BLOGGING-THOMAS

Violence comes in many forms. Bombs. Guns. Fists.

As well as words, gestures, posturing.

Bullying-behavior rarely resorts to the former; but bullies are masters-of-manipulation with the latter.

We live in the middle of what Ryan Halligan, a staff writer for the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, has described as “An Epidemic of Bullying,” verging on a societal pandemic.  At least, in the case of the bullying of children and young adults, light is finally beginning to be shed on this dark behavior, and responses are being formulated.  For example, St. Thomas’ Parish participated in the It Gets Better project, a national response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because of their sexual orientation and identity:

Bullying in the workplace, however, has been described as “The Silent Epidemic” — it happens regularly, but it isn’t being discussed very openly yet.  Writing for Psychology Today, Ray Williams defines such bullying as “the conscious repeated effort to wound and seriously harm another person not with [physical] violence, but with words and actions. Bullying damages the physical, emotional and mental healthy of the person who is targeted.”  And we have gotten so accustomed to such behavior in our entertainment, our politics, and our work-environments that we are numb to the effects of psychological violence, much less to potential remedies for it.

That’s one of the reasons that St. Thomas’ Parish is in conversation with Bishop V. Gene Robinson about the formation of a Center for Nonviolent Communication in our new building when he retires as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2013. Meanwhile, we are already beginning to work on our own nonviolent communication skills, as well as the community dynamics that can encourage and discourage them, in our upcoming parish retreat with Canon Charles LaFond, who oversees congregational development in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

This is important work for us to do, because besides being potential agents of change in a culture of violence-filled rhetoric and behavior, churches also can themselves be hotbeds for bullying.  In an organization that is built on a metaphor of sheep being cared for and protected from harm by a shepherd, churchgoers get caught off-guard when the sheep attack one another .. or sometimes, even more viciously, the shepherd.  Episcopal priest Dennis Maynard has chronicled the latter behavior in his book, When Sheep Attack, which provides chilling examples of how a lone-wolf bully, or a small pack of parishioners bent on destruction, can threaten to bring a parish to its knees through their bullying behavior.

One of the worst characteristics of church communities, however, is not just that such behavior exists — undercutting even the best efforts of a community to foster an environment of hospitality, welcome, and inclusion — but that often virtually the entire congregation is  aware of what is going on and chooses to stand by and do nothing.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, one of the most respected voices in describing the systemic dysfunctions of families and communities like the church, challenges this bystander-behavior in the face of bullying in his little book, Friedman’s Fables, in the story he entitled “The Friendly Forest.”   There he describes the efforts of the inhabitants of a forest to encourage a lamb to disregard the continually threatening and aggressive behaviors of a tiger who has taken up residence in the same forest where the lamb lives. Some want to brush off the behavior as “just the way tigers are,”  while others even go to far as to suggest that the lamb is bringing in on herself by being so unnaturally peaceful. Then the conciliators of the forest suggest that all that is needed is “better communication” between the lion and the lamb; they should should just talk through their differences.

The fable ends rather abruptly when, following the continuing advice to the harried lamb, “Don’t be so sheepish. … Speak up strongly when it does these things,” finally “one of the less subtle animals in the forest, more uncouth in expression and unconcerned about just who remained, was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”

Bullying continues until it stops.  And it seldom stops of its own accord.  It stops when it no longer is deemed acceptable to blame the victim of bullying and instead the bystanders step up — which often begins when they speak out — and state the obvious: We’ve got to cage the tiger.  Authentic nonviolent communication leads to justice in the way we behave — not by talking while the bullying continues, but by finding ways to “cage the tiger” … in ourselves and in our communities. This is the way that Christians envision the Reign of God when the “lion lies down with the lamb” … and the lamb sleeps well through the whole night.

Sermon preached at St. Thomas’ Parish
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Dr. Wayne Whitson Floyd
Audio Podcast Available

Choosing Nonviolence Download

“You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” (Psalm 139)

Of all the ways in which human beings are indeed so marvelously made, one of the most wonderful is our capacity for memory. It is in the process of remembrance that we assemble the pattern of the formative moments of our personal identity. Anamnesis Plato called it – reminiscence, remembrance. Anamnesis is at the core of our Eucharistic theology; Holy Communion isn’t considered valid without invoking the Holy Spirit (epiklesis) to transform the bread and wine to bear the presence of Christ, first comes anamnesis, remembrance, of the deeds that give significance to the communion elements. “On the night before he died,” the Celebrant reminds us. So “Do this in remembrance.”

Our own memories, likewise, and those of the communities to which we belong, that give significance to all that we have become over a lifetime. In my own memory, the spring and summer of 1968 left an indelible mark. I graduated from high school that spring and left home for the first time to begin college late that summer. All of my classmates who shared those experiences would forever remember the first half of 1968, but unfortunately not for any of the reasons we might have imagined when the year began.

Through our parents and grandparents, our lives already had been shaped by the turmoil and terror of World War II, and then Korea, and now Viet Nam. Closer to home, violence had slashed through our junior high years, when just before Thanksgiving of 1963, President Kennedy had been cut down by gunfire in Dallas. Now just five years later, our high school graduation was bracketed in time by two other assassinations by gunfire, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4th and JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy on June 5th.

Barely a year later other dramatic events for a while overcame the notoriety of these deaths with equally graphic and iconic cultural images: the first manned moon landing on July 20th, 1969; Woodstock that August; and between them the Stonewall Riots in New York on June 28th that began the modern gay rights movement. And then just a year after that, arson struck St. Thomas’ Parish church in the summer of 1970. There was only one Woodstock; and decades have passed since the last person walked the face of the moon, leaving us with but fading memories of those glory days. But we are still playing out the consequences of the violence of the 1960s and the ways we have learned, or refused to learn, how to deal with it.

The commemoration tomorrow of the birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an act of remembrance celebrating a remarkable life and recalling a painful and transformative period of our national history, a time when the effectiveness of his strategy of resistance through non-violence could seem like a pipe-dream when surrounded by the smoke of arson and the brutality of war and racial and social upheaval. Who could have imagined Barak Obama in the White House less than fifty years later, or that incessant war would still consume so much of our country’s resources across so much of the globe.

With Dr. King and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, however, world history took a turn towards the possibility of a more redemptive future. The pains of social dislocation were the birth pangs of the culture of radical hospitality and inclusion that have now a half-century later come to define St. Thomas’ Parish. We in this very room are heirs to the legacy of the riots at Stonewall, NY, as well as those on 14th Street just blocks from here, and those that left Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor that lay in ruins. And Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence needs to be remembered as the essential backdrop for the dream we currently explore with Bishop Gene Robinson to establish a Center for Non-Violent Communication in the new church we are building. In looking back, we frame our future, with gratitude to those who have shown us the way, however painful those memories often are. Read more

The artwork on the cover of this week’s worship bulletins for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at St. Thomas’ Parish is a nativity painting by the contemporary Chinese artist He Qi. The video below is the first movement of the choral composition, “Touch,” a 3-movement multi-media work for chorus and chamber orchestra based on the paintings of He Qi by Allan Robert Petker that premiered just last fall. The “Prayerful Creed for Christmas Eve” at our 7:00 p.m. Saturday evening Holy Eucharist is based on the text of this work.

this is my very favorite telling of the Christmas story.  It comes from a quarter-century old book by John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected; I first read it in Ron Rohlheiser’s The Holy Longing.  It’s called “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer.”

She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity convinced every word was revelation. She said they were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass (hee-hee) but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lited the roof Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was? Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars, The baby was God. And she jumped in the air whirled round, dove into the sofa and buried her head under the cushion which is the only proper response to the Good News of the Incarnation.

A New Tradition Begins:
Candlelight Service of Lessons and Carols

Gather by candlelight on Sunday evening, December 18, at 5:00 p.m., to hear lessons from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament about the coming Messiah and the birth of Jesus and sing carols about the coming of Christ-among-us, then and now.  Classical guitar preludes begin at 4:40 p.m.

Music includes choir, classical guitar, oboe, English horn, piano, and double bass to accompany anthems and congregational carols.

Outtake from “Love Free or Die”

“Love Free or Die: How the Bishop of New Hampshire is Changing the World,” the documentary film directed by Macky Alston and produced by Sandra Itkoff, will be one of sixteen U.S. documentary films to have its world premier at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Described as “A portrait of Gene Robinson, the first gay partnered bishop in the Episcopal Church, and his refusal to quit either the church or the man he loves,” the film is an important reminder that much of our country, ironically, lags far behind the traditionally-risk-averse Episcopal Church in confronting our society’s systemic as well as individual homophobia.

What strikes me most, however, in such attempts  to measure the enduring significance of an iconic figure like Bishop Robinson, is that his legacy may well prove to be not just what he has already contributed to the gay rights movement in church and state, but what church and state still have to learn from Gene about our common calling to our higher selves.

I believe the heterosexual community is learning from faithful and pastoral Christian leaders like Gene Robinson not just how to be more humane towards our LGBT sisters and brothers in the faith, but how to be more fully human ourselves, and more faithful to our calling as Christians to see Christ in our neighbors, without reserve, rather than presuming that  there is already enough Christ evident in us to show off to others with ease.   It’s one thing for Gene Robinson to teach us about what it means to be gay; it’s another when he begins to show us superior ways of being straight, as well.

The backlash against Gene Robinson hasn’t just been because he is ‘the gay bishop’ but also because he has shown us through who he is, not just what he says or does, the deeper bonds that unite us as Christians once we no longer let ourselves judge others by their sexual orientation.

Once we allow him to be the faithful human being and priest that he is, we begin to imagine what Bishop Robinson may have to teach us about ourselves, whatever our sexual orientation.  Gay rights really becomes human rights, and we all become more able to be our authentic selves, and perhaps even to become more than we believe we are capable of being.  If so, then it’s no exaggeration:  This Bishop can change not just the church, but the world. (W. Floyd)

The role of the prophet was an impossible one.  Prophets were called to speak truth to power, to name human folly, and to declare to those living in comfort in the middle of prosperity that God’s preferred residence was actually at the margins.  The prophet was tasked with afflicting the comfortable.

As a result, prophets were usually on the outs with leaders of church and state who had taken it upon themselves to let God know their expectations, and to demand that God meet them.

The prophets role was to remind us of the folly of our human expectations — that if God is on our side, we will prosper, our nation will have a preeminent place in the world, and our religion will protect us with God’s special favor.

“All people are grass,” Isaiah wrote; “their constancy is like the flower of the field” that withers and fades. And so the prophets of Israel were the ones to speak up and remind the people that God did not exist to meet our expectations.

The prophet’s role, however, was even harder to live out.  After Israel fell to conquest and the people were sent into exile in foreign lands, it was the prophet’s role, as well, to comfort the afflicted and to remind them that God remained faithful to them, even when they were allowed to suffer the consequences of unjust living, of human unfaithfulness in loving God and their neighbor.

Isaiah had, before their exile, called the people to account for their expectation that God would continue to bless them with military and monetary success, however little justice their lives displayed.  Now, at the far side of that time, the prophetic voice that we will hear on The Second Sunday of Advent turns the other cheek:

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her, that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid …”  God will “feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

This is not the voice of God to the triumphant privileged, but to the sheep who have been ravaged by wolves, some of which they  have invited into their own folds.  It is the voice announcing that God will be their shepherd, doing for them faithfully what they had refused to do for one another — show mercy, compassion, forgiveness to those who live at the margins.

It was Isaiah’s job to declare not only that God  had chosen deliberately not to live up to their former expectations, but also that God doesn’t plan to live up to their expectations in the future, either!

Why?  Because  God has something better in mind.  The world will one day be turned on its head.  The margins will become the center of God’s life-giving presence.  The last will be first.  “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.”

In a word, the Messiah is coming.

And in that Blessed One, all of creation will discover God’s expectations for us, to be seen in the face of a poor child, born on the margins.

So wait.  And watch.  And stay awake.   For throughout the Advent Season, God is coming towards us already, with unanticipated mercy and compassion and love.

Whoa!  It’s Advent already!

Happy New Year (the church calendar began anew this past Sunday)!

I first ran into Advent … head on, as it were … when I was 21 years old and serving as the lay minister of a tiny United Methodist Church in Crawford, MS.   I had no training, just the fearlessness of youth when you don’t know enough even to say “No.”  I was asked to take on the job so this country church wouldn’t have to close.  There was nobody else.  So I said those fateful words: No Problem!  Well, obviously the problem was that I had no idea what I was doing.

Each Sunday I had to preach twice at 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.   Since the same people attended both services, I had to have two sermons.   And when I looked up the biblical lessons assigned for those Sundays in Advent only weeks after I’d begun the job, they turned out to be about The Second Coming of Christ (as we called it in Mississippi in 1971).  What the h……….???!?!  I expected them to be about Christmas.  So I was shocked to have to try to make sense of why these stories were about the return of Jesus at the end of time, rather that Jesus showing up the first time in the manger.

Years later I discovered that both of these sets of readings shared a motivation to shake us up, to challenge our expectations about what God is like, what the story of Jesus is about, what it means to be a follower of Christ, where we think the world is going, what we think matters most.  And they certainly had accomplished that!

My experience gave me a lasting appreciation, as I grew up and later joined the Episcopal Church, for the importance of Advent and it’s themes of expectation, anticipation.  The significance of the prophets’ longing for a Savior, John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb at the news of Jesus’ forthcoming birth, and much of Jesus’ own ministry is to challenge us to look at our own lives and ask questions like:

• What are you hoping for?
• What are you longing for?
• What really matters to you most?
• What fulfills you in the deepest way?
• Where do you think your life is taking you?

As it turns out, no one was quite expecting what they got in Jesus — he was too poor, too lower class, lacking too much in connections and power, to be “the Savior of the world” — at least as people had long expected the Messiah to be.

Each Advent, I recall the Gospel lesson from Mark this past Sunday, and Jesus’ words that ring with challenge for me now, just as they must have to his first hearers:  “Stay awake!”  Pay attention.  For God is at work around you already in ways that you are not yet willing to see.  When God came in Jesus the first time, and when God creates the heavens and earth anew “at the end of time,” it probably won’t be what we expect — it’s probably not what we’re waiting for when we check the mail, or the stock market, or the newspaper headlines, or even the unfulfilled longings of “our selves, our souls and bodies.”

And so each fall season, I find myself being challenged anew, as I have come to hear the question that Advent poses for me:  “What are you waiting for?”