi God!”?
I disappoint myself! I can’t imagine a new heaven and a new earth and new Jerusalem where I would be at home. God knows what I’ll do in heaven! But, you know, I’m not happy with the alternative either, at least as we heard it in the first reading. “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” This is from Paul and Barnabas, rushing like crazed commuters across the face of the old earth. Hard work, many hardships, endless travels, constant persecution, continual quarrels—is this the alternative vision to John’s or is it the same one. The problem with both is the deep divide between hardship and glory, between absence and presence. Suffer now and be rewarded later. John is full of the reward and Paul full of the hardship but they both make the same bargain.
OK, I’ve built up the dilemma so now for the resolution!? Uh uh! Jesus, in the Gospel today, does show a different way, a different bargain. But I’m not sure I like the price.
Here we are at the last supper. Jesus is having his own vision of glory. He himself glorified. God glorified in him. God glorifying herself. And God glorifying Jesus. It’s like he can’t hold all that glory in ordinary words and they tumble and fall after each other. But it isn’t a future, new-world, no-more-tears kind of glory. “Now,” says Jesus, “now is the hour of glory.” Here and now—as night has fallen and Judas has just left the table to sell him for silver. How can Jesus get so excited exactly when he is being betrayed? Is he nuts? This is the moment when everything begins to go wrong for him and, right there, he sees glory in it.
You see the price of this different bargain? The glory and the hardship are all mixed up in his vision and called love. “Love each other as I have loved you.” And he means now. This morning. And he knows love has a price. And he knows love has its glory. And he knows love takes practice. Earth is the right place for love. This is the way his kingdom comes—one little act of love at a time.
May 14th, 2001
We’ve been back for days now, his friends, his witnesses, his followers. And, me, Peter. Back to the Galilee. Waiting. Twice he walked through strong, Jerusalem walls to half-terrify, half-amaze, half-thrill us. Twice he touched us, twice he breathed real breath on us, spoke over and again his peace into us. And then … nothing. “Third time’s the charm,” we said. But nothing.
All that pain and hurt. Then all that shock and delight and hope and expectation. And now this—this waiting for more. He walked right into our mourning with his wounded hands and his tender touch and then he went and left us waiting. … He IS risen. We know that. He isn’t dead. But still we have lost him—it feels like that. You know that special way a friend speaks, how he holds himself, how he smells, just how he’s here and now and touchable and present and available. To have that ripped from you, then given back, then—you slowly realise—not given back at all. It is all going to be different. And all you want is for it to be the way it was. For him to be the way he was. And he’s not even dead so you can’t mourn. I can’t mourn.
We’ve been trying to bring back the feel of him, the memory of that upper room, we wash each other’s feet and it’s almost like him. We take the bread and bless it, break it the way he did and pass it hand to hand and eat and hope to taste him. And sometimes you do. Or close enough to be brought back to that smoky room, smelling of lamb and fear, where you can hold him for a moment.
But it’s not the same. The room is closed. And this is Galilee. And the waiting is killing me. And I half think we’ve had it. Had the best of him. Seen him dead, then not dead, and God knows where or what he is now. And we, poor fisher folk, are left to make sense of it all. Where’s Judas when you need a theologian!
Well enough of it all. If fish is my business then I’m going fishing. Fish you can trust. Fish don’t go appearing and disappearing when they want. Find the place, cast the net, and let all the old skills bring this battered body back to life.
…
Cold! This late in the night it is cold to the bones and this little charcoal fire might be singeing my beard but my toes are freezing. Dangling them in the dark waters was not a good idea but I never could resist. Now, Peter never would, fisherman for life and all, but a carpenter will brave any chill to get the dust and shavings from between the toes. There hasn’t been much need of that for a while but it did feel so good to sit there fishing in starlight and shadow, trying to remember the tricks Peter taught me, trying to catch something good for him, for them. I want the best I can manage. “Please, God, let me catch more than minnows!” Well, I must have learned something for here they are—three of them, plump and glistening and eager for the fire. The cleaning I can manage. I watched my mom so many times take that sharp blade and slip it in clean and slit and twist and rinse. There! But I’d forgotten how the scales can cut.
God it is cold! Hm… Dawn is climbing over the hills. Not so long now! Just a little while and they’ll be here. And just as cold as me. With the light on them still silver and sharp. And I want the fish perfect. Seared and succulent. Want the scent of it to lead them to me. No better smell than baking bread and fish a-crackle, dripping and flaring onto the coals. Mmm… I can almost taste it already. The fish flaking between half-burnt fingers, soaking into still-warm bread. A little watered-wine to round it off. Their faces will be something! I can almost see the look—that mix of knowing and unknowing—is he-isn’t he?—should they-shouldn’t they. One of them I can guarantee will know and name me. And Peter, Peter will do something wild and glorious as usual, and the rest, as usual, will follow. A useless bunch one-by-one but together, ah together, they’ll change the world. And I love them. Each. All. Oh man I want this breakfast to be so good. Want the taste to linger on their lips for years. Want it to be how they remember me. Not just pent up in that upper room but out here. Out in the place they love. Out where a lifetime’s work has made land and lake a home. Where they can do what they’ve always done. They think they’ve been waiting for me—but truth be told, they’ve been trying to conjure me, to work me out, to do the right thing to get me back. They want to find me—but I’m here to find them. Now they’ve finally given up finding me.
And not in some upper room—I hated that upper room—but right here, under their noses, at home, plying their trade, playing the fool. And they’ll never know where to expect me next. But I’ll find them. I’ll keep on finding them. Finding them and feeding them. Breaking the bread for them. Having one name me, another rush like a fool to reach me, and all the rest to follow and eat and laugh and sing around the fire, the taste of fish on their lips, all hungers satisfied as they share the broken bread and wine dark as—Here they are! O, Thank you! And look at them! What a sorry bunch of weary kids! God! look at them!
“Children! Have you caught anything to eat?
April 29th, 2001
So I slapped her, I slapped her, and I said, “I’m Peter, I’m the Rock, and I’m the one he left in charge, and I’m having none of this nonsense, especially from an hysterical, old whore like you Magdalene!”
I know—I can hear you gasp—I’m not proud of that. Not one bit. But I’m full up to here with things I’m not proud of these last few days—so what’s one more piled up on top, eh? And it was the last thing we needed, she should have known better, not rushing in here, making all kinds of noise, attracting attention and all, gasping and wailing. “Quiet woman! Do you want us all dead like him!?” But she wouldn’t stop and that’s when I slapped her.
And then … between … gasps … she was … spilling it out. Some story. Body-snatchers: his tomb broken open. Another story, another rumour. Like the idiot spreading the tale that the Master didn’t really die—that we switched bodies. Or that we spirited him down off that filthy cross by magic. I wish we could have done. O God yes! … People just don’t want to admit it. Don’t want to accept it. He’s dead. We failed him. And he’s dead. I failed him. … And he’s dead.
If anyone should know that it’s Magdalene. She saw. She watched. … I … I was … somewhere else … I didn’t see. But I believe it. I believe the blood and the screaming and the sound of nails. I believe the silence. Hell, it’s been silent in here since I heard the news. Echoing silence. Empty silence. Just my own betrayal ringing off the walls of my soul, “I do not know him,” accusing me over and over, nothing else. Hollow.
He was the best man I’ve ever known. He made me hope. He made me laugh. He made me think. … He made me preach! He made me—made me into something, something more than the flaky, foul-mouthed fisherman I was. He made me see, more and more, about rich and poor, about life and death, about love, about his passionate, vulnerable, forgiving, living God.
When I look back and see how I got up that day, emptied out my life for him, upped and followed … like a fool. But he was … special. I do not know—I’ve been saying it over and over—I don’t know why he did what he did these last days. But I never knew him. Why he asked for trouble? Why he walked up and begged for it. But more than that, I don’t know how he did it. How he went through with it. How he expected me to, too. How he didn’t back down. Wouldn’t. Back in Bethany I asked him. I said, “Master, this is stupid. This is pride. This is wrong! Don’t throw it away like this. Bide your time. Maybe next year? Marching into the Holy City right now we’d be like lambs to the slaughter. Why risk it?” And he answered me, he did, light at first, “If this is the Holy City, where could we be safer!?” but then, seeing my frown, slow and serious like he could get sometimes. “How can I un-say what I’ve said, Peter? How can I go back on my word? I don’t want to die, Peter, but better one man dies than God be made a liar.”
I wish I could unsay what I’ve said. Unsay my words. Undo my denials. Do it all over different. Stand by him this time, the one who stood by me. Say it, with love, with pride with relief,: “Yes, I do know him.”
…
Oh Mary kept on weeping, frantic. And you—you he always loved more than any of us—you were looking at me as if I were … Oh I don’t know! With eyes like his. Not accusing. Not angry. I wish you were. Sorrow? He looked at me like that. Challenge? His eyes could speak bibles in a glance. And forgive a sea of sins. God I wish he could forgive me now. I couldn’t meet your eyes. But I didn’t need to because before I knew it you were off and running. And there I was, the leader, following. Again. Trying to keep up. You and me. Running through the empty streets—curfew crashing around us—and me at any rate panting like an old man—and praying, “Please God don’t let it be true, don’t let us have to go through any more of this, just let it be over, let it be over.”
Panting and praying. And you were out of way ahead. I didn’t catch sight of you until I caught up and found you here. And found out Magdalene was right, the tomb mouth was open, gaping. Mary was right. And you were just standing there. Standing there. Standing there. God I hate it when you get that knowing look that leaves me feeling stupid. But there was the hole in the rock, ahead of me, staring at me, the tomb dark and echoing. And inviting me. And I couldn’t believe it but I was stooping and looking in. The cool darkness calming me, drawing me. Then I was in. Inside. Crossing the threshold like the high priest entering the Holy of Holies. Into the sacred, empty heart of all things. I am inside. And it is empty. Full of emptiness. And my heart is pounding. And I don’t know what to think. But my empty heart is filling up. “Please God let it not be over.” And tears are pouring down my beard like blessings. “Let me have another chance.” And silence, breaking like bread, is on my tongue. “Let me live again.” And emptiness, echoing like love, is forgiving me. And then you are behind me saying, for once, the obvious. “He isn’t here.” And though you are right, for once, you are wrong. I’d know him and his touch anywhere. “No, he is here. And, yes, I do know him.”
April 15th, 2001
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind—and your neighbour as yourself.”
Love! It is almost a love story itself, this little snippet—the scribe with all his hopes intent on Jesus. Jesus himself with that response burning from his opening heart. And then our scribe’s tumbling, wide-eyed, delighted words agreeing, echoing, piling on top of Jesus own. And we can even, perhaps, hear in Jesus’ final affirmation a certain un-looked for awe at what has come to pass between them. Two hearts, two souls, two minds caught up in a single love.
“Yes to love him with all our heart, with all our thoughts and with all our strength, and to love our neighbours as ourselves is worth more than any Lenten sacrifice!”
That’s all right for these star-crossed lovers but what of us—we whose desire hardly ever approaches the ardent intensity of the love these two find focused between them—and when our love does manage to flash and flame is it ever un-hedged, impartial, unencumbered, and unashamed? What of us? If Lent is a love story what of us?
And I do mean us. That question is not just about “me and Jesus,” not something private between you and your God. This is about theology. Are we not scribes and scribes in training? Is that scribe’s question not our own—“what is at the heart of all these words, words ,words about God?” This is about theology. This is about the very possibility of theology at all. For when those others, standing by, witnessed the words passing back and forth between Jesus and the scribe … “no one had the courage to ask him any more questions.”
If we don’t know how to love—love God, love Jesus, ourselves, our neighbour—how will we ever find the courage to ask God any more questions? Where will we find the courage to do theology?
April 1st, 2001
“The Lord is kind of merciful, the Lord is kind of merciful …” Kinda. Let’s not go overboard here! God is pretty good. Quite compassionate. Kinda kind. But …
There are disadvantages to preparing a homily in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I get migraine headaches from time to time. If you’ve ever had them you know they are nasty little beasts—headache, sickness, confusion—but the worst part for me is the aura—the series of sensory disturbances that mark a migraine’s coming. For some people it’s flashing lights, for others facial numbness, for me it’s as if the things I’m looking at aren’t quite there and not quite gone either.
Seated at my keyboard this morning, writing those words I began with, I saw my words not quite there. Just the on the edge. And I felt that rush of panic to my stomach. Migraine coming! And here is how my inner dialogue went …
“Dung! (well I used another word with four letters—you have to be careful what words you use in homilies) Dung! God why now? Don’t do this to me!”
And amid visions of calling Peter to say “You’ve got a surprise mass this morning” I went straight to the heart of my actual theology even as I was preparing to tell you the one I say is mine. “Why are you messing things up again God?!”
Well, I lay down, closed my eyes, apologised a bit, and waited, and waited … did I dare open my eyes? … is the ceiling all there? … maybe the screen is too? … whew ! false alarm!
So here I am with a different homily …
It might be a migraine at the wrong time, it might be real illness, it might be an electric bill, it might be a love being lost, it might be the smell of sick cattle being burned, it might be children hungry, cities dirty, earth quaking, age a-creeping-up, it might be any damned thing that has us silently shouting “Dung!” That part, at any rate, is good. All that is dung, is waste, is death and dying, and we are right to hate it, to object to it, to shout at it. But we have to have blame too! That’s what’s wrong. And we have to blame someone we don’t trust. And there are two obvious choices: Blame God—the bastard is always letting us down—or blame ourselves. We deserve it! It’s God’s will! Why doesn’t this marriage work? Why can’t I pay the bills? Why can’t I be as beautiful as the boys on TV? Why am I sick? Why must disappointment all I endeavour end? Is it my fault or is it yours Big Guy? You’re the one with all the Power. Don’t you care? What kind of God are you?
There was a guy with a fig tree, hell with a whole vineyard, but he wanted figs. And there’s the poor feller who does the digging. And the parable forces a choice on us—forces is the wrong word—slips a choice past us so we don’t even notice how naturally we make it. Where is God in the parable?
Is God the one demanding fruit, always looking over our shoulder, threatening to rip us our by the roots if we can’t produce? It’s sad how we have God typecast that way. But Jesus does it deliberately, sets us up. “Cut it down! Why should it be wasting soil?” I heartily praise those among you who didn’t even flinch a tiny bit in self-recognition—I did.
OK so you already leapt ahead of me … maybe God isn’t the owner, maybe God is the vinedresser—giving the people—giving us—a second chance, a third chance, a 607th chance, to bloom and blossom and ripen and bear fruit. Even committing himself to a season of shovelling … dung … to get the accursed tree to come to life. Holding off the hasty with all their saws and spades.
That’s not the only choice here … we never know if all that digging and dunging was a waste of time, whether that tree perked up and produced the goods, or whether it sat anxiously unable beyond the patience of men or the industry of God. The parable leaves a hole there for us to fill in. “if it makes fruit in the future … well … otherwise if not you can cut it down.” There’s a hole. You can almost hear the dot dot dot. Will it or won’t it? Of course we’re rooting for the tree. Sunk in … dung … we want it to respond to all the lavish attention and pull through. But what if it doesn’t? When will we run out of patience and pass the sentence of death? The vinedresser’s fighting for a reprieve but even he admits the “otherwise”—if this last ditch attempt fails … well then.
That vinedresser’s not much better than the owner. The owner gives us three chances, the dresser four—big deal! I need more than that! God has to be more than that! Otherwise earthquakes are acts of God. And violence is his judgement. And both God and I are to blame.
Jesus tells this story as he is making his way to Jerusalem for the last time. He has been readying his disciples for what he reckons is inevitable. They will get there, he will speak his piece, he will take his stand for a blameless and un-blaming God. And he will fail. He will be cut down, rooted up, and left to dry in the sun. He will die a fruitless death. It will all be a waste.
Or will it? That’s the hole in the story, the gap to fill in. Will Jesus’ death have been a waste or not? Yes, that’s up to God … but it’s also up to us. Will we change our minds—will we repent—about what life and death mean … or not? Will we follow him to Jerusalem?
March 30th, 2001
Lent never starts at the right time. It always comes as an interruption—an unwanted interruption. When did you last hear someone saying, “I can’t wait for Lent”? Or think to yourself, “I wish Ash Wednesday were here!” No, we are just getting used to ordinary time and a rhythm of life when the whistle blows and we are wrenched from our routine and dragged here to dirty our faces right in the middle of the busy business of our lives.
Lent always begins from outside: we never choose it, but it won’t be avoided. They are blowing that trumpet, they’re proclaiming a fast, gathering the people. They are urging us on to an urgency we don’t feel, to a repentance we hardly want, before a God we scarcely trust. And we don’t even get a day off!
But we come. Here we are! … We come for ashes. Churches fill to the brim for those ashes. We’ve sought larger premises on account of those ashes. And I’m not sure why. In another assembly we might suspect superstition. … Maybe we just like beginnings. Or maybe we brave the embarrassment of walking, black-browed, down the street simply out of habit. … But I like to think our bodies know better than our minds about these matters: that dust is calling to dust.
…
Why does God finally pay attention and take pity on the people in that last line of the Joel reading? … “The LORD was stirred to concern for the land … and took pity on the people.” For the land. I get the impression that God hardly notices all that trumpeting and fasting and assembling, until God notices the land. And I wonder … maybe it’s only our kinship with earth that gets us noticed. Is that why we come here year after year—to be soiled: with ash, with dust, with the dirt of the land? Not as camouflage but as beacon. “See Lord the land and have pity on your people!”
…
Today to celebrate our kinship with dirt. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” We are dust, we are dirt, we are ash, we are earth. We are earthlings, creatures formed from the dust and the spittle of God. We are children of Adam—earth creature—which was our communal description before ever it was a personal name.
We are made of earth; we are made for earth. Earth is what joins us and makes us one. It is what we share. It is soil that unites us to each other, to every other creature of earth, to this very planet, and even to the stars—since every atom of our bodies is dust and ash of long dead suns. Even here on earth, every atom of our bodies has been used before, countless times, in other bodies; other humans, other creatures. We breathe the breath of Shakespeare and Stalin. There is, literally, a little of Jesus in all of us—and something of the slime-mold.
The dust of DNA tells the same story. Of all the genes that makes us who we are, there are only a few hundred that aren’t shared with mice. Only a few tens to set us apart from apes. Down that deep our human differences disappear. Yet you would look at our divisions and think we were from different planets.
Haven’t we always been uppity creatures. Since our clay was first fashioned we’ve been struggling to climb out of the dirt and forget where we come from. We have two faults. We like to dress up … and we like to go it alone.
We like to dress up. We cover our clay with finery. To hide our origins in the soiled earth behind whatever mask we can find. To put on an alien face for the God who made us and project an image for all to see; one endless diversionary tactic lest we be revealed for who we are. I reckon the original sin is not so much Pride as Shame. We were thrown out of Eden and we’ve been in the closet ever since.
Maybe that’s why we like to go it alone? So as not to see, in the mirror of another’s eyes, our own nakedness or the tawdriness of our make up. But we are not alone. For the sake of the soil God took pity on the people. We do two things today when, together, we accept on our foreheads the mark of our making: we accept our humble origin and we accept that we are one people.
…
This is our beginning, this Lent. Our end is some weeks away, with Jesus and that awkward drama of Holy Week. But what we do in between is what matters. The temptation is to dress up to be ready. But whether it’s good deeds, or giving up, or getting clean, we need to be careful our Lenten trajectory matches Jesus’ own—with all its downward mobility. Or when we get to Holy Week we’ll be floating miles above the one we want to stand beside. Whatever comes later, Lent is the season of his failing flesh and his humble return to dust.
Let us fall back on humility this Lent: let us be humus, human. To be human is to be something made, very well made, and made of the same stuff as all other things. Made from dirt and made for a humble beauty God longs for us to accept. We are just soil—soil singing a song of reconciliation for all creatures.
March 29th, 2001
Next Posts
Previous Posts