The biggest change I didn’t expect was that the morning after the surgery I woke up cold.  Before the surgery, I was probably the one person in any room who would be sweating and wishing we could turn the air down.  Since the surgery, I’ve been one of the coldest people in any given room.  The first summer I slept under a heavy down comforter with an electric blanket turned up.  Before the surgery, a single sheet was often too hot for me to sleep at all.  Last summer I was under a heavy down comforter.  So things had started to change — at least a bit.  As I move into this summer, I’m using a light down comforter (and sometimes sweating and too hot to sleep).  Until this month, I always wore at least a light sweater over any shirt I was wearing (even when the temperature was in the nineties).  Now, I’m not actually shivering sometimes when I skip the sweater.  It’s been almost two and a half years.  But things are moving back towards where they were before the surgery — which has both pros and cons!

This spring, the tests showed that the one place my vitamins were out of balance was the D vitamins.  I’ve had to add a D3 pill daily (to the multivitamin and mineral plus iron and calcium and sublingual B-12 I’ve been taking all along).  Not a bad result.  I can get all of this from Trader Joe’s (in sublingual and chewable form for a reasonable price) — though the one calcium I actually like is from Celebrate.

Anyway, this procedure is not for everyone (and there are alternatives out there that may serve some people better).  But it’s made enough difference in my life, in a good way, that I feel like I should share my experience so that others considering doing something like this have some sense of what could be involved.  Really, it’s different for everyone.  There are a variety of reasons to consider doing this.  There are things that might need to be done on the front end that make success more likely.  There are so many possible complications that I don’t think there’s really any way to prepare for all of them.  But a large majority of people doing gastric bypass surgery seem to lose and keep off 60 to 80 percent of their excess wait for at least 5 years after surgery.  Some people do better (as I have).  Some people die (though the added risks of really life threatening conditions, which might well kill you pretty quickly anyway seem to be at work in most of these).  As far as I know, the gastric bypass is the only proceedure that is likely to get you off diabetes medication (even insulin) regardless of weight loss (for reasons they don’t seem to understand).

But I’d talk to people who’ve had the surgery, and attend support groups for folks who’ve had the surgery, and get a lot of medical advice before going ahead with this.

The results can be amazing and life changing, but not always.  This is not a free pass to automatic weight control (or even loss) and there are significant consequences (which should be understood before doing this).  And most people, while much healthier, do not lose all the weight they would have liked to have lost.

The more you work it, before and after, the better your results are likely to be.

But we’re talking likelihood.

And we’re talking life changes that will continue for the rest of your life.

Church members, like everyone else, are sinners.  We never fully live up to our best intentions.  Each of us does have our own walk with God.  Our faith has to fit us — it’s not one size fits all.  Nature can draw us towards God — though it is not God.  All institutions, the church included, care about their own survival — sometimes disproportionately so.

Still, without a structure to preserve and teach it, much of our ancient tradition would have been lost or changed beyond recognition.  Without others to hold us accountable, we are likely to pick and choose uncritically and self indulgently among he spiritual paths available to us today.  We need ways to turn our lives around when we fall short.  All of these things require some kind of structure.  The church provides this, however imperfectly.

There is a story, a true story (that might have actually happened!), about and English priest who visited one of his non attending members one cold winter day.  After saying hello, they sat for a while in silence before a charcoal fire, sipping their tea.  After a while, the priest took the tongs and removed one coal from the fire, setting it down on the stone in front of the grate.  They watched in silence as the lone coal dimmed and finally went out all together, while the fire behind the grate continued to burn.

They sat a while longer in silence.

Then his parishioner said, “I’ll see you in church Sunday, Father.”

In theory, this was because those who opposed her inclusion were not aware of the deep connection between her faith and her ministry in the world, and because they believed (inaccurately) that later in life she lost her faith.  (It does seem to be true that she shattered her health in her work and withdrew from public view.  It also seems to be true that she continued to practice her faith, and that it was very important to her.)  I always thought that she got kicked out because of opposition to women’s ordination and creeping secularism (she was a woman with a ministry in the secular world) and I was pleased to see her back in the calendar.

One of the more problematic “saints” for me has always been Cyril of Alexandria.   I’ve been thinking, off and on, about him for a couple of weeks (since his name and actions came up, again, in a book I was reading).  He was a strong defender of what has become orthodoxy.  He was also utterly ruthless.  He seems to have practiced a kind of “scorched earth” policy in his opposition to Nestorius and his followers that caused ongoing division in the church (things might have been worked out more peaceably and the division avoided).  He also seems, at the least to have instigated, and quite possibly to have overtly plotted, the death of a neoplatinist opponent in the hands of a rioting mob of his followers.  I’ve always known that all of us, including our saints, are sinners.  But I’ve never been able to justify, in my mind, (seemingly) unrepentant murder with sainthood.

The best I could ever do was see him as a kind of example of what not to do — our own ayatollah (and I do mean that in the pejorative sense sense I normally hear that word used by my fellow Americans — someone so convinced they know the mind of God that they will ruthlessly impose their vision on absolutely everyone, if they can).

I was thinking about this, after Matins this morning, as I reread part of Robert Atwell’s introduction to Celebrating the Saints. So I looked up Cyril to see what he had to say about him.  He talked only about his being a champion of orthodoxy.  Then I looked up Cyril in Holy Women, Holy Men (which is our current, official calendar).  Cyril wasn’t there.  I confess myself relieved.  I’d rather read about Cyril as an important, and very mixed, part of our history and heritage than celebrate him as an example to imitate in my own life.

He really did play a big part in shaping the faith of the church I live in today.  He has a role in the faith I hold.  But, for me, he also sets an example in behavior that I find ignoble and unChristian, and that I truly wish to avoid in my own life.  All of us have feet of clay.  Every saint has their own faults and failures.  But, for all he accomplished, Cyril’s failures, as I understand them, are simply too great and too indefensible for me to want him in my calendar of saints.

Never the less, I cannot understand those who feel that faithfulness to God and wealth go hand in hand — particularly the pursuit of wealth.  Today’s gospel comes to mind (Matthew 6:19-24 — the gospel in the Daily Office Lectionary of the Episcopal Church for Wednesday in V Easter).  It says:  “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth …  For where your treasurer is, there your heart will be also.  … No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I guess we don’t understand that wealth is an idol — even if it isn’t personified as “a god.”  But I am really, honestly, always puzzled by what part of “you cannot serve God and wealth” people don’t understand.  Certainly the early church was clear about this.  But maybe it is because so few of them had access to great wealth.  Still, a reading from Gregory of Nanzianzus (who died in 389 CE) is not atypical.  He is commemorated today in our calendar.  He says, in an oration “On the Love of the Poor”:

Is it not God who asks you now in your turn to show yourself generous above all other creatures and for the sake of all other creatures?  Because we have received from God so many wonderful gifts …

And if we are not generous, if we misuse what has been given to us, St. Peter will say:

Be ashamed of yourselves for holding on to what belongs to someone else.  … Let us not labor to heap up and hoard riches while others remain in need.  … He has given abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, not divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure.  … he wanted to give equalility of blessing to equality of worth.

So, not only are the poor among us equally blessed, they are as deserving and worthy as the rich!

This runs together, for me, with a paraphrase from Isaiah 58 (appointed for the ninth day of the month in Celtic Daily Prayer) which talks about the “fast” acceptable to the Lord:

… the fast … I have chosen …
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry?
that you bring to your house those who are cast down?
… if you extend your soul to the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted soul,
then shall your light dawn in obscurity
and your darkness shall be as the noonday.

And in Preferring Christ, about the Rule of Benedict, Norvene Vest comments (in what I am reading today) about why we behave compulsively (in all forms of consumption):

“I am incomplete, like … a couple of notes apart from a musical phrase.  … If … I choose to live with my incompleteness … I discover in the heart of my longings … that I am made for relationship with God.  The key to any spiritual discipline for me is this willingness to experience the pain of my present partialness …

So there is no necessary disconnect between wealth and my walk with God.  But I cannot serve both.  I am called to be generous with all that God has entrusted to me and to share my bread with the hungry and value the worth of everyone regardless of nationality or estate.  And it is only in recognizing my incompleteness, my need for relationship (with my neighbor and) with God, and my willingness to experience and live with this discomfort, without turning to wealth or other idols (of consumption), that I am able to move forward in my walk with God.

On the whole, it sounds like wealth is likely to be a distraction …

I think, if you’d asked me during my college days what the most important thing in my life was, I might have answered ending the (Vietnam) war.  Or I might have answered finding the meaning of life (I was a philosophy major) or figuring out God (I did become an Episcopal priest).  Or I might have answered my writing.  It would have depended when and in what context you asked me.

Did I want a real relationship with a woman?  Sure.  You bet!  But it might well not have been on my list of most important things.  And, in the context of making some woman happy by supporting her living the American dream, it was certainly not on my list of vital things to do with my life.  I’m pretty sure that’s still true.  Living the consumer version of the American dream (for some woman) is still not on my list of vital things to do with my life.

The words in that song which I keep coming back to are when he tells some American Woman “… I’ve got more important things to do than to spend my life growing old with you.”

And I find myself thinking, even after what I said above, that this is not necessarily true.  Maybe it’s because I’m about to retire (though I’m expecting an active retirement, including work, and I don’t think so).  I think it’s because I’m becoming more and more convinced that relationships are more important than anything else.  What we have with God is a relationship.  What I have with my family is a relationship.  What i have with the world around me is a relationship.  Relationships seem to be what endures.

I’ve become convinced that God (that Christians believe is a single entity with a Trinity of persons – which I think is an explanation of how we experience God more than anything else) is personal and relational as God.  When we were created male and female in the image of God I think that means we were created to be in relationship and make choices.  I see this life we live as a chance to learn to be in relationship and to make good and meaningful choices.  Family life is sacramental because it is relational, and by learning to live with each other we learn about God’s love and how to be in relationship with God, as well as with each other.  Heck, if the new science is right, everything in the world only exists in relationship to everything else in the world – there wouldn’t be anything at all apart from the relationships.

So these days, when I think of Anne as my American woman, it’s not primarily about what I can buy and the security my resources can help provide us (though I like having some security — don’t get me wrong).  It’s about being in a sustaining and challenging relationship.  And, even allowing for God at the center of my life, I’m not sure I have anything better to spend my life on than growing old with Anne.  That’s where I learn to be a person.  That’s where, concretely, I learn to love and be loved, to give and to take, to care beyond my own ego needs and respond to the needs of everything around me.  That’s where I learn to live in relationship.

If I’m right, about God and creation, there really is nothing more important for me to do than to spend my life growing (actively and creatively) old with Anne.

Imagine the hottest person you can, man or woman, whatever floats your boat.  For me it would be a woman.  Imagine that she’s the most alluring thing you’ve ever seen.  She’s everything you’ve ever wanted, and more.  She’s smarter than you are.  She’s better read.  She’s more athletic.  She’s kinder.  She see’s right through you.  She looks at you, and she just knows everything there is to know about you.  Are you going to approach her?

I’m betting you don’t.  She’s simply overwhelming.  She puts you to shame. You know, on a basic level, that she’s simply out of your league.  There is simply no way in hell you’ll ever measure up to her.  We are simply ashamed to approach her.

The only way we might ever do more than look from a distance is if she actually approached us.  If she reached out to us, and let us know that she loved us, the actual us, not the us we know we’d like to be or ought to be.  If she approached us, we’d probably feel like we were in heaven.  Then we might actually be able to respond and develop a real relationship with her.  Then we’d know it was safe to be honest and real.  Then we might actually come to feel, over time, at home in this relationship.

And that, my friends, is why it’s so important for us to know, to understand, on a gut level, that our God loves us, each and every one of us, and accepts us, each and every one of us, for who we are.  That, I believe, is why the crucifixion is at the heart of our faith.

In his book Prayer, Simon Tugwell notes:

We imagine that it is we who have to look for God …  it is the other way about:  [God, particularly in Jesus] is looking for us.  … very often we are not looking for God … we are in full flight from him …  he knows that and has taken it into account.  He has followed us into our own darkness; there where we thought finally to escape him, we run straight into his arms.  … Our hope is in his determination to save us.  … Our part is not to shoulder the whole burden of our salvation … our part is to consent.  … wherever we have got to, whatever we have done, that is precisely where the road to heaven begins.

I am convinced that God’s victory happens in our hearts.  It’s not so much that God has to beat the devil.  God has to let us know that we are loved and accepted.  Because only when we know, really know and accept this, can we turn to God and begin to develop a real, life saving relationship with God.

And a God who empties himself to become one of us, to really face what we face and endure what we endure — not just the joys and everyday getting through the day of life, but the pains and injustices and finally, an excruciating and tortured death on a cross, for us, for our sake — a God like that really loves us.  How can we doubt that.  A God like that, who reaches out to sinners, to invite them to come home and be loved, a God like that is someone I can have a relationship with.  I can live with a God like that.

So much of religion seems to be about judgement and living up to impossible standards.  So much of what many Christians say is about our failures and shortcomings.  They start by telling us we’re going to hell.  They want to scare us into a relationship with God.  But when you get down to it, I really don’t think this works.  When I’m scared, I run.  Or I fight.

Jesus came to love us into a relationship with God.

I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing that really works.  When I know I’m loved, I tend to stay put.  When I know that I’m loved, I’m willing to work on the relationship.

Know that you are loved!

My time with you in this congregation is drawing to a close.  I don’t have too many more chances to highlight what I think is important, even crucial, in our walk with God.  This is one of them.  Know that you are loved by God.  Know that God comes to you and reaches out to you in love.  God knows you.  God knows who you are.  God knows what you are.  God knows all your good points and all your bad points.  And God loves you.

Knowing that, can you accept God’s love?  Can you love God back?  Can you enter into a real, meaningful relationship with the one who made you and sustains you and wishes only the best for you?  Can you open your life to God?  Can you deepen your walk with God?

Because God gives us our freedom, because God will never force us, this is a question which can only be answered in our own hearts and minds.  God can only win if we are willing to be in a relationship, a real relationship, with God.  And relationships take time.

And I’m pretty sure this can only happen when we know, and accept, just how loved we are.  Jesus loves us.  Our God loves us.  In the love of God, all things are possible for us.

Glory to God, who’s power in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever.  Amen.

After dinner, you and your friends go for a walk, and stop in the park.  You ask them to wait for you, while you go away by yourself and think about what’s coming down.

It’s not a pretty picture.  It fills you with dread.  Your soul is so filled with sorrow that it almost leads you into despair.  If only there were some other way …  ”Father, take this cup from me …  But no, this is why I’m here:  to do your will.”

In your distress, you return to your friends, seeking some comfort from them, from their presence — there is so little time.  And they’re sleeping for God’s sake.  Couldn’t they be there for you this once?

You wake them, but you’re so frustrated you decide you’d better be by yourself for a few minutes.  And when  you return, they’re sleeping again.  So you wake them again, and leave them, and return, and they’re still sleeping!

And now it’s too late.  ”Get up!  On your feet!  I’m about to be betrayed!”  And they’re still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes when Judas comes, and with him a mass of people with clubs and swords.  Judas comes straight to you, and kisses you.  You know what that means.  It’s enough to break your heart.  But it doesn’t stop there.  No.  This is only the beginning.  They grab you roughly, but one of your followers draws his sword and cuts the ear off one of your captors.

So you shake off their hands.  ”I have been teaching publically every day at the temple.  But you com after me with swords and clubs in the dead of night.  Yet what has been foretold must come to pass.

All your friends run away in fear of their lives, except for one, who follows as they take you away.  Until they grab him too, and he only escapes by leaving his clothes behind.

Then you face your accusers who are already gathered in waiting for you.  They are here to question you.  But you already know they are not interested in the truth.  They are only looking for their excuse.  Because you’ve called them into question:  their teaching, their authority, their livelihood.  And they cannot face the scrutiny.  They will not face themselves.

Out of the babel, you hear one question asked again.  ”Are you the Son of God?”

“Dear God, spare me this!”  You shake your head to clear it, and you answer aloud, “I am.”

That gives them all they need.  They plan to kill you anyway.  And you’re here to die for the truth.  Still, you’re not prepared, not fully, when they begin to really abuse you, to hit you, and spit on you.  The room is smokey from the fires.  You begin to feel nauseous.  But after a while everything begins to blur around you and lose definition.

By the time they march you off the next morning you’re pretty well numb.  You aren’t feeling much, thank God.  The pain is mostly a distant throbbing, in your head, all over your body.  They tied you up almost before you realize what’s happening.  And then they lead you away, stumbling awkwardly over your feet.

The next thing you really know is that you’re being interrogated again — more gently this time.  But you already know, deep in your gut, that it will come to nothing.  Nothing will change.  Your friends have already abandoned you.  You don’t see any of them in the crowd even.  And, dear God!  That crowd, the very ones you’ve spent your life on!  They want your blood too.  they’d rather see a murderer set free than you.  After all you’ve done!

Then they strip you, and whip you, and mock you, dressing you in purple like a king or emperor, and pressing and turning a crown of thorns into your head.  And you thought you were numb …

And they keep hitting you, and spitting on you, and finally they take the cloak off you, and when you can’t carry your cross for yourself, they grab someone and make him carry it for you.  By this time you can barely stagger along.  You’re thirsty, you’ve had no sleep, no food, your body is one big ache, and you’re beginning to get delirious.

Just when you thought you were beyond feeling anything else, they pull you down, and … Oh!  The pain!  Searing through your hands …

And you must have passed out from the pain.  Because when you awake, you’re hanging in the air, and the agony is less …  Almost bearable …  And the crowd below, and the men being crucified with you are still mocking you.

You’re all alone.  There’s nobody left, only the pain.  Every breath you take is a struggle.  Your body is screaming in torment.  The pain just goes on and on …

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  And someone thrusts s a stick in your face.  And it begins to get dark.  And then …

Anselm is probably best known for his ontological argument for the existence of God — which I studied way back in college.  Basically it says that since God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and since we have the idea of God (as unconditional being) in our mind, such a being has to exist (or there would be something greater) and we could not even talk about such a being if it did not exist outside of our mind.

I’m probably not doing a fair summary of the argument, possibly because it has always seemed a circular and unconvincing argument.  I know others are truly moved by it.  It just doesn’t cut it for me.  On the other hand, he saw himself as “faith seeking understanding.”  And that makes more sense to me — though some kind of honest understanding seemed to be necessary for me to embrace faith.  So I may have it, from his point of view, precisely backwards!  Unless you argue (and I think I would) that it was the faith seeking to emerge in me that had me seeking understanding.

I went to college as a philosophy major precisely because I was trying to understand and make sense of life.  And what I found was that there were any number of systems of belief which, if you accepted certain premises, could make coherent sense of the world.  And in the end (though there are parts of existentialism that really make sense to me) I found that the premise of God, looking more deeply into my Christian tradition, made best sense of the world to me.

And later still I found that that which I felt I was beginning to understand (however partial that understanding was destined to remain) became personal and experiential in my life.  And yet somehow some kind of understanding that I felt held integrity for me was necessary for me to have (or at least to acknowledge) these experiences in my life.

Anselm is also the most famous proponent of the satisfaction theory of the atonement.  (Atonement is a made up word in English to talk about how people who are sinners can be reconciled with God and become “at one” with God.)  The satisfaction theory of the atonement argues, at heart, that God can only be satisfied and accept us sinners if someone (Jesus) can make a perfect sacrifice (a sinless life) on our behalf to God.  Jesus’ blood washes us clean in God’s eyes.

I have trouble with calling this the satisfaction theory of the atonement because I like Jim McClendon’s breakdown of atonement theories into three basic theories based on who it is that has to be satisfied.  He argued (back in my seminary days) that all atonement theories have to satisfy God, the devil or people.

The problem with the classic theory, that God has to be satisfied, is that it makes no sense that a God who could not accept us in the first place would come in person to live and die for us so that we could be accepted.  Again, I know most people hold and find meaning is this classic theory of atonement.  But it makes no sense to me that such a God would come to save me.

The problem with theories where the devil has to be satisfied (and these are the least common, though there was an uptick around the time of the holocaust) is that this seems to give too much power into the hands of something other than God.  If God is the final arbiter (and I believe this) then the devil does not have the final word on this.

The problem with people being the one’s who have to be satisfied is that this is a subjective victory.  But it’s the victory that makes sense to me.  In my mind, what holds me apart from God is not that God does not accept me or that the devil will not let me go but whether or not I am able to trust God and turn to God and live in God.

For me, Jesus came and made God’s love and faithfulness known.  For me, that is what allows me to trust God.  For me, that is what allows me to have faith and to let God into my life.  That is what allows me to let God live in my life and bring me home to the place Jesus tells me God has prepared for me from the beginning.  That is what makes going home desirable.

That is a victory that has to be won in my heart (and in each and every person’s heart).  And that is the only victory that matters:  do I trust God’s faithfulness and goodness and acceptance enough to let God be a part of my life?

That is why, when I first came to St. George’s, I told them that the one thing I really wanted them to take with them from my time with them was that they were truly loved and accepted by God as they are.  Not, mind you, that there were not changes God would like to see (and maybe even we would like to make).  But God loves us, not because we are perfect or good enough, but simply because God loves us.  That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a good marriage.  We are loved, faults and all, for who we are.  That’s the way it works with God.

Anselm fought with civil authority as archbishop and was exiled twice.  He was admired by Norman nobility and loved by his monks.  His life had a profound piety and he was well-respected for his spiritual direction.

Certainly there were things, major things, that he believed and is known for that I have real problems with.  But I do find myself in conversation with him (in my mind).  And there are also parts of his life that I not only respect (even if I find myself in disagreement) but also want to emulate in my own life.

An ancient people tells us that when the moment of a great teacher’s death was near, the disciples said, “What is it we will see when you are gone?”  And the master said, “All I did was sit on the river bank handing out river water.  After I am gone I trust you will notice the water.”

How wonderful!

As a priest, it’s really tempting sometimes to get caught up in one’s own importance.  We often think we are indispensable.  But we are not.

To use the image in the story, what matters is the water — using Christian terminology, “the water of life,” which is Jesus.

If I have been faithful, I’ve handed out this water flowing freely past me to those who pass by thirsty — which is all of us.

But the water is there, and free, whether I am there or not.

I hope my congregation notices the water when I am gone.