VA-effin'-R

 VA-effin’-R 

“Are you still writing about forgiveness?” Nils asked me from the other end of the phone. “I read what you wrote about the parable.”
     “Yes, I am,” I said. “Even today when I am writing about Premier League soccer.”
     “Well, that should be good!” Nils said.

“If it is, it’s because I am getting help.”
     “From?”
     “Rory Smith.”*
     “I’m impressed,” Nils said. I could have said, “Don’t be,” but I didn’t. But it’s not as if Rory called me, or I could call him. But he was writing about soccer as “entertainment.” And I was reading it, with interest. He was saying that it’s “an existential tension within soccer — in all sports — . . . . Is it, primarily, a form of entertainment? Or is that more accurately depicted as a byproduct of the activity? Is its actual aim to establish which team is better and which worse, and the fact that people seem to find it compelling just a happy accident?” I can answer that, “It’s entertainment. Not only primarily but secondarily as well. All of it: soccer, tennis, basketball, water polo, beach volleyball. Especially beach volleyball.” Or, it’s all entertainment except baseball.

     But Rory goes on to frame it in what he calls “less theoretical terms. This season, the all-knowing, all-seeing referees of the Premier League have decided that there is no greater threat to the well-being of the most popular leisure pastime the world has ever known than time-wasting.” So, “referees have shown a blizzard of yellow cards to players deemed guilty of time-wasting.” They agree with me that “players are entertainers, and therefore have a duty to provide as much entertainment as possible . . . . [And not] being sufficiently entertaining has now been turned into an offense.”
     What they haven’t cottoned onto: that they and their use of effing VAR are the guiltiest of all time-wasters; by far the least entertaining moments in any match are when it is stopped to consult someone watching a bank of cameras miles away from where anything we are interested in is happening. We can’t get rid of the referees — I don’t want to — but can’t we show the all-time red card to the damnedest time-waster of all-time time-wasting time? VA-effin’ R, if that wasn’t clear! Please.
     It’s a game. It’s imperfect. Don’t waste my time with a pursuit of perfection, when it can’t take you any closer to it than 15 to 18 takes you closer to infinity. *#//@&%*! I’d say if I said that sort of thing.
                                                                           10.05.23

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* Tomorrow, Rory will write more cogently if less pungently about VAR here.

Excursus: Matthew 20:1-16

 Excursus: Matthew 20:1-16 

Uncle Albert mentioned this passage in last week’s post. Later, Roz asked me what the parable really meant, as if I could say. So, “I couldn’t say,” I said.
     “Well, think about it then,” Roz said. “Then say.” She was serious, I could tell. So, I did; and I read about it, and I talked to Axel about it, and I talked to Uncle Albert about it, and I even talked to Nils about it. I called our rector, Susan, the former Miss Virginia, to see if she had anything to say about it she hadn’t said the Sunday before, but I couldn’t reach her.
     Then, I wrote this, which I gave to Roz, who said, “What does it say?” — handing it back to me. And I read this (below), until she said, “Don’t read it to me. Tell me.” Then, I read it anyway mostly but in a telling voice: “One of the more difficult of Jesus’ parables, often called ‘The Workers in the Vineyard,’” I started.

It’s easier to think about what a story might mean if we know the circumstances in which the story is being told. You know that. It’s one thing to read a story in the newspaper; it’s another to hear it over the telephone from a friend. 
     Jesus is in four different, but related, conversations in chapter 19. The first, with the Pharisees about divorce, need not concern us here. In the second, he is telling his disciples to let the children come to him. “Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And he lays his hands on the children that come.
     The third is with the so-called “rich young ruler.” He wants to know what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. He should keep the commandments, Jesus suggests. “Which?” the young man asks. “You know: You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal or bear false witness. You shall honor your father and your mother. Finally, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He has, the young man answers, all of them. He keeps the commandments. But he senses that isn’t all that’s involved, so he asks one more question, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” “If you would be perfect,” Jesus answers: “Go sell all that you have. Give it to the poor. Then, come follow me.” But the young man can’t accept Jesus’ invitation; he has too much to leave it behind. Unlike the children, who do come to Jesus, who have nothing to leave behind, just something to look forward to, meeting the rabbi, sitting on his lap, feeling his hand on their heads.
     In the last conversation, Jesus tells the disciples how difficult it will be for the rich to enter the kingdom. “Who will enter, then?” they want to know. Who knows? Jesus suggests. But we do know that with God nothing is impossible. “Will we?” the disciples ask. Yes, they will, for they have accepted Jesus’ invitation and left their homes to follow him.

Workers in the field.
Photo by Justin Russell

 So, to the parable of the workers in the vineyard. 
     If it is difficult, it is because it doesn’t go as we might expect or hope or want, because it isn’t complicated.
     This is what the kingdom of heaven is like: A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire workers to work in his vineyard. He finds some; they agree on an amount for their work, a denarius. (However much that is: we’re not entirely sure, incidentally.) And the landowner says, “Come, then”; and they do. The landowner goes out again—we don’t know why; interestingly, we don’t even know what season it is, whether he is planting or reaping or tending or what he is doing besides hiring workers. But the landowner goes out again—three times. He goes out at mid-morning and at noon and in the early afternoon, and he hires more workers each time. But, these don’t make an agreement with regard to an amount they will be paid. Instead, when the landowner says he will pay them whatever is right and says, “Come, then,” and they do.
     The landowner goes out yet again, in the late afternoon. The day is almost over. Still, he is hiring workers. Again, we don’t know why. But of these, he wants to know, “Why are they idle? Don’t they want to work?” They answer, “No one has hired us.” Again, we don’t know why, though it is often assumed that they haven’t been hired because they’re not hirable. But our landowner is still hiring. “You come into the vineyard as well,” he says. And they do. Nothing is said about payment. Nothing at all.

Not too long after the last-hired workers arrive, it is time to “reckon up.” The landowner instructs his steward to pay the workers, beginning with the last. He pays those (who have just arrived) first; and he pays them the denarius the first workers had agreed to. So, when the first workers come to be paid, they clearly expect more. And they are paid a denarius as well. They gripe. As we would. Fair is fair. If you pay someone who works an hour a denarius, then someone who works eight . . . ?
     But here is our problem. We have certain expectations about how work works: there is to be a clear connection between worker, work accomplished, and wages. If there isn’t, well, there ought to be. But not in our story. The connection becomes more and more tenuous, more and more questionable, as the story goes on. It begins with workers working for a specific wage, but their employer hires more and more and more and more workers, some at an indeterminate wage, some without talking about payment at all.
     So, maybe the story isn’t about wages after all, though you’ll never convince those who are convinced they worked the hardest. Because hard work ought to pay.
     It is worth noting that Jesus does not denigrate “work.” When the rich young ruler asks him what he should do, Jesus tells him. He tells the disciples that they will enter the kingdom because they have done this: they have come to follow him. But that isn’t work exactly, is it? Following Jesus. It isn’t always easy, but it isn’t exactly work, is it?
     But, again, the parable isn’t about work. It’s about following; it’s about accepting an invitation. That’s what the disciples have done—“Come, follow me,” Jesus has offered; and they have accepted the offer. “Come to me,” Jesus tells the children. (“Don’t stop them,” he tells the disciples.) The children, too, accept his offer. The rich man, sadly, declines. 

Come into the vineyard. Come into the kingdom, the landowner says, again and again and again, and again at the end of the day. The kingdom of heaven isn’t like where the early bird gets the worm and the later gets nothing at all. The kingdom of heaven isn’t like where the best and the brightest get the best and the brightest spots and the duller get the lower and the duller. But the kingdom is like a landowner who keeps going out and going out and going out and forever inviting in.
     It is like the father in the parable of the prodigal son. We get so focused on the spendthrift son and the angry older brother that we forget to watch the father. But, what does he do when he sees his younger son is coming home? He goes out to meet him and invites him in. What does he do when he hears his older son is outside sulking? He goes out to invite him in.
     This is what the kingdom is like, then. This is the nature of it in Jesus’ stories. God is always inviting us in. Morning, noon, and night. “Come,” Jesus says. “Come in. Follow me. All of you. Please.”

“I know you were reading that,” Roz said. “But thanks for trying.”

                                                                           10.03.23

Forgiveness, part 2

 Forgiveness, part 2 

“So,” Roz said. “How many learned about forgiveness this morning?”
     I had been delegated to church while she and Uncle Albert stayed home to tune in the (what would be massively disappointing) Arsenal-Tottenham fixture. (The match ended in a draw after a certain amount of luck on Tottenham’s behalf and the usual fussy shillyshallying from Arsenal: sixteen passes, advance an inch and a half, retreat.)
     “7,” I said. “I’ve had some grief about that post, incidentally,” meaning last week’s on forgiveness. “Apparently, at least according to many, forgiveness is not a virtue belonging to Christians as if no other could possess or exercise it.”
     “Oh!” Roz said, drawing it out, making the long-o as long as she could.

Uncle Albert has the good for-
tune to nap while Arsenal pass
the ball around going nowhere.

“Oh, indeed!” Uncle Albert shortened it considerably. “But did any of those many others read today’s lessons?” Which he had apparently, because he went on to enumerate, “the warnings against elevating fairness above . . . well, unfairness. How Jonah can’t stand it that God forgives the Ninevites, who don’t even believe in him, not to mention all the wickedness they — and their animals — are always up to. And how the diligent workers from morning to night can’t stand it that the dozy late-comers are paid as much as they are: generosity should have its limits, to be fair.”
     “So,” Roz said, picking up where she left off, ignoring Uncle Albert. “Only seven heard the lessons. Are the rest, however many billions, unable to forgive because they didn’t hear them?”
     “8.1,” Uncle Albert said. “8.1 billions minus 7 . . . individuals. And no, they aren’t unless they are willing to give up fairness for . . . .” He hesitated.
     “Unfairness?” Roz asked.
     “Yes,” Uncle Albert said. “Exactly. As I said.”

Later, before the half but after Roz had disappeared, he said to me, “Unless they can embrace unfairness. Be as unfair as God is unfair both to the Ninevites and to Jonah.”
     Later still, as the match was drawing to its untidy close: “After Christianity — even now — the obsession is with Justice. Capital-J. And It — capital-I — can’t let anything go because It has to take Everything into account.”
     (The capital E is mine though it is what I heard.)

At the close of the match, he blew a raspberry. Then he said, “What’s for lunch, do you think? And when?”
                                                                           09.26.23

Forgiveness

 Forgiveness 

Roz didn’t intend to go to church with Uncle Albert and me; she was only going to help us up the stairs, then she was going to get a cup of coffee and come back to help us back down. But when she realized how little time she was going to have for her coffee, and then when she ran into our rector, the former Miss Virginia, at the top of the stairs, she decided to stay: to help us down the aisle to our seats and to help us to the communion rail for the body and blood. And in the interim to listen to the Bible and the message.
     The Bible was about the story in Genesis (50),* where Joseph forgives his brothers because even though they intended him harm, God intended it for good, in order to save many, including them, the ill-intending brothers, and their little ones. And about Psalm 103 and the God that forgives all our iniquities and heals all our diseases because he doesn't deal with us according to our sins; rather as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes them from us. And it was about The Apostle’s letter to the Romans (14) where he asks them shy they pass judgment on one another? why do they despise one another? Don’t we all stand before “the judgment seat of God”? — which, haven't we just heard, is all-forgiving? And finally, the Bible was about the story in Matthew 18, where Peter comes to Jesus to ask how often he should forgive, and Jesus tells him 77 times. That is, if he doesn’t want to stand before God’s judgment, which.
     And the sermon was about forgiveness, the vocation above all other vocations for the follower of Jesus.

St. Jude’s

The rest followed: the creed and the peace and the pages and pages of prayers and the kneeling at the rail then trying to get up again after the priest, the former Miss Virginia, said the eucharist has ended, go home. (Except, I think, she said the Eucharist.)
     And we did get up and we got down the aisle and we got out the door and we got down the stairs, with Roz’s help. And into the car, and on the way home, Roz looked at Uncle Albert sitting beside her and over her shoulder at me in the backseat behind him and said, “Why do you think, since all over the world today the message must be about forgiveness, no one is very forgiving, if at all?” And after a minute, Uncle Albert asked her how many people she guessed were in worship that morning at St. Jude’s? And she shrugged. He said, “8.”

“She is right, you know,” Uncle Albert said at the half of the extremely boring, indeed unrelievedly tedious, Everton-Arsenal match. He looked over at me. I muted Rebecca Lowe and the one Robbie and Lee Dixon. I looked vacantly back, meaning she who? “Miss Virginia,” he said. “Not that the other she, Roz, is wrong. But when the last Christian dies, probably not too long from now, forgiveness will disappear from the planet, for we are the only people that have a true vocation for it.”
     “Oh?” I said, meaning “You really think so?”
     “I mean true forgiveness,” Uncle Albert said. “Everyone else wants justice though some will pay lip service to mercy. But mercy is not the same as forgiveness. Actually, you have to have that vocation for forgiveness to know how far away it is,” Uncle Albert said.

                                                                           09.21.23
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 * The passages, from the common lectionary for the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (September 17, 2023) are here.

More on being concise if you can't just shut up.

I am still on the topic of concision (See here.), re-running a post from April 0f 2020, during Covid. That is why in the post, Uncle Albert and I are going “to Easter service in a different state.” On Facebook or YouTube, randomly we went.

 Best Easter sermon ever. 

As we have been these last few weeks, Uncle Albert and I went to Easter service in a different state according to a different polity.

     Roz said she would be happy - “I really mean it,” she said, “happy” - to fix Easter dinner instead of watching with us though I had volunteered to make spaghetti.

     “What will you be cooking then?” Uncle Albert asked, pretending not to be pleased. He says he likes my spaghetti, but he always adds “okay.” “I like your spaghetti okay,” he says.

     “I don’t know,” Roz said. “I’ll have to look around. We’ll see.”

     “It’ll be something with chicken,” I said. I hadn’t thought about Easter dinner when I went shopping, but I knew we had chicken.

     “We’ll see,” Roz said. And she disappeared.

“There was a mad preacher from Ai . . .”
Not Edward Lear
For genuine Lear, click here.

And Uncle Albert and I went to church on Facebook Watch. We had to wait a while for it to load. Then, it finished, and we watched. Because the church is in another state in a town we’ve never been to, we watched a bunch of people we didn’t know participate from home, reading Scripture, leading prayers; children sang from different living rooms in different keys. We also sang - hymns we didn’t know because the church was in a different denomination.

     The sermon wandered a bit - and a bit more - but it always came back to what Easter sermons almost always come back to: “Christ is risen!” so rejoice!!

‘almost always’ because

     When we were done and had turned it off, Roz came in and said, sounding like the mom: “Wash your hand, boys. Time to eat.”

     And at the table Uncle Albert said he remembered, he thought, every word of the best Easter sermon he’d ever heard.

     “Yeah?” I said. I didn’t believe it.

     “It was less than a minute long,” he said, “maybe even less than half a minute.”

The preacher had read the lesson from Mark.** It told how early on the first day of the week the women come to the tomb, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome, with spices to anoint the body. They are wondering who is going to roll the stone away for them. But it is rolled away. And the tomb is empty. Or except for a young man in white who tells them Jesus isn’t there because he’s risen. They may see him in Galilee if they went there. And they run out astonished. They don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything. At all.

     “And the preacher said,” Uncle Albert said: “‘Every Easter we talk, talk, talk. We talk the resurrection to death because we think we have to say something about it. But, the truth? - what can we say that makes sense out of what doesn’t make sense? Look at it through Mary, Mary, and Salome’s eyes. Don’t think. Look. The tomb is empty. Or there’s a strange man inside who says, “Go to Galilee.” Go where? What? Gob-stopped, that’s the word. The women are choked with amazement; they have nothing to say. But, what can anyone say really?’ And he, the preacher, shook his head and sat down.

     “And he sat then for the length of a regular sermon. There was one whisper after about two or three minutes. And he said, ‘Shhhhh,’ so everyone could hear it.

     “That was it,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Who was he?” I asked.

     “Nobody,” Uncle Albert said. “Nobody you’d know.” And I thought later, “Right. Nobody at all,” because can you imagine any preacher you’d know shutting up after a minute anytime, much less on Easter?

We had African peanut stew.***

04.13.20 / 09.14.23

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   *  There was a mad preacher from Ai,
       Who had a young sister called May-I,
            Johnny, cross your river?
            No, you may not, ever, ever.
       So, she stayed sad on the shore east of Ai
  ** 16:1-8. See here.
*** The recipe, from the cookbook, Savory Stews (1969, by Mary Savage), is here.

A not-so-sacred vow of concision

 A not-so-sacred vow of concision 

I was thinking this morning: There’s that passage from the book of James: “Not many of you should become teachers, for you know that those that teach will be judged with greater strictness. And we all stumble, in many ways.” Which I guess I ignored when I agreed to teach Sunday School. That is, the few times I did — and only as a substitute. Reluctantly. Maybe I had it, the passage from James, in the back of my mind; it was why I was reluctant, I just didn’t know that.
     That was in the Presbyterian Church. I go to the Episcopal Church now, with Uncle Albert, when we go. And my best friend is a Lutheran pastor, when we see each other. I’m trying to think now what that means, all of it.

John Calvin, reading what he wrote.

I was thinking yesterday morning while I was dusting that I dust mostly because I need to feel I am putting something in order. I was thinking that it was a matter of conscience, broadly defined. My conscience, I decided, if tentatively, gets its instructions from the Calvin of The Institutes, not in anything he says — because what do I know about what he says? — not in what he says but in what he does, reducing “the Christian Religion” to a series of propositions. 
     Or maybe he expands it to a series of propositions. He did have a lot to say, it occurs to me.  Not only did he write The Institutes but a whole shelf-full of biblical commentaries, among other things — quite a number of other things, I’m sure. All the great theologians write quite a number of things: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher, Barth; they write shelves and shelves of things.

Besides about teachers, James writes about the tongue, which is a small thing but can brag of great things. It’s a small fire that can start a great fire; it can set the entire course of life, the whole wheel of fortune, ablaze.
     And what is the pen but an extension of the tongue? I don’t know where that leads me, or leaves me. Maybe I just acknowledge that few of us, particularly few of those in religious institutions, can take a vow of silence — and even a vow of silence didn’t stop Merton from writing his shelf-full. But since we can’t say nothing, the less said, the better?
     Or is that easy enough for me to say, only because I have so little to say?

                                                                           09.07.23

Sunday, bloody Sunday!

 “Have you lost interest in the living?” Axel said.

“Is your sister writing your blog now?” Uncle Albert asked, startling me. Leaning over my left shoulder, wobbling on his three legs — how could he have come there? (He seemed to have materialized, like Jeeves.) And how could he read the tiny letters on the screen I had trouble seeing myself. These (below the headline):

 Sunday, bloody Sunday!  

Dear Ted,
     How are you doing with Dr. Feight? Does he have anything to say? Anything helpful? Does he say anything about me? If he asks, tell him that when it came to it even St. George could not have slain the dragons — plural, for there were more than one — that had me. For they had me securely; I was determined in what I was doing. I regretted having to do it, but I didn’t regret doing it (if that makes sense) — at least not at the time. But I didn’t think of you at that time, or for a long time after, maybe not until you lost your job [link] running away from dragons of your own. Maybe I am overstating the case, and anyway enough of that for now. I am required, it seems, to revisit it every so often, but not to you. Sorry!
     Speaking of sorry (not really!), your friend Max took me to a fast-food seafood restaurant another evening ago, where a beautiful blue-eyed African-American boy (another war casualty, why do I meet so many?) took our order and called our names when it was ready — the fried fish and the french fries like so much air smelling salt and vinegar and the cherry Cokes like the nectar of the gods invented by small-town American adolescents, laced with crushed ice and sweeter than honey. Afterwards, we went to a baseball game that ended in a tie and there were fireworks after.
     I’m only kidding about that, but we should have; we would have maybe if we had gone for hamburgers instead of fish. As if we become what we eat, which we definitely do not where everything is spirit. But I don't think we ever did, even where we and hamburgers were both flesh and gristle, and only the hamburger buns were air.
     In any case, we didn’t go to a baseball game with fireworks or a stroll on a beach or even back to the park but our separate ways, blue-eyed Kareem back into the kitchen where they conjure the fish and chips, Mac who knows where — I have no idea where he lives — and I through a sudden lightest of showers to where I am, to sit at my kitchen table to write you.
     Then, there is a rap on the window, and it is Gretchen and the two Johns, her friend and her (lovely) cousin, wanting to know if I want to go to a movie. They are thinking about something called Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which they seem to think I’ve heard of — and I think I should have heard of it — but I haven’t. But it’s directed by John Schlesinger, who directed Midnight Cowboy, so I decide to go.
     But it is not the same. There are too many telephones ringing too loudly, too much cutting between scenes. I assume the way they, the scenes, are juxtaposed, the juxtapositions must mean something (like rhymes and half rhymes and all the different ways of rhyming — alliteration and assonance and anaphora and all — should mean in a poem; but I don’t see it: dinner with parents, charades, the enthronement of the boy/man at his bar mitzvah, the death of a dog hit by a potato truck (and mourned for 40 seconds), another phone ringing, lots of smoking. About an  hour and a half in, we see the young man — but I didn’t say this yet, did I? At the center of it is a vapid young man, played by nobody I’ve ever seen, shared by Peter Finch, as a gay Jewish doctor, and Glenda Jackson, with eyes as green as a cat’s and perfectly arched eyebrows; but you can’t figure out why either cares for him. So, when we see him at a TWA counter, presumably buying a trip to the United States, though there must have been half an hour of film to go, I left, because I was glad he was leaving, and I didn’t want to see anybody sorry he was.
    Then, when I got outside, and it was showering again, I thought that might be the point — this was not a movie without a point: that people can love other people that are not much at all; and most of us aren’t, are we? The thought didn’t make me go back into the theater, though.
     Instead, I came home again. I sat back down at my kitchen table; and I wrote this to you (among other reasons to say if you have any say in the choice of movies, make better selections). You are welcome for the long letter. Write me back when you can.
                                                                                                               Love, Moira

 “Have you lost interest in the living?” Axel said. “Is your sister writing your blog now?” Uncle Albert asked.
     “It may seem so” I said. “But what do I have to write about, hardly going out and then only to the same places I always go, seeing the same people I always see. But mostly I am sitting in with you, reading old books, or paragraphs of old books between staring out the window and wandering from room to room?”
     “I see your point,” Uncle Albert said. And he turned and wobbled silently away. Silently, on his three uneven legs, he shimmered out. 
                                                                           09.02.23