It has not been a quiet week

It has not been a quiet week.

Is it ever? Sometimes it feels thus. 

Jesus visits his hometown synagogue, reads from a familiar text ('Such a nice voice he has! Isn't this Joseph's son?'), and then tells everyone gathered that the spirit of freedom, truth-telling, liberation, healing, and God's favor rests on him, and on them, too, when they take this Word into themselves.

The 'spirit of the Lord rests upon me, and has given me power and strength to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, and the truth that God's time is Now.'

When is the time to do this, to seek the spirit of the Lord that it might rest on us and give us power to speak? Now!

Bishop Budde - the diocesan bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, DC - certainly was anointed by the Spirit to speak a word of truth.  In fact, it's part of her ordination and consecration as a bishop -- we ask her to step into this role, to ask for the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read to us 'recovery of sight to the blind, and good news to the poor.'  The prophet Micah sums up much of the call of a bishop - indeed, our call together, as the Body of Christ: to do justice, love and proclaim mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

The good bishop did these things.  She called - gently begged, actually - for mercy to be shown to the vulnerable, and spoke gospel truth in a gracious way. And she was subsequently excoriated for doing so. If you read further in Luke's gospel - beyond the passage we read this week - you see that Jesus is quickly rejected and subjected to threats of violence from those who have just been listening to him -- 'a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown. Very well, then: I will go elsewhere.'

I think what struck me so forcefully about Bishop Budde's sermon is that it was just that: a sermon.  Not a speech.  Not political 'gotcha'. If you've heard much preaching in the Episcopal church (or, the Lutheran church or the Presbyterian church, or...), you'd be familiar with both the content and tone of what she said.  Rather than call down fire, or castigate the arrogant sitting right in front of her, or engage in presumptuous moralism, she simply addressed the most powerful person in the world as if he had the capacity for good, still, right within himself.  She spoke *as if* even when so much would point otherwise, and it has become easy to assume that the current president has indeed vacated his own soul. Speaking *as if* has a strange power.  It is the power of the resurrection.

It was a theological proposition she advanced by speaking directly to the newly inaugurated president as if he might still wish to respond to God's call for mercy for the vulnerable -- the poor, the frightened, the immigrant, the earth itself. *As if* he might still yearn to be governed by the better angel of his own nature.  As if he, too, were still and all a child of God and not beyond redemption.

And, of course, he is not beyond redemption.  Nothing is.  All things are possible with God.  And the 'law of the Lord' is mercy, is righteousness, is the reconciling movement that makes all things new in this world, always.

To proclaim this, and to act *as if* this is so is also then to show up the very real, terrible gap - a gulf, really - between word and action, or between current states and possible states.  To make very clear how much in need of grace and of the Spirit's renewing power we all are.  And, especially, it would seem, the current president. The gap between bishop and president was not just the forty feet between them, or supposed politics. She spoke to him as if he were someone who himself might need, recognize, or enact mercy. Regardless of what she might think of the state of his soul currently! And, speaking thus revealed a gap between them which would not have been revealed as fully if she had been speaking his own language of power, castigation, resentment, anger -- righteous as her own anger might be, and regardless of my own desire, dear reader, to have the president have to hear my own anger.

She spoke of mercy, she spoke of grace because she spoke with grace and mercy. To do so thus was to embody the power of the resurrection, which is its own verbal currency, sui generis. And in this light, we see light.

So, when we pray for the needs of the Body of Christ -- the whole enormous cosmic body that includes the cosmos and the earth, itself, and includes our own bodies and relationships, and certainly includes our politics -- when we pray for the grace to be, to act, to love, to heal, to reconcile... when we pray thus for 'all those in authority in this land' we do so *as if* the Spirit of the Lord rests on us to ask for this, and *as if* the Spirit of the Lord calls us all continually to leave that which divides and mains and distorts and embrace again and again that which gives and reveals life, fulness, and reconciliation. We pray as if those in authority can be brought to greater mercy and righteousness.

Prayer is not 'wishing well for someone or something.' 

Prayer is 'holding that for which one prays in the light and the truth that is God, that is what the Spirit of the Lord reveals, constantly.'

Praying for the president is praying that his heart will be converted, and in doing so the gap between current states and possible states of being is revealed.

Praying for this, or for anything, also reveals - in the light of the Spirit's guidance - what we may do, and speak, and need to reconcile, ourselves.

Praying helps us understand, live in, and be transformed in the gap.  It is a living in the *as if* God were already making even that cold, tight, mean heart blossom into righteousness.

This is always our call, in prayer and in the just action that is prayer-with-feet-and-voice.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, in the power of the risen Body of Christ (that's us, *as if*), and it is always our call, gift, and sign to ask for mercy for those who need it -- whether for ourselves, standing in the need of prayer, or for others. It is always our call to proclaim good news to the poor, the restoration of sight to the blind, and to see together the jubilee, the year of the Lord's favor.

See you tomorrow.

Peace,

Mark