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The LARK BLOGCAST is a written exploration of God’s scandalous grace read aloud for those who don't have time or don't like to read. Listen in and be encouraged as you go. Read at larksite.com/blog. Join the conversation by emailing howdy@larksite.com.
A TOAST TO ROBERT CAPON
By Jameson Allen
No one caused more mischief in my life than Robert Capon. As a preacher lost in endless revelries over the outrageous grace revealed in Jesus Christ, he was the glitch in my spiritual matrix.
Since Robert’s birthday is October 26 (1925-2013), we saw it fitting to join the celebration with a commemoration - no apologies to those tired of all our Capon quotes.
This article is a glass raised in bedraggled relief to the late, venerable scandalmonger himself, Robert Capon.
CANCELED WITH CAPON
For countless parishioners and readers, Capon’s prose and preaching estranged us from the cages of fear, shame, and slavery that we call “church.”
Good thing, too, since “the church that God inspired to be the ongoing sign of such vulgar Good News is not an institution; it is a community of merely human beings entrusted with the proclamation of an astonishingly catholic salvation” (The Astonished Heart).
I’ve been called a heretic, shunned, and forgotten as a result of my friendship with Robert Capon’s work - among other things, too, certainly. I only wish I could have shared a good scotch and a porch sit with the Episcopal priest. That “community of merely human beings” forms anywhere his books are read and his words are repeated.
I’ve learned with Capon to be ok “wasting time” with people in those drawn out dinner conversations where everyone is leaning back in their chairs ignoring the dishes on the table. And he loved food - the making and the eating both. Communion around a meal could be seen as the unifying principle of Robert’s approach to life, ministry, faith, and friendship.
Inspiring is just not a sufficient word here. Capon helped us finally get comfortable with being human, even though that meant getting expelled from the ranks of those who’ve climbed the ladder.
WHY WE HATE READING CAPON
Something I suspect to be all too common for readers of Capon is the condition of their copies of his books. At one point or another, most people I know who took the time to study him have thrown the book across the room.
He has that effect on you - he pulls the rug out from under all your excuses and preoccupations with what you’ve always thought. He knows the questions you’re going to ask next and structures his writing to frustrate the hell out of you. He simply will not allow you to add anything to the finished work of Jesus that single handedly won you an irrevocable seat at the table.
I’ve never poured out more highlighter ink for another writer. I’ve never felt so duped before either - it’s like he was the only kid bad enough to throw his rock at the glass of conventional-churchism so we could finally catch a glimpse of the God Jesus actually revealed.
“God does so many ungodly things - like not remembering our sins, erasing the quite correct handwriting against us, and becoming sin for us - that the only safe course is to come to Scripture with as few stipulations as possible” (Kingdom, Grace, Judgment). Capon made it his mission to search and destroy all our stipulations. And he did it well.
No one has to agree with everything anyone says. But, the number of people who relationally dismissed me - as I seriously explored the scandal Capon harped on - was a chilling experience. Still, I couldn’t stop.
CAPON’S PARADOXICAL LEGACY
I see a great enigma at play in all this. That is that while Robert Capon’s message certainly led to profusions of divisions and departures among friends, it has also led to an emergence of collective engagement with the real Jesus among new comrades.
When I mention his name to someone and their eyes get as big as a lemur I know we’re about to banter about an unsanitized Jesus. An unexpected unity of souls arises to revel deeply in “death as a way of living,” Capon’s concept of faith that “lives out of death” (The Parables of Grace). Tears, honesty, laughter, and relief inevitably ensue.
He has done the work to help us modern people with language we can understand. And that was no small task. He simultaneously dismantled all that imprisons us while also giving us training wheels so we can explore the actual life of faith, freedom, and friendship Jesus really invited us into.
Not to mention, he does it wryly and inappropriately. “Giving the human race religious reasons for not sinning is about as useful as reading lectures to an elephant in rut” (The Parables of Grace). I love how distilling this is, how incriminating, and how relieving.
His ability to make you laugh, gasp, cover your mouth, and do a double take is what pulls the veil back and pulls the wool from your eyes. He surgically renders all our religion and guilt-mongering absurdly absurd.
FAITH IS FREEDOM ACCORDING TO ROBERT CAPON
Capon made us suspicious that we’re not actually as free as we say we are, that we’re not living as free as Jesus says we are.
And this is one of Capon’s greatest contributions - he returned faith to the realm of mystery and church to the realm of humanity. When he’s finished with a debate about whether we contribute to God’s acceptance of us, everyone who walks away disappointed are those who have made faith sensible and predictable. In short, they refuse to lose control, to die.
But, faith is a mystery. It is a beautiful adventure of getting more - not less - lost in Jesus. “The only thing you can really do that’s wrong is refuse to pass along the presumption of innocence you’ve already been blessed with… There are no bad guys in hell, just more forgiven sinners… who for some reason find the thought of a free ride home an insult to their integrity” (The Mystery of Christ).
As his work ages, Capon will only become more popular in the barrels of time because he demonstrated a precariously uncontainable Jesus. He insisted - with that northeastern accent and straightforward manner - that “morality is all right as far as it goes… but when all the semi-moral types start cheering for morality, you better duck” (The Man Who Met God in a Bar).
He equally insisted that no one can escape Christ, that he is the presence David could find no reprieve from, that life outside Christ is a myth. When Capon gets under your skin about the mystery of Christ, a watershed of furious curiosity, questions and preposterous hope pours forth like a volcanic eruption.
Capon has pastored us back into faith, back into the mystery of dumb trust in a Father who’s never not been our Father. He has shepherded us away from the false gospel of the western church that seems to want humans to overcome their humanity. “In all the priestly acts of the church, we’re celebrating what Jesus has already done, not negotiating with God to get him to do it” (The Foolishness of Preaching).
SURPRISED BY ROBERT CAPON’S HOPE
I can’t say enough about how Capon has turned the lights on for us. He smacked the ass of the elephant in the room and pricked the silent fretful spirit within each of us. He refused to allow our continuance in the darkness of our delusional take on reality - and I wish I could high-five him every time I turn a page.
“With nails through his hands and feet, at three o’clock on a dark Friday afternoon, he will die our now unmanageable death, take our disastrous knowledge of good and evil down into the darkness of his dead human mind, and by refusing to play God by our rules, he will restore our freedom to be human again in the silence of Jesus’ tomb. All we can do, or need to do, is trust him” (The Foolishness of Preaching).
With a sweepingly canonical attention to detail and an entertaining flare for narrative conversation, Capon articulates the kerygma out of a burning passion to help us behold Jesus. He’s truly a descendent of the apostles in this way.
Whatever else can be said, Capon caused a lot of trouble for the self-sanctified. He is part of the centuries-long movement disrupting the myth of the religious God. As such he’s certainly a patron saint for the community of Larks we’re running with.
He’s a homing beacon for all who dare to hope that there is such a thing as the peace that surpasses understanding. He desperately wants us to finally see Jesus instead of the monster and maniac we project upon his figure. He wants us to be free, to actually take freedom seriously.
CAPON’S VISION FOR THE CHURCH’S FUTURE
While he was an Episcopal priest for many years, he began envisioning the future of the church most recklessly later in life. This in no small part compelled the inception of Lark, our ragtag movement centered on Jesus’ message of freedom and the way of friendship.
One of the handles he gave us for reimagining the future of the church comes from his dazzling and prophetic book called The Astonished Heart, an honest critique of just how seriously all the various versions of church throughout history took the person of Jesus.
“The first test of any new form of the church must always be: Is it sufficiently unacceptable to the world? Is it non-religious enough to get the church out of its twenty-century-long love affair with religious respectability?” Is there a more desperately needed word for the Church today?
And a few pages later, Capon muses, “I suspect it will look like an outdoor wedding reception that refuses to stop on account of rain.” He unrelentingly stressed that “only the dead hear the voice of the Son of God… it is the thirsty and the hungry, the last, the lost, the least, the little, and the dead - who are the sacraments of the church's hope. Only fools, of course, willingly embrace those conditions.”
May the canvas of Capon’s astonished heart lead to innumerably more people dumbfounded in the same astonishment. May we all dare to live as astonished as he at the dead and risen Son of God.
THE CRUX OF PREACHER ROBERT CAPON
Few have helped me like Capon to see that we already have the freedom we’re in fits of rage and rummaging to find. Of course we’re going mad - we’re searching for the wallet already in our pocket. We’re trying to make something true that was never untrue.
Nothing is as silly as quoting or summarizing Robert Capon, you must read all of him yourself. At last and anyway, here’s the paragraph that set the hook in me, the words that smashed the already toppling tower of my Christian religion like an asteroid from the other side of the Milky Way. Don’t stiffen your necks as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah (Ps. 95).
“Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at last something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside of the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance” (Between Noon And Three).
Here’s to saint Robert Capon, a man enchanted by the mystery of Christ, and by the Gospel of grace, and by a Jesus who will draw all unto himself without anyone’s help.