A Home for God

In its earliest days, when Augustus and John Kirby Allen marketed their soupy, Yellow Fever-infested, sixty-six hundred acre real estate boondoggle as, “having an abundance of excellent spring water and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness…handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well-watered,”[i]  Houston, Texas attracted sophisticated people such as William Fairfax Gray, a blue-blooded Virginian who moved here with his family.  But an influx of sophisticated people dis not render Houston cosmopolitan overnight.  In 1838, Gray himself wrote a letter lamenting the brutality and heathen immorality of his new home.  Gray wrote that, “Dissolute and vicious habits are too general here.  Those who do not fall into [them]…mourn over the privileges and social blessings they have left [behind] and eagerly look for the time when they shall be received here.”[ii]

Why did Houston have such a difficult time in those early days adopting godly, civilized ways of being?  William Fairfax Gray felt sure of the answer.  He said, “We have had several Presbyterian preachers here—several Methodist—occasionally Baptists—and one Roman Catholic…but not once have I heard an Episcopalian preach, or the Episcopal service read since I [arrived]!”[iii]

The time had come, it seems, for the Episcopal Church to arrive in young Houston.  From Houston, William Fairfax Gray wrote to the Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States begging for resources and a missionary priest.  And by March 16, 1839, he would wait no longer.  Gray and twenty-seven other prominent men of Houston signed the charter establishing an Episcopal Church—at the time, the Episcopal Church—in Houston.  And thus, Christ Church was born.

If this much of this history gives you a sense of déjà vu, it’s because I first shared it with you four and a half years ago, when we celebrated Christ Church’s 175^th anniversary.  But there’s more: In 1845, Christ Church’s growing congregation purchased an abandoned wooden schoolhouse and moved it onto this city lot at Texas and Fannin, creating Christ Church’s first makeshift building.  Two years later, the first proper church was completed, followed by a second church in 1859.  In each instance, the congregation outgrew the worship space even before it was completed.  Finally, in 1893—the same year the United States was hit with a major economic depression—Christ Church built this stately and beautiful sacred space in which we now worship, and which we are in the ongoing process of restoring for future generations.  The first service in what is now the Cathedral was held on Christmas Eve 1893, one hundred twenty-five years ago this coming Christmas.  What a dedication that must have been!

Christ Church Cathedral, not quite in 1893

And here we are, newly back in the Cathedral after several months in Reynolds Hall.  Without conscious planning on our part, but surely, I think, with God’s smiling providence, the day of our return to this space is the singular day in which the lectionary gives us the story of the dedication to end all dedications, that of Solomon’s great Temple in Jerusalem.

If we think Christ Church’s journey to the completion of this space was long and arduous, we need to read our bibles.  For the Israelites, the long trek that culminates today with the dedication of the Temple included escape from Egypt, forty years of wandering in the desert, a long period of tribal warfare with neighbors and one another, the dysfunctional reign of King Saul, and finally the consolidation of power under the great King David, before David’s son Solomon finally builds what both he and God call a “home for God.”

After years of building, furnishing, decorating, and preparing, today the great Temple is ready to be dedicated.  At one point in the august proceedings, Solomon’s confidence falters.  He, Solomon the Wise, shows acute human doubt when he asks, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?”  Solomon has built a house for God.  It is grand, and beautiful, and crawling with priests.  It surely looks the part.  But will God show up?  Almost three thousand years after King Solomon, as we reenter this beautiful and sacred space in the midst of a restoration, as we rededicate it by our use, we may wonder, too.

Dedication of Solomon’s Temple

In this morning’s reading, King Solomon is not disappointed.  God keeps God’s promises, and God has earlier promised that God will abide in the Temple.  It is Solomon’s confidence that is shaky, not God’s commitment.[iv]  When the Temple’s holy precincts are opened, we are told, “A cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.”

I believe that is true here, too.  I believe that, as our prayers and praises rise in this space, so does God’s Spirit.  Can you sense it?  Do you feel it?  It expands and fills these holy nooks and crannies like the smoke of incense, seeping into and through the wood, seeping into and through us.  The glory of the Lord fills this house.  God dwells here.

Obviously, our restoration of this sacred place is not complete.  There will be scaffolding and green fencing around God’s house for several months yet.  Navigation around the campus is, admittedly, a bit tricky.  But all this ongoing work on the Cathedral serves to remind us that our ongoing work in this world is incomplete.  The reading from 1 Kings today ends with the image of one who barely knows Israel’s God nevertheless seeking God out in the Temple, dropping to his knees in his need, and praying to God for solace and help.  Solomon says that God’s glory will be revealed most of all when God responds to that man, to the one who has not yet known God deeply.

That is our work left to do, each and every day.  We live in an era of scandal and disillusionment, and the news of the past week from politics to the church only underscores that fact.  In a world where people increasing live as if we are our own little gods, answerable to no one, and ignore the reality that the divine is present in our midst and in our lives, our fidelity to the God who lives here calls us to go out from here and meet those who do not know God, who are alienated and estranged, and extend a word, or a hand, or an act of surprising grace.  When we leave this space and live that way, then God’s glory is revealed in stunning arrays, and God begins to fill the world around us.  Lives are changed; the world is changed.

From this very house—this very base of operations—God moves out into this city, passing in glory over and into God’s creation and God’s people.  We call this day Rally Day, and what better around which to rally than that!  We, like the disciples today when Jesus asks them if they will walk away from his Gospel, say, “Where else could we go?  For you give us the words of eternal life.  We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  This is God’s home, and we are privileged and blessed to make it our home, too.  And where God dwells, grace abounds.

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[i] https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/At-least-the-Allen-brothers-got-it-right-on-2144575.php

[ii] A Happy Worldly Abode, 25.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] 1 Kings 6:11-13

If it walks like a duck…

In 1738, an eccentric but very serious French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson created a life-size, copper-plated mechanical water fowl that amazed an audience at the French Royal Academy of Science.[i]  The bird could quack, as well as move its head and wings.  It ate kernels of grain.  And most spectacularly, it digested and excreted that grain like, well, something malodorous that moves through a duck.

This was the Age of Enlightenment, when such philosophical giants as Hume and Kant were asking the big questions about life, knowledge, and the universe.  And Vaucanson’s invention oddly, if but for a moment, took center stage.  It begged a philosophical question of its own.  Copper or not, some contended, if it quacks like a duck, and flaps its wings like a duck, and…excretes like a duck, it must be a duck!  And thus was created the “duck test.”

The “duck test” entered more commonly into our lexicon a century later through the poet James Whitcomb Riley, who said explicitly, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”[ii]

Incidentally, in our own era the duck test has gained in sophistication through the artificial intelligence test developed in 1950 by Alan Turing.[iii]  The Turing test monitors the workings of computers to determine whether they exhibit functions equivalent to that of human thought.  If (or when) a computer passes the Turing test, we will have to ask seriously, “If it thinks like a person, if it is intelligent like a person, is it not a person?  Is it not alive?”

A blueprint for Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanical duck

Though that’s both ominous and interesting, it’s a lot deeper than I intend to dive in this sermon.  We’ll stick with ducks.  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.  The idea is simple and compelling.  It’s also theological.  Proverbs 23:7 reads, “For as a person thinks in his heart, so is he.”[iv]  In other words, whatever resides within us—whatever anger, grudge, resentment, suspicion, self-regard—is not separate from us.  It is us.  Despite our twenty-first century tendency to detach and compartmentalize, Holy Scripture will have none of it.  Sooner or later, I am not a man who is angry or resents or self-serves.  Rather, I am anger and resentment and self-serving. That’s who I am.  In his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis mentions, for instance, the grumbling woman who becomes the grumble.

We may be able to mask this from the world.  But we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking we’ve fooled God.  The Prayer Book has us remind ourselves by praying to God each and every Sunday, “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid…”[v]  God knows what is in our hearts, and God knows, even if no one else does, who we are.

My goodness, that’s depressing.  It may help to note that it is not only dark thoughts and vicious feelings that can define us.  Ducks are not inherently ominous, and the Proverb is not necessarily negative.  As a person thinks in his heart, so is he, and if we are inwardly loving, empathetic and compassionate, selfless, then that, too, is our identity.

But what if we aren’t?  That brings us to St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians today.  Unlike most of the New Testament epistles, Ephesians wasn’t written to address a specific problem.  In fact, it likely wasn’t originally directed only to the church in Ephesus.  Most likely, the Letter to the Ephesians was a general letter directed toward all or many churches.  It addresses general, universal issues that face everyone.  And one of the issues it addresses head-on is our human tendency, often without awareness, to be formed into the kinds of people God doesn’t want us to be.

Paul diagnoses that we “live in the futility of [our hearts and] minds…darkened in [our] understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of [our] ignorance and hardness of heart.”[vi]  That sounds hopeless.  But is it?

Years ago, married friends of mine saw their marriage fall apart.  The reasons for the breakdown were common and mundane, and eventually the couple lived as uncomfortable roommates in the same house.  They reached a point where it was extremely awkward even to be in the room with each other, and physical contact of the slightest kind was abrasive.  The husband said to me, “I can’t even remember why I ever wanted to be married.”

For the sake of their children—and only for their sake—the couple went to marriage counseling.  The counselor told them to go out to dinner at least once a week, and when they did so, to hold hands at the table.  She told them to sleep in the same bad and scoot toward the middle.  She told them to sit down together at the end of each day and recap the day’s events to one another.  And she made them, verbally and in writing, promise to do these things for six months.

In the counselor’s words, she told my friends to act “as if” they were a contented couple who enjoyed and were interested in one another.  At first, it was physically and emotionally painful.  Everything in them rebelled against the practice.  And things didn’t get better in a day, or a week, or in several weeks.  How could it?  As my friends thought in their hearts, so were they.  They disdained each other.  They were disdainful.

But eventually, subtle shifts began to happen.  On the drive home from work, he would realize with surprise that he looked forward to recapping his day with her.  She would catch himself wanting to try out that new restaurant with him.  They would brush past one another in the kitchen and linger rather than recoiling.  They pretended and practiced, with dedicated intention, until, finally, the “as if” became real.  Their outward actions transformed their inner selves.  More than a decade after these events, they are married, and they are people marked not by disdain but by joy.

Acting “as if” is a common prescription in psychotherapy.[vii]  It also turns out to be a spiritual practice with deep roots in Holy Scripture.  In his Letter to the Ephesians, in addition to diagnosing us so deflatingly, St. Paul reminds us that we are called to union with Jesus Christ and with one another as his Church.  Paul encourages us to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which [we] have been called.”[viii]  And how do we do that?  How do we go from being people with darkened and futile minds to become grace-filled people who live through grace in the world?  By acting “as if.”  Today Paul is our counselor.  He says, “Put away falsehood.  Speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but…do not let the sun go down on your anger…Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up…so that your words may give grace to those who hear…Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

St. Paul puts a fine point on his prescription when he says, “Be imitators of God.”  Act “as if.”  When we do this with dedicated intention, Paul affirms, then slowly, perhaps imperceptibly at first, and with God’s help we are changed.  You see, one who speaks consistently in love will eventually find it very hard to hate.  One who lives in community with his neighbors will find it impossible to disregard them.  One who dwells upon God’s blessed forgiveness will, perhaps to his own surprise, find that he cannot hold on to his grudges.

We walk in grace; we speak with grace; we spread our wings in grace; and we discover that we have become a different duck.  In Paul’s words, we mature to “the measure of the full stature of Christ.”[ix]  In this way, and no other, the kingdom of God dawns.  In this way, having been transformed, our lives of grace begin to transform the world.  As if it could be true…We’ll never know unless we start quacking.

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[i] https://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/you-know-phrase-if-looks-5235884

[ii] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6770726-when-i-see-a-bird-that-walks-like-a-duck

[iii] http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html

[iv] New King James Version

[v] BCP 355

[vi] Ephesians 4:17-18

[vii] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/201606/when-fake-it-till-you-make-it-and-when-you-shouldnt

[viii] Ephesians 4:1

[ix] Ephesians 4:13

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

“What I did on my summer vacation,” by Barkley Thompson…Remember those grade school essays?  I’ve been away for a while.  Sixty days, to be exact.  I was on sabbatical, which is not exactly vacation but was hugely fun.  So, what did I do on sabbatical?

I finished writing a book, which is this very day available in the Cathedral bookstore.  I wrote a historical essay on a dark chapter in my family’s Texas history, in which one family member murdered another in 1878.  (I’m hoping a journal will pick it up.)  And, I prepared the lectures for the Dean’s Hour series on God in Southern literature that I’ll teach in October.

I read a lot.  I read the morning newspaper, which was a rare treat.  I read Ron Chernow’s new biography of Ulysses S. Grant.  I re-read a sublimely good Wendell Berry novel.  And I read one other book, to which I’ll return in a few minutes.

But I didn’t simply sit at home, read, and write.  At the beginning of June, Jill, the kids, and I traveled to Malta, where I served as the summer vicar of Holy Trinity Anglican Church.  While in Malta, the Thompsons lived in the big, rambling one hundred ten-year-old former Bishop’s House, which had what I’ll call a “moldly nostalgia” to it.  It was shabby chic, with a strong emphasis on the shabby.  Even so, it was home for most of a month.

Valletta, Malta

After returning stateside, I supplied one Sunday for our sister parish, St. Mary’s in Bellville.  I visited General Convention for a day in Austin.  We hosted twenty-two Thompsons for a family reunion at our little place in Austin County. I returned here for a day to honor the life of, and lay to rest, our friend and brother Ardell Ray. Finally, we traveled to Linville, in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I served at All Saints church last Sunday.

As I said, the sabbatical was hugely fun, but it was also taxing in a way I did not expect, both intellectually and geographically.  I’ll explain why.

In writing the essay about my Texas family, I traveled back in time and read century-old letters that chronicle my own kin betraying kin, loved ones disowning loved ones, family spilling blood with acts of violence.  In reading Ron Chernow and Southern authors, I revisited periods in our national history in which we treated one another as less than human.  In reading the daily newspaper, I was reminded that such periods are not only past history, but also present.

Geographically, on Malta I again encountered a place that has been conquered more often than perhaps anywhere else on the planet.  Every empire that has ever traversed the Mediterranean has invaded, at one time or another, Malta.  From the Middle Ages to the Second World War, the Maltese have been a people under assault, pawns in someone else’s geopolitical chess game.  This identity is in the Maltese psyche, and for a month I experienced just an iota of it through osmosis.

A letter written by my great, great, great grandfather, lamenting the family feud that would ultimately lead to his murder in 1878.

Just down the road from here in Bellville, St. Mary’s church is between rectors, and the good folks there are experiencing the palpable anxiety that comes with such between time.  The parishioners of St. Mary’s wonder who will emerge to become their next spiritual shepherd.  They wonder if they’ll be o.k.

A bit further on, in Austin at General Convention, the day I visited the anxiety there was heightened because the debate was Prayer Book revision.   You want to discomfit a convention center full of Episcopalians?  Talk about revising the Book of Common Prayer.

And then I met grief, as did each of you, when Ardell died.

When I think back over the summer, over all of these things, I realize I should be drained and famished, spiritually speaking.  Betrayal, disregard, violence, conquest, anxiety, grief: These are the things I visited on sabbatical.  But then, one doesn’t have to go on sabbatical to encounter any of these.  They are part and parcel to everyday life.  We need only turn on the news, or peek around the next corner, or get out of bed in the morning to find them.  Perhaps we should all be famished.  And yet, today I stand here with and before you, and I am full.  Each experience I had on sabbatical—both in my armchair and traveling far and wide—sustained me.  Why is that?  How can it be?

The last book I picked up on sabbatical (the one I am still reading) is Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie’s classic Tales of Old-Time Texas.  Dobie shares one tale about the ubiquity of cornbread in the wilds of old Texas.  Those who left their old lives behind to blaze a trail in Texas often suffered depredation and want; they encountered betrayal and loss; their souls, like their mouths, at times become so parched as to leave them desolate.  But every time it seemed that hope was gone, when they’d reached the farthest edge of the frontier, the weariest traveler would come upon some cabin or campsite and be offered cornbread.  Wheat was scarce, and even salt pork sometimes ran out, but cornbread was reliable.  When life was precarious, a kernel or two of corn ground into meal and mixed with a sprinkle of water was enough to sustain.  It was like a gift from heaven.

In last week’s Gospel lesson, five thousand hungry people were fed with fish and bread.  They ate their fill and felt good.  Their grumbling stomachs were assuaged.  Today’s Gospel lesson begins the very next morning, and the crowd is ravenous again.  The full-bellied satiation of the evening before has worn off, and the crowd craves for something more.  They follow Jesus doggedly across the Sea of Galilee, and one senses that their desperation is not of the kind that comes from missing breakfast.  Their hunger runs deeper than their stomachs.  The Gospel is trying to tell us something more here.  It is revealing to us what we already know in our own lives: that material sustenance—whether food, leisure, abundant things, or manufactured summer experiences—is always transitory.  It can fill us up and satisfy us for an hour, a day, or maybe even a season, but eventually we recognize that transitory things can’t nourish the spirit.  At best, they are like a faddish diet pill that merely masks the emptiness caused by the anxieties, griefs, and disappointments in our lives.

The crowd who follow Jesus around the lake want him to feed them again like he did the night before, to keep their gnawing emptiness at bay. But this time Jesus won’t give them something transitory.  Jesus says to them with a truth so simple as to be elegant: “The bread of God gives life to the world…I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Each of my sabbatical experiences could have ended with a gnawing spiritual hunger, an emptiness.  But none of them did, because in each of them I met Jesus.  Each time the landscape began to look desolate and the pangs began to throb, some kernel of grace, some sign of God’s very presence appeared.  In the often convicting Southern writing of Flannery O’Connor; in the fierce Catholic devotion of the Maltese people; in the anxious but ardent faith of Episcopalians in Bellville and Austin; in the vulnerable love of this congregation for Ardell Ray; in blessed moments with my family—in each of these Jesus was present this summer as the bread of heaven.

And so it is with all of our encounters.  At the very edge of our frontiers, when we are drained and empty and the landscape seems desolate, there is a kernel of grace to be found, it we will but look.  Jesus is always there, ahead of us on the lakeshore.  He meets us, assuaging our deepest hunger, filling our emptiness, redeeming our bleakest encounters and greatest challenges with God’s embracing love.  He is the bread of life, the very gift of God that never runs out.  And like those met in friendly cabins or around warm campfires, he is ours to share with one another.

It’s good to be home.  I’ve missed you all.