Hazards and Fairways: The Sometime Grace of the Recovery Shot

15 September 2013

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

This morning I will be shedding one of my most tightly guarded secrets.  In twenty-one years of preaching--giving sermons and chapel talks, I have never preached on this subject.  Never, not once.  Even people who know me well have never heard me speak of this personal obsession.  It’s my little secret.  Here it is:  I am fascinated by the game of golf.  Where this passion began exactly I don’t know; but it has been coming on strong since the late 1990s.  Maybe it was when the novelist John Updike, one of my favorite authors, said that sports writing got better the smaller the ball.  The smaller the ball, the better the writing.  I was intrigued.  Baseball sports writing is good, but golf writing is even better, I’ve discovered.  The game appeals to my perfectionist side, but then it explodes this way of thinking, almost completely.  If you are swinging a golf club, you cannot be a perfectionist...without going crazy.  The golf swing has so many moving parts—it’s like trying to keep trying to keep fifty ping pong balls underwater all at once.  It’s so simple, and impossible, at the same time.    

When people ask me if I play, I always say no.  No, I don’t.  I’m just a friend of the game—a fan, a golf intellectual perhaps.  I look at the game from the perspective of a writer, like Updike; with detachment, appreciation, and a nose for irony.  But the truth is I secretly play.  My swing is awful, but it is mine.  It is a little like becoming really interested in someone because they don’t like you, or they have rejected you.  That’s golf for me, a fickle and capricious lady who tortures me.  For what it’s worth, I follow the men in the PGA tournaments, but I prefer the Ladies Tour.  Yes, I’ll say it, their clothes are fabulous, and they can really play. 

                        So what do I like about golf?  I already mentioned that I like the clothes, and this is true for both the men and women.  For me, it’s the way in which perfectionism and realism, the ideal and the real, collide in the most beautiful of settings.  A well made golf course is a work of art, and yet the artist is still nature herself.  But the real collision of the ideal and the real is in the mind of the golfer just before the swing.  The mental game is everything in golf.    

I took my daughter Beatrice, who is eleven years old, to her first tournament this summer, just before school started.  We went to the Barclays Tournament played at Liberty National Golf Course, a course along the New York Harbor, and just under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.  We saw the tournament on both Saturday and Sunday.  I don't take Beatrice to a lot of sporting events. She gets bored with spectator sports—it’s a little tedious.  She has yet to attend at Mets game (too much human suffering there—it’s bad for children), though she likes MLS ok.  Beatrice loved the Barclays Tournament, in particular the choice to go wherever you want to go, and to watch whatever you want to watch.  There is so much to see: from people watching—lots of fashion choices to study--to the animals on the course in a peaceable kingdom.  Like many children, she was mesmerized by the errant shots. These are shots that go wildly off course, and often into the crowd.  This is also one of my favorite parts of the experience as well, the collision of perfectionism and realism, the moment when everything goes wrong.  Within ten minutes of arriving at the Barclays, a golfer hit a ball at least a hundred yards off course.  The ball landed in the food court, next to a pretzel stand.  I didn’t have to worry about my daughter being bored; she was hooked by the crazy physics of it all.

A professional golfer hitting a shot wildly out of bounds is schadenfreude for the crowd.  I used a word there: schadenfreude.  There is no direct English translation of the German, but the word means something like “pleasure (or glee) in response to the misfortune of others.”  One of the most disturbing human tendencies is the real pleasure we get from the mistakes of other people.  As the writer Gore Vidal once said:  “It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.”  But in golf, schadenfreude goes in surprising directions; it changes shape, becomes something very different. 

Let’s go back to the errant shot that can give the crowd so much pleasure.  Let’s find where the little white ball actually landed. 

The crowd knows more about the shot than the player, as caddie and pro make their way to the gathering spectacle, the new station of life after the disastrous tee shot. The children are ecstatic, so happy—it’s like an Easter egg hunt, except you can’t touch the magical egg.  You’ll be stupefied if you touch it (Harry Potter reference there).  In many cases, the spectators help the golfer locate the ball if it’s in the woods or tall grass.  Is it pleasure the crowd is feeling?  Sure, you can see its gleeful ripples, but there is something else as well.  People deeply identify with the golfer.  There is humor, but there is also a swelling compassion.  Everyone knows all about mistakes; and here comes the so-called celebrity, reduced to the common man, having to join the peanut gallery.  No other sport has the player enter the crowd like the sport of golf, to play an actual shot.  Caddie, golfer, and marshals give stage direction to create a pocket for the shot, opening outward, towards the new target for the golfer.  The caddie, who is much like the medieval squire, dutifully marches off the new, unusual yardage in nobody's book. That is, he takes a walk to the flag, if that’s where the golfer is aiming, and he then walks back, carefully counting his steps.  It all takes time; it is not over fast.  Though the crowd loves the reduction, the humbling moment--the humiliation, they are all pulling for the amazing recovery.  The recovery shot is right after the shot out of bounds.  Sometimes the golfer ends up in better position than he or she would have been had nothing gone wrong.  Everyone is rooting for the golfer because everyone identifies with the mistake.  I saw Phil Mickelson early in the summer, at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, hit a ball straight off a tree trunk, after already being out of bounds. The crowd, the golfer, and I all had to scatter together to avoid the ricochet.  And we got to do it all over again, in nearly the same spot.  It made the crowd love Phil even more.  That guy hits some crazy shots.  And he is also crazy good.       

                        So, back at the Barclays, Beatrice will never forget the shot a golfer named Jason Kokrak hit a hundred yards off course.  It was her introduction to the sport.  From the pretzel and beer stands with hundreds of new friends around him, Kokrak then hit a recovery shot to within ten feet of the hole.  I had never heard of Jason Kokrak, and I watch golf every weekend.  I looked him up on the leaderboard after the hole.  Was he about to lose his tour card?  Was he on the edge of a nervous breakdown?  Was it time to find a new career, maybe selling real estate or life insurance?  Maybe go to divinity school?  Jason Kokrak was in the top twenty of the Barclays Playoff.  He was having a good day at the office.     

All of us are going to hit shots out of bounds.  I do it every day.  We make mistakes, sometimes big ones.  If you are not used to failing at something, you haven’t tried anything very hard.  But the disastrous shot doesn’t have to define you.  It doesn’t define your worth, or your abilities, or your future.  It’s actually when you join the human race.  But the very next moment—the recovery shot--may very well define your character forever.  How you respond to ordinary adversity is when your character is forged.     

            So what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to say about recovery shots?  Here’s what Jesus has to say about the wayward sinner, and the mistakes we all make:

“’Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?’  ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’

‘Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully and find it?  When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’  ‘Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.’”

It is clear from Jesus that God loves recovery shots.  To repent is literally to turn around; to choose a new target of wisdom and morality, to go for the right flag.  God cares for us most deeply when we are out of bounds, when we have run off the map of how we think our lives are supposed to go.  Anybody can handle success.  How you handle a big mistake or a major personal failure are the moments when you discover your faith, and the size of your heart.  Courage is fear turned inside out, and the recovery shot may be the most remarkable shot you have ever hit.  You will find, in some cases, that you are in a better position than you would have been had you never made a mistake.  This is the moment of grace; and we get a chance to participate with God’s grace and become stronger at the most painful or embarrassing moments on the course of life.  Jesus says there is greatest joy in heaven when one person does this.  This is because the recovery shots are the moments when we develop compassion for other people.  We get out of our own heads and really learn to love each other.  It is the moment when we reverse the schadenfreude of Gore Vidal’s quotation.

“It is not enough that I succeed.  Others must succeed too.” 

            This is Kent after one week of school in our river valley.  People are hitting shots out of bounds every day.  Tee shots sail into the river, or off the chapel.  They land behind dormitories, or roll past the mail room into the student center.  Oops, that one’s going in Macedonia Creek.  It’s in the hazard.  You’re going to have to take a drop.  The disaster does not define you, the gospel tells us.  But the recovery shot, the one that God is watching closely, can change your life; and it can land right by the hole, making you richer for the wayward journey.  It can be a great show here at Kent, watching other people make mistakes.  Or: your own recovery shot can change how you see yourself and everyone around you, and their fundamental worth as children of God.  It is not enough anymore that I must succeed.  Others must succeed too.  Have a great second week.  I’ll see you on the fairway. 

The Native Call of Education: Manifestos and Making History

Opening Service for Faculty

3 September 2013

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

I’d like to wish everyone a happy September.  It really is here.   In the last few weeks of summer, especially the dog days of August, I spend my time working on my bucket list.  This is nothing dramatic—it’s a list just for the summer.  Things I absolutely must do before the summer ends.  The items on this list, mostly in my head, are the books still left to read, the hikes to take, or that last trip to the city.  But in my years at Kent, I have learned not to give up the bucket list once the year starts.  My list continues this week, with intention, and I’d encourage yours to continue as well, even into the fall months.  Don’t forget to have a life.  It’s only Early Week, after all.  Take it slow.  If you do, I think you’ll find it’s actually good to be back.  It is a grave understatement to say that we begin a marathon, not a sprint. 

            Since we have established when we come back--tonight, it is helpful to consider why we come back.  The quick answer for me is that I come back for the students.  Not all of them, that’s for sure.  Just last week we remembered the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall—the words that changed our hearts.  I thought of the special educators who taught King—taught him to think, about the history of his nation and the history of his people.  From grammar school to divinity school, who were the people who inspired him?  And who were the people who stood in his way?  The powerful role models he resisted.  We know that Dr. King did not go to Kent School, but how would we think about our own school history if he had?  How would this change, if at all, how we approach the students who are arriving this week? 

And this is the moment where things take a surprising turn.  What would you say if I told you that a Martin Luther King did go to Kent School?  Well, it’s true, in ways stranger than fiction.  One of the greatest leaders of a beleaguered but surviving people graduated from Kent School in 1951.  This individual might be our most famous and influential graduate, though there is significant competition there.  Only no one knows who he is.  Who he was, since he died in 2005.  His name is Vine Deloria, Jr.  He was only the greatest intellectual activist and political leader of the Native American community in the twentieth century—the MLK of his people, and time.  Deloria wrote over twenty books and 200 articles in his prolific academic career as a college professor.  Yes, he became a teacher, like you… He taught at Western Washington, the University of Arizona, and Colorado-Boulder where he was a graduate of their law school, and taught law.  He founded the discipline that we now call Native American Studies at Arizona.  He was the first academic to recognize that the Native American experience could only be accurately assessed with an interdisciplinary approach–one using history, literature, anthropology, music, law, and yes, even theology.  Along with being a law school graduate and professor, he also went to divinity school.  We’ll come back to that training. 

Deloria was an intellectual powerhouse—a rigorous, independent, and often sarcastic polymath.  Deloria was an iconoclast who rejected intellectual, political, religious, and even scientific orthodoxies.  He rejected the Bering Strait land bridge hypothesis of archeology, arguing that American Indians were always indigenous, from the very beginning.  Deloria is sometimes called a creationist because he believed that Native American creation myths were real.  They are true.  He rallied his people, and he definitely pissed some people off with books titled Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, God Is Red: An Indian View of Religion, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact.   Like our current president, Deloria was a grassroots, and eventually national, community leader.  He was also a feared and respected lobbyist in Washington.  Deloria ascended to arguably the most important post that a Native American could hold in the United States: National Director of the Congress of American Indians.  During his tenure in this position, the Congress grew from 19 tribes to 156.  He was the voice of his people, and he was our conscience too.  Like King, his career and thinking went in surprising directions because of his faith in God; and the arc of justice bending to earth that we must seek with all our hearts and minds in every age.  Justice doesn’t just happen, not in the real world.  And that’s where Deloria lived.  He was also willing to call out and challenge his own people.         

Just imagine Deloria arriving at Kent School from South Dakota in 1947…meeting his white roommate, going to the dining hall for the first time, walking under the portrait of our founder, Father Sill.  I try to see him in mind’s eye, strangled with a tie that he would never need in his career, sitting in one of our wooden desks on the first day of school…The image fills me with inspiration, hope, some sadness, and humility.  What was going through his mind?  What was this young man thinking in chapel (which occurred everyday in 1951)?  There is evidence that this religious exposure in St. Joseph’s was not a complete disaster.  Like Black Elk before him, Deloria was quite comfortable with Christianity at its best; he just didn’t think white people knew their Jesus very well at all. 

For Native Americans who made it to boarding school in the last century, the message was straightforward and unyielding for those offered scholarships.  Your job is to assimilate, to fit in.  The message that came through loud and clear was that you had to forget your heritage in order to be successful.  We’re giving you this once in a lifetime opportunity—look at how wonderful we are.  We’re putting you on the fast track.  When I hear this kind of language, I always want to know where the fast track is going.  I see a lot of miserable people who are right on track, just perfect.  Deloria had an additional influence in his ambitions, and personal trajectory, one which affected him in ways both large and small, for his whole life, I suspect.  Deloria was here to become an Episcopal minister, just like his father and more famous grandfather, the Reverend Philip Deloria (known among the Lakota as Black Lodge), the Episcopal missionary to the Sioux tribe.  Become like your grandfather and father; that was the family message, and why Deloria was sent to a church school in the first place.  Deloria rejected, very thoughtfully, this particular doorway of assimilation, and he chose not to serve in the church despite graduating from divinity school following his days at Iowa State.  Vine Deloria, Jr., was one of our own, but he was not one of us.  In the significant histories written on the Native American experience in the twentieth century, no Native thinker gets more praise, more attention, more respect than a Kent graduate.         

I like to think the English Department gets partial credit for Deloria the writer, but I’m sure he suffered at times in our classes.  At any rate, he became a remarkable writer and thinker.  His powerful sentences did not take him to the ivory tower, but rather deep into the seemingly insoluble problems of Native Americans.  His prose has an energetic charge that possesses, at times, the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King assuming, eloquently, the prophetic mantle of his people.  But his writing is more regularly in the trenchant and sarcastic realm, or better yet, in the satirical pitch and range of Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man. 

Here is Deloria at the beginning of his Indian Manifesto in Custer Died For Your Sins.  This seemed like a good choice after yesterday’s mighty thunder storms--and eventual rainbow over Kent, Connecticut—a small arc of justice reaching the earth perhaps.    

“Indians are like the weather.  Everyone knows all about the weather, but none can change it.  When storms are predicted, the sun shines.  When picnic weather is announced, the rain begins.  Likewise, if you count on the unpredictability of Indian people, you will never be sorry.

One of the finest things about being an Indian is that people are always interested in you and your ‘plight.’  Other groups have difficulties, predicaments, quandaries, problems, or troubles.  Traditionally we Indians have had a ‘plight.’

Our foremost plight is our transparency.  People can tell just by looking at us what we want, what should be done to help us, how we feel, and what a ‘real Indian’ is really like.  Indian life, as it relates to the real world, is a continuous attempt not to disappoint those who know us.  Unfulfilled expectations cause grief and we have already had our share.

Because people can see right through us, it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction or fact from mythology.  Experts paint us as they would like us to be.  Often we paint ourselves as we wish we were or we might have been.

The more we try to be ourselves the more we are forced to defend what we have never been.  The American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always there.  Those Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt.  Most of us don’t fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating, which is seldom.”

The most significant thing that Deloria accomplished, intellectually, and practically among the tribes, was reversing the unquestioned assumption that assimilation was the only route to survival, and economic success.  To him this was the way of extinction as a people.  In his work as a writer and national leader, Deloria presented Native heritage and its revitalization as the medicine for the future, and not just the past. 

Now, for just a moment, a show of hands.  True confessions with the priest.  How many of you, before tonight, had never heard of a Kent graduate named Vine Deloria, Jr., class of 1951?  It really is time to go back to school.  Anything can happen here. 

For example.  In the spring each year, I teach a course in Native American Literature.  Every year since its inception, at least one student has done his or her research project on the longstanding legal dispute between Kent School and what remains of the Schaghticoke Tribe (there are actually two branches in this lawsuit, with one supported financially by Subway Sandwiches…yes, the gods must be crazy.).  But not until last spring did a student actually walk down Schaghticoke Road to interview the chief, whose name is Alan Russell.  Our student and the local chief met many times—and I was not aware of these interviews.  I probably would have discouraged them, with the so-called wisdom of safety first.  It’s dangerous down that road…imagine what they say about us.  The result of these meetings was the best research project I have ever received.  It was not a well-written paper, let that be said.  It was not even a formal academic essay, though the documentation of the research was ok, certainly passable in New Student Seminar.  But no student had so thoroughly explored the Native point of view, by talking to those involved, and trying to walk in their shoes.  The student was inspired because of his own Indian heritage from Canadian tribes.  The paper is now in our library, along with the eight titles that we have by Vine Deloria, Jr.  Chief Russell was deeply moved by the personal interest and courtly manners of our student.  And so was I.  Amazed is more like it. 

Who wrote the research paper Schaghticoke Tribe: Seeking Land?  It was supposed to be 7-10 pages long, but this student wrote twenty and could have written more.  This research project was undertaken by one Alexandre Villeneuve.  For those of you who are new, let’s just say Alexandre was not our top student in last year’s class.  But his extraordinary work last spring reminded me that we do is extremely important, and subtle, and shocking at times.  Our work with our students is life-giving, holy, and even magical.  It is always mysterious, even when we fail, or think we have.  This is our blessing and our burden as teachers, our soaring inspiration and our thorn of conscience that keeps us grounded.  It is one of the few vocations that is clearly undertaken in the name of God.  Atheists can be quite good at it too. 

So why do we come back?  We come back to meet our students, of course.  To begin a journey that will last the rest of their lives.  Graduation is just a beginning in that vein, and so is tonight.  Your journey as an educator begins with that first practice, the first class this Monday with a list of names—some known and others just a question mark.  Who are these people?  The prickly and tickling curiosity—the great mystery--of this year begins with a single step forward.  Tonight we move into the future again together.  To make our own little history. 

“It All Started With a Monk”

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Reunion Weekend

St. Joseph’s Chapel

It’s ok to admit it this morning: Reunion Weekend is overwhelming.  It is dizzying and confusing, wonderful and terrifying.  And this morning we throw Father’s Day into the mix, as if there weren’t enough going on.  Some people are so confused they didn’t even make it to chapel.  You would not believe the signs of disorder and chaos I have seen on this campus on Sunday morning at the end of Reunion Weekend, as I make the slow walk up to St. Joseph’s Chapel.  The walk of shame.  For those of you who did make it to the Memorial Eucharist, congratulations (you get extra credit): and I hope to speak to the confusion this morning.  My own vantage point is mostly stationary.  I work here, I live here; this is my home.  I don’t have a plane to catch, a suitcase to pack, or a prep school dormitory room to vacate.  But the emotions that are stirred up by this weekend for me are always significant, and deserve theological consideration.  Where is God in all of this?  Right in the middle of it--ok, but where is the middle?  What does the sacred center look like?    

It doesn’t matter what year you graduated, there is a feeling of many times in your life coming together right now.  Many people and storylines are regathering, and reconnecting.  Different times in your life are coming up to greet you.  Things that had grown old are being made new.  What will you do with all of this?  How will Kent shape you again?  Father’s Day heaps even more memories and life experience upon us, as students of Kent become fathers, and grandfathers.  For those of us who have lost our fathers, the living and the dead can be eerily intimate, especially at this Memorial Eucharist.  From a theological perspective, it were as if our arms were so full of memories, that something must give way.  What should we hold onto?  What is it now ok to let go of?     

As I attempted to bring all of this together in a sermon, pretty much unsuccessfully, I had a wonderful interruption this week.  Three monks from the Order of the Holy Cross came to pay me a visit.  Brother Robert, Brother Julian, and Brother Daniel came to visit the school founded by Father Frederick Sill, a monk from the same order, one hundred and seven years ago.  Walt Disney, who is one of my personal heroes, was fond of summing up all of his movies and theme parks and lives touched with the simple statement: It all started with a mouse.  Somehow this simple phrase centered him, and humbled him.  It gave him the right perspective to take it all in.  Well, at Kent School, it all started with a monk.  I thought of our history as the three monks and I said a prayer at the grave of Father Sill, just outside this chapel in the garden.  The three monks and I toured the campus on a rainy day with something like this simple phrase in mind.  It all started with a monk.  A monk who certainly had no vision of his school eventually having a campus for girls, or –God help us, a consolidated campus with boys and girls together.  Yet it has all come to pass.  The occasion of the monks’ visit was the founding of another school by the monks of Holy Cross: this time in Grahamstown, South Africa: Holy Cross School.  As Kent was once founded for young men of modest means, Holy Cross is attended by some of the poorest children on the Eastern Cape of South Africa, in a region ravaged by AIDS, and poverty.  The most pressing needs for these children are medical care and education, and Holy Cross School has educated 150 children so far, and they are adding a grade each year.  As we walked the campus of Kent School under umbrellas, Brother Robert Sevensky, the Superior of Holy Cross, remarked: “Just look at this place.  Imagine what Holy Cross School will be like in a hundred years.”  Because of their visit, this Reunion Weekend wasn’t about the parties for me, though I hope you enjoyed them.  It was about a deeper vision of who we are, and who we can be, and how we can affect the world.  With Grahamstown and its little school in mind, the complicated feelings and experience of this weekend became incredibly simple: education is the best way to change the world, one person at a time.  And the quickest way to change the world is to change your own heart.  It all started with a monk.  And it is happening again.          

Sometimes the lessons on Sunday can also help to simplify things on Reunion Weekend.  They give the day focus, at least for the preacher.  That is not the case this Sunday.  The readings are all over the place.  But the gospel from Luke in particular deserves consideration.  Like the weekend itself, the story of an unnamed woman anointing Jesus can be incredibly complex and overwhelming; and it was also quite scandalous, make no mistake about that.  So how should we approach this story from Luke?  In our own story, Father Sill came from the Holy Cross Monastery at West Park, New York.  He came from the banks of the Hudson River to the banks of the Housatonic to start a school.  It has never failed to impress me how often those who choose God over mammon often end up in such nice places.  Here in our river valley, perhaps the best image for me to get the most out of Reunion Weekend, and Luke, is to just jump in the river.  Just take a leap.  To jump in the waters of memory, and to keep it very simple: try to be in the moment.  Just be.  Let the current take you.  Don’t fight for control.  Be still, don’t thrash around, and let the river tell you her story.  In our shared history, it all started with a monk.  In the lesson from Luke, it all started with a woman. 

The gospel today is the story of a woman who anointed Jesus in public.  It is a story that combines overwhelming gratitude, and healing, with a scandalous intimacy at a dinner party.  Jesus is anointed with holy oil, but, more importantly, with the tears of the woman.  Jewish men and women who did not know each other generally didn’t speak in public at this time; they certainly didn’t touch each other.  In the anointing, the oil and tears mingle on the feet of Jesus, and she wipes his feet tenderly with her hair.  Everyone is scandalized by this woman.  Everyone except Jesus.  He is touched, literally and emotionally, spiritually.  It is easily the most loving thing that is done to Jesus in his recorded ministry.  Jesus is usually the one giving love, even unto the cross.  Here he receives love, without shame.  It all started with a woman.  The woman is unnamed by Luke; or is she?  Many scholars, including me, believe that Luke is presenting the anointing tradition of Mary Magdalene, who is introduced immediately following the scandalous dinner party.  Who was this remarkable woman? 

Getting to know Mary Magdalene is like jumping into one of the most mysterious rivers of our tradition.  And the church has been little help in finding, let alone navigating, this river--because the current is so strong.  Dan Brown has been no help either, though I hope you enjoy his books.  But if you make the leap, the scenery is unbelievable.      

Let’s begin with background on the Marys we think we know, but haven’t ever really met.  As Mary his mother gave birth to Jesus’s life, Mary Magdalene was the mid-wife of his death: the one who anointed Jesus before his crucifixion.  However, this would be following solely Luke’s gospel, and only by a logical leap: “And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.”  The woman is unnamed in Luke, but, as mentioned, Mary Magdalene is introduced at the beginning of the next chapter (which the church includes in today’s gospel text).  Mary is described as a woman of means, a wealthy woman and patron, not as a prostitute, or even as a sinner.  In no biblical tradition is she described as a prostitute. 

The proximity of the woman who is a sinner (still not necessarily a prostitute) to Mary Magdalene in the text of Luke provides the connection; they must be the same woman.  Mary Magdalene, the woman who is a sinner, is then the one anointing Jesus so intimately.  This connection was first made official by Pope Gregory in the sixth century, six hundred years after the fact; there is no proof for it.  But, lost in the sound and fury of Mary Magdalene’s alleged status as the woman who is a sinner, is the fact that Matthew, Mark, and John all agree that Jesus was anointed by Mary before his death.  But she was not Mary Magdalene.  It was more likely Mary of Bethany because the anointings all take place at Bethany.  This is the sister of Martha and Lazarus; she has a few stories.  Only John’s woman is explicitly Mary of Bethany in his anointing at Bethany.  A logical assumption would then be that Luke’s unnamed woman is also Mary of Bethany because it follows the same structure of the anointing scenes of the other three gospels; it just doesn’t locate it specifically at Bethany.  Despite the overwhelming agreement of three gospels, and the anonymity of Luke’s woman, the anointing tradition is most often associated with Mary Magdalene.  What is happening here?  Where are we floating to? 

The tradition of anointing the human body was not embraced by the early church, and there is a great deal of mystery surrounding Mary Magdalene as a result.  Bruce Chilton, a Religion professor at Bard College, and also an Episcopal priest, attempts to rectify the repression of this remarkable woman in his biography of Mary Magdalene.

“Mary and her nameless colleague in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel both show what other ancient documents demonstrate: Women in Jewish antiquity, particularly within the folk wisdom practiced in Galilee, exercised a prominent role as anointers.  Their domain extended far beyond the conventional household, and there is evidence that significant groups of practitioners looked to these women to guide them in their quest to leave this world behind them and experience the divine world.”

Mary Magdalene’s suppression as an early leader in the church, which she was, as well as the first apostle—the first witness to Easter resurrection in the gospels, which she was, is likely the result of the early church’s discomfort with physical anointing, especially its physical component.  There is an unhidden element of eros in all four gospel traditions with the woman anointing Jesus with oil from the alabaster jar, not to mention the unseemly tears.  For his part, Jesus is not embarrassed by it; he is instead deeply moved by the woman’s love and tender devotion.  But the male witnesses are quite alarmed.  In all but one case, they are too disturbed to even name the woman directly.  The four evangelists share the taboo panic with the witnesses; or rather they project it on to them. 

The scenes with the anointing woman show that the evangelists and the early church were uncomfortable with powerful women anointing others as a spiritual practice of the church, yet it was too important for them to fully cover it up.  So it’s there, but very confusing.  Jesus also approved of it; all the gospels agree on that point, however reluctantly.  Despite this institutional discomfort, the church has retained the remnant of the anointing tradition in four of its seven sacraments: Baptism (with the chrism, the oil anointing the forehead), Confirmation, Holy Orders, and Last Rites, with the laying on of hands.  The hidden history is actually in front of our eyes, hiding in plain sight, in the sacraments of the church.  What a strange way for an institution to continue its past while repressing the mystical female tradition of Judaism and the early church, and completely forgetting its first priestly practitioners.  This is a mighty river with no name.  It deserves one.

We often think of the love of God, the wisdom of the divine, coming directly from Jesus into the world.  In this moment of time, Jesus stops in his ordinary rounds to receive God’s love from someone else.  There is no moment quite like it anywhere in the gospels.  Jesus received the anointing tradition, a priestly ritual, from a woman, but it was no dry formula.  It is a personal religion, overflowing with love, with appreciation, with gratitude.  With tears.  The God in Mary Magdalene meets the God in Jesus Christ.  When we live in gratitude, to our school or to our fathers, we are capable of giving God’s love to each other--even giving it back to Jesus, with our names, our lives, our tears.  We are not passively receiving God’s love, we can also give it back.  We were all given the gift of life.  How we live it is the gift we give back.  Your life is a sacred story.  

As we leave the mysterious river for the familiar dry land, I’d like to close this morning with a poem by the playwright Jose Rivera.  The poem is an odd one, as poems go; it’s just a list of the first times that you do something.  I shared this poem with my own high school class at our 25^th reunion, as we remembered our past together.  There were tears in the crowd when I read it, like the woman with Jesus.  Kids want to grow up and be adults, and adults long for their lost youth.  It’s crazy the way we are.  There is another way: to be completely awake in the moment.  Then this poem, this list of firsts, becomes your own witness to the beauty and wonder of your life, your sacred story, and the God who loves each of you as if you were the only person on the face of the earth.  From Rivera, a simple list.  A poem, of your wonderful life: 

The first time a child trusts you to carry them to the next room.

The first time you drive from Westfield, Massachusetts, to San Diego, with someone you’re in love with.

The first time you watch birth.

The first lines of Paradise Lost.

The first time you make a decisive three point shot in a game that really counts.

The first time you get the dog to go to the bathroom outside.

The first time you can read “I love you” in a lover’s eyes.

The first family reunion without homicidal fantasies.

The first love letter.

The first serious talk about love with your child.

The first epiphany.

The first time you hear Lorca in Spanish.

The first real friendship with a person of another race.

The first gray hair.

The first time you see Picasso’s Guernica.

The first time you visit your birthplace.

The first time you hear Lightning Hopkins.

The first visible comet.

The first beer with your father.

The first time you feel attractive and someone calls you “angel.”

The first experience with something remotely like a god.

The first recovery after a serious illness.

The first time therapy makes sense.

The first birthday of your first born.

The first time you can’t walk and your lover carries you to the next room.

The first foul ball you catch in Fenway Park.

The first time you stand alone and you’re scared to death and you don’t change your position.

The first time you’re convinced of your mortality and you laugh.

The first sunrise after the first death of a parent.

The first time you forgive the unforgivable.

The first time you see the Earth from space.

The first time it is truly obvious that it was better that you had lived, at this time, in this world.

The first time you decide every moment of your life should be a work of art.

The first time you die and you breathe again and you speak to the living.

The first time you realize that it all just might have been okay.

May God bless you, your families, and all the lives you touch with your own.  

“The Theology of House”

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

            The gospel from John presents the healing of a man who was formerly paralyzed.  The healing takes place in Jerusalem, outside the temple, near pools of water.  The healing occurs on the Sabbath, and, because it is the Sabbath when no work was to be performed, the man is unable to enter the pool as he desires.  No one will help him; he is frustrated.  Though the other gospels present Jesus healing a paralyzed man, in all cases indoors, John’s gospel provides some unique details, including the healing taking place out of doors.

            The most notable detail is the question from Jesus to the man. 

            “Do you want to be healed?”  Do you want to be healed?

            The funny thing about this gospel is the man doesn’t answer the question.  He just starts in complaining about how no one is willing to put him in the precious pool.  I think there is an element of the human condition in this healing, one that is both funny and tragic.  The man would rather complain than answer the simple question: Do you want to be healed?  The man would rather whine than walk again.  Healings abound in all of the gospels, and the role of healer for Jesus is the constant in the four canonical gospels.  When you go looking for healing moments in the gospel, it’s hard not to consider them as the major theme of Jesus as messiah.  

Religion is not about everything going perfectly, and a perfect life without mistakes.  The word religion itself means to re-ligament.  To, literally, put ligaments back in place.  You can rightly think of this in terms of your own body, because that’s exactly how it was intended.  Religion assumes brokenness, and it means knowing what to do when something is broken.  You put it back together, if you want to be healed.  And the thing about a broken bone, it becomes stronger at the place where it was broken if it is set properly.  It becomes the strongest part of the bone.  But, as mentioned, you have to want to be healed.  Apparently, some of us don’t.

That part of the sermon, the beginning, came pretty easily; but then everything ground to a halt.  Maybe your papers are going like this as well right now.  Spring is finally here.  It’s May; and there are three weeks left of class.  I’m sure if it was the weather that caused my writer’s block.  Call it spring fever on this beautiful weekend.  As my seniors know, I don’t believe in senioritis, but I was experiencing something like it over the last few days.  I waited, and nothing came.  So I started watching television—I began watching reruns of a show I used to love.  It’s a show all about medicine and healing, one that that lasted from 2004 to 2012.     

 I had no choice for my writer’s block: I turned to a doctor.  He didn’t give me a prescription, but he did give me a sermon, or something like it.  His name is Doctor Gregory House of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.  The show is House.  House is the ultimate curmudgeon; he is part Nietzsche as an uberdoctor who doesn’t have to follow the rules, part Sherlock Homes, and part Socrates lifting up the examined life for all of us.  And yet House is, in many ways, a very, very horrible person; yet he inspires both fascination and loathing.  As your chaplain, I confess; I can’t take my eyes off him.  Terribly, tragically, I identify with him.  I love watching him trying to outsmart his wonderful and very attractive supervisor, Dr. Lisa Cuddy.  I would like to have Cuddy as my supervisor, and then I would like to trick her too.   

There is so much that I enjoy about House, but his character is not mine.  I’m much more like Wilson (like Watson for Sherlock Holmes).  I see the good side of people, most of the time, or I try to.  For House, there are no sides to people; otherwise we would be geometric shapes, right? 

There is only the truth that the grouchy doctor states all the time:

            “Everybody lies.”  Everybody lies.  

            How many times have you heard House say that?  We will have plenty of Housisms before this “sermon” is over, but here are some early House quotes.  House rules if you will.  

            “I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they do.”

            “It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies.  The only variable is about what.”

            “I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”

            “Dying people lie too.  Wish they’d worked less, been nicer, opened orphanages for kittens…if you really want to do something, you do it.  You don’t save it for a sound bite.”

            Now the title of this sermon is “The Theology of House,” if there can be such a thing.  House’s vision of the human condition is by no means a modern defense of original sin, and it does sound a lot like Augustine, whom House would have definitely hated.  But it certainly presents the world as no longer one of good people and bad people, the sketchy people and the special people.  There are only patients; we are all patients.  We are all being asked the question by the doctor: Do you want to be healed?  And we are all complainers.  There is a radical equality among all people, in the mind of House.  Jesus thought like this too.  Jesus and House.  What a horrible comparison, right?  Jesus is nice, right?  House is a devil.  Not exactly.  You can start reading the gospels tonight.  Do it.  How many times is Jesus nice?  Stay up all night looking for the answer, and I, like House, will see you in the morning.  Jesus isn’t very nice either.  And Jesus and House both have disciples.  Jesus had James and John and Andrew and Peter.  House has Foreman, Chase, Cameron, a disciple named 13, and that guy from the Harold and Kumar movies    

Every time I hear a feeble excuse from a student, like why Alex Gandolfo slept through my A block class, again, I think of what House would say.  What would House do?  WWHD.  But I don’t think I would enjoy spending time with a real Dr. House.  What would he say to me?  How would he penetrate my clever lies?  I can only watch him once a day, for an hour.  That’s it.  But there, there it is.  I’m already lying.  If there’s more than one episode, I’m watching it, even if I have papers to grade, or a sermon to write.  Two nights ago, I watched three episodes in a row.  Two I had seen before. 

I promised House rules, or House music.  So here are just a sample of the famous sayings of House, the rudest of the wise men, the curmudgeon messiah.  Here we go:    

            “Humanity is overrated.”

            “If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything.”

            “Tragedies happen.”

“Weird works for me.”

“In this universe effect follows cause.  I’ve complained about it but-“

“There’s no I in ‘team.’  There is a me, though, if you jumble it up.”

“Welcome to the end of the thought process.”

“If he gets better, I’m right.  If he dies, you’re right.”

“I hurt my leg.  I have a note.”

“If you talk to God, you’re religious.  If God talks to you, you’re psychotic.”

“Arrogance has to be earned.”

“…the fact that the sexual pleasure center of your brain has been overstimulated by spirochetes is a poor basis for a relationship.  Learned that one the hard way.”

“Never trust doctors.”

 “New is good.  Because old ended in death.”

“What usually happens when you poke something with a stick?  It pokes back.”

“Misery is better than nothing.”

“Reality is almost always wrong.”

And:

“You could think I’m wrong, but that’s no reason to stop thinking.”

My favorite House episode is the one with the hallucinating priest.  Among the many symptoms of the priest, he has seen a disturbing religious vision—of a hovering Jesus who is bleeding from the wounds of the crucifixion.  The priest is completely burned out by his ministry with the homeless, and it is no longer clear that the priest believes in a loving God anymore.  The dialogue between House and the priest is penetrating; each sees beyond the façade of the other man, to the core, the soul.  House calls the Catholic priest “Father Nietzsche.”  He is a patient that House even visits, happily, on house calls.  Though neither professes a belief in God, things happen to redeem them both that neither can explain.  When House eliminates the hallucination of Jesus as a symptom, rather than as an actual event in time, which it was, the doctor correctly diagnoses the priest’s disease.  At numerous points, House calls the priest a hypocrite.  The priest responds, without missing a beat, that House is the biggest hypocrite he has met in his entire life: for pretending that he doesn’t care about his patients.  Yes, he does care.  And we teachers care about all of you.  He may not like it, but Dr. House has soul.  Though he seems to teeter on the threshold of self-destruction, House always overcomes his intellectual isolation by engagement with the problems of others.  He gets out of his own miserable head by reaching out to others in pain.  Perhaps the most powerful moment of healing imagination recently in our nation was when victims of the Boston bombing were visited by soldiers who had also lost arms and legs in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Get out of your own head and your own problems.  If you want to be healed, rise, get up and walk, pick up your cross, and go visit someone in pain like you were.  In every powerful healing, there is a healing in the healer as well.       

            More than anything, House believes that the universe is a beautiful, complicated puzzle; the answers are out there, we just have to find them.  Is this a kind of faith?  I don’t look to House for faith, I already have that.  He would call this faith my imaginary friend.  Yes, my imaginary friend, the suprarational God who created a rational and intelligible universe, for genius atheists and all of you to figure out.  I love that God.  But enough about him/her, we talk about him/her all the time in chapel.  This talk is about House.  House gives me hope.  I look to House to remind me that eccentricity works, and conflict is an intellectual necessity.  Progress comes from the eccentric people in our world, not the followers, and House sure makes it look like a whole lot of fun to think outside the box.  His inability to love is a problem, but hey, nobody’s perfect.  Be an individual, avoid Dr. Cuddy (unless it’s a date), and clinic hours whenever you can, and do not take painkillers without a doctor’s prescription.  School is almost over, thank God, but there is still work to be done.  And you can do it; you can even excel, and save the patient, which is you, after all.  The answers to your classes are out there.  The answers to the problems in the world are out there too.  Now go and find them.  Amen.