One In Ten

13 October 2013

Chapter 17 of Luke reflects on two major Biblical themes: faith and going home. It is left up to us to reflect on what faith and homecoming have to do with one another.

Last week the disciples ask Jesus for more faith. It helps to remember that up to this point he is always telling them that their problem is that the do not have enough faith. So they ask for more. What does he say? Are you kidding me? All you really need is a teeny, tiny bit of faith – as small as a mustard seed – and you can say to this tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea.’

We may as well face it – even without any prodding from Jesus, we live in a culture that virtually worships having more of everything: more money, more food, more clothes, more shoes – whatever there is, we are meant to want more. It is our patriotic duty! It is how we keep “the economy” moving! I venture to say we put more time and energy into getting more of everything than we do into our prayer lives or following Jesus. Which is a shame since in our baptism we promise to “follow and obey him wherever he goes.” BCP 303

So look where he goes: the region between Israel and the Samaritans – a kind of no man’s land, a kind of wilderness that is meant to remind us of the 40 years experience after the Exodus, the Passover. It is also meant to remind us of exiles such as Jeremiah writes about. Exile is a new kind of wilderness. Both exile and wilderness connote a place with no power, no resources, and, perhaps most importantly, a place where we are not at home.

Huston Smith in his book, The World’s Religions, suggests that all religious traditions reflect on the most basic question, “Where are we?”  That is, in fact how the Bible begins. The man and the woman disobey the Lord, they hear him approaching them in the garden. They attempt to hide from the Lord. We may as well face it, most of us try to do that too. It makes no sense, but as we can see, God plays along with us and calls out in the garden, “Where are you?”

Isn’t God supposed to know where we are? Isn’t he busy counting the hairs on our heads? So this must be some sort of rhetorical question. Philosophical really. Where are we? We often end up feeling as if we are in exile, or wandering in a wilderness of our own making, or tossed about by the winds of fate or providence depending upon our world view of such things.

The ten fellows Jesus runs across are in exile from their communities for having something like eczema, or psoriasis, or vitiligo. Their skin is scaly, irregular, not quite right. The only thing we are fairly certain is that they did not have Hansen’s Disease, or leprosy, since it did not exist in the Biblical era. Which makes their exile even more poignant really. We think this kind of ostracizing of fellow humans is incredibly inhuman and ancient, then we turn around and talk about “the heartbreak of psoriasis.” And if TV advertising doesn’t do it to us, we, like the first man and woman, try to hide it ourselves.

Then as only modern liberals will do, we try to figure out of this story is “real.” Were these 10 chaps really healed?  This is based on our overlooking the simple fact that getting to go home after being ostracized to the no-man’s-land  is a really really big deal. They get to go home after getting re-certified by the local priest. They get to go home. Off they go, all except one. One in ten. That has a ring to it, does it not? Tis the season of Stewardship, and just one in ten stops to say, “Thank you!”  That would be a tithe of ten men with flakey skin. Beginning with Jacob back in Genesis 28 the Bible is not so subtle in working in these little episodes where 10 percent is part of the story! There’s the stewardship message for the day.

Yet, there is more. When we are honest with ourselves, we are all these ten men. That only one in ten stops to say  thank you to God. That after all is what stewardship is all about: giving thanks to God. Providing God and God’s church with the resources necessary to help and heal others. We are all the first man and woman hiding behind a tree lest God “find” us! We are all wandering in exile.  We are all wandering in the wilderness. We are all trying to find our way home.

Good News! We are all going home. My friend Pierre Wolfe, a former French, Jesuit priest, summed up all theology in one simple phrase: we come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. God is love. We are all on our way home. God in Christ promises in the 14^th chapter of John to come and get us. He promises that even now he is preparing a place for us! All of life is a homecoming – a coming home to God. We are all going to get out of exile. We will all get out of the wilderness. If only we have a tiny, teeny bit of faith – as small as a mustard seed.

Another New Testament writer says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

A woman came to visit us at St Tim’s a few weeks ago. Among other things she said that there are certain practices that can help us to overcome stress. Mindfulness Meditation, Compassion and Hope.

Exile and Wilderness are stressful places to be – just ask the children of Israel, the sons and daughters of Jacob.

Mindfulness Meditation, or Centering Prayer, really is simply taking time to stop – stop doing, stop saying, stop thinking, and just Be – Be Here Now. Just a minute or two can make a huge difference every day. As a practice, a regular practice, it can be life changing.

Compassion is taking just a moment to focus on someone else’s problems. A smile will do. A look into another’s eyes that says, “I know” will do. A hug, a moment of silence together.  You do not need much. You just need a little bit.

And Hope. Hope is what keeps us going. It is the conviction that God will take us home again. Because we come from the heart and home of God’s eternal  love. That is our assurance. After all we are those who every week say we believe in all things God creates, “seen and unseen.” It is the unseen that holds the promise of our future! You need just enough hope to take one step forward after another until you find yourself out of exile and on the way home.

Perhaps you will be the one in ten who stops for a moment to say thank you.

Amen.

On Faith

On Faith

In the study of the world’s religions one of the first things they all grapple with is some version of the most basic question: Where are we? This is a way of getting at what we rather casually call “the human condition.” It is one of the first questions God asks the first man and first woman in the garden as they attempt to hide from God, ashamed of having disobeyed his command not to eat of the tree: “Where are you?”

That seems rather odd. Is it possible that God did not know where they were? Or, is God calling us to acknowledge where we are? I rather imagine it is both/and. Looking over the events of the past several weeks in our nation’s capital I can imagine even God trying to understand where we are, how we have gotten here, what has pushed us to be right here right now. And, I can imagine God calling us out to acknowledge where we are and how we have gotten to this point – a place where people who are hurting so badly inside see no way out other than acting out violently – a place where elected officials of all stripes have lost sight of what we once called “the common good” and can think only of their own narcissistic political strategies for some future election, or some commitment to one dogma or another with seemingly little regard for any of the rest of us.

We sometimes think of these ancient stories as hopelessly old-fashioned and archaic, and yet, at some dimension within ourselves we are all asking the question, “Where are we?” Perhaps even more, we wish someone beyond ourselves would stop us and pleadingly ask us, “Where are you?”

So one day the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”  The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” - Luke 17:5-6 (NRSV)

Not exactly the response they or we are hoping for. What is the matter with him, they no doubt asked themselves. We want practical faith. There is no way we can get trees to obey our commands. Well, he might reply, now you know how God might feel about us. But here is the surprise: Despite what a mess of things you have made, God loves you. Even despite your doubts. As one of my messengers Frederick Beuchner will put it one of these days, “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” Just keep moving on this journey together we call Faith.

When I first undertook acupuncture treatments for a neck injury years and years ago, I discovered a book by Diane Connelly titled, All Sickness Is Home Sickness. The idea behind it was in fact inspired by the Blessed Augustine who writes in his Confessions that our hearts are restless “until we find our home in Thee.” We are on a journey that has taken us far from our true  home. We find ourselves somehow separated from our true home. This makes us restless, uneasy – and when this restlessness is no longer grounded in some kind of faith, we find ourselves doing things, as Saint Paul so eloquently puts it, that “I would rather not do, and not doing the things I should want to do.”

So whether your faith is that there is a god or there is not a god, the good news is you do have faith! Therein lies a mustard seed of hope. The mysterious and unknown author of the epistle with the name Hebrews has this to say about faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” -Hebrews 11:1 (RSV) So as we continue to journey through this world, a world that so many of us want to escape, faith has the capacity to enable us to have some assurance that things we cannot see at present may very well hold the key to bringing us home. Again, Beuchner has said, “Faith is a journey, trusting that it will lead us home.” That is, as Hebrews reminds us, faith leads to a kind of hope that we are in fact on a journey that leads us home – which for many of us means a return to that place from whence we come – the heart of God’s eternal love.

It is when things get desperate, when things get stressed to the breaking point that the kind of hope that faith engenders begins to bend and even break. The old patterns and rituals seem ineffective in holding faith and hope together. A kind of chaotic depression begins to settle in and take over the way we see, hear and experience this journey called life. We call this stress.

Last week a woman came to speak to the girls at St. Tim’s. She observed that research has shown that when things reach some level of stress, there are three things, three strategies, three ways of “being,” that can relieve the stress and put us back on track: Mindfulness Meditation, Compassion, and Hope.

Mindfulness Meditation goes by many names: Centering Prayer, Transcendental Meditation, Sitting Zazen, and so on. It is really a practice that requires us to stop: stop doing, stop thinking, stop worrying, simply stop – sit, breathe, close your eyes, and let go. Such stopping has the capacity to break the cycles of stress, reset our faith and our hope, and put us back on a journey that we trust is leading us home again.

Compassion is that practice that takes us beyond ourselves and places our attention on the needs of others. It is the awareness that I am not the only one who is stressed here. And it is very possible that my experience of stress gives me the capacity to understand what troubles others, even just one other, and that I might hold the key to relieving their stress. Often we discover that in helping others, or simply being present to their distress, just being with them holds the key to relieving our own stress.

Finally, Hope is that dimension of faith that urges us to press on, trusting that, as Julian of Norwich assures us, “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.” For those of us who have journeyed along the Judeo-Christian path, our sense of Hope is buoyed by our accepting that we are loved by Love.

The question for all of us is, “Where are you?” Are we in a place where we allow ourselves to stop doing, stop thinking, stop worrying and just accept the news that we are loved by Love? Are we in a place where we can stop and take the time to place our attention on the stress and suffering of others? Are we in a place where we allow ourselves to maintain a sense of Hope, a sense of direction, and a sense of trusting that faith, whatever our faith may be, will lead us home?

Years ago, reflecting on all of this I wrote the following song. I sometimes forget to sing it. I often forget that I even wrote it! Yet, here it is, a living reminder to myself that we do not need big, huge gobs of faith. It is as our Lord says, OK if you only have a teeny, tiny bit of faith as small as a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds that when planted and tended can grow into a great shrub capable of adding new and fresh flavors to this journey we call life which is really a life of homecoming – a coming home to the household of Love, the heart of God’s eternal love.

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

You can take trees and hurl them in the sea

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

The lame will walk and the blind will see

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

Wars will cease with the end of greed

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

Loaves multiply so there’s enough to feed

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

As you sow you shall receive

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

As you pray you will believe

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

Trust in the Lord, He’ll supply every need

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed/

As you follow Christ you’ll begin to lead

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed

If you only have faith, as small as a mustard seed

Amen.

The Mustardseed Song

Louisiana Pastor Killed During Sermon

Luke 16: 19-31

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Woke up this morning to find on AOL:  Louisiana pastor killed during sermon.  It happened Friday evening while preaching during a revival. A man came into the church, shot Pastor Ronald J. Harris, Sr, and then fled – the shooter later turning himself in. In the comments that followed, a dangerous place to look to be sure, were reactions ranging from “there must be more to this story,” to “no doubt the NRA will argue that had more people in the congregation (good people) had guns this could have been prevented.”

For me this of course brings up memories of that day in May 2012 when my two closest working colleagues at Saint Peter’s, Ellicott City, Maryland, were shot and killed in the church office. And later that year the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. People think of, or at least used to think of, churches, synagogues, temples, as safe places – refuge from the storms of life, sanctuary, a place set apart from the violence that surrounds them on all sides. Now such sanctuaries seem to be nothing more than a part of the greater terror landscape that accompanies a society seemingly obsessed with guns, violence, violent “games,” etc. In a couple of weeks I will be filling-in for a colleague at a nearby church for Sunday services. Should I fear for my life?

Was it something the pastor did or said, some people were asking online? Does and answer to that really change the framing of the problem? I find myself thinking back on the Hebrew prophets, not always a popular bunch, who like Socrates were constantly challenging the status quo. They put Jeremiah in the bottom of a well to silence him, to leave him to die, for challenging the status quo. What status quo was he challenging: the right to self-defense. Jeremiah advocated a non-violent solution to the pending invasion of the Babylonians. The town-folk appealed to the king that it would be heresy not to defend themselves. The tradition honors Jeremiah. It’s all in Jeremiah chapter 38.

Back in the 1990’s there was a surge of violent behavior in churches across the land – a backlash against clergy of all denominations, of all kinds of churches. It was thought to be a reaction to a downturn in the economy – people were being downsized or pink-slipped across the board. People felt helpless to act against their employers, the government, banks, or whatever institutions they felt were responsible for the downturn in their personal life. Churches, it was felt, were safe places to act out anger, fear and aggression – after all “the church” has to forgive me, right? Ironic isn’t it? The church once a sanctuary from violence now viewed as a safe place to act out violence one cannot act out anywhere else without reprisal. The church, among other venues, becomes the one safe place you can be assured of killing one or more innocent people to assuage your anger.

Jesus tells the story of a rich man and  a poor man named Lazarus – no relation to the brother of Mary and Martha of Bethany. The gist of the story is that people have become disconnected from the Word of God – disconnected from the ethical demands of being a faithful person – demands such as to love and care for one’s neighbor. The rich man learns that for ignoring the ethical demands of the Ten Commandments life after life is not going to go so well. Accepting this, he pleads for someone from the dead to return to warn his sons, family and friends so they will not make the same mistakes he has. The story concludes: “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Admission: I grew up and card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, and spent many Saturday afternoons at the local police firing range earning my medals up through Sharpshooter Bar VII. I cannot in good conscience be a member today. There are no more fundamental commands in Holy Scripture than the Sixth Commandment against killing or murder; and the command of Jesus to love your neighbor, and even to love your enemies. Despite the millennia-long existence of Just War Theory in Christian theology, that has always applied to government regulated armies or militias, not individuals. Further, the origins of Just War Theories of self-defense and proportionate response were conceived when people were fighting from chariots and horses with hand-held variations on a club or at best a spear or a bow and arrow. Even the NRA has its origins in responsible use of rifles – it is not the NHA, National Handgun Association, after all.

I admit I have never been much of an advocate for the kind of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) jingoism that has seized much of what passes for Christianity these days. Nevertheless, this morning as I pray for Pastor Ronald J. Harris, Sr, and his alleged assailant, Woodrow Karey,  and the witnesses in the congregation who I now know for a fact will never be able to forget the nightmare that unfolded before their eyes, WWJD might not be a bad place to start. His story about the richman and Lazarus is at one dimension a venting of his frustration as he tries to challenge the status quo of a society seemingly gone off the rails. Just as Jeremiah was venting frustration as his people were facing exile at the hands of Babylon. No one was willing to engage in any sort of meaningful listening to warnings they were issuing.

Walter Brueggemann has always been fond of asking the key questions in our time. One of which might be:  How much gun violence does a society have to endure before it admits it is already in exile? Jesus is no doubt correct on this one: we have been told and told and told again what life is meant to look like. Even if someone were to return from the dead to warn us today, would we even bother to listen? Or, are we so distracted with protecting our so-called “rights” that we would not even hear a word he or she might say to us?

God Helps Those Who Help Themselves?

God Helps Those Who Help Others

 [On Sunday, August 25, former governor Robert L. Ehrlich (R) concluded his opinion piece reminding the reader that he was always taught, "God helps those who help themselves". Below is my response to the Baltimore Sun, which was printed with the bracketed sections left out for reasons of space, etc.]

                With all due respect to the former governor’s parents (“HUD latest vehicle for White House power grab,” Robert L. Ehrlich, Sunday, August 25), there is no evidence in the Judeo-Christian Bible that “God helps those who help themselves.” Yes, this is a longstanding bromide of American folklore built on similar concepts such as we all need to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And although it tops polls as the most widely known “Bible verse,” it appears nowhere in the Bible. In fact, it appears to fly in the face of the Bible’s central message of Grace, which Good News Jesus came to reassert in the first century of the modern era.

The God of Judaism and Christianity provides a much different worldview from the Garden onward: God values those who love God and love others, and God routinely sends messengers and prophets to chastise us when we focus solely on helping ourselves. As early as Leviticus chapter 19 we are urged to love our neighbor as ourselves.

 [The Hebrew word for “love” means something more like doing something helpful for one’s neighbor. You need not even “like” your neighbor, but there is an imperative to help those neighbors who are in need. Indeed, when asked to define “neighbor” Jesus told a story about a Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37). The Samaritans were social and religious enemies, outcasts, folks who lived on “the other side of the tracks,” quite possibly in substandard housing! A man is beaten by robbers on the road and left to die. Two respectable men walk by, see that this is a Samaritan, and someone who as a result of the beating is “unclean,” and they walk by, leaving him to help himself. The most unlikely of characters, a Samaritan, comes by, helps the man, takes him to an Inn, pays for food and lodging, and promises to pay all expenses  associated with his healthcare. “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” asks Jesus.

Or listen to Amos, one of the Hebrew Prophets of the Axial Age, those years from around 800-200 BCE that the philosopher Karl Jaspers asserts, “"the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today." In Amos 2:6-8 the prophet decries the sins of society :

“They buy and sell upstanding people.
    People for them are only things—ways of making money.
They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes.
    They’d sell their own grandmother!
They grind the penniless into the dirt,
    shove the luckless into the ditch.
Everyone and his brother sleeps with the ‘sacred whore’—
    a sacrilege against my Holy Name.
Stuff they’ve extorted from the poor
    is piled up at the shrine of their god,
While they sit around drinking wine
    they’ve conned from their victims.]

No sense among the Hebrew prophets of telling people that God only helps those who help themselves. Quite the contrary, those who help themselves at the expense of those of lesser means are the ones judged as sinful. Not unlike when King David has not  only helped himself Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, but arranged for her husband to be killed on the field of battle, the prophet Nathan cleverly gets David to judge himself, proclaiming, “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12)

It is universally understood that the arrival of Jesus in the midst of a Roman Civilization characterized by helping themselves to the goods, people and resources of every possible nation they could conquer was God’s proclamation that life had spun out of control and that the myriad ways in which we are called to assist and help (i.e. “love”) our neighbors, all neighbors clean or unclean, neighbors nearby and far away, had been replaced by an emphasis on ownership of personal property. In all four gospels, Jesus spends most of his time helping others. Never does he tell them to help themselves.

 [“God helps those who help themselves” is great advice for a narcissistic, consumer driven culture such as ours has become. But do not be fooled: this does not represent in the least God’s message as handed down through the Bible. God’s message of grace and love of neighbor rests on an ethic of personal sacrifice for the the good of others, and that when we address the good of others we are securing the common good – something that used to be a bedrock American value long before helping ourselves replaced it.]

The Reverend Kirk A Kubicek

Chaplain, Saint Timothy’s School for Girls, Stevenson, MD           

The Living and Active Word

The Living, a Active Word

By the Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek

 Hebrews 12:18-29
In our reading from Hebrews today, the Word of God is described as “living” and “active.” That is, the Word of God is not dead and static. Because we tend to associate the Word of God primarily with the texts of the Bible, we tend to lose sight of its living and dynamic character.
And we tend to forget that the Bible is largely a collection of past utterances that came from God to address critical situations as they arose in history.
And we sometimes forget that the Word of God is also wholly contingent on what is happening right now, whenever “right now” happens to be. Therefore, God’s Word to Abram is vastly different from God’s word to Jeremiah, or to the psalmist, or to Jesus, or to whomever left us the epistle called Hebrews.
So one thing we get from reading the Bible is that the God of Israel is capable of addressing many different situations as they arise in many vastly different historical periods and places: Time and space shape the Word of God.
One thing that should also be obvious is the simple fact that there is no book, not even our Bible, that can contain all of what God might say. That is, the Bible surely does not contain all that God has said or might say.  Nor is it God’s only way of speaking to us.
The Bible does not address many topics we consider to be of grave importance. For example, neither the word “abortion” nor “homosexual” can be found in the Bible. All efforts to find out what God might think about these and similar issues depend on one’s reading or one’s interpretation of texts we think might be able to inform us.
But in the end, we are left with our interpretation of the texts over against the interpretations of others, to which we attempt to apply our own calculus in fashioning some sort of trump argument.
Which brings us to having to admit that when one wishes to enter God’s world through the texts of the Bible, we all do so with whatever tools and preconceived notions we bring along from our own experiences.
There can be no reading of the text that is not interpretive. Or to put it positively, all readings of the texts are interpretive. Because of who we are and the gifts God has given us, there can be no neutral readings of any of the texts.
The Bible itself, in fact, spends a lot of time interpreting and re-interpreting its own material. And the Bible gives a lot of equal time to dramatically competing notions of what it means to be a people of God.
To begin with, then, one needs a firm grasp of all the Biblical landscape, with particular attention paid to a few core narratives: exodus, exile and Jesus’ life/death/resurrection.
It can be argued that all the Bible reflects on these core narratives – exodus, exile and Jesus – with emphasis upon the indisputable fact that nearly all the New Testament looks at Jesus through the dual lens of exodus and exile. It is no coincidence, for instance, that in our liturgy we describe Jesus as “our Passover.”
Without an intimate knowledge of what the Passover story is  – slavery, exodus, wilderness, land of promise – we end up having no idea what we mean when we call Jesus “our Passover.”
To put this another way, the entire Jesus saga engages the reader in a vast interpretation and re-casting and reinterpretation of both the exodus and exile narratives.
So in Hebrews today, a contrast is being made between how God was experienced at Mount Sinai during the wilderness sojourn of the exodus and how God is experienced in Jesus.
In its conclusion, our posture before God is to remain one of thanksgiving, eucharistia, reverence, fear and awe, because our God is “a consuming fire.” A fire that Jesus hopes to kindle across the whole earth!
The text in Hebrews depends on our knowledge of all that happened in the books of Exodus through Deuteronomy for it to make any sense at all to us today. Just as the word that comes to Jeremiah as a young boy eventually uses the exodus saga to announce a new exodus from the exile in Babylon.
While in exile and coming out of exile and re-settling Jerusalem, the biblical texts carry on an extended sort of debate about whether or not God’s Israel should bar the gates and become an exclusive community, or open the gates and become a blessing to all the nations of the earth as God had promised all the way back to our brother Abraham.
That is, should we become an exclusive or inclusive community? Should we remain particular in who we are? Or should we become more universal in our acceptance of others?
There are whole books of the Bible that argue the need to be exclusive and pure, and whole books that argue the need to be inclusive, tolerant and universal in the acceptance of others. There are whole books devoted to strict adherence to the purity codes of Leviticus, and whole books devoted to reaching beyond custom and law in an attitude of compassion and justice to accept all people of all backgrounds into the community of God’s people.
To see Jesus’ perspective, as we do today in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 13, step outside the limitations of tradition and beyond the customs of the Sabbath and the purity code. Jesus heals a woman, a woman who does not call out to him, but one whom he sees and calls to himself, a woman who, because she was a woman and because she was crippled, would not be allowed into the synagogue, let alone inside the gates of the city in all likelihood. This seems to suggest which side of the exclusive-inclusive debate Jesus lived on.
Surely it does not take too much interpretative skill on our parts to see that Jesus shatters the status quo to announce a new way of doing God’s business.
In Jesus we see that God’s Word is alive and active, not at all dead and static. Jesus is seen to be reinterpreting the Bible and the biblical tradition. Jesus, God’s Word, is alive and active.
We cannot even begin to know the significance of this story without intimate knowledge of the exodus saga, the Abraham saga, the prophetic literature calling us to care for those in need, the life and the customs of Israel in the first century. That Jesus would touch an unclean woman in public is remarkable, and causes division amongst the community of God’s people. Note how those who are angry do not address Jesus directly, but rather spew their indignation at the woman and the rest of the congregation. Some things never change!
We all want to know what the Bible says. But are we willing to put in the time necessary to become familiar with all its texts, its various histories and points of view? What it addresses and what it does not? All the personalities represented, and the possibilities and promises sometimes merely hinted at?
Are we willing to let the Bible, the Word of God, have its way with us rather than our trying to domesticate it to our own needs and desires?
Are we able to step back from a verse or a few words and see them in the larger context of an entire book, or the whole Bible?
Are we comfortable with a Word that is living and active?

— The Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek has served as rector and assistant in a broad variety of parishes over the past 28 years. He is currently chaplain and teaches at St. Timothy’s School for girls, the Diocese of Maryland girls’ boarding school, where he teaches World Religions and American History.