In the few months that I still have to be with you, I will a number of times do something that has just never been able to generate much support in this or in any of my other parishes–and that is to have celebrations on weekday evenings of the saints [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

In the few months that I still have to be with you, I will a number of times do something that has just never been able to generate much support in this or in any of my other parishes–and that is to have celebrations on weekday evenings of the saints of the church. This autumn we will gather on weekday evenings to honor St. Matthew, St. Luke, St. Michael, St. Simon and St. Jude. Some people wonder why I tilt at this particular windmill, especially given the large number of “really important” issues to address.

The saints have pretty much fallen, not so much out of favor, as just out of consciousness. Lutheran churches used to be named after saints fairly routinely, but nowadays we prefer cutesy names like “New Life” or “Harvest Wind” over St. Paul’s or St. Matthew’s. Even among Roman Catholics, the saints seem endangered, like the passenger pigeon or the Dodo bird. Years ago, Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar lamented the sorry fate of the saints in his church:

Nowadays the saints may possibly have a more hidden existence than heretofore. Contemporary church architecture wants to do away with the pictorial; the saints are forgotten; their feast days are confusingly moved about; their communion and mediation remain unused. There are still canonizations, but they hardly evoke any wide resonance. Thus the saints go underground, at least for a time. They are not interested in being venerated anyway. If their disappearance meant that God would be loved better and more deeply, they would be the first to approve. It remains doubtful, however, whether we see God any more brightly in the absence of their light; I think we do not. We shall have to set the light of the saints on the lamp stand once again if we are not to stumble around in a night of our own making. For it is by the light of the saints, which is nothing other than God’s light in the world, that we see the light.

I agree with von Balthasar that saints are important for a theological, or incarnational, reason. They refract the Light of Christ to us. God always comes to us in earthen vessels. We Lutherans teach that the canonized saints are no more saints than any other baptized Christian. The purpose of canonization is not to set these folks above us, on a pedestal. The purpose is to set them amongst us, as models. They call us to our own saintliness.

I celebrate them with a Eucharist on a weekday, however, not just to honor them, but also to drag the Eucharist off of Sunday. And the intense secularity of our world makes this effort even more important to me. It hallows our weekdays. It reminds us to be Christians every day. I understand that given our insanely busy lives in the D.C. area it may not be feasible to get to all these services, but I think it is important that they happen. It has been said that even in the 17th century when George Herbert would pray Matins each morning in his rural parish few if any members gathered with him, but they heard the church bell ring, took off their hats, and remembered God. Modern secular society now frowns on church bells as noise pollution, but I hope you remember that each night at CTS Vespers is prayed, and sometimes Mass is said in honor of the saints on their given days. When you can be with us, that will be a great joy, but when you can’t, I hope you will find a way to doff your cap and remember God.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien

Kalu Rimpoche wrote: “Reason tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these poles, my life unfolds.” I like the quote, so I tried to rework it from the perspective of Jesus and his understanding of love, and I came up with this: Whenever I think [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

Kalu Rimpoche wrote: “Reason tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these poles, my life unfolds.” I like the quote, so I tried to rework it from the perspective of Jesus and his understanding of love, and I came up with this: Whenever I think I am everything, I become nothing; but when, out of love for others, I make myself nothing, I become everything!

Liberal individualism in America (and elsewhere) went wrong because it thought that individual self-cultivation was its own End, but, in fact, self-cultivation is not an End, but a way of searching for my End. The wondrous irony is that pursuing the meaning of my individual life always ends up propelling me beyond my individual self toward others. The self-enclosed individual merely achieves a supreme loneliness and meaninglessness. Precisely as individual, I am nothing. The purpose of political liberalism is not self-enclosure. The purpose is to give each human person the inalienable right to pursue his/her own meaning without having it imposed upon him/her by any State or Church or other Power.

When Christianity threatened people with the Gospel, the Gospel is what was lost. The threats (“believe our way or go to hell”) exposed a great insecurity, a profound lack of self-confidence. You cannot threaten people into heaven, you can only love them into the Kingdom of God. I have such confidence that God is really essentially revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth that I have ceased to worry about the insufficiency of my neighbors. They don’t go to church enough, or they aren’t Christian; or they are agnostic; or whatever. Gods’ love–Jesus’ teaches me–will find a way. I don’t have to worry about them in that regard. I do have to worry about their well-being in other ways…are they well? Do they have basic human needs met? Are they hungry? In other words, I do have to love them. No, strike that. It is not that I have to love them, it is that I get to love them. And as I love them the Nothing that I am becomes Something. This love fills me up and I become a real person.

Do you see this sublime irony? We need to be free to be individuals because only then will we be free to become more than individuals. I am not afraid of what will happen to me (with my weak, cowardly Christianity), nor am I afraid for them. Love has cast out fear. God’s love for me (and us) underwrites my love. Suddenly I am Everything.

Have a great summer!!

In Christ,

 –Pastor

          The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;           The unreasonable one persists in trying to           adapt the world to himself. Therefore all           progress depends on the unreasonable man.                              –George Bernard Shaw.

The philosopher, Hannah Arendt, in an essay entitled “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” wondered if [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

          The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
          The unreasonable one persists in trying to
          adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
          progress depends on the unreasonable man.
                             –George Bernard Shaw.

The philosopher, Hannah Arendt, in an essay entitled “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” wondered if it were possible to sustain a truly human society without a vital and loving spirituality. She opined that the sensual needs to have the “supersensual” in order to find its meaning. I’m not completely comfortable with the term “supersensual,” but I take her meaning. The way I have been putting it over the years goes something like this: the spiritual is not the opposite of the material. The spiritual is the meaning of the material. What religion, poetry, art, music, philosophy, etc. add to the equation is precisely the possibility that all the mundane pieces that make up our lives can add up to something. This is what God and the worship of God are all about. We are on a quest for the meaning of our lives.

George Bernard Shaw puts this in his usual witty way. We really need life’s dreamers who try to make life more then it is at present. People like Gandhi or Martin Luther King (or even Martin Luther) saw the possibility of a world that looked impossible to most people. Their dreams changed the face of history.

The greatest dreamer of them all was Jesus of Nazareth. He dared to dream of a world where Love had become our God. He hoped, prayed, and worked for a world where every human being would be recognized and valued as God’s own child, indeed, a b’selem elohim, as God’s very own image. Jesus here was picking up on Isaiah’s ancient dream of a “Peaceable Kingdom.”

You and I are Christians. That means that we are people dedicated to carrying on the dream of a world ruled by unconditional, unstoppable love. The “real” world is discouraging to us–it seems that heartlessness, cruelty, violence, and greed reign supreme. Jesus knew this too. He knew that our dreams are subversive and countercultural. He knew that the world would prepare crosses for people who dared to dream of a better way. That, too, is still the case. But, as Shaw noted, as Arendt stated philosophically, everything depends on those of us who refuse to give up hope. It still seems unreasonable to dream of a world of justice, peace, and love, but all progress depends on our crazy, dreamy faith. The old world is just death. We are the partisans of life.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien

Last month in this space I quoted Eastern Orthodox theologian Gennadios Limouris on the Orthodox refusal of a separation between sacred and profane. All reality is God’s reality and what we learn from and how we live in the “profane” world is of religious importance. Everything is, or can be, [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

Last month in this space I quoted Eastern Orthodox theologian Gennadios Limouris on the Orthodox refusal of a separation between sacred and profane. All reality is God’s reality and what we learn from and how we live in the “profane” world is of religious importance. Everything is, or can be, epiphany. This month, Limouris wants to take that general truth and apply it to our individual lives. Every human being has been created imago dei, in the image of God:

          …The icon helps us to decipher every human face as an icon. For
          every human face is an icon. Beneath all the masks, all the ashes,
          every human being, however ravaged he or she may be by his or her
          destiny, by the destiny of history and of civilization, carries with him
          or her the pearl of great price, the hidden face. During the liturgies in
          an Orthodox church, when the priest censes the people, he censes
          every individual Christian, and in every individual Christian he censes
          the possibility, the opportunity of the icon, in some sense or other,
          the chance of ultimate beauty, of true beauty.

I hope when you read those words, you recalled that when we use incense at CTS, we don’t only cense holy altars and books. We cense the congregation, carrying forth this fundamental Christian insight into the holiness of our lives and of every individual living person. I would only add: not only is every Christian an icon, every human being regardless of religion is an image of God and therefore deserving of iconic status. NO EXCEPTIONS. So we, as Christians holding this belief, are dedicated to the struggle for human rights for all: religion, gender, sexual orientation, racial categories, class categories, nation identity, and whatever else you can think of to discriminate–we Christians are called to say: NO EXCEPTIONS.

The other important consequence of this faith in the image of God in us is our belief in redemption. Some of the people the priest censes are indeed living ravaged lives, so we cense their potential, the possibility of rising to their God-given iconic status. That act of incensation should be a first installment of our commitment as Christians to working for TIKKUN OLAM, the mending of the world. My big concern about our post-modern culture is that it is in danger of becoming a culture of despair that has given up on redemption as a real possibility. I think we celebrate Easter to remind ourselves that not even death can stop us now. God built God’s image into us. We have suppressed it, forgotten it, misplaced it; but it is always there waiting for us to be censed and to rise up to the fullness of who we are. Homeless people on grates are imago dei and we must not give up on them. Or, what may be even harder to believe, presidents of corporations, politicians, pedophile priests and the bishops who enable them, are all still imago dei and we must pray for them as well. It’s that pesky NO EXCEPTIONS thing again. Christ died and rose again for us all, sinners though we be. “Sinner” is too non-specific though: selfish people though we be, people who defraud pensioners, people who play cynical games in political office, people who abuse power, people who let sick, distorted desire rule their hearts, people who do real, quantifiable evil–they are imago dei. We cense them and do whatever we can to call out the iconic being hidden deep under all those layers of garbage and death.

I would love to cense Tiger Woods or Bernie Madoff or Osama bin Laden. (Insert here the name of a person who arouses your feelings of moral outrage.) I would love to cense them to remind them that Easter is for them, and to remind myself that Easter is for them. NO EXCEPTIONS!

Have a blessed Eastertide,

–Pastor Bastien

This month and next I am going to be commenting on the thoughts of a Greek Orthodox theologian in an attempt to delve deeply with you into the meaning of Easter. I want us to ask what the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ means for our lives in the [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

This month and next I am going to be commenting on the thoughts of a Greek Orthodox theologian in an attempt to delve deeply with you into the meaning of Easter. I want us to ask what the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ means for our lives in the world today. If we believe the spiritual message of Easter, this should have an effect on how we see ourselves today, how we understand our lives in the Spring of 2010. So read these words from theologian Gennadias Limouris:

     Since God is the creator of all creation (cosmos), there is no sharp distinction
     between the sacred and the profane, between the physical and the metaphysical.
     Whatever was edifying was adopted. John of Damascus wrote, ‘Let us search
     the wisdom of the profane. Perhaps we can find something useful from there,
     and we may profit by finding therein something edifying for our souls.’ The
     Fathers felt no need to divide history and art into secular and holy. According
     to the historical Socrates [this is a different Socrates from the Greek philosopher],
     ‘The good, wherever it is, belongs to one Truth’ and this is confirmed by Basil
     of Caesarea. The Fathers viewed history as a continuous linear process with
     no disruption in the divine economy. They did not raise the question, ‘What has
     Jerusalem to do with Athens?’ The God of history before Anno Domini is the same
     as He of the Christian era. They emphasized the continuity of Christian culture
     with the Greek past and the new culture. The epiphany of the Logos was simply
     the apex of a long process in the plans and historical involvement of God who is
     never absent from the world.

Limouris traces the importance of a creator-God for our understanding of the value of creation, earth, and history. Easter underscores this radical new idea of a God who is not apart from our bodily and historical lives, but the source and goal of them. If the First Article (the Creator-God) shows us our source, the Resurrection instructs us about our goal. God has made and destined us for resurrection. What is resurrected is not some spiritual aspect (the soul) in some never-never land of an afterlife. What is resurrected—brought back to real life—is our bodies. God made us for embodied life and Easter calls us to the perfection and completion of those lives. Easter forbids us to give up on history. Easter forbids us to see our bodily existence, even our finitude, as shameful or humiliating. We are created for these lives we have now. Easter asks us to cherish these lives and to bring them back to God in lives of love, hope, and faith.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien

(We will continue with more insights into the meaning of Easter with Gemmadias Limouris next month.)

It is March, our Lenten journey is continuing, we’re all getting tired of winter and await springtime and Easter with some ardency. I hope we are also yearning for an interior springtime, new spiritual lives.

St. Augustine wrote: “The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

It is March, our Lenten journey is continuing, we’re all getting tired of winter and await springtime and Easter with some ardency. I hope we are also yearning for an interior springtime, new spiritual lives.

St. Augustine wrote: “The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.”

Well, that is pretty typical Augustine, who could be a little dour in his thinking, but I think it may help us to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish in our long Lenten journeys. I suspect that Augustine’s use of the word “form” may involve Platonic associations that no longer convince us, but if we read it metaphorically, we may still find useful insights here.

Plato thought that everything was based on an ideal form or essence that was its truest self. But the world has drifted from this purely spiritual essence or form and become deformed by matter. St. Augustine’s Christian version of this is that humans have been specifically deformed by what Augustine calls sin. We were made in the image of the God of Love, but we no longer “image” or reflect this pure love; we have become “turned in upon the self” (this is Luther’s version of Augustine) and thus have forgotten who we really are, what our true “form” is. The world suffers from a vast spiritual amnesia that leads ineluctably to moral deformity.

But then something amazing happens. This God of love in whose image we were created comes down from his pure essentiality and recreates God’s self in our image: he takes on our deformity. It is an act of purest love. This love is made perfect, i.e. God completely identifies with our deformity, on the cross. And the miracle is that this utter solidarity with us in our brokenness heals that brokenness. By becoming de-formed for us, God in Christ re-forms us. He recreates us again as God’s children and image. So, says Augustine, “let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.”

St. Francis famously said that it is better to love than to be loved, but Augustine digs deeper. He sees that no one can love unless that person has been loved deeply and profoundly. And we all have been so loved. The deformed man on the cross is God’s love for us. Let us hold it fast.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien

February, as most years, brings us to another Lent. This is not most people’s favorite season, not their idea of a good time. And there is a good reason for Lent’s unpopularity. It is way too relevant. Christmas and Easter are about our hope for a new human future; Lent [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

February, as most years, brings us to another Lent. This is not most people’s favorite season, not their idea of a good time. And there is a good reason for Lent’s unpopularity. It is way too relevant. Christmas and Easter are about our hope for a new human future; Lent is about the distressing reality of our present; the reality of our sinfulness, our brokenness.

It would be great if the problem were something really deep and the solution were very hard. Then we could console ourselves for our seeming inability to change. But Jesus is clear that the remedy for sinfulness is quite simple: love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Ordinary compassion and fairness are all we need. Yet we seem unable to get there from here.

James Baldwin once wrote, “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own; in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.” This is the truth of the Golden Rule in a bizarre underworld. How we treat others is how we will be treated and how we will live. Jesus would have us create a world of compassion, fairness, and equality–then that is who we will be. But we can choose to create a predatory world of cruelty and social Darwinism, and then that is who we will be.

In Lent, those of us who hate what we have become gather, with ashes and tears, to ask the God of Jesus to help us to change. We yearn to really repent so we can really change, even if an inch at a time, and become the people we want to be. Jesus’ cross is an invitation to a love so great, so deep, that it will risk life itself in order to gain life itself. The streets of Harlem, or SE, will tell us how we’re doing.

So Lent is not an easy time. It shows us truths we would rather avoid. But Lent is a way, not an end. It intends to help us arrive at Easter. A new Life. So I wish for you a truly powerful and earnest Lent.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien

I would like us to begin our New Year by contemplating this line from an Eastern Orthodox hymn: “The uncircumscribable Logos of the Father was circumscribed [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

I would like us to begin our New Year by contemplating this line from an Eastern Orthodox hymn: “The uncircumscribable Logos of the Father was circumscribed by becoming incarnate and by transforming the darkened image to the original, united it with the divine beauty.” I like this poetry because it provides an alternative to the legal model by which we in the Western church have tried to understand the Incarnation. The Eastern church has always preferred an organic and aesthetic metaphor to our legal one, probably because a legal metaphor leads pretty inexorably to legalism. Both the monarchical absolutism of the Papal churches and the absurd literalism of the fundamentalist churches seem to me to derive ultimately from our Western (thank Saints Augustine and Anselm) reliance on this legal metaphor.

As we head into a new year I would urge us to rethink how we think about God. What if God did not become human in order to create a legal loophole that would allow our salvation? What if God became human to unite us again with “the divine beauty.” Or, as Orthodox mystics like to say, “God became human so that humans could become divine.” Now this is a crazy notion if what we mean by “divine” is Zeus or Marduk. We are not stupid enough to think that humans can become omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. (At least I hope we’re not!) But if the “beauty of the divine” is the Love incarnate in Jesus, then it all starts to make some sense. What makes God radiant is love, What has darkened human life is the loss of love. God entered Jesus in order to enter our history and to reacquaint us with the people God designed us to be. Our loss of this love has had tragic consequences too awful to contemplate, but here they are—right on our doorstep in 2010.

It is to the effort to turn those evil consequences back and to become healthy humans again that I pray that we will dedicate our lives as disciples of Christ in the year ahead. A basic piece of that effort, that struggle, will be to rethink God. We need a faith that can teach us again how to be human. I look forward to working on that new theology with you here at CTS.

Happy New Year!

-Pastor Bastein

As we celebrate Advent this year as a way of getting ready to celebrate Christmas, I would like to call to your attention these words of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers:

The untruth of the present state of affairs…cannot be remedied by great political actions. No improvement is possible unless [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

As we celebrate Advent this year as a way of getting ready to celebrate Christmas, I would like to call to your attention these words of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers:

The untruth of the present state of affairs…cannot be remedied by great political actions. No improvement is possible unless the individual is educated by educating himself, unless his hidden being is awakened to reality through an insight which is at the same time an inner action, a knowledge which is at the same time virtue. He who becomes a true man becomes a citizen.

This quotation helps me to understand what was happening to us in the incarnation. What was being born among us in that stable was “a true man,” one not seduced by “the untruth of the present state of affairs,” and, therefore, one able to “awaken” us to Reality, the insight that is also virtue.

The Christian doctrine of the Fall of humankind and the consequent (not just subsequent) expulsion from Eden is a very colorful way of stating that we are now living in a state of existential Untruth. That this is a fall from God means that it is fundamental–we have lost a hold of what life is really for and bought into a Big Lie. Genesis suggests that the Big Lie is that we can be like God. Jesus suggests that the irony is really complex–we are, in fact, refusing to be like God (who is agape–self-giving love) in the very act of trying to be like God. God is not a selfish imperial despot–that is our idolatrous misidentification, one that has turned history into one tragedy after another.

Jesus is born, and Jesus is born where and how he is born, to teach us what God is really like and to invite us to actually be like God–then knowing good and evil will no longer be such a disaster. This is why it is important not to subvert the celebration of Christmas into just more selfish Untruth. I love the Christmas revels, the feast of Light in darkest winter. I am not urging you to celebrate a spare, ascetical Christmas. But I am urging you to remember that the heart of our joy has to be our recommitment to Light and Love; if not, we succumb to Untruth and are not true humans yet.

So, I wish for you a glad Advent and a most joyous Christmas and a blessed New Year. The joy will be full and true if it is centered on the knowledge that God is present for us in this babe. The result of that knowledge will be a truer humanity that will qualify us to be upstanding citizens because we will be awakened to an insight that ends up as virtue. True faith always becomes love.

Have a Merry Christmas,

–Pastor Bastien

In this pastoral letter, I am going to take apart a comment made years ago by Pastor Connie Parvey, an early feminist theologian in the Lutheran tradition. (But this statement is not about feminism per se.)

–”Christianity is universal.” This is why we Lutherans insist on being called catholic. Most people [...]]]> Dear Friends in Christ,

In this pastoral letter, I am going to take apart a comment made years ago by Pastor Connie Parvey, an early feminist theologian in the Lutheran tradition. (But this statement is not about feminism per se.)

–”Christianity is universal.” This is why we Lutherans insist on being called catholic. Most people think “catholic” is the name of a large, indeed the largest, Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, but the word “catholic” is actually a reminder that Christ’s Church is bigger than any denomination. Our concerns tend to be parochial; God’s love is universal.

–”It was not a call to join a new religion in a culture where religions were as multiple as the popular magazines of our time. Rather it was a call to join the company of the God of creation, the maker of heaven and earth, the sovereign Lord of both nature and history, in the work of transforming the very society in which men lived.” I am a loyal Lutheran, but I do not think Lutheranism is the true church. I think thinking that is a temptation to be avoided. We can be true to the Church only so long as we refuse to see ourselves as the true church. The work of transforming society begins here. We give up all our chauvinism (nationalism, sexism, religious absolutism, racism–the list goes on–), and instead find ways to be universal. Another word for catholic, besides “universal,” would therefore be: INCLUSIVE.

–”It did not guarantee fertility or success.” I continually talk to Christians, indeed, I continue to be a Christian, frustrated by the Way of the Cross. Martin Luther understood that Christianity is a minority report. We call for a world of justice where people live by the love ethic, but then we get impatient when that world does not arrive. We have to understand that things would be significantly worse if the voices of people of compassion were not there.

–”Its sole affirmation was the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and of God’s call to all…to share in his death and resurrection, and so to live in the Spirit.” Christ’s death and resurrection, and God’s call, are not historical isolates. They are spiritual possibilities. God is offering us a new life, lived by the values of the Kingdom. We access this by faith. Faith then becomes life. We lean into God’s Kingdom.

When we celebrate Thanksgiving later this month, we will be tempted to be thankful primarily for “harvest home,” for our material blessings. But I think what we most need to be thankful for is this call to a universal spirituality, a call from the God of Love, who invites us to share in Christ’s new life and to live by the Spirit of God’s inclusive justice.

Yours in Christ,

–Pastor Bastien