Grace Cathedral
1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Today’s reading from John’s gospel concludes the bread of life discourse. After feeding five thousand with a few loaves, Jesus identifies himself with the bread that fed the Jewish people in the wilderness and proclaims that he has come from heaven to consummate abiding relationships with believers. It’s looking like a teaching moment. Jesus delivers his closing remarks in the synagogue at Capernaum. It’s a disaster. The audience doesn’t accept his teaching. The crowd abandons him. The remaining stalwarts admit they have no choice left but to take his word on faith.
Who has the courage to speak to a hostile audience? The safe path would have been to serve the meal and skip the lecture. But we, too, may be called upon someday to state what we believe and never mind the doubters.
John paints a dizzying picture of Jesus and God and bread and ourselves. The picture oscillates between resemblance, equivalence and identity. If this picture is a diagram, do the lines come first or the dots? (The believer lies awake brooding over what they believe while the doubter sleeps soundly in their disbelief.) It seems that all the readings today want to close the gap between awareness of God and recruitment into God’s life and purpose, to disclose us entangled in the moment of recognition.
The 17th-century mystic Thomas Traherne said, “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.” Ocean or blood, grain or bread, particle or wave, God and mankind in the moment, let us be entangled, Lord.
This reflection was written by Jim Simpson. He is a member of the Grace Cathedral Congregation Council and a graduate of the cathedral’s Education for Ministry program.
I turned off the news feed on my smartphone a couple weeks ago. The device came out of the box with a feature that pushes snippets of “breaking news” onto the screen. You might have this feature on your phone too. The news feed uses the same sales technique as the dope dealer. The first hit is free. It’s an incredible rush. After that you pay to avoid withdrawal. What do you pay to scan the headlines day and night? It might not only be your time and attention. It might also be your imagination.
The poet Wallace Stevens delivered a lecture at Princeton University a few months before the United States entered the Second World War about the extraordinary pressure of the news. The world was “in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive.” Not only are there more of us now but we are closer together in every way. “We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us.”
Stevens thought that the desperate intimacy of his time was a threat to poetic imagination. Metaphor requires a departure point to bring back unfamiliar, unexpected connections. There is not much room for rhyme and meter when the drums are beating outside the window. I submit that the news feed confounds the moral imagination as well. Factoids drown out facts and values fall into positions. Haven’t you found yourself being less empathetic and compassionate when you’re distracted or fearful? Whether we react with speechless indignation or wild enthusiasm, the news is all the same if we are too overwhelmed to respond to it.
This brings me to the news that a public official claims that a certain biblical passage confers preferential legitimacy on the administration’s callous separation of refugee and immigrant parents from their children at our southern border. It is law, he is quoted as saying, and the scriptures demand obedience to law. By this reasoning, every act of state comes with a holy imprint.
They say the news cycle has moved on from this story. Many people of faith in the Grace Cathedral community and other churches are still trying to understand it. The passage in question comes from a letter published in the New Testament advising readers not to become too worldly, or pick fights with the authorities, or turn away from their neighbors. This is not a dropdown menu of lifestyle options for you to pick and choose. The theology behind it requires all these things at once and more. Read it yourself. It’s probably on your smartphone.
How could an officer of the law think it would be acceptable to people of faith to single out the reference to civil obedience when scripture admonishes us time and again to show hospitality and charity to strangers and refugees in need? Why would they weaponize the Bible for political purposes? Not only does this overrule moral imagination in the public square, it clouds the vision of the leaders themselves. If the authorities are beyond question, they don’t even have make sense. The law is simply more bad news.
There will be borders as long as there are nations. Surely we can find a way to patrol them with decency and kindness. Executive power and morality are not mutually exclusive. Could it be that our leaders, no less than ordinary people like me, need to switch off the news from time to time, tone down the tweets, and engage their imagination?
Abraham Joshua Heschel said: “All beings obey the law. Man is able to sing the law.” At Grace Cathedral and other churches throughout the country, we are trying to imagine how we can sing truth and justice into law. Come and see sometime.
Jim Simpson is a member of the congregation. His blog is inspired in part by the Civil Discourse seminar that the cathedral held in July. You can find the Wallace Stevens essay in a compilation entitled “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.” Romans 12-13 can be found at biblegateway.com.
1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16; Psalm 133; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41
In today’s readings, a jealous King Saul attempts to murder his successor, David, in a gruesome way. Jesus appears to be oblivious to a storm on the Sea of Galilee that threatens his followers. The apostle Paul endures hardship and persecution. You may be excused for thinking this is not an encouraging picture of the religious life. But do listen closely when these stories are read during today’s service. Courage in life and constancy in faith are what they are intended to inspire.
Our readings were first set down for people who were not sure whom they could trust. Even as they longed for righteous leaders, the prophet Samuel’s audience was losing faith in worldly kings. The early Corinthian church was in turmoil; there were doubts that an itinerant preacher like Paul could bring them peace and harmony. Mark’s readers saw storm clouds on the horizon that would soon bring persecution. Many were not sure they could trust themselves to keep the faith.
In these times people ask why God allows things to get so messed up. We answer this question not with a definitive explanation but with a response. The Bible contains multitudes. Today Mark reassures us that Jesus is merely asleep; the wind wracked sea is still at his command. Paul gains strength and resolve from his trials. Samuel offers a timely rejoinder that not all those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Commanding obedience is not the same as deserving it.
Life may be tragic but it not futile. As the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno said: “May God deny you peace but give you glory.”
This reflection was written by Jim Simpson. He is a member of the Grace Cathedral Congregation Council and a graduate of the cathedral’s Education for Ministry program.
Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:24-30, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8
We hear today about an Ethiopian court official reading Isaiah out loud while riding his chariot home from Jerusalem. Jesus has departed. We can tell from the passage the court official is reading that he is trying to understand what just happened. But the book he should be reading has not been written yet.
Willie Johnson was an itinerant gospel blues singer from Texas in the 1920s. He had a gravelly voice and played the slide guitar. One of his best-known recordings goes, “I have a Bible in my home, I have a Bible in my home. If I don’t read my soul get lost, and it ain’t nobody’s fault but mine.” Willie Johnson could not read his Bible though. He was blind and often homeless.
Some can read and have no book, others have a book and cannot see, and we are all trying to catch up to Christ. Writing about a blackberry bramble somewhere in Marin County, the poet Robert Haas laments, “The word is elegy to what it signifies.” Yet Jesus says in John’s gospel that he lives in our words as fruit glorifies the vine, and the coda in Haas’ poem is an image or invocation of subject and object in ecstatic union: “Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” To the Ethiopian court official and to Blind Willie and to every person who is afraid of being lost and left behind, let us whisper, “True, true, true love, love, love.” What is to prevent Him from being here now?
This reflection was written by Jim Simpson. He is a member of the Grace Cathedral Congregation Council and a graduate of the cathedral’s Education for Ministry program.
Wisdom 3:1-9; 1 Corinthians 15:50-58; John 5:24-27
At a recent memorial for North Bay fire victims, Rep. Nancy Pelosi told the audience: “Hope is where it has always been, sitting right between faith and love. Love in the air is thicker than smoke.”
Today’s readings are about hope, specifically the Christian hope that death begins an endlessly new life, at once peaceful and grand. The Wisdom reading asks us to imagine death not as punishment but as a procession into God’s grace and mercy, where we are transformed into celestial bodies that “shine forth and run like sparks through the stubble.”
“Listen, I will tell you a mystery!” Paul exclaims in 1 Corinthians. “We will not all die, but we will be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of the eye.” This to a mixed audience, poor and rich, women and men, insiders and outsiders, ex-pagans and mystery cultists. A life lived in this knowledge, says Paul, is “steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord.”
In John’s gospel Jesus says that all who hear and believe have eternal life. We will be judged with favor if we order our lives in the knowledge that everyone, not the least ourselves, is noticed and accounted for. This is God’s love, the promise of faith, hope in the air.
This reflection was written by Jim Simpson. He is a member of the Grace Cathedral Congregation Council and a graduate of the cathedral’s Education for Ministry program.
When Luna was eclipsing Sol a few weeks back, I was sitting in a plastic chair on the deck of my cousin’s house in Nebraska drinking beer and looking out over a field of prairie grass. I was totally psyched for a religious experience or at least a spiritual buzz. It didn’t happen. Some of this had to do with Pink Floyd’s gloomy “Dark Side of the Moon” playing in the background. Why that record has enduring appeal is more baffling to me than any old eclipse.
Grace Cathedral also played a part in this. You know those moments when the cathedral is gradually obscured by fog? The soaring space grows dim and the stained glass windows fade to embers. Then the fog passes by, the sun breaks through, and the windows are ignited with beauty and light. It’s an awesome sight. A total eclipse is an awesome play of darkness and light too, but we don’t worship our windows and I can’t imagine what it would be like to pray to the sun.
An eclipse does bring to mind images of cosmic forces in opposition: dark and light, good and evil, triumph and defeat. Still, it seems to me that the sun and moon are merely splendidly coexistent. An eclipse is a beautiful coincidence, not a sign. Doesn’t one of the Psalms say that the heavens forever declare the firmament and the sky above proclaims his handwork? We just have to remember to look up.
Meanwhile back on the deck in Nebraska, the shadow over the prairie accelerated in the final seconds before totality. A wind blew across the grass and the meadowlarks flew in a mad spiral. Someone remembered to turn off the music and we lifted our eyes in silence. After a minute or so, the whole thing happened in reverse. The miniature night gave way to a shallow dawn. The meadowlarks went back to their usual business. Now we have to remember to look up.
As the summer winds down with Labor Day, we look back to one of this summer’s cultural highlights at the cathedral. Look in the upcoming issue of Grace Notes for amazing events coming this fall.
Last month I attended an evening performance in Grace Cathedral of John Luther Adams’s electronic soundscape, “Veils and Vespers.” This is not an ordinary musical composition. There are no performers or musical score and very little of the theme and variation, tension and release that we are accustomed to in Western music. What you are listening to is pink noise (electronically-generated sound waves that emphasize low frequency tones) passing through filtering devices that divide the sound into a six-hour cycle of different tones and tempos, amplified by loudspeakers (emphasis on loud) placed throughout the cathedral and the Chapel of Grace. What you hear is a shimmering, pulsing, calming, and remarkably beautiful landscape of sound, harmonic interplay seemingly appearing from within the mind in the same way that thoughts and emotions rise and fall in meditation practice.
The vast space undoubtedly contributed its own sonority but I sensed only the enveloping presence that the Cathedral always has, even in silence. This is the kind of performance where the audience (remarkably large considering the unconventional nature of the piece) was welcome to come and go, walk around, practice yoga, fall asleep in the pews, whatever. It is also the kind of performance that causes the listener to reflect on the nature of music, sound and time.
I sat on the floor of the nave (it was vibrating) and on the spur of the moment took a Book of Common Prayer from the pew rack and read the order for evening service. The interior rhythm of those timeless words and the curtain of sound sweeping through the Cathedral seemed for a moment to have a kind of non-linear affinity, maybe even to converge. As the piece came to an end, I was thinking about John Donne’s description of the house of heaven where is no noise or silence but one equal music.
How do you imagine God’s grace is expressed? The priestly author of this Sunday’s reading from Exodus describes one method among several. Recognizing the Israelites’ potential for righteousness despite their mixed track record, God offers a way of life, a covenant to summon the latent goodness in their human character.
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans refers to “this grace in which we stand.” Although Paul would concur with the Old Testament writer that grace is not a bonus for past performance, the gift of which Paul writes is not one that is dispensed according to human potential. Paul’s insight, so poignantly linked to his own story, is that the full force of grace is aimed at the least righteous among us. This is an image of grace as an enveloping transformation.
The third reading for this Sunday is Matthew’s account of Jesus granting a special commission to the apostles. Jesus authorizes his followers, including Judas Iscariot, the one destined for an abject end, to cure disease (no copayments or deductibles in this plan) and to dispel demons. Matthew’s story does not deny the capacity of grace to be a catalyst and an instrument of conversion, but the grace of which Matthew writes is the privilege of being an instrument, even if it is only for a moment, of divine mercy.
Inducement, empowerment, enlistment: three images of grace, amplifying one another. What do you imagine God hopes for, enables and has sent you into the world to do?
This reflection was written by Jim Simpson. He is a member of the Grace Cathedral Congregation Council and a graduate of the Cathedral’s Education for Ministry program.