Lend Me Your Ears

Prayer Breakfast: Love your enemies

2012-02-03T18:22:00.000-05:00

Author Eric Metaxas's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast is one for the ages. Very (very!) jokey, but listen for the kind message to the President and the rest of us: we would be on the wrong side of whatever right side we are on, were it not for the grace of God. We're all wrong without Jesus. I love the joy with which he names the name of the Lord.

A Look at 'Groundhog Day'

2012-01-28T12:17:00.000-05:00

We knew Bill Murray could be counted on for a good laugh, so my wife and I chose Groundhog Day for our matinee one cold afternoon in 1993. After the fun, on the drive home, one thing dawned on me: virtue. Phil Conners, the main character, became a virtuoso on the piano. He had plenty of time since, within the magical world of the movie, he kept repeating the same day, Groundhog Day, over and over and over. He knew this was happening, but the rest of the people in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, appeared into Phil’s world each day brand new, as though they had just arrived from February 1. First, he was terrified; then he was liberated—or so he thought. Then he despaired, but even suicide could not free him: he’d just wake up again on February 2 and start the day all over again. Again. Finally, Phil became virtuous. Appearing for countless February seconds at the door of the local piano teacher, he eventually became a virtuoso.

On one of his many Groundhog Days, Phil tries to convince Rita, the woman he learns to love, that he knows everything about everybody in Punxsutawney. You see, he’d spent so many days in the diner chatting that, over time, he learned all the names and stories. “I’m a god,” he announces to Rita. “I’m a god, not the God. Maybe the real God’s not omnipotent. He’s just been around so long he knows everything.” Rita shoots him down: “You’re not a god.”

In a similar way, Adam and Eve are shot down in the Bible for their presumption to eat the forbidden fruit in their desire to “be like God.” Yet we learn later that their understanding of godlikeness is the problem. They want the immortality and omnipotence, but what good is that without virtue? Given the strange gift of immortality, how will Phil use it? Will he finally see his dark side, his shadow?

Virtue, the slow, tedious process of becoming incrementally better persons—not only finer musicians but more forgiving, more kind, better listeners, braver—can seem a waste of time. So it seems to Phil at the beginning of the film. He lives for the moment and for pleasure alone. The punishment that the movie script deals out—we could call it his Hell—is to have essentially what he wants. You choose to live for the pleasure of the moment, Phil? Well, here you go. Here’s moment after moment after moment, unending and undying.

When Phil is first habituated to his plight he does indeed see it as a grand stroke of luck. He can do whatever he wants with no consequences. Live like there’s no tomorrow! Later, when the horror of such a Hell dawns on him, he shouts, “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!”

Phil’s initial exhilaration sours because life’s purpose and challenge drain away. We long to live “in the moment,” and so we should, free from worry and regret. But when “in the moment” becomes “for the moment,” and we do not reach up for something higher and more noble, when we do not seek to make each moment of our life a gift, it becomes unbearable. Phil gets exactly the world he wants, and before long he’s desperately trying to escape from it. But he can’t get out.

So Phil does the next best thing. He becomes virtuous. Not only does he master the piano. He reads Chekhov; he sculpts ice; he protects the weak, the sick and the needy; he saves lives; he gives gifts that bring joy. The biggest change in Phil is his total transformation from a self-centered snob who sees the small town people as disgusting rubes into a genuine lover of mankind who delights in the beauty of every human soul no matter how humble. In the process, Phil himself becomes humble, even though he is now what he earlier only imagined himself to be: the most popular guy in town.

Then, gloriously, Phil is redeemed. He gets released from his Hell. The script alone is not very clear why this happens, but I think it’s because Rita buys him. She spends all she has (in her checking account) to “buy” Phil at a mock slave-auction fundraiser. The death he needed—death to self and to sin—prepared him for the gracious gift of a redeemer who would both own him and, paradoxically, free him.

Like the old man whose words are remembered by Christians on the February 2 feast that lies behind Groundhog Day, Phil can live life as a gift precisely because he can let go of it as a possession.

Out with the Old; In with the New

2011-12-28T10:33:00.000-05:00

It’s inevitable. Tonight you will surely hear these words sung: “Should auld (old) acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot and auld lang syne (roughly, ‘time long past.’)?” The expected answer to these rhetorical questions is, NO!

Hold on to the memories, to the days long ago! Don’t let them merely fade into oblivion. The “for auld lang syne” of the song’s refrain pretty much means “for old time’s sake.” The song is often sung after some robust drinking, and it milks the maudlin and wistful feeling that alcohol sometimes produces. (If you’re Irish instead of Scottish, just think of “Danny Boy.”)

Nothing characterizes our society more than the idea of progress. We are convinced that we are smarter than people who lived a hundred, fifty, maybe even twenty years ago. Why, they didn’t know how to operate a smart phone! Their particles didn’t accelerate like ours. They hadn’t tittered their way through still one more “envelope” being “pushed” ridiculing or condemning the morals and cover-ups and stilted phoniness of auld lang syne. Forget them!

Obviously, I’m exaggerating. Most people are perfectly kind and gentle toward the old. Many of us respect and seek out the wisdom of age. The problem is that we don’t have a framework of thought on which to hang these sentiments. The assumptions of our day are strictly “progressive.” I don’t mean the politics that sometimes goes by this name. I mean the assumption that the present is and must always be an advance on the past. The past, in other words, is just raw material for the present. “New and improved” is not just an advertising slogan for us. It’s our way of thinking.

But what if the opposite is true? What if the past was better than now? What if it was more human, more neighborly, more honest and more respectable? This line of thinking doesn’t work any better than the first. Sure, nearly everybody longs for a time when people didn’t text and drive, but almost none of us is willing to be the first to give up the cell phone. And we must admit the past had its evils aplenty.

The trap we’re in, I think, is historicism. We are convinced that history has to go somewhere. So, either things are getting better and stronger and freer, with the future an improvement on the past, or things are getting dingier and less valorous, with the future as a frightful wasteland of conflict and brutality. Our official belief—mouthed constantly by politicians and advertisers—is the first: things are ever better. Our dark fear is that the second is true, and this nightmare is often manifest in “apocalyptic” movies.

We might find a Buddhist or pagan argue that history has no meaning, but I’m a Christian and we officially believe that history is going somewhere. We teach that history is headed toward a conclusion that goes by many names: last judgment; second coming of Christ; kingdom of God; new heavens and new earth. Perhaps this belief is responsible for the drivenness of Western culture, for the feeling that there’s always important work undone. Even the Bible seems of two minds in that it reveals both a coming kingdom of peace and reconciliation and at the same time nightmarish explosions of war, disease and horror. So, which is it? Is the world getting brighter or darker?

How about both? Yes, Christians believe history has a destination, but full-throated theology also stresses that that end of time is entirely God’s doing. When the Christian idea of history jettisoned belief in God and became the Western idea of history, our culture started its breakneck race toward change, improvement, and final solutions. The world we now live in is sick with stress brought on by ever-increasing speed of change. And for what? Are we really improving? Maybe this is the apocalypse. No wonder we’re nostalgic for auld lang syne.

A story Jesus tells involves servants waiting for their master to return home. It’s a parable of the last day, of the end of history. “Blessed is that servant,” Jesus says, “whom the master finds at his appointed tasks when he returns.” Not, “Blessed is the one who has made improvements.” Not, “Blessed are those who completed their bucket lists.” Just “Blessed are those faithfully doing their tasks.” Every moment and every era in history is equidistant from the kingdom of God because that kingdom comes from outside this world, from outside history. We say, “from heaven.” It is God’s gift, not our accomplishment.

So here’s a way out of the stress nightmare—trust in God. Maybe we should raise a glass to Carly Simon and sing, “these are the good old days.”

It's Wonderful, Life Is.

2011-12-05T16:42:00.000-05:00

My VHS copy of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life contains a short addendum that tells us two things about that great, upstate New York, 1946 movie that seem to be contradictory. First, the movie was controversial because the villain, Mr. Potter, gets away with his evildoing. Never does he have to face the light of justice. Second, the movie was criticized for being “Capracorn,” that is, a corny feelgood film designed to tug at the heartstrings. Can both of these critiques be true? Can a world in which the wicked are not punished still be wonderful?
Perhaps so. While Mr. Potter is not a murderer or a rapist and maybe not even a thief (he does not purposefully intend to steal the cash from Bailey Building & Loan; he simply fails to return it when he finds it), he is unquestionably bad. Would not a world in which bad people are always punished and good people always rewarded be a better world than one where these things do not happen?
Let’s consider George Bailey’s world. It is a world where the good are not always rewarded for their labors. George, his father and others do not receive what they deserve for their hard, honest work. George in particular wants to travel the world like his outrageous pal, Sam Wainwright. He never gets to. Why? Because he’s, well, too good. He gives his honeymoon money to B & L depositors in order to keep the shabby business open; he pays himself too little for a decent car; he keeps Uncle Billy employed; he fathers four children. In a film noir version of this movie, nothing good would happen to George Bailey; instead, we would put on our pensive look and contemplate the irony of a world in which, to quote other pop verses, “only the good die young” and “nice guys finish last.”
But this is Capracorn. Good things do happen to George, wonderful things, but they are not the good things he wanted. The community raises the money to keep George and Billy from prison and George is showered with love and affection. He still can’t go to Paris. He won’t ever go to Paris. He’ll stay in Bedford Falls knowing that even though evil lurks around every corner, a wonderful grace and peace belongs to those who do what’s right in life. That is not only the world George Bailey lives in, it’s the world we live in.
The movie utilizes a silly device, of course. An angel working to get his wings lets George enter an unreal world—the world as it would be without George Bailey ever having been born. It’s an infernal cauldron of revenge, debauchery and fear. Could one ordinary man make such a difference in the world? Really? The device reveals to George not what a great guy he really is (that’s what the viewer sees) but what a Wonderful Life his is. Released from the hell-world to breathe fresh air again, George runs through Bedford Falls in love with absolutely everything and everybody, the good, the bad, all of it. He does not yet know that the money has been raised. In fact, he’s ready to go to prison, smiling and leaping for joy. He is free on the inside; no bars can take that away.
Could it be that the world Clarence the Angel produces for George and that world of our fantasies where all wrongdoers are punished and all doers of good are rewarded in exact proportion to their good or their wrong—could it be that these two unreal worlds are the same? Maybe Bert and Ernie (the cop and the cab driver) don’t deserve the happiness they have in the real world. Maybe their misery in the George-has-never-been world is exactly what they have coming. The Martini family doesn’t deserve the free car ride for their goat to their new home. Consider Bert and Ernie serenading George and Mary on their wedding night. The pouring rain signifies the wretched Depression. But evil cannot conquer grace. Indeed, evil cannot even comprehend grace. A presumably better world where every crime is exactly punished and every honesty exactly rewarded is a world without grace where nothing’s extra, nothing’s unexpected and nothing’s new.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of arguing that ours is the best of all possible worlds. It could be a lot better. But no good world can exclude grace, and any world that includes grace, both the common grace of affection and generosity and the cosmic grace of sacrifice and forgiveness, is a wonderful world. Perhaps the movie’s odd title makes this point. We expect A Wonderful Life, referring to George’s. But the movie is about life itself: It’s a Wonderful Life.

For Those Who Weep

2011-11-08T16:28:00.002-05:00

Sunday School students are often quizzed on Bible statistics. What is the shortest verse in the Bible? Answer? John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” It’s strange that it should be that verse. Christian doctrine develops a view whereby Jesus cannot be moved by anything other than his own will. That’s rather close to a Jesus with no emotion. Yet the Bible is not afraid to show Jesus hungry, tired, angry and, yes, sorrowful.

Jesus does not weep at his own horrific torture and execution. It is not himself he weeps for but another. The only mention of Jesus weeping is beside the grave of a beloved friend named Lazarus. The other mourners are weeping; the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, are weeping. Jesus wept.

Recently I saw the interesting movie The Tree of Life. It has the most penetrating view of childhood, including toddlerhood, I’ve ever witnessed in a movie. Children are fully human, not just creatures on their way to being persons. During a sad set of images, Mozart’s “Lacrimosa,” a choral piece from his Requiem, played as soundtrack. While often translated “Mournful,” the word lachrymose comes from the Latin word for tears. The composer’s genius and the story’s sorrowful plot together with the pierced innocence of childhood was indeed tear-worthy.

We associate crying with children. After all, babies cry, and it’s a first response for us for many years after we emerge from infancy. Maybe that’s why so often we are told by the adults in our lives to stop crying. Our ability to control our emotions—and thus to control our tears—signifies maturity. I don’t understand it, but I’ve known men who claim that the imperative to stop crying was so hammered home to them that now, as adults, they are unable to weep. That is a great loss.

If maturity is signified by our ability to stop ourselves from weeping, a deeper and more full-blooded maturity abides in the grown person who is not afraid to cry. It is a weeping not from cowardice and fear, but from sorrow and grief.

As Jesus was walking to his crucifixion, carrying his cross, a group of women approached him, weeping in the demonstrative fashion of the often-paid mourners of his day (“beating their breasts and wailing.”) Their show didn’t impress Jesus. “Do not weep for me,” he instructed, “but weep for yourselves and for your children. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” He seems to be rejecting sentimentality. We need to think hard about the way a sentimental response to some story that tugs at the heart strings can blind us from considering the larger injustices that underlie sad stories. And yet, in the right moment, Jesus wept.

Another piece of music that can awaken deep emotion is any of several works based on these words from the stories of King David: “When David heard that Absalom his son was slain, he went up to his chamber and wept, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!’” Absalom had rebelled against his father and David’s troops put down the rebellion, killing Absalom in the process. For a time, David forgot his duties as king—to congratulate and reward his army—and sank into the grief of a bereaved father. At times the pain of life is simply too great to bear without tears. It is not sentimental to grieve with tears; it’s human.

“Weeping may spend the night,” says Psalm 30, “but joy comes in the morning.” Ultimately, the Christian story is a great, divine comedy. That is to say, as the Bible does in Isaiah and again in Revelation, that God will wipe away all tears from our faces. As we’ve already seen, this belief does not in any way make faith sugary or unreal. Just the opposite. Because we believe that, as an early English mystic put it, “all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well,” precisely because we believe that, we are free to plumb the greatest depths of human sorrow. We are not required to pretend that life is easier or cheerier than it is because we know that the pain and grief will not overwhelm us forever. They may last the night, but joy comes in the morning.

Sorrow and crying and pain cannot solve anything. They’re not meant to. They are simply signs of heartache. But they are not ultimate; they don’t get the final word. Joy does. Now, here’s a little secret. “Jesus wept” is not the shortest verse in the Bible, at least not in the Bible’s original language. In Greek, the shortest verse isn’t “Jesus wept.” It’s “Rejoice always.”

Poems for Harvest

2011-10-15T13:38:00.001-04:00

A ramshackle store called The Catholic Shop used to sit kitty-corner from St. Joe’s Hospital in Syracuse. We Episcopalians, though protestant, do require candles, vestments and such, so I had had occasion to shop there from time to time. It seemed a family-owned place, and the business practices looked to be haphazard. I suppose there were computers somewhere under all the mess, but boxes and catalogs covered everything. I had to wait for somebody at the hospital one day, so I went browsing at The Catholic Shop.
Books were clearly an afterthought there. In the back, covered with dust, they were mostly outdated explanations of Catholic doctrines and practices. Somehow there sat four copies of a book of poems by Jane Tyson Clement called No One Can Stem the Tide published by the Hutterite publisher, Plough. I knew Plough to be one of the most creative and spiritually sensitive publishers, so I bought all four.
Clement’s poetry continues to feed me. See this reflection on God’s judgment from “Autumn”:
Each dawn I did not see, each night the stars
in spangled pattern shown, unknown to me,
are counted out against me by my God,/who charges me to see all lovely things:
the clear, unresting moon, the night-filled sea,
rolling shadowed waves across the shore,
the cool wind, speaking softly of the flowers
in moon-drenched beauty by the garden wall,
the bright, relentless glamor of the day,
the ocean, curling out upon the sand,
and tumbling foamy combers to their end.
We who talk blithely about “not judging” and about “being grateful” are brought up short by Clement’s insight. It is those sins of omission, things left undone, that most condemn us—our bland failure to serve God as creatures made in his image, to take in the glories of his creation with our senses and to produce praise.
Each time my eyes uncomprehending saw
these lovely things, and passed them by unmoved,
the keen-eyed angel, frowning, moves the pen
and leaves his record stained, immutable.
Autumn, or more exactly harvest, is in biblical symbolism the time of judgment. God’s Word is planted like seed in our hearts. We are to bring forth the fruits of his Spirit such as love, joy, peace, kindness and self-control. The beloved Thanksgiving hymn “Come, ye thankful people come” carries the judgment theme, picking up one of Jesus’ many harvest-stories, this one about the fruitful wheat and the unfruitful weeds (“tares”):
give his angels charge at last
in the fire the tares to cast,
but the fruitful ears to store
in his garner evermore.
Jane Tyson Clement (1917-2000) was a native New Yorker. After raising seven children in New Jersey, she and her husband turned away from conventional life and settled with a Bruderhof commune in Rifton, N.Y. This satisfied both her longtime pacifism as a Quaker and her desire for a deeper following of Jesus. What her poems were doing in The Catholic Shop I’ll never know.
Twice she uses lovely in the poem above. Things are lovely because there is in them something to excite and draw our love. The belief that God is the creator is not derived solely from the external fact that things exist or that they work in amazing and complex coordination. More than that, things are charged with something more—beauty—that is uniquely fitted for human adoration, for love. We surmise, then, that the creator loves his creation. When we love what God loves we move in a rare fellowship with him. Rare because we are the creatures who are able to share the love of God.
Where fellowship and love are, treachery and hate are possible. God’s unique gift to the human race—the ability to love with him—carries with it a unique culpability. We, alone among his creatures, can turn and fail him. We are free to reject his goodness. Thus we are judged. Here is Clement’s “Harvest Dusk”:
The sheep crop on the stony hill,
the martins skim the evening sky,
the golden day-fall lingers still;
one star stands high.

The barley field is silver-gold;
it stirs beneath the breath of night.
The thrushes pour their songs of old
in fading light.

Thy harvest yield is ever free,
so let it grow within my heart
to bring me into peace with thee,
no more apart.

Lighten Our Darkness

2011-10-04T18:23:00.002-04:00

The power went out at my house last week, on the 22nd, for five hours. We went out to dinner, then home to see if it was back. It wasn’t. At about 10 it returned. I guess it was the equinox day, when day and night are equal length. As we lit candles around our quiet house I thought of earlier times, most times, in human history.
We hardly notice now the arrival of the dark, in part because it hardly arrives. No wonder people before us spent so much effort looking for full moons. The crescent symbol of Islam, I guess, refers to the first glimpse of moon that signals the end of the Ramadan month. When St. Paul wrote, “Let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon,” (Col. 2:16) he was saying something shocking. New moons meant much. Not that people actually feared the moon would not return from its absence; they were more sophisticated than that. But the departure of the moon spoke to the heart of our real fear: that God would abandon us to chaos. The dark on the night of the new moon is utterly dark to those without electricity, so dark you can’t see your feet as you walk. Better hold a festival, light big fires, plead with God not to leave us alone.
We—many of us, that is—suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD!), a depression correlated with the darker seasons. Artificial light really cannot substitute for natural sunlight; our bodies sense the loss. Depressed, we feel alone and abandoned by God. We know in our minds that Spring will come again, but our hearts are afraid. It’s hard to say what we’re afraid of when we’re SAD, but maybe we fear God will abandon us completely. After all, he is not bound, as the moon and sun are, to return on a schedule. He is free just to leave us in the chaos and mess our sins and the sins of others have delivered us to. Maybe, we start to think, we deserve it, that our lives are worthless anyway; if they’re worthless to us, maybe they’re worthless to him, too.
The Gospel of Jesus counteracts that possibility. God is free, yes, but in Christ he freely chose to identify himself with us for good. He even became human as we are. He is the light of the world. We are not left to the darkening mire of our complicated sins. Instead, we are lifted out, redeemed, liberated and restored.
After Jesus, in John 10, called himself the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, John added, “it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.” It was Hanukah, in other words, the December feast marked by miraculous light. The Good Shepherd, like the sun, could be counted on to remember us. Though we walked through the valley of the shadow of death, we should fear no evil. Here is not so much a cure for depression in the moment as a defeat of depression in the end. In the end, the one who laid down his life for the sheep returned from death to lead them. Depression will simply vanish like darkness evaporates at sunrise.
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one.” (John 10:27-30)

There Is A Hell

2011-09-13T18:11:00.001-04:00

Think of a fireman on 9/11, one who ran in, up the stairs, to rescue the perishing. That mental image resembles a phrase from the Apostle’s Creed: “He descended into Hell.” The difference in our case is that Hell on 9/11 was up, not down. He ascended into Hell.
The doctrine of Jesus’ descent into Hell after his death and before his resurrection has a sketchy foundation in the Scriptures. There are a few sentences in the First Letter of Peter that assign Jesus a role of “preaching to the spirits in prison.” The idea, called the Harrowing of Hell, developed that Jesus broke the chains of the underworld and rescued from it men and women who had lived and died in the ages before his arrival. It is Jesus as fireman, carrying souls to safety.
So we have a theological analogy to 9/11. But is it more than analogy? Sure, we refer frequently to “Hell” as any sort of rotten experience of pain, difficulty or even tedium. But we take it generally as a quaint relic of some earlier worldview, rather like people used to say “By Jove” long after they had stopped believing in Jupiter.
But what if there really is a Hell? And what if it really did open out into our world on 9/11? Human beings crave meaning, but when we ask what the terrorist attacks of 2001 mean, we are handicapped by our one-dimensional thinking. We assume that everything in human history can be explained by something earlier in human history. Cause and effect. “Hell” is just a colorful term for “a set of very unpleasant circumstances caused by a long chain of ignorant or malicious choices, or by sheer chance.” Even we who believe in the supernatural often tuck it safely away, outside history. Thus, Heaven and Hell are places you go when you die, not before.
It is possible, though, that there’s more to life than just causes and effects. Chaos and conflagration may be more than the mere results of bad luck and poor judgment. This is tricky, because we ought not to remove the human choices either. A small group of men made the conscious decision to commandeer planes one day that brought them unimaginable success in their mission. The wickedness of their actions is plain. What’s more, that wickedness opened up a door, you might say, to the underworld and, literally, all Hell broke loose.
Now, back to the fireman. Heaven has not given up the battle, and Heaven fights with weapons which Hell does not have or understand. On the surface, both sides seem the same. The hijackers were willing to die. So were the firefighters. But the hijackers sought to become dead sacrifices; theirs was a sacrifice to death itself, giving death a chance to reveal its horror for all to see. The firefighters offered their bodies as a living sacrifice, seeking not death but life. They simply put the lives of others before their own. And that’s the part that Hell cannot comprehend.
There was more than enough greed and sin in lower Manhattan that day—and at the Pentagon—to give Hell the right to swallow them up. But that’s something else Hell doesn’t understand: grace. In the courage and quick thinking and sheer compassion of the first responders and so many others on 9/11—remembering especially the passengers on Flight 93—Heaven fought back that day. You might even say that on 9/11, all Heaven broke loose.

[FILL IN THE BLANK] MUST CHANGE OR DIE!

2011-08-18T17:36:00.000-04:00

You, too, can write a best-selling book. Just use the formula above for your title. Subtitle might be Why Everything You Thought You Knew About [fill in the blank]is Wrong! or A Bold New Prescription for [fill in the blank] in Today’s World! (Remember to use lots of exclamation points!) Now, just fill in the blank with “Washington” or “Christianity” or “The Family” or “Fishing” and you can retire to Vail on the sales.
But seriously, we live in an age of progress. It’s been this way for a while. The so-called Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries began this epoch in human history. Now, several centuries later, the progressive faith is getting a little frayed around the edges. Basically, a progressive era believes that the new is better than the old; the gadgets, the morals, and the philosophies of “today” are nearly always better than those of “yesterday.” Old ways are superstitious; new ways are scientific. Old ways are hidebound; new are liberating. Old ideas are brimming with prejudice; new ideas are fairer and more inclusive. And so on.
In contrast is a traditional society. It believes almost the opposite. The old ways are venerable and wise; the new are untested and reckless. What is old gives our lives meaning and ballast; new things introduce chaos and fear. While we have some sympathy for a traditional approach, we really cannot exit our era and live traditionally. Perhaps the closest we can come is to note the traditional cultures still surviving on the fringes of the world, among aboriginal peoples in remote areas. For good or ill we belong to the world of progress.
One of the painful aspects of progressive culture is the emptiness at the end of life. Instead of gathering around the elderly to learn about the traditional and life-giving ways, we pass them by. They don’t get the new jokes and they can’t manipulate the new tools. Instead of the young feeling uninitiated in the truths of life, as the young might feel in a traditional world, it is our elders who feel out-of-it and foreign in the very world they worked to build.
“Change or die,” the catchy mantra of a progressive culture’s bestsellers, is a bitter reality. Those who can change—who can progress—do, while those who cannot die. But here’s something sad, the Achilles heel of progressivism. We all will die. We will all stop changing. And no matter how up-to-date our machines and ideas and breakthroughs are today, they are sure to be supplanted tomorrow. When the categories of good and bad are replaced by the categories of future and past, everybody is consigned to being, eventually, out of date. Our world does have its version of Heaven and Hell. Heaven is The Next New Thing (you’re not quite there yet!). Hell is Out Of Date (be careful to avoid this!). In the progressive era, everybody finally goes to Hell.
Christian faith is somewhat connected with progressivism. Christians were the ones who refused to worship the tribal and traditional gods, after all. Judeo-Christian faith impelled early scientists to discover truth in God’s creation. Christians spoke of a kingdom to come and of a New Testament in contrast to an Old Testament. The Old Testament, too, breaks with traditionalism. Do not be like your fathers, the psalms exhort, for they were a sinful and wicked generation.
For the Bible, perfection and truth lie neither in the future nor in the past. The coming kingdom, while strictly speaking in the future, does not develop out of the present. It is not the culmination of human progress but a gift coming down out of Heaven from God. From the Bible comes the idea that every era in history—and every period in each of our lives—is not measured by its worldly success. The standard is not whether my present actions lead to something better in the future; the present has its own integrity and its own measure. That measure is love. Nothing, and no one, is to be discarded in favor of something better down the road. Every finite thing and every finite moment can be received with thanksgiving to God. All can be redeemed.
And at the very center of the story is the case of a man who is God. He reverses the progressive order. He dies, then he changes. Instead of a relentless treadmill where we must always change or die, Christ calls us first to die: die to everything this world counts important; die with arms outstretched in love; die with no assurance that your death will be successful or even noticed. Die with Christ. That way, you go to Heaven.

Is Busyness the New Sloth?

2011-07-19T16:58:00.000-04:00

Busyness is the New Sloth

Ah, summer! Long afternoons lounging at the beach, reading thick novels. Languid evenings chatting aimlessly with friends on the patio. Children catching fireflies, playing for hours at the far end of the lawn. Or not.

The pools, the gardens, the lawns, take hours and hours of care. The kids need carting from camp and park, and from one parent to the other. Vacations are themselves massive work, not to mention the undone stuff that piles up at work waiting for us to return. In a minute June is gone. In mid-August, the college kids begin to leave already. The hammock we got in spring and hung up between the trees never got used. We wrap it up for winter; the trees add one more ring.

The seven deadly sins, which are not found in the Bible itself but developed in Christian history, are a marvelous tool for taking our spiritual temperature. They’re not sins, exactly, at least not in the strict sense of willful acts of disobedience to God’s command. Instead, they are really seven deadly inclinations, hardly evil in themselves, yet subtly inclining us away from the Creator’s purpose and design for us.

Think how Lust and Envy can quietly colonize our background thinking. In fact, if we were to guess which of the seven deadlies most infected us twenty-first century Americans, we’d be likely to choose one of those. Anger, with its violence, might get some votes. Coveteousness—which is something like greed—would certainly rank high. Some people say that our culture has managed to turn all seven of these from sins into virtues. We actively work to cultivate Gluttony (which is obsession with food, not overeating), and as for Pride, well, let’s just say that until recently “self-esteem” was considered a fault.

But we haven’t converted all seven into virutes. We all still despise Sloth, don’t we? Maybe there’s a danger that Anger, say, or Lust could ensnare us, but who worries about Sloth?

We don’t worry because it seems the farthest from our possibilities. We are busy, busy, busy. And we mistakenly imagine that Sloth is simply another word for laziness. Somewhere, perhaps, there are mindless couch potatoes whiling away hours in meaningless TV, somewhere those people who constantly comment on internet articles are hunched over their laptops, but they are not us. We’re busy! We’re not lazy. Sloth, however, does not mean “lazy.”

The official name for Sloth is accidie, a word that never really caught on. It’s taken directly from Greek and means “not caring.” Sure, Sloth can manifest itself in laziness; a person who doesn’t care enough about his neighbor to rouse himself from bed when he hears a scream next door is without doubt slothful. But so is the one who eagerly sets up a lawnchair to watch and listen to the domestic battle next door. Sloth is indifference to matters of moral and spiritual importance.

The catch here is that indifference does not only mean turning away. It may mean turning toward. That is, to treat life and the world around us as merely entertainment, as something to relieve our boredom, is Sloth. Sloth, therefore, can masquerade as Busyness. We’re so busy, so active, so harried. But our busyness may not be a matter of engagement but of disengagement. That is, we lose the ability to discern what really matters. Everything is a TV show.

Strangely, then, just as Sloth insinuates itself into our souls under the guise of busyness, so the remedy for Sloth can also appear in surprising garb: rest. Rest, like that rest commanded for the Sabbath Day, is not always laziness. It might be the very opposite of Sloth. To step back from our frenetic activity and the world’s mindless entertainment to rest, truly rest in mindful and sober repose, peacefully focusing on the permanent and solid goodness of the world is to pay high compliment to its Creator.

So, to combat Sloth, climb up into that hammock and use it before the snow falls!

The First Easter May Have Been Terrifying.

2011-04-23T17:12:00.001-04:00

This year our church's Easter stationary pictured clouds. That's it, just clouds. I guess I'm picky, but what do clouds have to do with Jesus' resurrection? A big stone, maybe. Bloodstained dirt, linen wrappings neatly folded in a cold cave, yes. But clouds?

Actually, the most telltale thing in the Easter story is a body—the body of Jesus that was executed on a cross. In half of the stories, it's the absence of the body that drives the narrative—it's not where it's supposed to be, namely, in the tomb—and in the rest of the stories it's unexpectedly present, as when Jesus appears, alive, to display his nail-scarred hands and feet to his speechless followers.

So why the pictures of clouds? Probably because believers and non-believers alike frequently confuse and conflate the resurrection of Jesus with his ascension into heaven. In fact, many people mistakenly think that the Easter greeting, "Christ is risen!" means that Jesus died and went to heaven, sort of like Grandma. One source of the confusion is semantic. We don't much use the term rise to mean "wake up"; it's over-formal to say "I rose from sleep this morning." Instead, when we hear the word rise, our minds think of levitation, stage curtains, or birds taking flight. But when Christians say Jesus rose from the dead, we mean simply that he stood up or woke up, as we do every morning.

Maybe some of that semantic confusion is at work when the first message we glean from the news that Jesus rose from the dead is a message about life after death. You can search through the stories found in all four Gospels about Jesus' resurrection; you'll not find anybody drawing conclusions about life after death. Years later, as believers themselves faced death, yes, teachers pointed out that Jesus defeated death itself, our "last enemy." Because of his victory, those who belonged to him had nothing to fear from death. But this was far from the first thought for those who were suddenly face to face with the man they saw die three days earlier.

Their first thought may have been sheer terror.

Consider, especially, Peter, his chief follower. We know that, as Jesus was being framed by a kangaroo court indoors, outside, beside the fire, Peter was vigorously denying that he had ever laid eyes on that jerk, much less had been one of his followers all the way from Galilee. Peter was afraid of being crucified himself, and he was a coward, a doubter and a fair-weather friend. When he realized how false he had been he was overcome with shame. He went out, the Bible says, and wept bitterly.

The last thing Peter expects is for Jesus to wake up from death and come pay him a visit. The very idea would fill him with fear. Imagine you were watching when a car plunged into a shallow pond, but that instead of wading in to help, you decided that you were too busy or that you didn't want to get your clothes wet. Imagine that you find out later that children inside the car could have been saved had only a bystander acted quickly. How would you feel? Now imagine that, somehow, those children who had suffered so were able to return from death and confront you to your face. Would you be anticipating the meeting? What if they now possessed a power and authority beyond human knowing?

You would expect, at the very least, to be permanently shamed. At the most, you might have to pay for your callousness with your life. You wouldn't be thinking about clouds.

Tantalizingly, the Bible reports that just such a meeting—between Peter and the risen Jesus—did occur, but the encounter is not narrated. We don't know what Jesus said or whether Peter cowered in shame and remorse. But we know the outcome: Peter becomes brave. Eventually, it is said, he was himself crucified—upside down.

What happened at the meeting of Peter with Jesus after the resurrection is the seed of the entire Christian faith. Peter would not have to pay for his failures; in fact he could not. Jesus paid for Peter's wrongs and for the wrongs of the whole world. And the overwhelming power demonstrated by the resurrection of Jesus was channeled not toward the punishment of the weak, the wrongdoers and the two-faced, but toward their forgiveness and rehabilitation.

It's a truth that still rankles us when we wish God would spend a little power on overcoming the bad people, but it is our everlasting comfort when we realize that we ourselves, however bad, can still be forgiven and saved.

Douglas Taylor-Weiss is the Rector of the Episcopal Church of Saints Peter and John in Auburn.

Faith in His Blood

2011-03-31T09:51:00.001-04:00

There's something strange about blood with us. First, our worship service involves the drinking of Jesus' blood, under the Sacrament of wine. Here are some more blood-phrases from our Eucharistic Prayers: Through faith in his blood, we, and all thy whole Church, may obtain remission of our sins (Rite I, Prayer I); By his blood, he reconciled us (Rite II, Prayer C); Your . . . Church, redeemed by the blood of your Christ" (Rite II, Prayer D).

If it doesn't seem strange to you (since you've become so accustomed to it), consider: Jesus taught us to renounce vengeance and payback. He stopped the crowd from stoning the woman. He rejected "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, lifeblood for lifeblood." We spend a lot of time asking how our wine can be transformed into his blood, but maybe we ought to ask ourselves how Jesus was able to transform blood into wine. Clearly, that was a move away from blood sacrifice toward peaceful fellowship.

Let me offer four ways to put our faith in his blood.

(1) Believe that Jesus' blood substitutes for yours. Recognize that wrongs you have committed have damaged others in this world, often in ways you do not know. It's not enough to apologize. You have contributed to the pollution in the stream of history, and you owe something of your life to repay the damage you've done. Jesus offers his blood in place of yours and pays the debt you owe. Trust in his blood and receive forgiveness.

(2) Believe that Jesus' blood substitutes for the blood of others. The wrongs that others have done to you and to the world are severe and long-lasting. Apologies are not enough. Those who did them deserve punishment; they owe something of their lives to repay the damage they have done to you and to the world. In serious cases, they deserve to die. But Jesus offers his blood in place of theirs; he pays in full the debt they owe. Trust that his blood covers all the wrongs committed by others and release them from their debts, in Jesus' name. Forgive.

(3) In ancient Israel, consuming blood was strictly forbidden. The blood was understood to be the life, and although the meat could be eaten, the life belonged only to God. When Jesus invites us to drink his blood, he is offering us his life—an eternal and divine life that exceeds mere biological life. To trust in his blood is to believe that God raised him from the dead: he is alive and is now able to share that life with us.

(4) We, the Church, are the body of Christ. The blood of Christ is the blood that gives life to this body. We do not hold the Church together through meetings or plans or structures. The Church lives because Jesus' life is poured into it by the Holy Spirit. Trust in the blood of Christ: he alone binds us to one another. We belong to one another because we share the same blood, we drink from the same cup. Without his gift of love enacted on the cross, we are nothing but a club—and a shrinking one at that. But because of his blood, we are one with the saints in heaven and on earth. In St. Paul's words, "We are dying, and behold! We live."

Where is God when Disaster Strikes?

2011-03-28T11:45:00.001-04:00

In April, 1843, a teenager, Henry Richards, drowned in the Hudson River off Poughkeepsie as a result of his boat capsizing. His grandfather was the senior professor at Auburn's Presbyterian seminary. The grandfather, Dr. James Richards, wrote a letter of condolence to his son, the boy's father, Henry:

A letter from your brother Edward informs us that the body of dear little Henry had not then been found—a circumstance which naturally augments your trial, and prolongs its anguish. But this too, is a part of God's wise design—a thing determined from eternity, and without which his scheme of government would be less perfect.

Wait a minute! Is he saying that this insult to injury—that, after the horrible drowning, authorities can't even recover the corpse from the river—is itself "part of God's wise design . . . determined from eternity?" Are we to believe that God determined before the foundation of the world that if the body of 13-year old Henry Richards were to be recovered then the overall plan for the world "would be less perfect?"

I have no doubt that Dr. Richards was a sensitive and comforting man. His letter overall is full of sympathetic feeling. And, of course, he was grieving too. But his extreme view of God's direct causation of everything, good or evil, is more than I can stomach.

If God is the author of every event, if he engineers every drowning, every house fire, every tsunami, in order to calibrate the most perfect world possible, then while there may be now some "reason" for every single ill that comes, there is no meaning or reason to the whole of it. If God is nothing but a grand and dread will, utterly overruling all our acts and cancelling out our freedoms, then he is no longer, really, God. God is not sheer will. God is love. Love involves will, but it also involves a withholding of the will so as to give room for the beloved to act and to be.

When giant disasters strike, like the Japanese tsunami, one can detect a slight swirl of excitement among some atheists. One more chance to prove that there just can't be a God who is both almighty and loving! Actually, though, there's no need to wait for a tsunami. Any child wasting away from cancer in any pediatric ICU should have the same effect. Unless, that is, we think that thousands of untimely deaths of innocents is somehow "worse" than just one.

But we don't think that, not really. And why not? Is it because love cannot be quantified? Is it because any disaster, small or large, simply spits in the face of love? Is that why we, like Rachel of the Bible, refuse to be comforted? Yes. Or, to put it another way, we refuse to be comforted by the evil event because it has no comfort to give us. Dr. Richards was just wrong. Fatal accidents and such absurdities don't contribute to a more perfect world. They do just the opposite: they make the world less perfect.

But just because we refuse to be comforted by the horror itself, does not mean we refuse comfort altogether. Instead, we might rather look outside of the catastrophe for comfort, where there is much to be found. There is the love of family, friends, neighbors, even strangers, who still survive, love that we may have been ignorant of before, love we may have taken for granted. There is nobility and bravery and skill displayed by those who attend to the victims of senseless wrong. A single act of kindness can, like love, be of infinite value. There are sweet memories of the days before the disaster, days of play and laughter and hope.

But how do we keep those sweet memories from becoming bittersweet and, then, just bitter? By taking comfort in God. He is not the author of evil. He is the all-powerful creator of everything, visible and invisible, but that doesn't mean that he does everything. What he does do is love, comfort and—finally—rescue us from the wasting disease known as evil.

The creation is like a broken mirror, absolutely beautiful in so many pieces and places, reflecting the sheer glory of God's love and hilarity, yet tragically, mournfully broken too. We should hate that it is broken and love it even in its brokenness. More directly, let us thank God for the privilege of life in this magnificent and spiritual creation of his, and let us reach out in comfort to those who are whipsawed by the cruel absurdities of suffering.

Why do Numbers Mean So Much in Scripture?

2011-02-03T17:16:00.001-05:00

I'm planning to teach a class soon on Revelation (the book in the Bible, not the concept.) It's forced me to study that strange book again and, with the help of an amazing British Bible scholar, Richard Bauckham, I've learned some marvelous new things. I'll share the exciting stuff in the class (Mondays, 7 p.m., March 14—April 11) but here, just for fun, are some surprising numerological statistics from Revelation.

Any reader of the Revelation to John knows that numbers matter quite a bit. There are lots of sevens and fours throughout, and who can forget this identification of the Beast: "Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666"? That's a number nearly everybody's heard about from Revelation!

In general, the number 7 signifies perfection or completeness. The book is written to 7 churches, signifying a complete number, representative of the entire church. There are series of judgments in Revelation: 7 seals, 7 trumpets, 7 thunders (these are rescinded and not carried out) and 7 bowls. There are 7 blessings given. The number 4 signifies the world or the created order. Thus, the earth has 4 corners and 4 winds.

Seven times four means, therefore, something complete that is connected to the world. Look above: 4 series of 7 judgments constitutes a complete judgment on the whole world. (Since one of the 4 is rescinded it may mean that judgment is withheld from some of the world.) A long list of cargoes imported by "Babylon" from the merchants of the earth totals 28 (= 4 x 7) signifying the entire output of the whole world.

John 7 times describes the peoples of the earth in a fourfold way. Interestingly, each time is a little different:

tribe and language and people and nation (5:10)

nations and tribes and peoples and languages (7:9)

peoples and languages and nations and kingdoms (10:11)

peoples and tribes and languages and nations (11:9)

tribe and people and language and nation (13:7)

nation and tribe and language and people (14:6)

peoples and multitudes and nations and languages (17:15)

When it comes to God, again numbers matter. The full term "The Lord God Almighty" appears 7 times. So does the phrase "The One Who Sits on the Throne." Then God or Christ identifies himself by a phrase signifying his eternity: "first and last," "alpha and omega," "beginning and end." He utters such a phrase 7 times.

The word "Christ" is used 7 times and the name "Jesus" appears 7 x 2 or 14 times. Seven times Jesus announces that he is coming again. And the term "Lamb," which refers to Jesus, occurs 7 x 4 or 28 times. Likewise, there are 4 mentions of "the seven Spirits of God." Since these Spirits are, John says, sent out into all the earth, it makes sense that they're spoken of 4 times.

Much of the meaning of Revelation circles around the testimony of Jesus inspired by the Spirit of prophecy. (Revelation itself is a prophecy.) The word "Spirit" appears 14 times, the same number as the appearances of "Jesus." The word "prophecy" shows up 7 times. At the center of the book is a parable of two prophets who embody the testimony of Jesus and are killed for their witness. Perhaps that's why there are 14, that is, 7 x 2 occasions of both "Jesus" and "Spirit."

The number 12 signifies the people of God. (It's no coincidence that 7 = 3 + 4 and 12 = 3 x 4.) Twelve squared (for completeness) and multiplied by 1000 (to signify vast numbers) produces the number of God's army: 144,000. The description of the New Jerusalem near the end uses 12 throughout; furthermore the number 12 can itself be found 12 times.

There may be more. Since "Dragon" occurs 13 times, "Satan" 8 times, "Devil" 5 times, and "Babylon" 6 times, Bauckham suggests that the numbers 7 and 12 are in those cases being deliberately avoided. Then there's the famous 666. Evil imitates God (thus, 3 digits for Father, Son and Holy Spirit) but evil always falls short of God as the number 6 falls short of 7.

This may seem silly to us or mildly insane. But think of it as the musical soundtrack to a movie. Revelation, in fact, is very much like a movie with its improbable scene changes, its moving back and forth through time and its visions both freakish and fantastic. One hardly notices directly the soundtrack in a film. Yet it clues the audience to the meaning of the scene. So operate the numbers of the Bible, clueing the reader and hearer to the deeper significance of the passage.

WORKING MOTHERS

2011-01-19T10:27:00.001-05:00

If you want to start an argument, just bring up the question of mothers going to work. First of all, we haven't even got the right language to talk about it. Naturally, as the bumper sticker used to say, "Every Mother is a Working Mother." Well, okay, let's exclude here the absolutely horrible mothers who abandon their children just to go out drinking. But this is a tiny, tiny minority. What we want to say is that mothers who stay at home are themselves working. Raising little humans is hard work. So we try to talk about those mothers who "work outside the home" which still doesn't make clear the status of those mothers who "work" (that is, they have remunerative jobs) but who work nevertheless from home. Could we maybe refer to "paid" and "unpaid" mothers, then? And how about those who homeschool their children? They are "working" in still another way than simply as homemakers. By now, some readers will already be edgy.

John Rosemond has pointed out that we used to speak of "working wives" and "housewives" and thereby emphasized the woman's relationship to another adult rather than to her children. Remember the old-fashioned case of the housewife who was childless, a woman who did not have children and who nevertheless did not "work" (did not have a paying job)? She might carry out important charity and social functions in the community, caring for matters not directly related to the money economy that other women, burdened with many children, were unable to attend to. Such a woman might still be honored on Mother's Day for she was a mother in the community. "Mother" meant someone who reminded us that community and society were more than, and more important than, money.

I said that children are a burden. Some may find this offensive. After all, the thinking goes, if you don't want children, don't have them. If you have them, find them never a burden, but always a joy, in fact, the greatest joy in all your life. I say, forget it. Children are a burden, as everybody who's had them knows. Yes, they are also a joy, and a blessing, and a great privilege more noble than running a billion-dollar corporation. Yes. But they are a burdensome joy, a burdensome blessing and a burdensome privilege. Children are not a consumer commodity that one might obtain if one feels the desire. Children are the future of the human race, and so long as we hope in God who promises to bring his kingdom to fruition in the future, we have a responsibility to exercise that hope by, among other things, having children. We bear the burden of rearing children to love God and neighbor—all of us, parents and non-parents alike—not because we find it appealing to do so but because we hope in God.

Lots of people imagine that the Bible supports the idea that fathers are to go "out" to work and mothers are to stay home. Not at all. As Wendell Barry has perceptively noted, the problem in our society didn't begin when mothers went out to work. The problem began a century earlier when fathers went out to work. Our obsession with money and our imbecilic idea that if something doesn't have a price it's not worth anything is our problem. So let's honor all "mothers" this year, everybody who still reminds us that life is more than buying, having, experiencing and accumulating. Let us honor those who bear the burden of hope because our hope for a truly human world is not in vain. Someday, by God's grace, we'll all come home.

What Would Jesus Do?

2011-01-18T13:11:00.001-05:00

Listening to an offbeat campus radio station some time ago, I heard a song called "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" In what I could make out over one hearing, "Brian Boitano" was an alien who came down to live on earth, and his followers kept asking, "What would Brian Boitano do?" In an equally goofy vein, the spoof movie The Life of Brian shows a scene in which Brian, a contemporary of Jesus in 1^st century Palestine, loses a sandal running away from his too-ardent admirers. His disciples immediately stop to fall into a dispute, one group claiming that the sandal should be encased in jewels and worshipped, the other insisting that, no, Brian meant to instruct us all to lose our sandals for the sake of our neighbors. Recently, a group of environmental Christians made waves by opening a campaign called, "What would Jesus drive?" the idea being that it would not be an SUV. Immediately, Jay Leno suggested that, as a single guy and carpenter from a rural area, Jesus would drive, naturally, a pick-up.

Actually, Jesus himself answered this question long ago: I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise. Jesus points us to the Father when asked what he would do. I do, he says, what the Father would do.

The teaching that Jesus came down from heaven can sound in our ears as though he is some sort of alien, some non-human being like Superman or "Brian Boitano" who looks like us but is actually different from us, and better. Someone with special insight and abilities who can solve our problems for us. But Jesus is not an alien. He is fully human. He does not want to be known as the man with special information and miraculous power. He does not want to be known as the powerful one; he wants to be known as the obedient one. He does only what he sees the Father doing. What the Father does is love.

One time someone addressed Jesus as "good teacher." "Why do you call me good?" Jesus retorted. "No one is good but God alone." All talk about Jesus as some religious or moral or spiritual genius in human history is off the mark. The miracles he performed were not those of an alien being, but they were the very acts that all human beings could do if we would only do what God the Father does, if only, that is, we would love. Jesus is what human is all about. At Christmas we remember that Jesus entered the world doing nothing at all. He just was. We shall find answers to our What to Do questions once we learn What to Be. We are to be children of God, obedient to the one who has become our Father through Jesus.

Here is what Julian of Norwich said, in English, in 1373: We know in our Faith, and believe by the teaching and preaching of Holy Church, that the blessed Trinity made Mankind to His image and to His likeness. In the same manner-wise we know that when man fell so deep and so wretchedly by sin, there was none other help to restore man but through Him that made man. And He that made man for love, by the same love He would restore man to the same bliss, and overpassing; and like as we were like-made to the Trinity in our first making, our Maker would that we should be like Jesus Christ, Our Savior, in heaven without end, by the virtue of our again-making.

Not only does Julian see what Jesus would do; she sees what he will do, and does.

A BIG 400TH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR

2011-01-03T17:44:00.001-05:00

Sitting as a boy through long, boring sermons, I was surprised to find these words at the front of my Bible: TO THE MOST HIGH AND MIGHTY PRINCE JAMES, BY THE GRACE OF GOD, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND IRELAND, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH, &c. The Translators of the Bible wish Grace, Mercy, and Peace, through JESUS CHRIST our Lord.

Huh?

For years I had no idea what these words were all about. They are, of course, the opening words to the Preface of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. (We call it that; however, the Bible itself simply says "appointed to be read in churches" and is known in England as the AV—Authorized Version.) The KJV was published in 1611; we celebrate this year its 400^th anniversary.

No book in English has had more influence. It is a standing refutation of the remark that nothing good is ever produced by a committee. This Bible was in fact produced by 6 committees (or "companies"), each given a portion of the Scriptures to translate, with at least 50 scholars in all.

The KJV was not the first Bible in English. A Bishops Bible was produced in 1568, and English Puritans (those wishing to rid the church of bishops) published, in Switzerland in 1560, an English Geneva Bible. In fact, the Geneva Bible remained more popular in England for years after the KJV was published. It is a strange quirk of history that even though Massachusetts was settled by Puritans, the Bible our Puritans preferred was the King James. Thus, congregational settlers in New England and Anglican settlers in Virginia used the same Bible. American writers from Hawthorne to Melville to Steinbeck to Faulkner all drank from the same biblical well. Only in the last 50 years or so have American churches abandoned the KJV. Today, many Christians—even many ministers—are unfamiliar with its well-worn phrases.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

Hundreds of like passages could be quoted. The KJV somehow is both stately and direct, both majestic and down-to-earth. It delights in English's abundance of one-syllable words. As Miles Smith, the author of the Preface, wrote, "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water." Each of Smith's four metaphors is plain English, yet each is, naturally, metaphorical. And metaphorical is spiritual for it sees a deeper truth in everyday reality. In fact, what Smith says about translation could be said about the Scripture itself: it is an uncovering—a revelation—of God who is light, bread, temple, and living water.

American history would not be the same without the KJV. We find it in Lincoln, constantly and with much depth ("the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether" [Psalm 19:9]); we hear it in Martin Luther King ("every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together" [Isaiah 40:4-5, with slight variations]); and even though the KJV is a Protestant Bible and the Catholics had their own 17^th century translation, John F. Kennedy, our only Catholic President, wisely chose the KJV—twice—in his inaugural address ("undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go free" [Isaiah 58:6] and "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation" [Romans 12:12].)

The 2011 anniversary remembrance will not bring back popular use of the KJV. Its authority is waning. Perhaps a valedictory from its own pages best speaks for the KJV itself: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

Getting Real in the Second Century

2011-01-03T17:43:00.001-05:00

In recent decades, much interest has been generated by documents discovered, or rediscovered, from early Christianity that are sometimes called Gospels. Most scholars agree that the unearthing of the so-called Gospel of Thomas from Egypt (where the climate preserves paper for centuries) is an important find. Others, like the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, and so forth, are pretty dull. They come from a third century community that was deep into philosophical speculations. Remember, just because some famous name is attached to a book does not mean the person named actually wrote it.

But a book that has been known for centuries which comes from the early second century is highly interesting. It's called the Didache (pronounced DID-ah-kee) which means "teaching." It claims to be by "the twelve Apostles," but it's not. However, you can tell in reading it that it is a real instruction dealing with real issues of the generation just after the Apostles died. It sounds similar to the latest letters of the New Testament like 2 & 3 John, Jude and 2 Peter. It is generally dated around A.D. 110.

So, for your light reading, here are some excerpts:

Baptize as follows: after you have reviewed all these things, baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" in running water. But if you have no running water, then baptize in some other water; and if you are not able to baptize in cold water, then do so in warm. But if you have neither, then pour water on the head three times "in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit." And before the baptism, let the one baptizing and the one who is to be baptized fast, as well as any others who are able. Also, you must instruct the one who is to be baptized to fast for one or two days beforehand. But do not let your fasts coincide with those of the hypocrites. They fast on Monday and Thursday, so you must fast on Wednesday and Friday. (7:1—8:1)

You can see here the concern for communal identity and unity. The writer takes little interest in the meaning of baptism or of fasting. He (she?) is more interested in everybody doing things the same. It is the beginning of liturgical experts, I suppose.

Then, there were scammers:

Let every apostle who comes to you be welcomed as if he were the Lord. But he is not to stay for more than one day, unless there is need, in which case he may stay another. But if he stays three days, he is a false prophet. And when the apostle leaves, he is to take nothing except bread until he finds his next night's lodging. But if he asks for money, he is a false prophet. Not everyone who speaks in the spirit is a prophet, but only if he exhibits the Lord's ways. By his conduct, therefore, will the false prophet and the prophet be recognized. If any prophet teaches the truth, yet does not practice what he teaches, he is a false prophet. If anyone should say in the spirit, "Give me money," or anything else, do not listen to him. But if he tells you to give on behalf of others who are in need, let no one judge him. If [a prophet] wishes to settle among you and is a craftsman, let him work for his living. But if he is not a craftsman, decide according to your own judgment how he shall live among you as a Christian, yet without being idle. But if he does not wish to cooperate in this way, then he is trading on Christ. Beware of such people. (11:4-6, 8, 12; 12:3-5)

The Christmas Story

2010-12-04T13:27:00.001-05:00

Christmas is a little hard to grasp at first. St. Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians, "You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." This amazing line, thrown off as something the Corinthians already knew, he writes in order to encourage their giving. He wants them to donate money to the poor of Jerusalem.

So you've got giving and Christmas, forever together. Now Paul did not have a particular holiday in mind. He himself did not celebrate Christmas. That all comes much later. But the event that lies behind the holiday is Jesus Christ giving up his wealth to become poor so that we—all of us, all the world—might become as rich as he himself once was. Christmas teaches sacrificial giving and a concern for the poor if in some small way those who consider themselves followers of Jesus hope to imitate him.

But what was Paul referring to? When was Jesus rich? When and how did he become poor? And how can that act of his make us rich?

The term Christians use is incarnation. Jesus is understood to be God in the flesh (Latin: carnis.) That would be sheer mythology if we meant simply that Jesus was a god, some sort of supernatural being masquerading as a man. But we say, rather, that in Jesus the one God—Being itself, not a being—assumed human nature. That, too, would be idiocy if we meant that God somehow ceased being God and started being something else. Instead of that, we claim that God himself is one God who eternally exists in three "persons." The second of those three persons in God—the person known as the Son or the Word—became flesh and lived among us. That eternal person of God—the Son of the Father—is also the man Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus we can say that he was once rich. In other words, he is God himself, beyond every worldly measure of wealth, all-powerful, all-knowing, above every passion, entirely without rival. But "for your sake," he became poor. Jesus, the eternal Son of the Father, had to learn how to eat, crawl, walk and talk. He got hungry, tired and discouraged. As an adult, he was rejected, mocked and finally executed. And—how strange for one beyond all suffering!—he felt the sharp physical and emotional pain of that execution. The promise of Christian faith is that through his voluntary suffering, we who have our own sufferings to undergo, our own poverties economic, emotional and social, can be joined to him as he chose to be joined to us. Since he was in the end victorious, we can have ultimate victory, too. As Paul put it, "by his poverty you might become rich."

That would seem to wrap up the story, but there's a twist. Christian teachers insist that Jesus—God incarnate—does not conceal the true nature of God. Instead, he reveals the true God. But how can that be? Jesus doesn't look like God at all; he looks like an ordinary man. He doesn't know everything; he can't be everywhere at once; and, in spite of some impressive miracles, he's not all-powerful either. Why not just say that God is hiding in human form? Well, that's not what Christians say.

God is fully revealed in Jesus according to God's truest self. God, you see, is love. When God decided to take our human nature to himself and to be born to us, he was not simply laying aside his godliness and lowering himself to our status, as though we were on some lower rung of existence than he and that he would come down and join us for a while. He was also taking up something from his creation—our human nature—and filling it with eternal life and joy. He issued to us an invitation—a Christmas card, you might say—to know him through his love. So Paul can say to his readers, "You know the grace. Now go and do likewise."

Explaining Benediction

2010-12-02T14:48:00.001-05:00

A parishioner told me recently of a dream. In connection with the dream, this parishioner received a strong impression on the mind, a sort of message. The message was simple: Put Jesus First. The Bible instructs us to test the spirits to discern which are from God. I am sure this message is true, from God, for our parish. It is in full accord with the Scriptures, the tradition of the Church and godly good sense. Whenever we are buffeted by trouble, anxiety, sickness or cacophony, we need to Put Jesus First. One concrete way to respond to that message was to institute the devotional service called Benediction. Honestly, I surprised myself, since I never had any strong attraction to this service myself. However, an item used in Benediction, a container for the Blessed Sacrament called a monstrance had been stored in a closet here for years. It was time, I reasoned, to put it to work. A description of Benediction from an Episcopalian devotional book called St. Augustine's Prayer Book explains it better than I can. Here it is:

This popular devotion began in the 13^th century. It is an extension of that very brief section of the Eucharist when, just before the Communion, special devotion is addressed to Jesus present on the Altar under the outward signs of bread and wine. [The author is referring to The Breaking of the Bread and the singing of the Agnus Dei, "O Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world . . ."] The Eucharist, however, is addressed primarily to God the Father and it would overturn the nature of the Eucharistic action to give the Eucharist over to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The love of devout hearts felt the need of expressing their faith in our Lord's sacramental presence and their adoration of him who comes to be with us in this lowly form. And out of this need grew the custom of taking the Sacred Host from the tabernacle at some time when Eucharist was not being celebrated, and holding a little service of adoration. A very old Christian tradition dictated that any people who might be in the church when the Blessed Sacrament was being reposed in the tabernacle, be blessed with the Sacrament, and this usual blessing naturally became a part of the service of adoration. Thus Benediction supplies a need of souls who have entered into the meaning of our Lord's real, objective presence in the Blessed Sacrament and, at the same time, guards against the danger of making devotion to the Blessed Sacrament a substitute for the Eucharistic action of offering to the Father.

Reporting back from the first experience of Benediction on Nov. 27, I can share the following thoughts:

This seems very appropriate for Saturday evenings because one feels, as it were, hungry for the Sacrament. The effect is something like the mouth-watering feeling you get when you enter the house where bread or cookies are being baked. You know you'll have to wait a little, but not long, before you get the chance to satisfy your hunger. In the meantime, the aroma makes the anticipation sweeter and the food—when it arrives—more delicious.

This also seems right for Advent. How often do we hear or say something about "putting Christ back in Christmas." Well, voilà! There is a deep connection between the coming of God to earth by taking human nature from the Virgin and the coming of that God-man to us in the form of bread and wine.

Another Look at Rock of Ages

2010-11-14T21:43:00.001-05:00

The number of hymns widely known throughout the American population grows smaller by the day. Amazing Grace and On Eagle's Wings seem pretty secure for now. Silent Night and other Christmas carols, though fading, are still recognizable by tune if not by lyric. Just as I Am, the staple of Billy Graham crusades, is still remembered, as are a number of African-American spirituals.

One famously popular hymn in the last century, now quickly losing ground, is Rock of Ages.

Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee;

let the water and the blood from thy wounded side that flowed,

be of sin the double cure, cleanse me from its guilt and power.

It's hard enough to accustom our ears to writings from the time of the American Revolution, when this was penned, but this song presents further difficulties, too. While there is reference in the story of Moses to his being shielded from God's full glory in the cleft (the fissure or crevice) of a rock (compare the hymn He Hideth My Soul in the Cleft of the Rock), here the Rock, clearly, is Jesus Christ.

When Jesus and two others were crucified, soldiers were sent to break their legs and thus hasten their deaths. Coming to Jesus, the soldier found him already dead. Instead of breaking his legs, he stabbed his side with a spear. The writer, John, carefully explains that blood and water flowed out from the wound. Christians have long seen in that description a foreshadowing of the two sacraments, Baptism and Holy Communion.

Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778), the hymnwriter, finds in the blood and water from Jesus' side a "double cure" of the guilt we suffer from our wrongdoing and of the habit-forming power that evil behavior has over us. More surprising, however, is that Toplady frames his hymn as a prayer to Jesus that he might be sheltered within the gruesome wound itself.

This vivid, somewhat repulsive, image reinforces the strong theology of this song. The wrongs we commit are themselves repulsive to the holiness of God. Yet God, in mercy, allows himself to bear in his innocent body the full damage that our sins produce. When we give up any claim to our own righteousness, when our wrongs become repulsive also to us and we depend entirely on God's unmerited favor, we are saved.

Should my tears for ever flow, should my zeal no languor know,

all for sin could not atone: thou must save, and thou alone;

in my hand no price I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.

The second stanza nails down this truth. No amount of regret, no heaping up of good works can atone for the disease that our wrongs have unleashed on God's good creation. Therefore, we come empty-handed before him, trusting only in his love.

These themes are not normally popular. I suspect that this hymn was a long-running favorite because of its tear-jerking third stanza. Nothing so attracts our perennial attention as a grief-stained gaze at life after death. Augustus Toplady's success is that he does not allow the pleasures of heaven to efface the suffering of Jesus. Standing victorious at the center of God's redeemed world is the same Rock of Ages, the Savior wounded "for me."

While I draw this fleeting breath, when mine eyelids close in death,

when I rise to worlds unknown and behold thee on thy throne,

Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.

Advent Arrives November 28.

2010-11-01T11:54:00.001-04:00

One of the questions that often occupies our Worship Team is how to assist the whole parish in deepening our love of God. Worship, after all, is a group of people expressing together their love for God. So we don't often ask ourselves how to make worship attractive or entertaining. Instead, we look for ways to reinforce in worship those desires that God the Holy Spirit has already implanted in our hearts—the desire to know God as our Father, to love what he commands and to hope for what he promises.

We are, however, operating with a very small set of aids to worship. Beautiful music is one such aid. So is beautiful architecture. Incense, pictures, stately language all help. But largely what we have to work with is confined to Sunday mornings.

Christians of previous eras lived lives much more immersed in reminders of God's goodness. Simple habits of speech—calling on saints, giving God praise—saint's day festivals and time off, religious parades, Christian guilds and clubs, open chapels, visible nuns and priests, roadside shrines, home altars and other such everyday displays of faith all served to bolster our desire for holiness so that Sunday worship was not the sole occasion of acknowledging God in our week. Rather, Sunday morning was the culmination of the believers' week of faith.

Well, enough of the history lesson. Let's not be nostalgic. God has called us to live out our faith in the 21^st century, and it is a precious, demanding and wonderful calling! We are to be his witnesses in this time and place!

So, Worship Team is asking: How can we help the congregation share our faith throughout the week without expecting us all to be physically present together? How can our common life of faith expand beyond the boundaries of Sunday mornings? Using ideas from the Team, I am proposing an Advent exercise.

Advent, you know, means "Coming," and it refers to the arrival of God in the person of Jesus. In fact, in Advent we celebrate both God's first coming to our world, as the son of Mary, and his Second Advent—his coming in glory at the end of history to judge the living and the dead. Joyful preparations for Christmas ought to be paired with spiritual cultivation of love in our hearts as we prepare for the final arrival of our Judge.

But December is so busy! That's why I'm asking you all to do this exercise: First, commit yourselves to daily devotions. You may use the Prayer Book—daily readings are on pages 936 & 938. We are also providing Advent daily devotional books at the back of the church for you to pick up and use.

Second, I urge and ask you all to conduct a three-hour fast on each Sunday in Advent. The Bible reports several occasions when the Holy Spirit speaks to the church while they are fasting. You pick the specific hours, but choose a 3-hour period on the four Sundays of Advent to abstain from food, drink, sleep, television, phone & internet. Laughter, games, walks, music, crafts, wrapping presents, SU Brass Concert, baking cookies, decorating the tree, writing Christmas cards, prayer and reading are allowed!

What about shopping? Is it a fasting activity? Uh. . . . I say no. Let's give a bow to those old days when stores were closed on Sundays.

I'm only asking for four short fasts, and the Worship Team will be collecting your responses and suggestions when Advent's over.

The Question of God

2010-10-11T16:50:00.001-04:00

You can have a long discussion about religion without ever mentioning God. After all, religion—a quintessentially human endeavor—involves texts and art and morals and cultural attitudes that impinge on nearly everything we do. Some people would rather leave God out of it, too. On one side are those who like religion for all the good it does. People are generally encouraged to be kind and loving, hospitals are built, moral boundaries are maintained, and beautiful artifacts are created. As a mirror opposite, others despise religion for all the bad it does. People insist on their own way, powers are cowed and coerced, fevers are pitched, and cultural boundaries are disrespected as believers try to spread their faith.

None of this, however, touches the question of God. To say it again: religion is a human endeavor, as basic as building houses. We all might consider a house built with today's materials and skills superior to a thatched hut with wattle walls. Likewise, we can make certain comparative judgments about religion. But how do we determine whether a given religion is true?

Just as the purpose of building houses is to shelter families, so the purpose of religion is to house truth. The family in the mud house might have much more love and hope than the family in today's expensive home. The construction of the modern house might be superior, but we would be wise to live in the hut if we really want to experience the best that houses are for.

So with religion. "Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it." Religions may perform all sorts of ancillary tasks—good, bad or neutral—but only that religion that is inhabited by God can give us what we seek and need.

So how do we know, how can we know what is true? There's a serious puzzle here: if we simply choose the religion we "like," then we are putting our own limited judgments above the truth of God. After all, wouldn't any true God actually challenge us to change our behavior and our ideas? But then, we can't put all judgments aside, either. Down that path lies fanaticism. How can we know what does or doesn't have the ring of truth?

Here are three possible tests: First, the moral test. Is God understood to favor what people almost universally attest to be good behavior? Nearly everybody recognizes that courage is good and cowardice bad, for example. Or, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, the cultures of the world disagree about which women a man may have, but they all agree that he may not have any woman he likes. Does God set moral boundaries: stealing, lying, murder, sex, etc.?

Second, the reality test. Is there confidence that the world as we perceive it is real and can be reliably examined by ordinary people? I am tilting the playing field toward the Judeo-Christian, I know. Their insistence that the world was created by God in accordance with Wisdom or Reason opened the way for modern science to flourish. So long as you think that what we observe is an illusion or exists only by God's whim—which can change at any moment—nothing like the Scientific Method makes sense.

Third, the beauty test. The story goes that in A.D. 988, Vladmir of Kiev, wanting to unite his kingdom in a single faith, sent delegations to Constantinople to investigate the religions there. Those who visited the Byzantine Christians reported, "We knew not whether we were in heaven or earth." At issue is not simply whether worship is pretty or moving. The question is whether the beauty around us—a peasant's quilt, a symphony, a field of grain—speak somehow of a never-ending Beauty reaching out to our hearts.

In short, is God good? Is God rational? Is God beautiful? To answer each of these with Yes is to draw close to the core of true religion.

Daily Devotions

2010-10-04T17:09:00.001-04:00

Surely, none of us will make progress toward union with God in Christ without daily devotions. I'm not saying that devotions are a surefire solution to our spiritual problems, just that they are a necessary component.

What do daily devotions look like? Time and place set apart for prayer. First, choose a time of day. I am a morning person. My devotional is in the morning. I sometimes manage something at bedtime or even in the evening, but not regularly. Some people, however, are better built for evening devotions or bedtime or even noontime prayers. Just make sure you've got a place set apart (stocked with any books or pictures you will need) and a regular time to be there. It is more important that the time be daily than that it be lengthy. If you can set apart ten, even five minutes every day, that's better than aiming at thirty once a week.

Develop an order. The Book of Common Prayer has one-page orders of private prayer for different times of the day on pages 136-140. These will get dull unless you alter the readings, the psalms and the hymns or canticles. Or, just make up your own. The following elements are, I would say, necessary: Something from the Psalms, personal intercessions & thanksgivings, the Lord's Prayer. These are highly recommended: Another portion of Scripture, a prayer from the Prayer Book, confession of sins following examination of conscience. (A good idea is to build in your confession for one particular day a week, like Saturday or Sunday.) There needs to be a mix of private and personal conversation with God with scripture and the formal prayers of the Church. Silence also is wise, even for a minute.

Traditionally, certain elements are assigned to certain times of the day. The tradition comes from monastic life where several prayer-times are observed every day. Morning uses the Apostle's Creed and the biblical canticle (song) called The Song of Zechariah or, from its Latin opening, the Benedictus. The evening canticle is Mary's Song, the Magnificat. Bedtime is the time for a confession, along with the Song of Simeon, the Nunc dimittis. For some, again, this can be too repetitious.

The Bible itself was centuries ago divided into chapters and verses; the simple reading of a chapter of Scripture each week is sure to cure your devotions of any boredom. For those who prefer to spend time meditating on small portions of the Bible, even each word, a verse may be the best segment to choose. Of course, some awareness of the context would be necessary.

We often say that the Psalms are "the prayer book of Jesus." It's true. And the 150 Psalms are also the prayer book of the church. They are an especially good place to find individual verses of great depth because each verse is in effect a stanza of a hymn. Also, a feature of the Old Testament where, as you know, the Psalms are found is a rhythm of sense. That is, instead of relying on rhythmic meter or rhyme, biblical hymns and poems repeat the meaning of the verse two, three or even four times. The Lord sets the prisoners free;/ the Lord opens the eyes of the blind;/ the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. This permits a deeper meditation and reflection. All Bibles contain the Psalms, and the entire Psalter is also printed in the Book of Common Prayer in a very satisfying translation.

AN INDEFATIGABLE AND ZEALOUS PRELATE

2010-09-20T15:49:00.001-04:00

September also began on a Wednesday in 1830. In fact, that was the day that Dr. John Henry Hobart, the (Episcopal) Bishop of New York, arrived at the old rectory of St. Peter's Church on Genesee Street in Auburn. Some reading this will remember that house which stood in the open lot between today's church and the Auburn Family Restaurant. It was finally torn down in the 1960's.

Hobart, small in stature, was a giant of a man. He founded two institutions that still endure, Geneva (now Hobart) College and the General Theological Seminary in New York City where professor Clement Moore penned A Visit from St. Nicholas in 1822. More than that, Hobart travelled to every corner of the state during his 19 years as bishop, more than doubling the number of churches and tripling the number of clergy. He confirmed around 15,000 persons. A beautifully wrought memorial bust brought to Auburn in 1833 aims, as it reads, "not so much to portray the character or commemorate the worth of the exemplary and gifted man, the learned divine, the faithful pastor, the indefatigable and zealous prelate and the sincere and pious Christian as to record the affectionate veneration in which his memory is held by the numerous individuals to whom he was known in life, and by the still greater number who lamented him in death."

Affection for Hobart was sincere. In an age when most men, especially men of station, were very reserved and preachers were dignified and contained, Hobart was bubbly, excitable and outgoing. He travelled west of Albany by horseback, stagecoach, canal boat (maybe) and on foot. Yet, he even made forays as far as Michigan in devotion to Christ. For a time, he was not only bishop of the whole state of New York, but also the visiting bishop in two states that had none—Connecticut and New Jersey. At the same time, he served as Rector of Trinity Church, Wall Street, the richest and most influential church in America.

On Thursday, September 2, Hobart preached at the frame church on Genesee St. that stood where the large SS. Peter & John is today. His text was Job 28:28, "The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom." He confirmed nine persons. His plan was to travel on Friday to Skaneateles to consecrate the St. James' Church, but he was feeling unwell. As his health declined, he cancelled the rest of his journey and wrote to his son in New York to come to Auburn to take him home. Hobart realized that he might die; he said to the Rev. John Rudd, Rector of St. Peter's, "Pray for me that I may not only say this, but feel it as a sinner; for, bear me witness, I have no merit of my own. As a guilty sinner would I go to my Savior, casting all my reliance on him—the atonement of his blood. He is my only dependence—my redeemer, my sanctifier, my God, my judge."

The bishop's son, William, arrived in Auburn on Friday, Sept. 10, and all were aware that this sickness would be Hobart's last. On Saturday, he asked to receive Holy Communion and dictated his will. Early Sunday morning, September 12, he died, two days before his 57^th birthday. After a morning wake at the Rectory on Sunday, Hobart's coffin was removed by hearse to Weedsport to be transported down the canal. The churchbells tolled until the procession reached the village limits. It was a time before embalming, but the new technology of the canal allowed the body to reach New York in less than 4 days.

A grand evening funeral that attracted almost 3000 people was conducted at Trinity Church and the bishop's body was buried under the Altar. It had once been said that Hobart was the most respected man in the state, a man who could easily have been elected governor. At his funeral, the mayor and governor were both present, along with many other dignitaries and clerics. Interestingly, that Governor was a man from Auburn, Enos Throop, who himself is now buried beside the Church of SS. Peter & John.

Would somebody please say:

2010-09-10T17:23:00.001-04:00

Look, the book-burner in Fla. is a kook. Everybody with any influence in America denounces his stunt--Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Churches, Rabbis, EVERYBODY. What more do you want??? Are we supposed to jail him? Cut off his head? America is a free country and that means you are free to be a kook. It's legal here to hurt other people's feelings. Sorry, but that's the price of freedom. Take your lumps. So, Muslim hotheads with nothing better to do, if you have to go out and kill a bunch of people because some dork in Florida is free to be a kook, then the problem is not just him, it's you. We don't have blasphemy laws here. Don't have 'em; don't want 'em.

Newspapers, Telephone Books & Church

2010-09-04T11:47:00.001-04:00

Twenty-four years ago, an article in Harper's Magazine caught my attention. It seems that the numbers of earthworm taxonomists keeps on declining. Universities with earthworm studies are being squeezed to replace them with more exciting programs, and the human race is losing its knowledge about the humble earthworm. Those meticulous 19^th century drawings of categorized worms are crumbling, and with what shall they be replaced? The internet, of course. You can get anything on the internet.

Well, maybe. The information on the internet is rather unreliable. Vibrant "Comments" and "Reviews" sections can't exactly be counted on for the truth. Wiki-everything is amateur. But, you know, the sheer volume of millions upon millions of people putting all their amateur juices together does seem to produce information that seems just as authoritative as anything produced by some bearded professor of entomology at Cornell in 1892.

Who knows? One wonders, certainly, whether we could be plunged into a Dark Age simply by somehow losing access to our electronic brain. Another concern would be storage. Will we, in 50 years, be able to retrieve the information we're now storing electronically? How many of us can still read the old 5" floppy discs? We can, with effort, still read books written thousands of years ago. What will people read of us thousands of years hence? We don't purchase anymore the book with every Episcopal Church's address, rector and phone just like we don't get the City Directory. It's all online. Will it always be?

People today love to read old tombstones, in part because it helps us connect to our past in a time we feel adrift. Have you noticed how many people are no longer leaving tombstones for future generations to read? "Scatter my ashes in the lake, say something nice, and move forward," we bravely tell our youngers.

Telephone books are getting smaller, and, as folks abandon land lines, residential telephone books will die out. Is that bad? It's hard to say, but it might be.

What will become of newspapers? They are shrinking and still losing lots of money. A field not to enter right now would be journalism. Who's going to pay you? TV networks, too, are laying off hundreds.

In context, the troubles of the Church don't seem so shocking. Seminaries are closing. Lifelong careers in ordained ministry are becoming rare. Old church buildings are becoming impossible to maintain. This may not mean that the world is losing its faith in God. After all, the decline in telephone books and newspapers is actually accompanied by a growing interest in news and in the use of phones—but in a new and fragile configuration.

That's true of church. Nearly every old form and plenty of new ones we try to plant are fading before our eyes. But Facebook, for example, has all kinds of faith in God displayed. Now, that hardly means some great new flowering of holiness. Like the other situations I've mentioned, there's plenty in today's Church-scene to worry about. There may indeed be a Dark Age down the road. Some of God's methods for dealing with the last Dark Age are showing interesting upticks: Christian pilgrimage is at an all-time high; monastic-style arrangements are proving popular; conversions are occurring in the most remarkable ways; we can hope that chastity will soon make a comeback. I would gladly return to the old way of tutoring students for ordination as was done for centuries before seminaries took over.

We'll see what we'll see. And the Church of Christ will move forward into the next age as it has into every other age since Jesus said to Peter, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

UP AGAINST LIFE’S TROUBLES AND SORROWS

2010-08-16T12:21:00.001-04:00

One of the first things I learned upon becoming a pastor was that problems and troubles happened to everybody—churchgoers and stayers away, fervent believers and agnostics, rich and poor, respectable citizens and habitual offenders.

This fact pretty much removes that tempting line of persuasion that says, "Join this church or adopt this belief and practice and your life will brighten up. Problems will melt away. Joys will be intense and sorrows fleeting. Here is the faith that will make you happy!"

Such a sales pitch feels natural to us. Why, we ask, would anyone commit themselves to an unseen Savior or to a demanding God unless it paid some serious dividends of contentment and happiness? This approach to religion seems obvious to us because it mimics advertising. No cultural form is more engrained in us than the ad. Ads we understand. If religion can be packaged as a product that improves our life, we can understand religion.

And God knows there have been plenty of attempts to frame religion in exactly that way. But in spite of the thousands religions and religion-substitutes that are hawked like that, as products to make us happier, it just isn't true. Life is difficult, painful and replete with sorrows.

One of the ways that Jesus shocks our sensibilities is by refusing to sell his Good News as a pain pill. Instead, he says, "I did not come to bring peace to earth, but a sword," and "You will be hated by all on account of my name." This guy, we might think, isn't going to attract many followers with that message. But Jesus doesn't only predict troubles; he also promises help. Specifically, he promises supernatural help to those of his followers who face persecutions. If such help were not available, he suggests, no one could hold on to their faith.

Shortly after his departure, the test came. In waves of Roman persecution, adherents of Jesus were thrown to wild animals, roasted over flames, beheaded, crucified and worse. One of the best known (for she kept a close diary) was the aristocratic matron Perpetua and others, including the slave Felicitas. Felicitas was eight months pregnant when these Christians, captives in Carthage, were awaiting their gruesome executions.

The law did not permit pregnant women to be victims in the amphitheatre, so Felicitas, it seemed, would be made to wait while her fellow church-members were torn by the beasts on the date set, a special performance for Caesar's birthday. Her ultimate appearance would come later, probably with common criminals. This disturbed the whole band and they prayed together. Immediately after the prayer, Felicitas went into premature labor, eventually delivering a healthy daughter whom another believer adopted.

Felicitas screamed in the dungeon as she suffered great labor pains, and a jailer thought to ask her an excellent question: "If you suffer so much now, what will happen to you when you are thrown to the wild beasts?" Felicitas answered, "Now, it is just I who suffer what I suffer. But then, someone else will be in me who will suffer for me, because I will be suffering for him."

Her answer is a flash of light. The soft faith to which we are often tempted in which Jesus somehow lightens every one of life's burdens is decisively rejected. Childbirth and so much else in life is hard, whether you're a believer or not. But we are drawn to follow Jesus because of the high and noble calling, the extreme demand he makes of us. Christ calls all his followers to an astringent and sparkling heroism. He even issues his call to obscure slavewomen. To join him in renewing the world by love is to live at the very highest level of humanity. The ordinary difficulties are still there, and other, worse difficulties enter in on account of the calling. But for those special troubles a special help is given, a comfort and peace that passes all understanding. He suffers for us when we suffer for him.

Say It Ain’t So

2010-08-02T15:02:00.001-04:00

It was in the news again today. U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "There is no religion that sanctions what can only be described as cold-blooded murder." Is he right, or not?

Crowley was referring to the killing of a Frenchman, Michel Germaneau, 78, by al-Qaida operatives in Niger and Mali. M. Germaneau was an aid worker. The French government had announced simply, "We are at war with al-Qaida." While the purpose of the State Department's statement was to express full cooperation with the French in hunting down Germaneau's murderers, they couldn't resist the opportunity to dabble in theology.

Since 9/11, both Republican and Democratic administrations have often repeated this theme: the violence perpetrated in the name of Islam around the world is not true Islam. In fact, it's not religion at all. We, the politicians and diplomats, will decide what qualifies as religion, and then we'll let you know. One catchy phrase has it that the terrorists have "hijacked" a good religion.

Precisely speaking, spokesman Crowley's statement is certainly true. No religion sanctions what can only be described as cold-blooded murder. The problem, though, is that this killing and many thousands like it, can be described in other ways. It's not cold-blooded murder to the murderers. It is, perhaps, courageous jihad, or the punishment for infidelity, or the protection of fellow Muslims from impurity, or whatever other religious justification there might be. What's puzzling to me is why the State Department or the President would anoint themselves as the nation's official theologians so as to declare to the rest of us what is or is not true Islam. Sometimes, the contortions they make to exempt religion from every criticism are ridiculous, like the Attorney General's refusal—after persistent questions—to admit that Islam plays a role in the terrorists' motivations, or the pretense that the Army major who killed 13 people at Fort Hood shouting the Muslim slogan Allahu Akbar was actually motivated by other soldiers' post-traumatic stress disorders. That officer's email correspondent, Anwar al-Awlaki, said after the shooting that "fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty." There is a dispute as to what true Islam is.

And that is my only point here. Our political leaders, thank God, are not empowered to do theology for the nation. They are not experts on what is or is not true Islam or true Christianity or true anything else. The Salt Lake City hierarchy of the Mormon Church is at great pains to let the rest of us know that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is not "true Mormonism." But I would be shocked if the government weighed in on this dispute. The prosecutions against the polygamist members of the second group are based not on their theology but on their breaking the marriage laws of Texas.

It is up to the Muslims of the world to decide what constitutes true Islam, faithful to the Qur'an and Hadith. The way this works is not that some grand poobah or authoritative Council simply lays down the law and Muslims worldwide accept it. That doesn't even work with the Pope. Instead, over time people will "vote with their feet" and adhere more or less strongly to one or another version of the religion until the present crisis recedes somewhat.

But then, up against a religious enemy, we can't completely avoid theology. More bracing and more responsible leadership would acknowledge that religion is the prime motive behind today's Muslim terrorists, and that religion is a search for truth, and that the United States does not accept as true any theology that endorses the murder of 78 year-old aid workers. We should say, with France, "We are at war with al-Qaida."

Baseball: A Spiritual Journey

2010-07-10T13:55:00.002-04:00

One long and difficult summer, trying to get to sleep on a humid night, I tuned my radio to The Detroit Tigers Radio Network. The season was half over already and I started my attachment to professional baseball with that most quintessential fan experience: the Tigers failed. It was 1967, before divisions, and the Tigers fought down to the wire with the Boston Red Sox. Boston went to the World Series. But I was hooked to the arresting narration of Ernie Harwell who made every game a story. Next year, I'd follow the Tigers from Day One. I'd listen to every pregame interview and stay awake half the night to hear the postgame wrap-ups from the west coast. A Michigan winter came and went and I was fully on board with the magnificent 1968 season in which the Tigers would win it all, rebounding to beat St. Louis in the Series after being down three games to one.

Baseball deals in infinity. Most sports—think hockey, football, lacrosse, basketball—resemble war. There's a goal into which one team needs to deposit the Thing. The opposing army defends their goal as the two teams take the field of battle. These "oblong games," as one writer calls them, operate in finitude. The field is bounded and there is a clock. It is good to remind ourselves that war, which these games symbolize, is likewise limited. The clock runs out and the nations go home, one a winner, the other a loser. Perhaps (as in soccer) the war is a draw. New wars will arise, true, but war is finite.

Peace, like baseball, is infinite. Both space and time in baseball are endless. The foul lines extend out so that fair territory infinitely expands. A quarterback who throws a pass a hundred feet past the end zone is a failure, but a hitter who smacks the ball a hundred feet past the outfield fence is the greatest of heroes. And there's no clock in baseball. In theory, a team could keep on hitting and scoring forever or, as we used to say in church, "world without end."

Baseball teams do not take the field opposite each other. Instead, the game is a series of individual contests—the person against the world. Infinity calls to each of us, but most often we're out. Baseball reminds us that to succeed against life's obstacles only twenty-five percent of the time is pretty darn good. After all, even the greatest among us fail more than half the time. Furthermore, when we do succeed, we usually still need others to help us along. Solo home runs are fine, but dull to watch. Success is rarely solo. It is good for others to further our contributions and to make them count. It is good, too, to help others move forward even if we ourselves are left on base, stranded when the inning ends.

Baseball suggests that our goal is to travel far, through many dangers, and finally to arrive at "home." It turns out that the home we come to is the same one we left, but it is infinitely more precious for our having sought it. That part of the game, interestingly, is finite. The diamond traces out a bounded life. This fits exactly. Life without boundaries is meaningless. We are surrounded by infinity, and we touch it, but we don't seek to become infinite. Think of the batter beating out a single and tearing down the first base line, then calmly turning back to the base, back to finitude.

In December, 1967, my mother died of cancer. In my eleven year-old mind, there was something like "The Tigers lost, and now this!" I avoided thinking about what had happened. Next year would be better. Losing seasons are normal and common. Don't dwell on the losses.

The Tigers' next season was heaven. I had belonged in a small way to their 1967 loss, but I was a full participant in 1968's victory. Through the intercessions of Saints Ernie Harwell, Jim Northrup and Denny McLain, I was held up by the infinite goodness that baseball signifies. As always, when the cold and dark approached in October, most teams went down under, defeated. But my Detroit Tigers did not. All winter long, through the snow and the death of cold, they were—and always would be—world champions.

This Column was censored by The Citizen (Auburn, N.Y.) for being “too attackful.” I guess they want religion to be all cupcakes and marshmallows.

2010-06-23T09:42:00.001-04:00

Auburn's Star Theologians: Manowar

Many of us in Auburn don't realize that missionaries from our little town travel the globe and preach to tens of thousands of people each year, telling them about God, good and evil, conversion and Hell (a lot about Hell, actually.) They are Auburn's most significant international product, the heavy metal mega-band, Manowar.

The brief study of their lyrics that I've conducted (using the website www.darklyrics.com) can hardly do justice to the theological poetry they've been singing for about 30 years, but a few themes do emerge.

Manowar taps Norse paganism for its vicious loyalty to the blood brotherhood of valor that laughs at death. Some parallel to Christ's "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend," could be drawn. But Jesus urges his disciples to lay down their swords, too, saying, "All who take the sword will perish by the sword." Manowar sings, I live and I'll die by the sword.

Odin, I await thee/Your true son am I/I hail you now as I die/I pledge you my sword and to no man I kneel/Ours is the kingdom of steel.

From earliest days, Christian believers were ridiculed for their kneeling to a man, namely, to Jesus. More than that, they were mocked for the fact that Jesus died so shamefully, without defending himself, in the company of common criminals. To kneel to this man, they said, is an impossible humiliation. Manowar's perspective is similar.

Manowar does preach nobility: My protection I give to those in need/Mother, Son and Daughter and Father will be free/from the chains of death upon them/I shall end their misery. The source of misery is perhaps the universe itself. One lyric calls it "The curse of the universe that damns me."

Christians, too, speak of an ancient curse. We believe, however, that God reversed the curse—a curse attributed not to God but to our own rebellion against his peace—by graciously sending his Son to take on human nature and to live and die as one of us, indeed, as one of the lowliest of us. There's a he-stoops-to-conquer strain of Christian belief that is nowhere found in Manowar theology.

A feeling of great grievance pervades the music. Revenge, executed fearlessly, is the only way to cleanse oneself. Gods of war I call you/My sword is by my side/I seek a life of honor/Free from all false pride. Long shall we remember/He who walked the road of danger/Master of revenge/Death's no stranger. A cruel, cursing universe seems to require from Manowar an equally cruel response of vengeance: Rip their flesh/Burn their hearts/Stab them in the eyes/Rape their women as they cry/Kill their servants/Burn their homes/Till there's no blood left to spill/Hail and Kill/Power and dominion are taken by the will/By divine right hail and kill.

This is religion. It commends a life lived in devotion to certain faith-claims. Like the paganism on which it draws, Manowar theology suggests the belief that the universe is a perpetual war between the weak (the false, the insincere) and the strong. We are urged to fire up our wills and become strong. In contrast, Christianity asserts that the universe is a peaceful gift given by a good God who calls us to care for the weak. Christians mark salvation not by heroic assertions of our wills, but by self-giving acts of love.

While occasional reference is made to a resurrection of the conquering warrior (in accordance with Norse mythology) the final victory is more simply seen as success in battle, head unbowed, kneeling to no man: Fight for the Kingdom fighting with steel/Kill all of them, their blood is our seal/Fight till the last of the enemy is dead/Ride through their blood that we gladly have shed. Into the darkness I command my soul/Never shall I repent, never shall I be saved/I go into the house of death/Before my last breath my enemies all shall die.

Christian sources also contain some vengeance, but the contrast could not be greater between Manowar and Jesus who said, shockingly, "Love your enemies." Here is Manowar: My strength is hatred, torment and pain, HATRED, HATRED/With heart filled hatred black blood runs through my veins./HATRED. What bracing sermons are preached from Auburn!

DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE

2010-06-06T20:02:00.001-04:00

Let's be honest. You don't like everybody. The beautiful thing about the Christian way is that you don't have to. That's right. You don't have to like everybody. You have to love everybody, but you don't have to like them, not all of them anyway. God made all of us different. The idea that everybody has to somehow be alike is an idea that comes not from God but from totalitarianism. It's a worldly, faithless idea that everybody has to conform to some visible pattern. What does the Scripture say? It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

So when we don't like somebody, it's just another way of saying that the other person is not like us. But that's okay. Because being like us is not the end all and be all. The end all and be all is to be like Jesus. And it does not yet appear what that shall be like. We all, when he appears, will be like him. Then—at his appearance—we will like everybody because everybody who belongs to the community of Christ's love will be like him. Those people we don't like now will change and be like him. And guess what? We also will be changed to be like him.

If we try to force ourselves now to like everybody, we are jumping the gun. It does not yet appear what we shall be. Simply accept the fact that we do not yet see everything in subjection to Christ whether in ourselves or in others. I encourage you all, at The Peace, to share the peace of Christ with all those nearby, those you know and those you don't, those you like and those you don't like. We are the Lord's children now, but the Lord is still unseen to us. When he appears we shall see him as he is.

True, we "see" him in the Scriptures, both in the Gospels where his mortal life is told to us, and in the rest of the Bible where his identity is prefigured (in the Old Testament) and revealed in the life of the Church by the Holy Spirit (in the New Testament.) True, we "see" him in the lives of the saints throughout Church history. We truly receive him as our food and drink at Holy Communion. But for all that, he is not yet visible to us. We await that final appearing.

Is there somebody who sucks your energy out of you by refusing to let go, or by asking too many questions, or being too needy? Learn to set clear boundaries and enforce them. You are not anybody's savior. Jesus is the Savior. You can truly love someone when you set those boundaries.

Do you find yourself thrown into long-term, regular contact with somebody whose ways are not your ways? Learn the old practice of civility. Hugging is not required. Respect is. Take an interest in learning the age-old patterns called manners. Read (or watch) more Jane Austen novels. Remember that your ways are not so adorable to others, either. How would you expect them to treat you?

I wonder if part of our problem isn't that we've come to expect our lives always to be enjoyable. Are we, as I've heard another teacher say, "addicted to fun"? I am convinced that those who make pleasure a goal in life are much more miserable than those who make goodness their goal. Of course there are difficult people. Of course there are times unpleasant. But be a Christian! The temptation to be unkind to others and the temptation to despair over the difficulties of life are both temptations to sin. Pray for God's help to resist these temptations.

—with love, Fr. Doug

The Urge to Praise

2010-05-20T10:50:00.001-04:00

Gratitude is a wonderful trait. Thanksgiving is a lovely holiday and everybody, religious or not, can celebrate it together. So long as we focus mostly on being thankful we hit the right note. One can be thankful toward God, or the gods, or The Force, or simply the universe. Decent people are thankful people—ready to acknowledge good fortune, sympathetic toward those less fortunate, and cheerfully generous rather than stingy and mean. And you don't need religion to be thankful, thank God.

But then there slips into our consciousness an urge. It's not just the feeling of gratitude. It's a feeling of longing and delight. It comes when we wake up some morning to the sheer fascination of being alive. It is good to be alive, we feel. Or maybe we hear a strain of birdsong or glimpse the fog just lifting from the meadow. This is good, we say. Just this, just the insane and impossible fact that this is this, that here is here and there is there. Goodness is bottled up in the isness of things and its glory is spraying out of every pore. Then arises the urge to praise.

Now we need God. Oh, sure, we can report on our experience to others. We love to tell a friend about the beauty we saw or heard or felt. But we need more, not just something to talk about. We need someone to talk to, someone who can listen. The urge to praise is the urge to say to the Source of all being, "You are good!" and have the Source answer back, "Yes. I'm pleased you noticed." In that exchange are held together both I am small (since the whole of what is is so much bigger than I) and I am big (because the One who holds it all together is pleased with me.)

Life without praise becomes banal. Recent writers and artists are superb at capturing the banality of a praise-less world. One example would be poet T.S. Eliot. Here are some lines of his: In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels / The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit, / The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court, / And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: / Their only monument the asphalt road / And a thousand lost golf balls.

Those last two haunting lines also reveal man as someone both small and big, except that in Eliot's vision we are small in the wrong way and big in the wrong way. Big and powerful in our projects, yes, but small in our significance because so much that we do seems so pointless. We need to praise.

A second author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, captures the soul of praise in telling the story of one of The Brothers Karamazov: Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. . . . Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and "he was not ashamed of that ecstasy." There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over "in contact with other worlds." He longed to forgive every one and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything.

A Magnificent Correlation?

2010-05-01T13:03:00.001-04:00

Have you noticed the window rescued from the old St. John's that is installed north of the side door to the church? It's the woman washing Jesus' feet. The story takes different forms in the four Gospels, even appearing at different times in Jesus' ministry.

The story in Luke is very helpful. The woman, entering into the supper at the home of a notable man, has caused him embarrassment and he concludes that Jesus must not be a true prophet. Otherwise, "he would know what sort of woman it is who is touching him. She is a sinner!" (Luke 7:39)

Jesus is able to read this man's thoughts so he decides to tell him a little parable. It concerns two debtors of a single creditor. One debtor owes a small amount and the other a very large amount. They were both penniless so the creditor forgave them both. Then Jesus asks his host a pointed question: Which of the two will love the lender more? The answer is obvious. It is the one who was forgiven more.

Jesus then turns to the woman at his feet and says, "See this woman? When I entered your house you didn't give me any water for my feet, but she is washing my feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. You did not anoint my head, but she anointed my feet with myrrh. That's why, I say, her many sins are forgiven to her. She loved much, but the one who is forgiven little loves little."

It's a classic Jesus-story. But we don't really know the back-story. It's always a bit confusing because the woman seems to know of her forgiveness coming in; that's what sparks her great love. But when did she get that forgiveness?

Well there is one remote possibility. You know the story of the woman caught in adultery? Jesus says, "Whoever is without sin cast the first stone." That story has no fixed place in the Gospels. In some manuscripts it's missing; in some it's after John 7:53 or after John 7:36 or 21:25 or after Luke 21:38. Jesus' magnificent, final words to the adulteress are, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." Do you suppose she's the woman who later washes his feet with her tears, having been forgiven much?

IN PRAISE OF MEN

2010-04-20T16:22:00.001-04:00

I took advantage of the splendid weather on Easter Monday to drive my daughter and her friend to Carpenter's Falls. It's one of the dozens of waterfalls on streams large and small as they cascade into our glorious Finger Lakes. There's a short trail from the parking place to a good view of the falls and plenty of further paths, less secure, if you want to get a really close view and feel the spray.

So I'm gingerly stepping along one of those paths and I pass a tree growing out from the steep slope. The trunk has cracked, fallen and wedged itself into the Y of another tree forming a perfectly horizontal beam jutting out over the river far below. I then realize that some young man in love has climbed up and out along that tree trunk to nail to it a set of white, wooden letters: emily will you marry me.

It's cute but not surprising. It's not surprising because it's fairly common. We've heard of the Marry Me banners towed by airplanes, the Jumbotron proposals at the ballpark, and the proposal mown into a field of wheat and visible only from the air. If these are the sort that make the news, just think how many smaller, Carpenter's Falls-type love notes there are out there.

Men are romantics. I know, I know, the current take on men is that we're slobs who watch TV all day and boorishly forget our wedding anniversaries. Not to mention the fact that we're dimwits who serve as the butt of every sitcom joke. I really loathe the way "Papa Bear" in the insipid and moralistic Berenstain Bears books is always a doofus who needs to be civilized and corrected by Mama Bear.

But, really, men are romantics. Women love their babies intensely and are fierce about protecting them. Maybe there's something about carrying a chiild in one's body for 9 months that can awaken that love. Men need to fall in love with their babies. Normally, this is accomplished by falling in love with the baby's mother. For men, families don't just happen; they are formed. Men need to express their romance by providing for and protecting their children and wives. It's gallant and chivalrous. It makes us feel needed, but most importantly, it makes us feel love. That's right. Guarding and feeding a wife and children causes men to love. Putting oneself at risk for another—whether on a flimsy tree trunk over a rocky riverbed or on a battlefield of mortal danger—feeds the romance that helps men to love.

I've worked at a desk job most of my years where the biggest physical danger is a paper cut. But men are still the vast majority in those occupations with a high risk of death. Maybe it's just the romantic in me, but I find something fitting in that. Giving birth was always a highly dangerous duty. Death in childbirth, until recently, was a woman's most fearsome enemy. Somehow, I suspect, men needed to put themselves at risk, too, for the future of the human race. They needed to have some skin in the game. So we find them mining, painting suspension bridges, fighting fires and going to battle in large numbers.

Everybody rejoices that childbirth has become, in much of the world, so much safer. And we'd all likewise rejoice to reduce death in the workplace and in war. Still, a risk-free world is not very hospitable to romantics who thrive on challenge, adventure and risk. Men cannot let today's culture round off our romantic edge. It may be the only edge we've got.

GOODNESS AND SEVERITY TOGETHER

2010-04-12T21:29:00.001-04:00

G.K. Chesterton once expressed surprise that so many critics of Christianity tee off on the Church for being harsh, unfeeling, and hypocritical while they admire Jesus the man. Jesus was a great guy, some will argue, but he never meant for folks to worship him as God.

You have to wonder why Jesus gets a pass here. Especially if we're contrasting the harsh with the lenient. Here there's no contest. Jesus is spectacularly harsh. His Church is most fluidly easy. If you're looking for the soft touch, the indulgent mother or the avuncular pat on the back, don't look to Jesus. Look to his Church.

The Church nearly always finds a way around her Lord's more uncompromising demands. Must I forgive my brother every time he sins against me? Jesus: Yes, every single time; if you don't, your heavenly Father will not forgive you. The Church: Well, it depends; try, but if your brother isn't very remorseful or if you simply can't muster up the forgiveness, God will bless your attempt. Jesus: If your eye offends you pluck it out; it is better to enter into life with one eye than with both eyes go to Hell. The Church: Now don't start plucking out your eyes; we all suffer with a little envy now and again; it's only natural; pray for the grace to be generous. Jesus: Whoever divorces a spouse to marry another commits adultery. The Church: There are ways to get around this. We could multiply such examples.

One of the Church's harsher leaders was the fifth century Bishop of Constantinople, John "Goldenmouth" Chrysostom. In fact, the Constantinopolitans pretty much drummed him out of town for constantly reminding them of their absolute duty to support the poor and to abjure all fornicating, drunkenness and luxury. And yet, Chrysostom's name somehow got attached to a magnificent sermon for the Easter Eve vigil that is still preached in churches each year around the world.

The sermon uses Jesus' parable of the workers in the vineyard. Those who have worked the whole day—from "the first hour"—get as much pay as those who arrived for work at 5 p.m.—the 11^th hour. So here's cranky old Chrysostom:

"Those who arrived after the sixth hour, let them not doubt; for they shall not be short-changed. Those who have tarried until the ninth hour, let them not hesitate; but let them come too. And those who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let them not be afraid by reason of their delay. For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. The Lord gives rest to those who come at the eleventh hour, even as to those who toiled from the beginning. To one and all the Lord gives generously. The Lord accepts the offering of every work. The Lord honors every deed and commends their intention. Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!"

Has the Church simply wimped out on the bracing demands of Jesus? Are we simply trimmers, dodging his clear commands? Some would say yes. A more subtle insight, however, is that this binocular view of the Kingdom of God—a world scrubbed clean of every sin and a world in which every sinner is welcomed and forgiven—is Jesus' intention in the first place. The Kingdom is not a flat ideal to hang on a wall and look at. It is a 3-dimentional reality to be inhabited.

If the Church simply repeats the teaching of Christ, his Kingdom remains unattainable for ordinary people. If the Church obscures his stringent words, she becomes worldly, nothing more than a club. But if, in an exquisite two-step, the Church receives his high demand and simultaneously incarnates his infinite mercy, the world is invaded by the very presence of Heaven.

LITERAL OR SPIRITUAL?

2010-04-12T15:16:00.001-04:00

I sometimes have to catch myself from saying, without thinking, "I don't take that literally!" I stop myself because I don't want to feed the popular idea that we must choose either to take the Bible literally or else to take it spiritually. In order to get Scripture's story right, we need to learn the proper interplay of the Bible's literal and spiritual meanings.

Take the event before us this month, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. People in Jesus' day were well-versed in the spiritual meaning of resurrection. They knew the story of Ezekiel's vision of dry bones that God breathed to life. They did not imagine a literal resurrection happened in front of Ezekiel. They knew (as Ezekiel himself said) that the dry bones stood for the people of Israel. It's like the old Dixie cry, "The South shall rise again!" We all know they aren't suggesting that the graves are going to open and that dead Southerners will somehow converge on Atlanta.

(Okay, I know you couldn't read that last sentence without thinking of the Zombie movie genre. I saw the original Night of the Living Dead recently and realized that it, too, has a spiritual meaning. It's not about corpses or radio waves; it's about race and fear in the 1960's.)

Back to Easter. Jesus' resurrection is literal. There's an empty tomb, a specific date, and experiences of the risen Lord in the flesh. That's what makes the whole story so amazing. Nobody expects a bodily resurrection. What they all expected, at best, was some sort of spiritual resurrection, some sort of South-shall-rise-again or dry-bones-live storyline. Instead, the whole company of disciples is shocked to discover a literal resurrection. Jesus is not a zombie, not a walking corpse. He is transcendent and immortal, to be sure, but he is real. It's really the same guy—in the flesh!—whom they saw executed.

But the resurrection of Jesus still would not make any sense without its spiritual meaning. The mere fact, bizarre though it may be, that an individual returned from death and ascended into heaven would only mean that sometimes strange things happen. The spiritual meaning of Jesus' rising becomes rapidly apparent to his followers: he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; he is the stone that the builders rejected whom God has made the cornerstone; he is the first of many brothers and sisters to rise; he is the avenue of renewed, righteous living for us (that is, for our spiritual resurrection); and so forth. These meanings arise not just from the bare fact of his resurrection, but from the things Jesus said and did. It makes all the difference in the world that this man, this Jesus, is the one who returned victorious over death. The (utterly unexpected) literal event became the new center around which old and new spiritual meanings would now rearrange themselves.

What Jesus' literal resurrection does, however, is assure the world that our spiritual desires for peace, goodness, love and justice are not just pipe dreams, not just fond hopes that never can be realized. If even literal death cannot gain a final victory over human beings, then why should we think that sin or war or pain or injustice is a permanent feature of life? We should not. We should, instead, come to believe that this old world is passing away and a new world is being born, spiritually speaking.

Body scans and us

2010-04-12T12:12:00.001-04:00

It's worth reflecting why we even feel such a thing as modesty and its twin, shame. We teach children to report anyone who touches them on the places "covered up by your bathing suit." But what would we say if the child asked, "Why do we cover those places with our bathing suits?" The Citizen dutifully sends its intrepid reporters down to the nudist colony in Moravia each summer, and the folks there seem to have an answer. They argue, with incontrovertible logic, that the human body is "natural," and that, while clothes may be necessary for warmth or protection, modesty and shame are nothing but outdated hindrances to human flourishing.

Even for those who—they know not why—are uncomfortable baring themselves in public, the nudists' argument seems to fit with the views of our day. We are beset by old-fashioned restrictions left over from Augustinian ideas of original sin, the line goes, and we need to eliminate every notion that there's something innately wrong with us.

But what if physical modesty arises not because there is something wrong with the natural human body (an idea, by the way, that Augustine would reject) but because there's something mysterious about it? Now mystery is not a category that we work with comfortably. A puzzle we understand; it is a question that can be—theoretically, anyway—solved. But mystery is a question that we can never solve. It is a question that becomes a calling to us, asking us not for a solution but for a response. With mystery, a question becomes a quest.

Consider this: there are three parts of the human body that are designed for another human being, the male and female genitals and the female breasts. One might argue that the voicebox or even the eyes lead us toward social interaction, but neither of these is quite so precise in being fitted entirely for the use of another single individual. It is these three parts that we cover for modesty. Surely, we are, as the Bible says, "fearfully and wonderfully made" if our union with a mate and our nurturance of the weakest human beings is built into our very bodies. But, of course, these traits exist in all mammals. They don't make us so special.

Precisely! What makes us special is that we, unlike the other mammals, experience shame and practice modesty. We know that we are miraculously made. And we know that the mystery we are marking by modesty is the mystery of love. Love, manifest in and through our mammalian bodies, is our quest and calling.

So why not run around naked and display our wonderful made-for-love bodies to all and sundry? Because we do not, in fact, love everyone. We would be untrue both to our present brokenness and to our high calling by pretending to be something we're not: perfected in love. So, aha! the moment in the story when Adam and Eve begin to experience shame is the moment when they become sinners. It's not our bodies that are shameful; it's what we do with our bodies—greedily, selfishly and angrily. We need to gird up our loins; there's work to be done.

2010-04-12T12:07:00.001-04:00

Are Demons Real?

To many, the picture of Jesus and his followers "casting out demons" seems downright silly and primitive for anyone living in the modern world. Perhaps, we sometimes suggest, the Bible's writers, living as they did in a pre-scientific age, imagined conditions we now know to be diseases like epilepsy or psychosis to be the effects of invading, malign spirits. Certainly some of the descriptions of the possessed in the New Testament resemble those sorts of sicknesses.

On the other hand, many others of us continue strongly to believe in demons. Dozens of movies take up the idea of demonic possession and oppression. (We might well distinguish between the two, the former being a case where the victim's personality is obscured.) We sometimes experience thoughts and interior struggles that feel like the workings of unseen and unfriendly powers.

Belief in Satan and in his fallen angels is deeply woven into Christian thinking even though there is no mention of either in our creeds. The Bible's accuracy does seem to be at stake. If Jesus himself and the biblical writers could so confuse a condition of sickness with the actions of imaginary supernatural beings, can we trust anything else they say?

The sterile antagonism between those who emphatically do and those who emphatically do not believe in the devil needs to be reexamined. Fifteen years ago or so, the theologian Walter Wink began to rethink the existence of demons. He noted that the Bible quite often lists these malign powers as "principalities, powers, thrones, dominions, elemental forces" and such like. This is a far cry from our image of little red angels with horns and pitchfork tails. "We wrestle not against flesh and blood," St. Paul wrote, "but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." This corresponds to the teaching of Jesus. He was at pains to teach his listeners that the Roman imperial rule per se was not the enemy. Nor was the ruling Temple leadership—even though these were the forces that, from a material perspective, put him to death. Instead, there was a force behind those forces, a spiritual and unseen reality that pushed them toward behaving as they did. This means, then, that we cannot establish goodness simply by knocking off the bad guys. Paul's admonition that "we wrestle not against flesh and blood" leads his readers to stop trying to fix the world by attacking other people. Instead they must pray, and love.

Perhaps our insight here is limited. We are locked into individualism. We think of each individual as an private mind, entirely self-contained. What if we're wrong about that? What, after all, do we mean when we speak of "the powers that be" or "mob spirit" or "bureaucracy"? The Bible calls Satan "the prince of the power of the air." Is that what we mean when we sense "vengeance in the air"? Could the experience of demon-possession be simply the concentration of malign forces resistant to God's goodness that coalesce in a particular person's psyche?

Newsweek recently ran a cover story: "Anti-depressants Don't Work." We were so hopeful that depression could be isolated as brain chemistry and then zapped to comply with our desire for happiness. But maybe Paul is right: we wrestle not against flesh and blood. Science News reported last month that loneliness, smoking, happiness and other trends can be contagious, like the common cold. Perhaps our individualism is a mental straightjacket that stops us from seeing reality.

Maybe the Bible's talk of demons and unclean spirits is not some unscientific way to name disease, but a highly insightful way to identify suprapersonal forces that hinder human flourishing. The Bible's point, of course, is that Jesus sees, names and defeats those forces on behalf of the humanity he loves.

Body Scans & Us

2010-02-09T16:33:00.001-05:00

After the foiling by a flying Dutchman of a Jihadist terrorist plan over Detroit on Christmas Day, tough-minded journalists from left to right have joined the choir calling for expanded use of the full-body scans for screening airline passengers. Those silly Europeans and civil libertarians who worry that the scans (which more or less reveal the naked body in an X-ray-like image) are an invasion of privacy! Aren’t we all grown-ups here? What’s the big deal? Most advocates have demonstrated their resolve by volunteering themselves to the scanner: “I don’t care if some TSA employee gets to see the outline of my skin. I’d rather be alive than modest!”
It’s worth reflecting why we even feel such a thing as modesty and its twin, shame. We teach children to report anyone who touches them on the places “covered up by your bathing suit.” But what would we say if the child asked, “Why do we cover those places with our bathing suits?” The Citizen dutifully sends its intrepid reporters down to the nudist colony in Moravia each summer, and the folks there seem to have an answer. They argue, with incontrovertible logic, that the human body is “natural,” and that, while clothes may be necessary for warmth or protection, modesty and shame are nothing but outdated hindrances to human flourishing.
Even for those who—they know not why—are uncomfortable baring themselves in public, the nudists’ argument seems to fit with the views of our day. We are beset by old-fashioned restrictions left over from Augustinian ideas of original sin, the line goes, and we need to eliminate every notion that there’s something innately wrong with us.
But what if physical modesty arises not because there is something wrong with the natural human body (an idea, by the way, that Augustine would reject) but because there’s something mysterious about it? Now mystery is not a category that we work with comfortably. A puzzle we understand; it is a question that can be—theoretically, anyway—solved. But mystery is a question that we can never solve. It is a question that becomes a calling to us, asking us not for a solution but for a response. With mystery, a question becomes a quest.
Consider this: there are three parts of the human body that are designed for another human being, the male and female genitals and the female breasts. One might argue that the voicebox or even the eyes lead us toward social interaction, but neither of these is quite so precise in being fitted entirely for the use of another single individual. It is these three parts that we cover for modesty. Surely, we are, as the Bible says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” if our union with a mate and our nurturance of the weakest human beings is built into our very bodies. But, of course, these traits exist in all mammals. They don’t make us so special.
Precisely! What makes us special is that we, unlike the other mammals, experience shame and practice modesty. We know that we are miraculously made. And we know that the mystery we are marking by modesty is the mystery of love. Love, manifest in and through our mammalian bodies, is our quest and calling.So why not run around naked and display our wonderful made-for-love bodies to all and sundry? Because we do not, in fact, love everyone. We would be untrue both to our present brokenness and to our high calling by pretending to be something we’re not: perfected in love. So, aha! the moment in the story when Adam and Eve begin to experience shame is the moment when they become sinners. It’s not our bodies that are shameful; it’s what we do with our bodies—greedily, selfishly and angrily. We need to gird up our loins; there’s work to be done.

William Blake, prophet

2009-12-26T15:59:00.003-05:00

William Blake is certainly heterodox. The man's views of Christian teaching veer rather sharply away from the standard. He sees as few others did, or do, however, what it might mean for the sharp images of the Scriptures to come alive for us. That is, he sees a world infused or maybe transfused by the spiritual world to come. Here's the captivating poem that I quoted on Christmas Eve, from his Poems of Innocence. It's called The Divine Image

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

Thief in the Night

2009-12-17T10:30:00.003-05:00

There's an image from the New Testament that crops up all over (1 Thess.; 2 Pet.; Rev; Didache; Gospel of Thomas). The "Son of Man" (Gospels) or the "Day of the Lord" will come "as a thief in the night." It's normally taken, and quite obviously meant, to refer to the final day of God's revelation and judgement, the event known as Jesus' Second Coming. In Matthew's quotation of Jesus (Matt. 24:43; cf. Luke 12:39) there's some attention paid to the guy getting robbed: "If the householder had known at what watch (of the night) the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into."

Now, what if the householder of this passage is not the bumbling, thoughtless Christian who has failed to properly prepare for Jesus' coming? What if instead he is to be identified with the "strong man" of Mark 3:27 (also Matt. 12:29; cf. Luke 11:21-22). In other words, Satan. "No one," Jesus says, "can enter into the house of a strong man and plunder his goods unless he first bind the strong man, and then plunder his house." In its appearance in Matthew and Luke, the reference is clearly Satan. That is, Jesus has bound Satan and is now plundering his belongings. What are Satan's belongings? We are! He has bound us to himself in sin. Jesus has come to free us from being the house-slaves of the devil.

Could the reference to the thief in the night be the same? The New Testament is not just using an image of surprise to get home a point about the unexpectedness of The End. Rather, it's casting Jesus as a burglar and Satan as a rich householder. When the Day of the Lord comes, those trapped by Satan in sin are freed by Jesus.

Funny how Santa Claus is also a kind of burglar--a reverse burglar it seems!

What about the good Hindus?

2009-12-16T10:32:00.002-05:00

Now, we don’t want to make a person’s belief a kind of “work” that one must perform to achieve God’s blessing of salvation. The truth is that we are grasped by God in Jesus and we respond to that grasp with faith. See Gal. 4:9; 1 Cor. 13:12; Phil. 3:12; etc. Surely that leaves plenty of room for questions to arise about specific persons. There are, of course, those who have never heard of Jesus. Then one might want to include those who have not rightly heard the Gospel—but what does that include? I’m afraid most folks today, so worried about offending, would like to suggest that anyone who refuses to believe in Jesus must, ipso facto, not have heard the Gospel rightly. Well, the Bible just doesn’t support that. People do reject and when they do they pay the price.

C.S. Lewis was a bit of an inclusivist. His The Great Divorce suggests that no one is in Hell who doesn’t actually want to be there. He thought that the story of the Shepherd-King-Judge of Matthew 25 was specifically referring to the “nations” that had not heard the Gospel. They would be judged by their works. I find both views attractive.

It might well be true that no one is in Hell who doesn't want to be there. The problem is that Hell actually means not knowing what the hell our wants are to begin with. It's that jumble of chaotic and inordinate desires that we pray to be released from by God's Holy Spirit.

I think “soft exclusivist” means that people who have never heard (properly?) the Gospel can be saved. I don’t have any trouble with that theoretically. After all, God is merciful, and it’s not up to us to judge the state of others’ souls. The problem arises when we start to decide who among the unchristian will be saved. We start talking about the sincere, or the true seekers, or the good, or whatever. Whenever people start asking, “Well, what about the good Hindus?” I like to respond, “What about the bad Hindus?” Doesn’t Jesus love them? Didn’t he come to save sinners? And aren’t there plenty of them to think about, to evangelize?

The Gospels actually deal with the “good” person in evangelism. Jesus sends out the disciples and instructs them to go knock on doors. “If a man of peace (good person) is there, let your peace rest upon him.” If someone is truly good, he will welcome the coming of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and join in the evangelizing of his maybe-not-so-good neighbors.

4th Century Christian Vegetarianism?

2007-05-13T16:20:00.000-04:00

The poem read in today's sermon is by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, a hymn-writer of the 4th century. It is doubtful that the vegetarianism displayed in "Hymn Before Meat" [Here, the English translator uses meat in the older sense of "food."] is intended for all Christians, but his objections to the violence of slaughter sound remarkably like the thoughts of many thoughtful Christians of today.

I'm sorry that I cannot link you to the splendidly plangent 1996 translation of this poem by David R. Slavitt in his Prudentius. The Cathimerinon; or The Daily Round. Slavitt's translation, so moving and fluid, was the only thing making possible today's recitation.

I do not teach vegetarianism. The treatment of farm animals today, however, is of deep moral concern. Geese, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys are all deeply compromised in their God-given identity by our predations. I endorse the work of the Humane Farming Association. One cannot look at the abuses without feeling that our gluttony is showing. I continue to suspect that our most fruitful avenue of healing the human relationship to the earth lies in correcting our eating practices.

Substitute Question #4

2007-03-13T16:02:00.000-04:00

If the return of Jesus Christ in glory to judge the living and the dead is delayed still longer, what will this diocese need in order to remain ready for his coming?

Substitute Question #3

2007-03-13T16:01:00.000-04:00

CORE VALUE/POSITIVE CORE. Regular weekly worship is the core of your congregation. In what ways is your congregation most successful in letting the worship service empower and sustain the ministry performed outside of worship? How are those other ministries taken up into the worship of your congregation? (Remember, the congregation’s ministries are not just the organized, official ones, but the work done every day in Christ’s Name by all the baptized.)

Substitute Question #2

2007-03-13T15:59:00.000-04:00

VALUES. Christ calls us to seek “the pearl of great price,” the Kingdom of God, and to value that above all else. What do you find most challenging about giving your life over to Christ’s kingdom? How has belonging to your congregation helped you to meet that challenge?

Substitute Question #1

2007-03-13T15:57:00.000-04:00

Our Best Experience. The single most important thing that YOUR CONGREGATION has contributed to your life is eternal life received through the true preaching and hearing of God’s Word and the faithful administration and reception of Christ’s Sacraments. How has that gift of eternal life changed your life? How has your thinking been changed? How has your behavior changed? How have your emotions changed?

Don't Be Humble

2007-03-13T14:43:00.000-04:00

Humility is like the number zero. For centuries, humanity got along swimmingly without it. There were all kinds of heroic virtues—courage, loyalty, piety and the like—without the need for anything like humility. Then, at the coming of Christ into the world, a brand new virtue, a kind of un-virtue, was born. A man humiliated on a cross, mocked as “King of the Jews” was raised from the dead. “Blessed are the meek,” this man had said, “for they shall inherit the earth.” What a fool! Right? You’d think so. Many people still think so. But God raised him from the dead. He’s not a fool anymore.

After humility was born, it swiftly rose to the top of the list of virtues. While theology carefully added Faith, Hope and Love to the classical virtues of Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice, it was humility, the opposite of the chief sin of pride, that became the virtue behind the virtues, the condition allowing the other virtues to flourish.

Yet, like the number zero, humility occupied a unique place. One can work on other virtues, and work with them. Refusing to shy away from danger can build fortitude; study and prayer can improve justice; love, hope and faith can grow by God’s grace. But trying to build up humility is like trying to divide by zero. It messes everything up.

To take notice of one’s humility is to lose it immediately. That’s because Christian humility is a kind of self-forgetfulness, both quiet and joyful. Laughing at a boor’s off-color joke is humble; lowering one’s eyes and turning away is false humility and therefore pride. Allowing strangers to fuss over you when you’ve slipped on the ice is humble; shooing them away with, “Oh, no. Pay no attention to me; I’m not important,” is prideful. The humble person loves life more than self. True, the Bible finds idolatry to be the worst sin. But Christian history discovered that after the rival gods were banished, the most insidious pretender to God’s glory was the anti-Trinity: Me, Myself and I.

Here in the Diocese of Central New York, we’ve been asked to participate in a survey to help the diocese with its Strategic Change Process. The Discovery phase of this business calls on parishes to involve every single member in answering questions about our “best experiences” in church. The idea seems to be that the long list of best experiences and of the “values” that go with them will reveal our strengths and, thus, the places where we ought to build supportive diocesan structures.

I want to center on one of the “values” questions asked in order to get a grasp of the whole. We are asked to consider our “VALUES: What are the things you value most deeply; specifically, the things you value about yourself, your work, and your ministry.” Note who’s front and center here: YOU! There’s not a hint of the lurking danger of idolatry, no reminder that what “I” value might be something that I ought not to value. There’s no suggestion that God has told us what to value (“Seek ye first the kingdom of God”) and that we are called to listen and obey. There’s only the cheery assumption that “my” values can give direction to the Church of Jesus Christ. Then comes the most revealing question of all.

Under “Values” are three sub-questions, a, b & c. “(a) YOURSELF: Without being humble, what do you value most about yourself—as a human being, a friend, a member of the community, etc.”

Could there be a more unchristian question than this? Not only does it directly order us to abandon the prime Christian virtue, the virtue underpinning Christ’s call to take up our cross and follow him, it assumes that humility is merely a mask, a Christiany pretense that can be removed when we really want to get serious. What if someone answering these questions truly “valued” humility as one might suppose a Christian would? Presumably he or she would be put in the position of violating that very value in order to truthfully answer the question: “I value my deep humility—as a human being, a friend, a member of the community, etc.” The very exercise of having to drop humility in order to talk about “my” values forces the interviewee not to value those things in us that God values most, namely, that self-forgetful heart that simply lays down its life for others known as Love, that unselfconscious delight in God’s faithfulness known as Faith, and the self-denying confidence in a future given by God known as Hope. All these receive their electric charge through humility by which they are transformed from opinions into truths and thence into virtues.

Like zero, however, humility itself has no value. It is, rather, an emptying out of value. No wonder humility has to be set aside in our diocesan questionnaire in order for us to register “my values.” Humility simply loses interest in what is “mine” and what is “yours” in favor of what is “ours in Christ,” namely, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” “Your life is hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul writes to the Colossians (3:3). “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who . . . made himself nothing,” he tells the Philippians (2:5-7), and “What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord,” is his watchword for the Corinthians (2 Cor. 4:5).

I guess we’re all supposed to be so sophisticated and beyond taking the Bible “literally” that none of us is shocked to see our bishop officially instructing all his diocese to stop being humble so that we can get on with the important project of (here’s a quote from the survey) “providing . . . the foundation upon which to build our future together.” The three theological virtues mentioned earlier are not likely to survive an attack on humility. Here, Hope is the first to crumble. The future is no longer the gift of God we receive confident in his power to save. It is now something we build. It’s our future.

Even more, it’s “mine.” As the final question asks, “If you could have three wishes for ministry in this Diocese, what would they be?” Not once in the entire questionnaire are we asked about God’s word to us. Nowhere do we listen for God’s “wishes” in his Word. The bishop, in promoting this with the clergy, made a few vague references to our expectation that the Holy Spirit would somehow help to produce the result. Maybe we could add that as one of our three wishes: I wish that the Holy Spirit would agree with what I decide I’m good at and with the future I want to build for myself. We would then have the perfect reversal of our Lord’s humiliating passion: “Not thy will, but mine be done.”

I am established by now as a regular diocesan crank. I object to the bishop’s attack on classic Christian sexual morality and I don’t cooperate with much diocesan programming. I don’t want to be a crank, however. I want to be constructive. So I offer some alternative questions which I invite my congregation and any others reading this blog to answer. You may answer in the comments sections or submit your answers directly to the diocese.

Here are the four questions. If you want to comment on this article, comment here. But if you want to answer one of the four substitute questions, go to the next four blog articles.

Substitute Question #1: Our Best Experience. The single most important thing that YOUR CONGREGATION contributes to your life is eternal life received through the true preaching and hearing of God’s Word and the faithful administration and reception of Christ’s Sacraments. How has that gift of eternal life changed your life? How has your thinking been changed? How has your behavior changed? How have your emotions changed?

Substitute Question #2: VALUES. Christ calls us to seek “the pearl of great price,” the Kingdom of God, and to value that above all else. What do you find most challenging about giving your life over to Christ’s kingdom? How has belonging to your congregation helped you to meet that challenge?

Substitute Question #3: CORE VALUE/POSITIVE CORE. Regular weekly worship is the core of your congregation. In what ways is your congregation most successful in letting the worship service empower and sustain the ministry performed outside of worship? How are those other ministries taken up into the worship of your congregation? (Remember, the congregation’s ministries are not just the organized, official ones, but the work done every day in Christ’s Name by all the baptized.)

Substitute Question #4: If the return of Jesus Christ in glory to judge the living and the dead is delayed still longer, what will this diocese need in order to remain ready for his coming?

The Hungry Boy

2007-02-12T16:17:00.000-05:00

The story told in yesterday's sermon, culled from National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, is from host Scott Simon's interview with former Philadelphia Daily News (I mistakenly said it was the Inquirer) columnist Pete Dexter. You can listen here.

I honestly don't think that I would have given that cat any of my food. And I'm well-fed. Well, as Jesus clearly said, "Woe to you who are full now; you shall hunger."

Understanding the Beatitudes is a matter of coming face to face with the reality of God. Either he has the power and will to bless the hungry, the poor, the mourning, the hated, himself or there is no blessing there. Certainly, poverty, hunger and the rest cannot be said to carry their own blessing. God is real, or the Beatitudes of Jesus are a cruel lie.

Joshua Judges Ruth

2007-02-01T17:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's an album by Lyle Lovett. The three Old Testament books Joshua, Judges, Ruth fall in succession right after the Penteteuch, the 5 books of the Torah ("Law"). Anyway, this Sunday's reading is from Judges 6:11-24. It's the beginning of a cycle of stories about Gideon, one of Israel's early "Judges." The piece is classic.

An Angel of the LORD (or is it the LORD himself? see v. 14) appears to Gideon and says, "The LORD is with you, valiant warrior." (NJB) Then Gideon, who is reduced to threshing wheat inside a wine-press for fear of being raided by the Midianites, replies, "Excuse me, my lord, but if the LORD is with us, why is all this happening to us? And where are all his miracles which our ancestors used to tell us about when they said . . . ."

Our appointed Psalm for Sunday is Ps. 85:7-13. For my money, though, Ps. 44 seems more appropriate. It begins,
1 We have heard with our ears, O God,
our forefathers have told us, *
the deeds you did in their days,
in the days of old.

2 How with your hand you drove the peoples out
and planted our forefathers in the land; *
how you destroyed nations and made your people flourish.

3 For they did not take the land by their sword,
nor did their arm win the victory for them; *
but your right hand, your arm, and the
light of your countenance,
because you favored them.

I find it ironic that the Psalm seems to hearken back to those good ole days when Israel was "planted in the land," that is, the days of the Judges. But go back to the Judges' time and you find them making the complaint that God has lost his power. Gideon's procedure in this passage for ensuring that God is really competent is to offer the angel a meal which is then consumed by fire from heaven. Later in the story (verses 36-40), Gideon famously puts out a fleece to see if God can cause dew to rest on it alone and not on the surrounding earth, then again in reverse--to see if the fleece can stay dry while the ground gets wet with dew. We might say that Gideon is properly sceptical of God's power.

Scepticism also plays a role in the second reading, from 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. The passage is justly famous because it is the very first written record of Jesus' resurrection, having been penned before the Gospels were written. Some in Corinth apparently did not believe that we would rise from the dead. It would seem that they argued for some sort of afterlife that was less than total resurrection. Paul is horrified at this development and refutes it by arguing for the resurrection of Jesus. Here he insists that Jesus, having died and been buried, was later seen by hundreds of followers, many of whom were still alive at the time of his writing. Perhaps one thread of connection with the Judges passage is that we are not simply required to believe in what seems impossible because, well, just because God says so. God gives evidence. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus not simply because it makes us feel better or because we somehow "ought to." We believe on the basis of the testimony of the people who knew him. It's not ironclad evidence. Very few things are. It is, however, credible. One way of putting it is this: Christian faith might be mistaken. It could be that the disciples of Jesus were subject to a mass delusion. (I find it very unlikely that they were able to concoct a story of his resurrection that they knew to be false in order to gain some sort of power or status. They ended up going to their deaths over their testimony.) Their evidence seems, to me, pretty sound. So it also seemed to Paul who himself had not known the mortal Jesus. True, Paul says that Jesus appeared to himself as well, but "as to one untimely born (or to a miscarriage)." We know from Acts that Paul heard the Lord Jesus speaking to him and saw a light. Since Paul would not have recognized Jesus by sight, there was little point in him seeing the risen Jesus. Perhaps that accounts for the odd way he describes his own "seeing" of the Lord.

The third reading for Sunday is the amazing tale from Luke 5:1-11. The story begins as does the parallel version in Mark. Jesus is teaching by the lake and (perhaps to avoid the press of the crowd--Luke doesn't say that but Mark does) Jesus comandeers the boat to put out a little from the land and teach sitting in the boat. The fisherman, who fish at night, were not needing the boats anyway. They were washing their nets after a fruitless night of fishing. After he's finished teaching, at the time when fisherman needed to sleep, no doubt, Jesus insists that Simon, the boat-owner, let down the newly-cleaned nets for a catch. Simon obeys even though he notes that the fish aren't cooperating. A huge catch is made and Simon--called now Simon Peter--is so amazed that he worships Jesus with "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." With the help of James and John, the fish are brought to land and they all follow Jesus, leaving the dirty nets and presumably the fish, to rot on the beach.

We can hardly ignore the story from John 21 about Jesus' appearance to a group of 7 disciples after his resurrection when he also commands a huge take of fish and Peter, recognizing the strange man on the shore to be Jesus, jumps in the lake and swims to get to Jesus. There, Peter, thrice addressed as "Simon, son of John" is given his commission as chief shepherd of the church. Nor can we then ignore the story from Matthew 14 when Jesus, walking on the water, bids Peter to get out of the boat and come to him on the water. Peter begins to sink, remember, and Jesus has to rescue him.

There is a great cluster of Simon Peter stories in the Gospels that relate to his calling by the sea, his swimming, his being given the name Peter by Jesus and his faith or lack thereof. They seem to connect like a chain: Simon called Peter and the miraculous catch of fish ~ the miraculous catch of fish and Peter swimming ~ Peter walking on the water and sinking due to lack of faith ~ Simon son of Jonah (bar-Jonah) expressing faith in Jesus and receiving the name Peter ~ Peter leaving fishing behind being called as "fisher of men" ~ Simon, son of John, being called as chief shepherd alongside the sea. Add to that Peter's denial of Jesus in Jerusalem and the untold story of Jesus first resurrection appearance to Peter mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 (Cephas is Aramaic for "Peter") and by Luke in Luke 24:34 ("He has appeared to Simon") and we've got a puzzle that, for all its unanswered questions points to the centrality of Peter in the reception of the Gospel.

First Commandment, anybody?

2007-01-06T15:18:00.000-05:00

Sure, it's cute. Beset with April-like temperatures in early January, the staff at a Pennsylvania ski resort jokingly arrange a sacrificial offering to Ullr, the Norse god of snow. NPR reported the little ceremony as a light piece in between more meaty offerings on All Things Considered Thursday, Jan. 4. Apparently, the ski folk burned some inexpensive wooden skis in a big bonfire. There wasn't much else to do, since nobody was coming to the resort.

I suppose I'm a genuine grinch here, but isn't there a Commandment that forbids this kind of behavior? I realize that the participants may not be professed Christians, Jews or Muslims of any sort, but some of them probably are. My guess is that the ski resort does a booming business on Sundays (or Saturdays--Jews--or Fridays--Muslims) so that the people working there rarely make it for prayer and worship at the local place appointed. They are definitely having trouble with Commandment #4, "Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep It Holy." Everybody in today's America struggles with Thou Shalt Not Covet (#10) and most of us have difficulty with a few others, but, until now, Commandment #1 was a piece of cake.

Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me was such a no-brainer for most Americans in this highly Christianized culture that in order to give it some heft, we commonly expanded its reach into more metaphorical regions. It meant putting nothing else before our devotion to God, we were told, and thus it became something we pretty much all do some of the time. Just like the coveting Commandment.

In Pennsylvania, though, we seem to be confronted with an actual instance of the literal breaking of the First Commandment. When Jesus is asked what the first Commandment (meaning not the first enumerated one of ten, but the first in importance) he doesn't quote the Ten Commandments, but the first part of his answer, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," (Matt. 22:37) is pretty close to #1 of the Ten.

What appears to be happening--given the light air with which the story was told--is that we have become so accustomed to the metaphorical meaning of the Commandment that we are tone deaf to the actual wording. It would be as though we became so interested in the larger meaning of the Commandment against murder (#6), namely, that we ought not to hate others, that we somehow overlooked the case of shooting somebody in the heart. The words of Jesus in another context, that the larger metaphorical meaning ought to rule our behavior without forgetting the things themselves (Matt. 23:23) seem to fit here. It is still wrong--deeply wrong--for any Christian to sacrifice to any other God. "Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed."

We might say, "Well, they didn't mean it. They weren't sincere. It was just a friendly joke, a marketing ploy, maybe." But why does that make it OK? There is an objective sacrifice offered to a pagan diety with the desire that that diety respond by making it snow. So what that the participants don't really believe in Ullr? I doubt that every Ullr sacrifice in pagan days was filled with absolute faith and earnest sincerity. For all we know, the pagans laughed and joked their way around the Ullr sacrifice, finding the cheapest skis to burn, exactly as today's Americans do.

It is so hard for us to get it in our heads that a Commandment is not a Suggestion. It's not a Discussion Question. It's not Something to Think About. A Commandment demands obedience. When we fail, as we will, there is abundant mercy through the cross of Jesus Christ, but the Commandment is not thereby rendered less absolute. We believe in one God. Those are the first words of the Creed. They mean something.

Jerks for Jesus

2006-12-11T12:18:00.000-05:00

This could be good news for Christianity in TV. E.R. has never done well with religion. First of all, there's never a chaplain in the E.R. even though they're a fairly regular occurance in an actual E.R. Most portrayals of religion tend toward the goofy and fringe types. Then, when they try to present a genuine Christianity, they miss the target and show something that's so unlike the real thing that believers cringe--even if the portrayal is sympathetic to the faith.

We should admit one thing. It's hard to portray the genuine life of faith in Christ on a TV show. We believers have genuine desires to please God in everything we do. Put that on TV and it comes off as showy or scary or theocratic. We also fight genuine temptations to horrible sins and sometimes we yield to those temptations. Put that on TV and you're getting calls from the Stop Defaming Christians Coalition.

E.R.'s Christmas show began with Dr. Archie Morris accompanying the new, pretty intern--whom we've already learned is a Christian--to her "Bible Group." The "Group" had the usual Hollywood wrong notes: They weren't actually studying the Bible; they went around the room naming opposites to the seven deadly sins, a list not found in the Bible; it seemed more like a catechism class than a discussion of believing and intelligent adults. When the circle came round to Archie, who was there, of course, only to get on the good side of the pretty intern--she had on an earlier show said she felt a fleeting, very fleeting desire to kiss him when she watched him do something competently--the deadly sin for him to address was, naturally, lust.

"Chastity is overrated," he begins. "What counts is purity of spirit, of mind, not of body." [These are not direct quotes.] It's cute. Scene over.

What non-viewers need to know about Archie is that he is a jerk. He is a self-centered know-it-all who doesn't work well with others. He cheats and lies to get his way. Now other doctors have appeared over the years with all of these qualitites, but they're usually doctors of exceptional talent. They are so indispensible that you put up with their antics. Archie is pretty mediocre as a doctor. He tried to leave the E.R. and I thought he'd leave the show, but somehow he's back again. There are flashes of medical talent and even occasional flashes of compassion, but they are very faint. As the intern found out, the impulse to like him is very fleeting.

So partway through the episode, one of his many "children" appears. We found out that Morris had sold his sperm to a sperm bank years ago and a group of his biological children found him. He cheerfully considered them as extensions of his ego. While the girl is there, Archie dressed as Santa Claus and comes to see her. She knows who it is and he delivers the standard Santa-is-about-giving-and-therefore-is-real speech. She and the intern then witness Archie/Santa be genuinely kind to a passing anonymous child. His "daughter" confirms that, yes, this is truly Santa.

All pretty predictable for the Christmas show.

Later, as he's passing over the night duties to the next attending doctor, he reports all patients were adaquately seen and processed. The incoming doc, knowing Morris's personality, says, "Go ahead. Gloat. Tell me what a great job you did and how nobody does it better." "No thanks," says Morris, slaping the collegue on the back. "I think I'll go with humility this time." Somethings changing in him.

Then comes the intern. She suggests they go out after work, get a bite to eat, a drink, and "see what happens." Morris struggles to believe his good fortune, asking for clarification. She quotes him back to himself: "Chastity's overrated. It's purity of intention that matters."

Morris stutters and stumbles, finally saying that he can't believe he's saying this, that it's as though "some dorky angel" has taken over his voice, but that no, he didn't think their "hooking up" was a good idea. They might regret it later, it might poison a deeper relationship possible in the future. He then literally runs away from her.

In the closing vignettes, we see Morris, still in his Santa suit, outdoors shouting at himself and anyone who will listen, "There she was for the fondling, and I said no! I blew it! Why? Why? Why do I have to be such a Christian? There's no God! There's no Santa Claus!" He looks up to the sky (and to the camera) and a look of shock comes over his face with a stifled cry. What does he see? Santa Claus? As he stares, the camera pulls back, back to take a bird's-eye or Santa's-eye or even God's-eye view of Chicago, snow softly falling.

I don't get the final scene, and I don't hold out hope that Morris will really convert, but for my money he looks exactly like a man in the final throes of a power of love stronger than himself. Here's my advice for the E.R. writers: Let him get saved. Let him go to church, sincerely. Even make him a bit of a bore about his new religion. (After all, he's a bore about everything else.) But don't let him become too humble or too good too fast. Let him continue to be a jerk. Let him slowly shed his jerkiness, scale by painful scale, in real life encounters with himself. Let the new Morris and the old Morris duke it out for a while, for years, even. Let him, in other words, be a normal Christian.

Come to think of it, that's what the writers have already been doing with this character. For them, it's the need for characters to be multi-dimensional if they're to last. For us, we'll see it (within the fictional story, I mean) as the prevenient grace of the Holy Spirit, preparing him for his encounter with Jesus.

Long Time Gone

2006-12-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

Ok, I haven't blogged in a while. Quite a while. Sorry. I have been working on a speech that I am going to try to reproduce here. It was delivered in Rochester, N.Y., on Dec. 9 at Bethel Christian Fellowship to a conference entitled The Crisis in the Episcopal Church.

Thank you, Al, very much for inviting me and for arranging this conference. I knew when I heard of this event that I wanted to be here, however, I was not so sure that I wanted to hear myself talk. I am a pastor and not an activist nor a theologian. Al said that that was what he wanted, so I was obliged to say yes. We shall pray that God the Father be glorified in his Son by the work of his Holy Spirit.

I am very happy to be here with you today and I want to congratulate All Saints’ Church of Irondequoit on the 1-year anniversary of its expulsion from the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester. The theme you have chosen for this conference, He who has an ear, let him here what the Spirit says to the churches, comes from the 2nd and 3rd chapters of the Revelation to John where Jesus says it seven times to the seven churches John is writing to. All Saints’ might be compared to a number of the churches mentioned in the Revelation to John, like the first church Jesus addresses there, the church of Ephesus. Speaking to the church’s angel, Jesus says, “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary.” (Rev. 2:2-3) Then, after warning them in very strong words about not departing from their first love, Jesus says, “Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (2:6)

My friends, the Nicolaitans are back, but I’m going to call them liberals in my talk. I have great love and respect for old-fashioned liberals, who were also conservatives, but I’m afraid I’ve decided to surrender to the currents of the age (in this one thing) and use a formerly good word to describe a new, virulent development in church life.

By the way, the verse you have chosen for this morning is one very much loved by the liberals. It is now being used liturgically instead of “The Word of the Lord” after readings from Scripture. I’m glad you chose it because we can’t be giving away biblical texts to our enemies. For them it means that the Bible says one thing and the Spirit something else, and that the Spirit’s voice has to be discovered as something hidden within and different from the plain biblical text which is, pointedly, not the Word of the Lord.[1] For us, the question posed by our Lord in these words asks whether we will attend to the words of Scripture themselves, the words printed right on the page of Revelation, chapter 2, as the voice of the Spirit. In language identical to the preaching of the mortal Jesus in the Gospels, the risen Jesus of Revelation addresses whoever has an ear to hear. For conservatives, there is no daylight visible between the audible words of Scripture and the message of the Spirit. The question is merely whether we shall allow the Bible’s words to be enlivened and applied to us today by the agency of the Holy Spirit.[2] We stand in exactly the same posture as those so-often stiff-necked people of Israel wandering in Sinai: their predicament was not whether they could discern the true message of God underneath or within his commandments; it was whether they would accept the commandments themselves as his demonstration of love and election, whether, in other words, they had “ears to hear.” To take the liberal’s position, that there is this airy “spirit” that speaks underneath or around or even in opposition to the words on the page is in fact an invitation to the spirit of the age to lead the church. And it will, ferociously.

The same rejection of the concrete for the ethereal is evident in their treatment of sex.. Liberals, having jettisoned the clear rules for sexual engagement are now stuck with creating all manner of frothy principles that they think will exalt everyday, animal couplings to the level of a sacrament–or not, principles of perfect selflessness and perfect equality and that long list of other perfections demanded from these obstreperous bodies of ours. Are they spiritual? Yes, indeed. Very. As C.S. Lewis warned, we must beware of becoming more spiritual than God.

The conservatives say that intercourse between a man and a woman married to each other is good, even when it’s bad, or selfish, or thoughtless, or distracted, or 30 seconds long. Selfishness may be wrong; thoughtlessness is wrong; inattention to the needs of one’s spouse is wrong, sure. But that doesn’t make the sex wrong. The marital embrace is what it is: ordained by God and therefore good. Likewise, sex outside marriage is wrong, no matter how respectful and loving and attentive and up-to-date it may be. We can respect the partner to the heights, but we’re still not respecting God. Game, set, match. God, the creator of this whole male-female business, gets top billing. I’m not saying that simply being married before engaging in sex is the sufficient to respecting God. I’m just saying that it’s necessary to such respect.

Liberals, given their approach, then, are seriously trying to make sense of the Bible and of Christian faith in light of what they consider to be an irrefutable and spiritual truth: a loving God could not possibly restrict sexual pleasure to a certain group of people and deny it to everybody else.[3] To them, that’s like trying to argue that the Bible teaches that the sun revolves around the earth. It simply cannot be done with a straight face. It’s nonsense on the face of it. If that is what the Bible was once thought to teach, obviously the Bible must be interpreted another way. For them, everybody knows that gay sex cannot possibly be inherently wrong just like everybody knows that the earth revolves around the sun. If they say, as they sometimes do, that they may be wrong, they mean it exactly the way one says that he may be wrong about the sun being at the center of the solar system. After all, I’ve never personally proven that the earth orbits around the sun, but I trust those who have. Theoretically, I may be wrong, but, realistically, I know I’m not.

I don’t buy the standard conservative line that this debate is not really about sex but about the authority of the Bible. The Bible could quite easily be perceived to say that God hates Edomites. Hates them. Detests them. Is eager to send them to torture in Hell. We all “know” (do we not?) that God in fact loves Edomites. Christ died for Edomites. (Calvinists might object here, but the Calvinists are wrong, deeply wrong.) So the Bible is overruled or, more precisely, appears to be overruled by the rule of faith, by the fact of Christ. This is the basic Christian precept that the rule of faith, that is, faith in Christ, shapes and determines the meaning of the rest of the Bible. This is not a “canon within the canon” as though some verse in Romans might be more true, more important than a verse in Nahum. Instead, it is that both Nahum and Romans are governed by the living Christ and the faith given to his body, the Church.

This, you will notice, is exactly what the liberals say. They say that the risen Christ determines the interpretation of the Bible’s texts about homosexuality. I say, they are right.

This debate is about sex. Specifically, it is about the resurrection of the body, and, more specifically, of the male body of Jesus. The question, “Is the risen Christ male?” is just a provocative way of asking, “Is Jesus risen from the dead?”

The recently retired Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church isn’t buying it. Jesus, he said in his final sermon as Presiding Bishop, is history. There’s Jesus, trapped in the first century, and then there’s the risen Christ, speaking, revealing and doing all sorts of new things in today’s world. In that sermon, Bishop Griswold strongly assented to the Chalcedonian doctrine of Jesus being fully God and fully man, yet he seems particularly weak on the hypostatic union averred in that document. Chalcedon insists that the two natures of our Lord, human and divine, are “without division, without separation . . . not as parted or separated into two persons.” It would appear that, for Bishop Griswold, Jesus was temporarily conjoined to Christ for his lifetime, then jettisoned at the resurrection. Now freed of his identity with Jesus, the risen Christ can do other things that Jesus would have abhorred. After all, as Griswold provocatively asserted, the question “What would Jesus do?” is the wrong question.

Now the difference between the conservative way of interpreting the Scriptures and the liberal way is made clear. We conservatives argue—or at least we ought to argue—that the whole thing revolves around Jesus. The Bible is properly understood only when his cross and resurrection are put at the center. Sex matters because Jesus’ male body was killed, then raised from the dead and later lifted into heaven. Quite true, Jesus himself says that there is no marrying or giving in marriage in the coming resurrection. (Mark 12:25) This could easily be interpreted to mean that there is no sexual difference in the resurrection, that male and female cease to be in the Kingdom. We could also interpret Galatians 3:28 in the same way. But we don’t, because Jesus is raised from the dead. The fact of his resurrection governs the proper interpretation of the whole of Scripture, even his own words in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. We therefore must interpret Jesus’ saying to mean that sexuality (now by “sexuality” I do not mean, as is so often meant, sexual desire and behavior; I mean more plainly the fact of us humans being created by God as one race in two kinds, male and female; sexuality means simply the condition or state of being sexual, that is, of being male or female)—Jesus is saying that, in the resurrection, sexuality is no longer used for procreation or even for pair-bonding in families, but is somehow transfigured into a higher key, in the same way that eating and singing and caring for one another are also transfigured.[4]

The liberals do not believe that Jesus is alive. They think that some other entity, a risen Christ, has replaced Jesus. For them, the Bible is reinterpreted by the actions of this unJesus Christ.
(You will find it quite difficult to distinguish between the unJesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.) For them, Jesus is not the antitype, the fulfillment of all the biblical types, but is instead just another type. He is an example of what Christ can do, even the preeminent example of what the Christ can do, but Jesus simply carries the Christ along. Jesus makes numerous breakthroughs in
his day that are evidence of him having–or even being–this Christ. Breakthroughs in our day, therefore, are evidence of this risen Christ at work.

This is a fairly strong Christology. It’s more than just saying that Jesus is a good man. He is God the Son, they would say, but only for his time. What’s determinative for them are themes in class=Section2>
Jesus’ life, not the specifics. Breaking through social conventions is one theme they discern. Reaching the outcast is one. Standing up to power is one. Courage under suffering is one. When such themes appear for us, we must perceive the Christ in us and play our part. So What Would Jesus Do still does matter, but only as an ideal or theme, not as a specific prescription. Jesus, as everybody knows, would have told the homosexual to go and sin no more. But that was just Jesus. The Christ in Jesus was saying, “Break the conventions; challenge assumptions.”

If anybody should be talking this way, it should be the Catholics. They have long been the ones to argue that they bear the risen Christ along in the very institutions of the church. A new St. Peter arises every so often with healing in his wings. They see changing church doctrine as a development, like the unfolding of a flower, yet they claim the power alone to determine what constitutes proper development of that flower.[5] How very Romish is Bishop Griswold’s claim that the Christ (or the Spirit) is now revealing new truths to the church that heretofore have been obscured. Instead of a pope, we have a General Convention, uniquely tuned to the voice of the risen Christ. The fact that it speaks words once thought scandalous only proves how supernatural is that voice! Who else but Christ could be so scandalous and get away with it! Are the innovators persecuted? Of course! It’s just as Jesus predicted![6]

The English Reformation can quite clearly be defined as a protest against the non-biblical claims of Rome that operated in favor of Rome’s power and desire. Now, the leading edge of Reformation Protestantism is doing the very thing it was created to oppose: making non-biblical innovations and claims for its own institutional importance in the kingdom of God. Maybe there’s more to the piling up of vestments and titles and liturgies in the new Anglicanism than we thought. Maybe it’s the natural accoutrements of a medieval view of Church authority. We are now regularly told that the Episcopal Church stands in the vanguard of the work Christ is doing in the world, with our female primates and our homosexuals installed in cathedrals.

Protestantism, or at least English Protestantism, instead viewed itself as a kind of placeholder Church. We are here to minister to the Christians of the day the solid, patristic core of Christian faith, complete with sacraments and church order, while the Roman Church is out to lunch. We are the church without authority and quite intentionally so. We hold to the Scripture not because Scripture is so obviously the Word of God, but because it is one of very few connections to the church of the Apostles that has not been tainted by Romish error. Scripture is in fact very complicatingly puzzling and we don’t pretend to have put it all together. All we can say is that it does one thing well: it delivers Christ to his church. We’ll just hang onto the Bible like a shipwrecked passenger hangs onto a life raft: we won’t tip it over, we won’t tear it apart and we won’t try to get beyond it. We don’t interpret any one part in such a way that it is repugnant to any other.

We realize that it’s Jesus, not Scripture, that saves us, but we don’t know any other Jesus than the one presented to us by the Apostolic Scriptures so there is simply no daylight between Jesus and the Bible. Sacraments and church order are likewise preserved as being recoverable from the wreckage of Romish failures. They are to be submitted to in humility. Beggars can’t be choosers. We trust, as Scripture teaches us to trust, in the promise of God. He visits horrible afflictions on his sinful people but he always saves a remnant. We believe that, due to no merit of our own, but only to his great mercy, we are that remnant. It will do for the remnant to sit down and shut up, to humbly walk with our God.

This, I submit, accounts for the enormous appeal of Anglicanism. It is humble. It is chastened. It is slow to anger. As either Archbishop Fisher or Archbishop Ramsey of Canterbury memorably articulated it, (I’ve seen it attributed to both) the Anglican Church teaches nothing that is hers alone, no special doctrine, no unique insights, but only the simple, catholic teaching of the ages. Many are the controverted questions left unanswered by Anglicanism, not because they do not matter, but because we haven’t got the authority to answer them definitively. We await a new day, perhaps in history, as some great Christian awakening draws God’s children back together, or perhaps at history’s end, when Jesus comes again. For now, we are a placeholder Church.

The liberals, by devising new doctrines, have squandered this gift. The conservatives, in reaction, are not far behind them. I’ve beat up on the liberals already, so let me attack the conservatives for a moment. The idea that Anglicanism itself is some sort of home for the soul is faulty. It is, at best, a home away from home. The last thing the world needs is another protestant denomination, and America needs it least of all. You might argue that conservative Anglican provinces could be a kind of placeholder for Anglicanism in the west, but I doubt the viability of a placeholder for a placeholder. We would start to exalt Anglicanism when Anglicanism was all about exalting Jesus Christ. The idea that more people can be brought to Christ by new Anglican denominations is far-fetched, as though the existing churches, Evangelical / Pentecostal, Orthodox and Catholic, weren’t sufficient to the task. As though what America really needed were more mitred bishops of piecemeal dioceses, more endless canonical wranglings and more evidence of a disunited church. What keeps the existing churches from making even more–and truer–converts is not the lack of an Anglican option but the fractured disunity of the church. This is a deficiency that is not going to be solved by more church division.

I am personally coming to the position that Anglicanism, the American sort anyway, is already gone. It is one of those things in history, good things like the village commons or the neighborhood grocer that simply pass out of history. The liberals and the conservatives are oddly arguing for the same thing. They both insist that something wonderful about Anglicanism is essential to the future of Christ’s church. But that old, wonderful Anglicanism is gone already. Christ’s church, needless to say, goes on.

I sometimes feel, as a pastor of a church that has not and will not secede from its liberal diocese, that I am something of a quisling. It’s true, I guess. My church is not burning up with evangelical zeal, praying in small groups, fasting and waiting on the Lord. We’re Episcopalians, for heaven’s sake. We don’t pray so much as we say our prayers, and we try to get by with faith in Jesus in this world, not separated from it. We believe, strongly, in loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Our church has been stolen by the liberals. The Episcopal Church, like many mainline churches, filled an important spot in Christianity in America. We were always a church that went rather light on the sinners, on the doubters and on the less-than-devout. We’ve paid for that posture in many ways, but we’ve also included in the Gospel’s reach some rather recalcitrant, or should I say reticent Christians. I’m thinking of the W.H. Audens, the Barry Goldwaters, the actors and the tycoons and the shy. We could do this as well as we did because we were, as a church, a placeholder church, awaiting God’s purifying fire. While we waited, we took in lots of sinners plagued with their recalcitrant sins to wait along with us. Our ecclesial humility could sometimes inspire genuine humility, often enough among the rich and talented who had no earthly reason to be humble at all. “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep” was our opening line and our organizing motto. Zealous and earnest saints found us too lazy. Humble saints recognized us as friends of Jesus.

The Episcopal Church has always been a good place for the half-converted to hear the Word of God, to receive the Sacraments of God's gracious favor, and to band together to give a Judeo-Christian flavor to the surrounding culture. Our Achilles’ heel–and not something that’s only happened recently–is that we sometimes put the half-converted into positions of real power and doctrinal authority. Half-converted people working in the food pantry are a blessing to the church and the world. Half-converted people raised to the office of bishop are heretics. Maybe we are nearing some crisis in world history. Those fearful words of Jesus, so long ignored by tasteful Episcopalians, seem to be coming true: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16)

These words are spoken by the Lord in Revelation to the church at Laodicea, the last church Jesus addresses. These are among the words that “he who has an ear” needs to hear what the Spirit says to the churches. It might be salutary to listen to the whole message to the Laodiceans as a message to the Episcopal Church:

“For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev. 3:17-22)

I said earlier that Anglicanism left many doctrines unsettled not because they were unimportant, but because we hadn’t, in ourselves, the authority to settle them. The liberals, however, have overturned our humility. Our church now confidently asserts its new doctrines and bases them on some special revelation delivered directly to us, the wondrous, forward-thinking Episcopal Church. Women’s ordination is not a humble trial, made with trepidation and due deference to the tradition; instead, it is the sign of our special election, a font of Gospel authenticity. A church that has long welcomed gay and lesbian believers into various kinds of ministry now has received new and definitive truth about sexual morality that only the most bigoted, darkened soul could disagree with. The liberals have left behind the idea that some of the unsettled things in Anglicanism are important, thus necessitating our deepest humility. Instead, they now declare that anything that is unsettled is, by that very fact, unimportant, a matter of indifference, adiaphora. Forget about nothing necessary for salvation being found outside Scripture. That formulation still allowed for the discovery of lots of matter necessary for salvation. Today, however, nothing outside the Episcopal General Convention is necessary for salvation. We–the Episcopal Church–have it all.

You might be confused here. You might be thinking: But homosexuality was not a matter unsettled in the church. It was settled. You are right. Only recently as folks arose in the Church claiming that the question should be reopened might it be termed unsettled. It is, of course, blatantly manipulative if, by raising a question about anything at all, a small group of heretical activists can turn a settled matter of theology into an unsettled matter simply by questioning it. But how is a Protestant church to avoid such manipulation? We have no magisterium that can simply declare some matters beyond dispute (although we’ve tried—and failed—to use the Creeds or the 39 Articles in such a way.) There is another way to avoid being manipulated, however. We can allow that a disputed matter may nevertheless be relevant to salvation. I think that the truest Anglican response to the homosexuality dispute was to say:

Yes, the immorality of homosexual acts, though universally affirmed in historic Christianity, is now being contested in our church. The church may, as a consequence, soon find itself unable to speak a clear word on this matter. That is regrettable, but it results from the brokenness of the church. Anglicanism does not solve the brokenness of the church; it witnesses to it. The question itself may indeed be of the highest importance, that is, it may be relevant to our salvation. It is, after all, addressed in such ways in the Bible. We must read the whole Bible with humility, recognizing that all we need to know for our salvation is found therein. We can tolerate the fact that a certain percentage of our membership finds nothing immoral about homosexual behavior. They are urged not to harden their hearts to the Word of God as found in Scripture and they are warned not to presume upon the mercy of God, but we can endure their sincere doubts and questions.

This is essentially the church we had before 2003. Barely. I for one was willing to live in that sort of a church. I did not and do not think it acceptable simply to insist that there is no other way to interpret the Scriptures on homosexuality than the one classically employed. I am convinced that the classical interpretation is far and away the most reasonable, but I do not need to expel from my church those who think differently. The marriage rite in the Book of Common Prayer sufficiently expresses the church’s teaching on sexuality. Those who find a way to interpret the Scripture so as to allow themselves certain degrees of homosexual practice still find themselves tacitly encouraged to tack as closely as possible to the practices of marriage. I know that this may seem insufferably weak to some of today’s conservatives—a sellout, really—but it is no longer viable in any case. I am simply trying to recall for all of us the sort of church that we used to have. It was, as I have said, humble.

No more. Now, what we have heard from “the Spirit” supersedes and even judges Scripture. I heard this expressed best by a priest testifying for Gene Robinson at the 2003 Convention. “We,” he cried out, “are the only catholic church left!” His definition of catholic was based on the amalgamation of different lifestyles that could be crammed into ordained ministry. It is not our sexual immorality which first strikes me about today’s Episcopal church. It is our enormous pride.

Let me conclude with my original theme. The present dispute is about sex. It is about sex because it is about Jesus. Incarnation is not an idea, still less a goal, though that’s how it’s often talked about by the liberals. Incarnation is a fact. He was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made Man. There might be a spectral idea of incarnation that hovers round the fact, but the Church is based on the fact, not on the idea. Thus we are not idealists, but realists. Realism speaks of sex.

It is sometimes said that the conservatives are obsessed with sex. We are no more obsessed with sex than we are obsessed with death. They stand at opposite ends of every person’s life, and their meaning is crucial to Christian faith. Sex means division, specifically our division as one race into two kinds, male and female. By that division, God has chosen to bestow history upon us in the form of children. Sexuality (again, I mean not the desires associated with the sex act, but the fact of being male and female) reminds us of our death. We are equipped with sexual organs because we will all die. That the primary activity signifying our death is also adorned with intense longing for interpersonal union and calls forth from us declarations of undying love certainly speaks volumes about the meaning God has implanted in our species. Procreation is how the human race will endure beyond our deaths until Christ comes again in glory. Must sex be associated with procreation and, thus, with the male-female division that enables it? Absolutely. By becoming incarnate in a male body, Jesus affirms this division of the race into male and female. He shares in our death and in so doing issues a declarations of undying love. He bears in his body the sign of our mortality. In overcoming death in his own person, Jesus does not immediately bring history to a close. He doesn’t shuck off mortality as something unworthy of himself; He clothes it with immortality. Thus he reinvigorates our created natures to take up, with renewed hope, the labor of history, knowing, as the Apostle puts it, that in the Lord our labor is not in vain. (1 Cor. 15:58)

If we make sex a matter of indifference in theology, we walk away from Jesus himself.

It is sad to think that we have failed to serve our part as a placeholder church, that we foolishly tried to take on the mantle of the True Church, even of the Kingdom of God, and in so doing lost our small but significant calling. We were to wait until Christianity found its unity again, or until Christ came back, whichever happened first, but we failed.

Now, how can we tie all this together? I said earlier that the liberals have stolen our church away. Let’s now take a little more responsibility for this and say that we have let them steal our church away. When the New Testament refers to Jesus’ Second Coming, it says this: If the householder had known at what time the thief was coming he would not have let his house be broken into. (Matt. 24:43; Luke 12:39) Alright, then, why is one of the apostolic church’s favorite images for the Day of the Lord an image of deprivation and loss: Jesus comes as a thief in the night? (1 Thess. 5:2; 2 Pet. 3:10; Rev. 3:3; 16:15) Is it just an arresting image, or does it refer obliquely to the reality that his coming is a purifying fire that will wipe away all we hold dear, as in Malachi’s Who can endure the Day of his coming and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap, (Mal. 3:2) or Isaiah’s I will turn my hand against you and will smelt away your dross as with lye, (Isaiah 1:25) or John the Baptist’s He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Luke 3:16)? When St. Paul says I am already being offered up and poured out (2 Tim. 4:6) is that his way of saying, with John, that those who belong to Jesus have already passed over from death to life(John 5:24) and, with Peter, that the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God? (1 Pet. 4:17)

When we are driven by the present disputes to point to the male body of Jesus are we not, in a sense, once again stripping him for his crucifixion, exposing him to shame once again? This reminder of the death that he shares with us reminds us also of his weakness, his humility, his submission to the constraints of human suffering and his refusal to come down from the cross to save himself and us. Do we not fall under the sentence of Hebrews 6:6 recrucifying the Son of God all over again?

So what has become of our church becomes now a reminder of what became of Jesus. We are ruined. We are left in the position of Just as I am without one plea. Think of Anglicanism as a church dangling over an abyss of god-forsakenness, of Hell, hanging by three fingers: Bible, church order and sacraments. Now the enemy comes along and the Bible loses its power among us, becomes a field of contention rather than a source of unity. That finger is peeled away. Then comes the proliferation of schismatic arrangements, of multiple and competing bishops, lawsuits and all that. The finger of church order is peeled away. Now along comes the new liturgies and practices that make of Christ’s sacraments pagan rituals and destroy apostolic disciplines like the requirement of baptism before communion. Finally the last finger is peeled away. What then? We fall into Hell. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Are we to hurry off our cross before all this takes place, to save ourselves and others? That is the enemy’s temptation. Turn these stones into bread. Pretend that the failure of the Episcopal Church is actually a great advance. Both temptations, coming as bookends to Jesus’ ministry, are prefaced with this: If you are the Son of God. That’s what we want to show the world. We are strong, we are not defeated, we are the niftiest, the best-dressed, the most via media church around. That, of course, is just what we must not do.

Instead of that, we allow Christ to be formed in us. This is the truth within the liberals’ idea that Christ is in us. Not that Jesus has somehow been left behind, but rather that Jesus is seeking to be glorified in us as he has been glorified in the martyrs and witnesses of the past. Those whom he loves, he reproves and disciplines. If we hear his voice and open the door, he will come in with us and eat with us and we with him. To be emptied; to be numbered with the transgressors; to be unable to come down from our cross is thus to sup with him. This is the pressure that the Holy Spirit exerts on the church; it is what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

We have nothing to show for all our efforts. We are stripped and naked. We have fallen into the pit we have dug. Just as we are without one plea but that his blood was shed for us. Or, as St. Paul puts it, Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes thorough faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:7-10)

[1] We need to notice what’s being removed in liturgical changes. There is nothing wrong with “Hear what the Spirit says to the churches” except that it supersedes “The Word of the Lord.” Likewise, the new versions of the Great Thanksgiving written for feminist sensibilities are often not objectionable in what they say but in what they don’t—and won’t—say. A prayer specifically promulgated because it avoids calling God “Father” ought to be immediately suspicious to a Christian.
[2] I also detect an avoidance of the word “Holy” when liberals name the third person of the Trinity. We might here recognize that what the Spirit does with Scripture is apply it to our hearts that we might become holy. That, and not mere conceptual clarity, is the primary purpose of the Spirit speaking through the Scriptures. The NT term “Spirit of holiness” (Rom. 1:4) gets at this better.
[3] The reasons they believe this vary. For some, it is because forbidding anyone the fulfillment of their deep-seated desires is not “loving.” For others, God simply cannot speak specifically about anything; all commands are seen as our childish attempt to nail down God’s true message which is something ethereal like “sense of dependence” or “infinite demand.”
[4] It is possible to reverse the method and argue that since there would logically be no sexuality (sex-differentiation) in the resurrection body, therefore the risen Jesus is no longer male. This would seem still to allow the text to be governed by the resurrection of Jesus. But in fact, it would mean allowing the text to be governed by an idea of resurrection. One of the most distinguishing features of the stories about the risen Jesus is that he confounds such ideas. Sex is not directly addressed, but the risen Jesus does eat after his resurrection. While he is on separate occasions mistaken for another man, he is never mistaken for a woman, or an angel or an astral being. He doesn’t glow. His wounds are visible and tangible. Many ideas we or his contemporaries might associate with resurrection bodies turn out not to be reliable. Furthermore, the disciples do not cry, “Ah, now we can look forward to going to heaven when we die!” What is so strikingly affirmed by Jesus’ resurrection is the importance of this mortal life in all its created goodness.
[5] How ironical it is, then, that the Pope and his detestable minions have suddenly found religion. The Catholic Catechism is a compilation of Scripture texts that any Protestant would be proud of.
[6] No one can argue with the claim “God is doing a new thing.”

Taking the Bible Literally

2006-10-02T18:35:00.000-04:00

So often nowadays we come across this term: taking the Bible literally. Usually, it is spoken by people who want to distinguish themselves as somewhat more sensible and clear-headed than some other Christians who believe that Noah's flood covered all the mountains of the earth or that God caused the sun and moon to stand still in the days of Joshua.

"I don't take the Bible literally," they say, meaning, I'm able to tell when a story is fiction and when it's fact. But that's not so easy to do after all. For starters, our concept of fiction and fact is a modern distinction. We have the idea that something can be true and at the same time be utterly insignificant. It's one of the dominant passtimes of our culture: trivia. Think Jeopardy!

For ancient peoples, I'd bet, the idea of truth was tied entirely to the idea of significance. These could not be separated. Sure, they thought that things they heard in the sacred stories were factual--they most generally believed them to have happened as told--but they recognized that the reason they were told was that the story was significant, in other words, it demanded a response from the hearer. We were being shown something important about what it means to be human, to be God's people, and we had to respond. That's what a true story meant.

We can carry out a little thought experiment. Let's say that we could go to a person in those earlier days, days we think of as naive. We would tell him or her that the story of the Tower of Babel was not true, that it never happened. Our ancient friend might then ask us, "Do you mean that the story has no significance?" We would quickly answer, "No, no. It has meaning. It's just that it didn't happen." "But if it has meaning, if we need to answer it with our lives and our hearts, then it is true. And if it's true, then it obviously happened."

See the impass? What might help is to say that our imaginary ancient friend would find our idea of trivia--true things that don't matter--to be untrue. We would object strongly. We've got the facts! But facts without meaning is not truth, either, not in the Bible anyway.

Let's return to the question of what it means to take the Bible literally. The Bible means what it says. We can be confident that there is nothing in the Bible that is worthless, that can simply be thrown out. (At least, this kind of confidence has always been part of what being a Christian means, from Jesus onwards.) Some modern folk have tried to say that while we cannot take it literally, we can take it seriously. Certainly we can, and must, if we are to have any connection to the marvelous way that Christ is pictured to his Church through the patient and prayerful exposition of the entire Bible. But if we're taking the Bible seriously, why do we need to qualify that by saying that we don't take it literally? Doesn't literally mean something like letter by letter? That would be taking it seriously.

What I often find is that people who are hesitant to take the Bible literally want instead to find in the Bible something like principles or themes that they can apply to their lives. They want to leave the specifics of dead Philistines and temple measurements behind and look for large ideas and ideals that can serve as a kind of true Bible hidden inside the worthless accretions of ancient religion. This seems quite sensible to our minds. It is, however, ideology--a religion of ideas and ideals. Christianity, however, is not a religion of ideas or ideals, but of reality and of events.

There's more to be said on this topic and I'll return to it another time, but I take as my prime example today yesterday's lesson of Mark 9:38-48. There we find this: "And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45: And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. 47: And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 48: where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

We might well expect someone to say that we are not to take this passage literally. I disagree. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Does your hand cause you to sin? Of course not. The problem is not in the hand, but in the heart, or the mind, or the will. That's where the sin is lodged. But how serious is sin? This serious: if your hand were to cause you to sin, you would need to cut it off. Yes. Absolutely. Take that passage literally. Not to take it literally is not to take it seriously at all.

And that's where I think the problem with the "seriously but not literally" idea is. But there's much more, including the question of what "figuratively" or "metaphorically" might mean. Let me come back to that later.

Purity of Heart

2006-09-25T10:50:00.000-04:00

I'm posting the eight o'clock version of yesterday's sermon at our website because I included there what I mistakenly omitted at ten, namely, a word about the Collect for Purity. Here it is in its 1552 version:

ALMIGHTY God, unto whom al hartes be open, al desires knowe, and from whom no secretes are hyd: clense the thoughtes of our hartes by the inspiracion of thy
holy spirite, that we may perfectly love the, and worthily magnify thy holy
name, through Christe our Lorde. Amen.

In other words, it's the very same prayer we use today except for the spelling. It's interesting because our reading from James chapter 3, verse16 through chapter 4, verse 6 yesterday speaks of the "wisdom from above" as first pure (3:17). Purity properly belongs at the beginning of our Eucharistic liturgy, exactly where it is (though in Rite Two it is an optional prayer.) The prayer serves well in our private devotions as a way of approaching God and summarizing the heart-to-heart relationship we have with him.

At the root of yesterday's sermon is the business of the Lord pouring his love into our hearts. The actual reference is Romans 5:5 which reads, in the classic, King James Version, "And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." The English "love of God" has exactly the ambiguity of the Greek. Are we to understand this as the love God has for his creation poured into our hearts so that God's love fills us (grammatically known as the subjective genitive--the noun belongs to the subject, in this case God) or are we to understand "love of God" to mean love for God enters our hearts (the objective genitive--"love," the noun, belongs to us and is expressed toward God)? In preaching, I'll sometimes choose the former and sometimes the latter. Yesterday, it was the former, as I viewed the love God has for the world he created, sinful and chaotic though it now is, to be given to us when we pray with fervor and persistence for the things we need and want. Thus, we receive not just things from God, but God himself, most especially his love. And God, when we pray with such fervency, receives not just our requests and not just our faithfulness in soldiering on when prayers go unanswered, but he receives us, poured out like and offering before him.

That the New Testament in general and Jesus in particular invite and encourage us to pray constantly for things we need without doubting, cannot be denied. Of the few references I noted yesterday are Matthew 7:7 with its A-S-K formula, paralleled in Luke 11:9. You can find the same idea in John 16:23-26, Mark 11:24, John 15:16, 1 John 3:22 and James itself, 1:5.

Another take on this idea is the saying the everything is possible for those who believe, found in Mark 9:23 and Luke 1:37.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 1:20 expresses that Jesus is himself the positive answer, the "yes", to all of God's promises. There can be no question about God granting our requests that accord with his will . He does. And we must pray all the more. Yet, there are disappointments in prayers not answered. In these, we begin to see that we ourselves are being transformed more and more into his image through suffering.

Borrowing Grace

2006-09-18T17:57:00.000-04:00

The amazing poetry of Jane Tyson Clement can be found here. Go to page 358 for the poem "Conversion" recited yesterday in the sermon. These poems bear plenty of meditation. They are clear enough to be read from the pulpit, and heard when read, yet true enough to sit deeply in the truth of God's grace and God's world. Treat yourself.

The preacher mentioned yesterday as the one who told of Jesus borrowing cradle, donkey, cross, tomb was one Vernon McGee. You can find his "Through the Bible" radio commentaries available for the listening here. He's still popular in reruns on the radio, even though he's died. I find McGee so incredibly refreshing and wise (not to mention his appealing Texas drawl) that one can easily overlook the few places where an inadaquate theology of the church or a weakened sort of literalism mars the result. In all, he seems to me to be a true saint, "rightly (and very faithfully) handling the word of truth." (2 Timothy 2:15) McGee, of course, would quickly correct me that "saint" in its New Testament usage, refers to any believer cleansed by the blood of Christ, and has nothing to do with his or her performance of works of righteousness. I'm using the term in its more natural sense, one who, having received the holiness of God through Christ, is now letting that holiness (sanctity, saintliness) permeate his or her life.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much what this business of "borrowing" the grace of Christ for our own salvation means.

By the way, I quoted also St. Paul yesterday. He wrote, "[Jesus] was rich, but he became poor for our sake, that we might become rich." It's a key text, exactly the story of Christmas. It establishes Paul's confidence in the pre-existence of Christ, that is, the Church's belief that Jesus did not simply come into existence when Mary got pregnant, but that the one conceived in her womb was also the Son of God who had existed for all time in eternal oneness with the Father. That is, Jesus "was rich." He "came down" from heaven. Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians 8:9 to carry forward his argument for generosity in Christian almsgiving.

Jesus tells us to "give to him who begs you" in Matthew 5:42 and Luke 6:30. He praises those who give food, drink, housing, clothing, care to his disciples (his "little ones") in Matthew 25:31-46. He praises those who lend his disciples help, even a "cup of cold water" in Matthew 10:40-42.

Our Patron Saint

2006-09-07T15:21:00.000-04:00

Our parish, SS. Peter & John, has a patron saint. He is the bishop of New York (when New York was one diocese) who died here in 1830, John Henry Hobart. Hobart's written works can be found at this website.

This Sunday we will (with our current bishop's standing permission) celebrate "Hobart Sunday" with lessons from the Prayer Book's "Common of Saints: For a Pastor (2)" For those without an arcane knowledge of the Prayer Book, that means we'll be hearing Ephesians 3:7-21 and Matthew 24:42-47, reading Psalm 84:7-12 at the 8 o'clock service.

Our Patron Saint

2006-09-07T15:09:00.000-04:00

The Archbishop and the Church

2006-09-07T15:01:00.000-04:00

The words of Archbishop (of Canterbury) Rowan Williams following our General Convention are most helpful in understanding the situation of what the Christian Century calls "the deeply divided Episcopal Church." You can read them here.

I tried to elucidate for this parish what is going on with the following letter:

The general press now commonly refers to the Episcopal Church as deeply divided and paralyzed by dispute. British newspapers say that the Archbishop of Canterbury has written a recipe for schism. (Schism is a split in the Church.) Average Sunday attendance is shrinking at the rate of 3% a year churchwide.
After a long period of decline in the 1970’s and ’80’s, the Episcopal Church began to grow slightly during the ’90’s, however that came to a halt with the fiery dispute over homosexuality.
In 1998, the bishops from around the Anglican Communion gathered at the Lambeth Conference, a once-every-ten-years event. Homosexuality was pressed onto the agenda. They approved, by an overwhelming majority, Resolution 1.10, most of which is reproduced at the left.
The unique identity of our church is that it is Protestant in the way that it counts Scripture as the final basis for Christian teaching and it is Catholic in the way that it upholds the ancient office of bishop as a necessary mark of Christ’s Church. Here were the Anglican bishops of the world teaching from the Scripture. It’s hard to imagine a stronger authority for us.
The decision of the General Convention of 2003 to ratify New Hampshire’s selection for bishop of a man living in what Lambeth called a “same gender union” therefore precipitated a crisis not only within the Episcopal Church but among all the churches in the Anglican Communion. The new Archbishop of Canterbury was known to have himself ordained to the priesthood a man in a gay union, yet he explained from the start that his role was not to impose his opinions on the Church. He formed a Commission of theologians of various perspectives from around the world which then unanimously produced, in Fall, 2004, the Windsor Report. A meeting of the heads of all the Anglican churches the next winter in Ireland received and endorsed the Windsor Report, adding some matters of their own.
Since some of the Report’s recommendations involved the Episcopal Church expressing our regret and agreeing to moratoriums, it was generally agreed that little could be done until the General Convention gathered again in 2006. That gathering has now taken place. A resolution was passed “call[ing] upon Standing Committees and bishops with jurisdiction to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.”
Some bishops immediately announced that they will defy the resolution (which carries no power of enforcement), the Diocese of Newark has nominated a man in a gay union for bishop, and some have pointed out that the resolution’s vague wording could also be construed to block the election of anyone who opposes homosexual practice since that, too, is troubling to some Anglicans. Divisions deepened over the election, as Presiding Bishop, of a bishop who has herself defied the Lambeth Conference by endorsing homosexual union ceremonies in her diocese.
Hopes for resolution are dimming. Seven dioceses have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury that they be recognized apart from the Episcopal Church. The church with the largest Sunday attendance has left the Episcopal Church with the approval of their bishop. Here, our Diocese is suing St. Andrew’s, Syracuse, for control of all assets upon St. Andrew’s announcement that it is no longer Episcopal. A church in Binghamton has voted to secede.
The dispute is not entirely about sexual ethics. We’ve always been a church with a very wide range of opinion and theology. Historically, it’s been held together by bishops willing to enforce compliance and by a strict uniformity in worship. Those historic bonds are now breaking.
What’s revealed is a church that likes to serve as chaplain to educated American culture. As that culture moves away from doctrinal Christianity, a portion of the Church feels compelled to move with it, reducing the faith to a project of self-fulfillment and the wistful hope that inclusion and acceptance can overcome human sin. Characteristic of this way of thinking, so prevalent in our time, is sheer intuition of right and wrong: if something makes one feel uncomfortable or offended or wronged, it is seen as obviously wrong. Anything that brings feelings of relief and wholeness, then, is viewed as right.
This establishes the very thing that the Church’s ballast of apostolic tradition and sacred texts works to avoid, namely, the dictatorship of the present. Under this dictatorship, whatever we think now must be superior to things thought in the past simply because we, by virtue of being in the present, stand at the ethical apex of history. Everything points to the current moment for its fulfillment (until, that is, the current moment itself becomes past and something else takes its place.) By this way of thinking, our ethical task becomes not adhering to the truths found in Scripture and nature but instead staying up to date.
Other fascinating divisions are showing up in the general climate of disorder in the Episcopal Church. Parishes are departing from the directions of the Book of Common Prayer with regularity. The rule that all hymn texts needed to be approved by the Convention (a means of regulating teaching) is completely ignored. Parish boundaries (which signified the oneness of the Church and discouraged “church shopping” in favor of patient service in one’s home community) have long been abandoned.
In recent years, the practice of admitting unbaptized persons to Holy Communion—in complete disregard for the unbroken practice of all branches of Christianity from the earliest times—is being proclaimed as a great breakthrough in compassion and inclusiveness. Many parishes trumpet this policy as a mark of their sensitivity even though the canon law of the Church expressly forbids it. What’s more, bishops like ours will not put a stop to it. Some openly encourage it.
It has always been the understanding of Christ’s Church that our compassion for the lost is shown by offering them the opportunity to repent and confess Jesus as Savior and Lord. Upon such a confession, no one is denied the Sacrament of Holy Baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Somehow, that offer, which is felt by some to be too restrictive, is now seen by them as inadequate and unloving.
Back to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Following our General Convention, he put forth a set of “Reflections” that is available on audio file. I think it well that we listen to this teaching, as a congregation. Rowan Williams is not like a pope. He cannot appoint or depose bishops. He cannot compel obedience. He knows this well and welcomes the distinctive weakness of his office as a sign of the Gospel of Jesus. His reflections are, I think, bracing and helpful for us all.

From Tuesday's Bible Study -- Isaiah 24

2006-08-25T11:13:00.002-04:00

After chapter upon chapter of judgments against the nations--Egypt, Philistines, Tyre, Moab, etc.--we finally break out in chapter 24 from the thicket of historical wrongs and their consequences in God's divine providence into an open space where we can see the final judgment of God executed upon all the nations of the earth, a judgment which carries with it the hope of God's final salvation and re-creation of the earth.

The final judgment involves (verse 21) a judgment of the heavenly powers of wickedness that Paul warns about in Ephesians 6:12. While the Biblical authors may have thought of these spiritual powers of wickedness as angels, or even stars or planets, we can understand what they're referring to if we consider spiritual forces like popularity or media or consumerism or trends and such. Christ is seen in Ephesians 3:10 as being objects of the church's proclamation of Christ. Therefore, Christ is Lord of all such spiritual movements just as much as he is Lord of the material kingdoms of the earth. We know how the spiritual realities can actually exert enormous influence over the material rulers of the world. Both, Isaiah assures us, will be judged and brought finally under Christ's authority.

Isaiah's view of God's final reign leads us to consider the idea of millenialism also known as chialism. Isaiah has (v. 22)

"They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a
prison, and after many days they will be punished."

Makes one think 0f Revelation 20:1-3: "Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while."

There are 3 basic ideas about this thousand years or millenium.

There are the pre-millenialists. These folk believe that Jesus will come again before the 1000 years. After he comes, he'll reign (in Jerusalem) for 1000 years of perfect peace. Then, after the 1000 years, comes a final battle and then the final judgment. It is generally believed that some of those who have died in history will be raised at Jesus' coming to join in his reign, however, the normal processes of birth (and even death) will continue, just without disease, dangers and so forth. Most of today's evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are pre-millenialists. I am unconvinced, but willing to receive Christ's coming in whatever way it manifests itself.

A few centuries ago, most evangelicals were post-millenialists. These believe that Christ will come following a thousand years of peace. These folks believe that somehow, through hard-working believing Christians or whatever, the world is getting better and better and will soon eliminate poverty, disease and war. Then, after 1000 years of that, Christ will come. Folks who think like this are more eager to get their hands on levers of power and to make things better. They are prone to believe that historical entities are the vehicle for the millenial breakthrough. One hears their voice in the Battle Hymn of the Republic where "God's truth is marching on." They combined missionary work with "civilizing" of barbarians in order to bring about the millenium. After the horrific events of the 20th century, the post-millenial position is largely discredited, however a small group of Christian Reconstructionists believe that the present order must collapse so that Christians (who will have wisely stocked up on guns and food) can then take over and establish an evil-free world.

I am in no way a post-millenialist. I do not believe in progress. I believe in miracle and providence.

Finally, there are the amillenialists who argue that the 1000 years is simply a symbolic way of portraying the new heavens and the new earth. I count myself an amillenialist. In other words, when Jesus comes, history as we know it stops. Yes, something else takes its place; yes, that something else has deep connection to the world we now know (the "new heavens and the new earth" might better be styled the renewed heavens and the renewed earth); yes, we shall be raised in transformed bodies to inhabit this world and therefore this-worldly images are appropriate to describe the world to come, but it is not simply a continuation of world history with the sin wrung out. Christ's coming, it seems to me, cannot mean his taking up of a world throne, the very thing he refused to take up before. He cannot start yet another career in history. The life and death and resurrection of Christ are the perfect revelation of God in history, not to be improved on in some future time.

But, as I said, I'll take his coming in whatever form it manifests itself.

From Tuesday's Bible Study -- Isaiah 24

2006-08-25T11:13:00.001-04:00

"They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a
prison, and after many days they will be punished."

From Tuesday's Bible Study -- Isaiah 24

2006-08-25T11:13:00.000-04:00

"They will be gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a
prison, and after many days they will be punished."

Presence of the Passion

2006-08-14T17:18:00.000-04:00

Here is a long piece I wrote early one morning when I couldn't sleep on account of the troubles of the Episcopal Church. The motto of the Diocese of Central New York is “to be the passionate presence of Christ for one another and the world we are called to serve.”

I fear that when I come again, my God may humble me before you, and that I may have to mourn over many who previously sinned and have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and licentiousness that they have practiced. —2 Corinthians 12:21

Piecing together the timelines of First and Second Corinthians is a full-time job. One pretty good guess is that there are snippets of four separate letters found in the two passed down to us. It makes some sense that Paul’s actual handwritten epistles might have been copied over into one or two booklets for easy transmission. Who knows?

Anyway, we’ve got him mentioning in 1 Cor. 5:9, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons . . . .” Obviously, there’s a letter before the one we call First Corinthians. Paul has to explain that he didn’t mean—in the earlier letter—that the Corinthians were to disassociate from fornicators in the world. That would have meant an Amish-like withdrawal from the world itself. No, he only meant “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister (we would say, “Christian”) who is sexually immoral . . . .” (1 Cor. 5:11) It may be that part of that earlier letter is actually preserved in Second Corinthians 6:14—7:1, a passage that seems out of place where it is: “Come out from them . . . be separate . . . touch nothing unclean . . . . making holiness perfect."

Then there’s a third letter that comes between our First and Second Corinthians. Again, Paul mentions it: “I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.” (2 Cor. 2:4) Could it be that this “painful letter” is also actually preserved in the Bible? Might it be the last four chapters of our Second Corinthians (chaps. 10-13) which, so unlike the earlier chapters, show a good deal of distress and anguish? In them, Paul discusses a visit when he will have to deal harshly with the Corinthians who apparently have ignored his earlier instructions. As the quotation at the top indicates, their dispute seems to involve still this matter of sexual license. By the time we get to the first chapters of Second Corinthians, the moment for that projected painful visit has passed (he didn’t make it after all, deciding that the letter was painful enough—2:1), the Corinthian church has repented from its disobedience after a brief period of grief (7:7-9) and Paul recommends that the original offender be restored to the fellowship with tender love (2:6-8).

Whether or not this reconstruction of the Corinthian correspondence is right or not, the discussion in First and Second Corinthians can be used to demonstrate that matters of sexual ethics are not to be considered matters indifferent to the witness and fellowship of the church. The idea that we simply agree to disagree on such crucial issues is anathema. The quotation we hear nearly every Sunday, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, etc.” (1 Cor. 5:7-8) is Paul’s effort to hammer home this very truth. My desire here, though, is to point elsewhere.

What touches me so is the emotion in Second Corinthians, the anger and end-of-my-rope agony of chapters 10-13 and the tearful joy that follows reconciliation in chapters 1-7. (Chapters 8 & 9 may be yet another letter. Sheesh!) Every time I’m asked to come along to the next clergy day or to join in with the work of the diocese and the Episcopal Church, I feel the anger, the agony and the sorrow Paul writes about. How can I participate, receiving Communion and all the rest, when this Church is in rebellion against God? Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us! How can I keep this feast when the feast is designed to celebrate our independence from the shape—and shaping power—of the holiness that Christ has given his church? “I feel a divine jealousy for you,” writes Paul, “for I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I am afraid . . . .” (2 Cor. 11:2-3)

I am afraid. I am afraid that the Episcopal Church has jumped off a cliff along with a depleted Western culture and is on its way to hell. Then I am afraid that I have been too divisive, deepening church fissures into chasms. Again I am afraid that I have not been divisive enough, failing my brothers and sisters by implying that the church’s sins will, like me, simply fade away without us needing to do anything. I am afraid that I’ve abandoned Christ, shirking his cross in order to hang onto a nice pension and a pleasant job. I am afraid that my “brothers and sisters” are not really my brothers and sisters in Christ any more, that they have turned to “another Jesus.” (2 Cor. 11:4)

I’m tired of people on “the other side” assuring me that there’s nothing to fear, that we’re going forward in mission and millennium goals and being the passionate presence of Christ and all the rest, just skipping over any disputes we might have over such small matters of personal opinion as Christ’s Bride’s chastity. And I’m tired of folks on “my side” telling me there’s nothing to fear since Jesus is on our side and thus we can’t lose. I don’t mind anger; it’s the cheeriness among some conservatives that drives me up a wall. As though still another protestant denomination in America would be some sort of victory for the Lord.

Fact is, there’s no theological way out of our dilemmas. If the conservatives are right, then the Church, Christ’s Bride, is an adulteress by embracing fornication for her members. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shun fornication.” (1 Cor. 6:15, 18) If the liberals are right, then the Church, Christ’s Bride, is a whore because in taking the position of her “strong” members, those who are “in the know,” she exposes her weaker members. “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy and you are that temple. The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect.” (1 Cor. 3:17; 12:22-23)

What makes Paul’s Corinthian agonies so deep is that he never dreams of starting up a new church. He specifically eschews it: “Was Paul crucified for you?” (1 Cor. 1:13) The crucifixion of Jesus is not some portable idea that we can install in the church of our dreams. We can’t just pick up the truth of Christ and take it with us. Christ, his crucifixion and resurrection, our justification and glorification are imbedded in his, not our, church. “From heav’n he came and sought her to be his holy Bride. With his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.”

An easy reply to all this is that familiar call for unity at all costs, a call rightly rejected by both sides in the current debate. If unity alone were the goal, Jesus would not have been crucified. Paul would not be writing the Corinthians about much of anything besides the weather. In fact—and here may be a key for us—Paul would not be preaching to Gentiles at all if unity were the only point. Israel rejected his gospel: there was the first division. Then he went to the Gentiles. He repeats the pattern set by the Lord Jesus himself who “came unto his own and his own received him not.”

The thought “Let me now develop a new religion” never entered Paul’s mind. It never entered Jesus’ mind. We might say it never enters God’s mind. Instead, Christ comes to redeem Israel, God’s people, and to call her to her destiny as a light to the nations. And Israel does in fact fulfill this destiny—in Christ! It happens not by Jesus separating himself from Israel, but by him identifying with her in all her adulterous sinfulness.

The Acts of the Apostles depicts Paul being literally drummed out of synagogues until finally he can find no shelter to preach Christ except among the Gentiles and among those Jews who, bearing reproach, were willing to step across the barrier dividing Jew and Gentile. In his own letters it’s clear the pain of that separation has not gone away. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be, yet God will somehow use even this sin to his glory. Paul’s question in 1 Cor. 1:13, “Has Christ been divided?” we usually take to be rhetorical: Of course not! Christ is not divided! The Christ we have (the Biblical Christ, the Inclusive Christ, the Via Media Christ, the Episcopal Christ, the Lambeth Christ) is the real, undivided Christ. I’ve got to think that somewhere in the back of his mind Paul’s answer to the question is, Yes, Christ is divided, torn, pierced, beaten, bruised and mocked once again, again and again, crucified over and over on account of us, orthodox and revisionist, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile, Sadducee and Pharisee, Ephraim and Judah, Cain and Abel.

Perhaps the call to “be the passionate presence of Christ” is more than we think, more than soup kitchens and Habitat for Humanity. Perhaps it’s more than “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.” Jesus tells us bluntly to take up our cross. To take up his passion. He didn’t suffer and die to maintain the Episcopal Church, or to raise the minimum wage, or for dialogue with the Hindus. Maybe the very incurability of our sickness is ordered by God so that instead of glorying in “Anglicanism” we might begin to see that Anglican itself signifies a division in Christ and that that division which we have so comfortably accepted and exploited so many years is abhorrent to God. We have groomed ourselves with the fantasy that Anglicanism is the solution to the church’s divisions, all the while kicking against the goads.

Maybe God wants us to be uncomfortable and even—dare I say it?—unhappy. Maybe he wants us to be the presence of Christ’s passion.

Which comes back to the beginning. How am I supposed to behave among my “brothers and sisters”? Do I show up for things and take part because we’re all one in Christ? Or do I stay away because our Church is bringing shame on Christ? Or would that be because I think myself superior to the rest? I take comfort in the fact that Paul was equally confused about the right course to take (“I’ll visit . . . no, on second thought, I’ll write. . . wait, I’ll send Titus”) and about his motives (“I’m weak for your sake. . . really, I’m strong with you . . . I’m confident . . . I fear . . . I speak as a fool.”)

Even now, we expect this missive to somehow wrap us all up in redemption, to resort to some passage about love (1 Cor. 13), or the one body (1 Cor. 12), or reconciliation (2 Cor. 5) or the Spirit (2 Cor. 3). We expect a solution to the division we are in. In fact, there is a solution: if all parties would truly repent and believe the Gospel, we would see the Kingdom of God. Our disability lies in deciphering the shape and content of that repentance. Even more, we lack the will to turn our hearts. That’s what makes this another “painful letter.” I conclude, therefore, with 2 Cor. 13:5-6:

Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test! I hope you will find out that we have not failed.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

2006-07-27T17:17:00.000-04:00

Hello, again. Sorry for the gap in coverage.

Sunday's readings are 2 Kings 2:1-15 and Mark 6:45-56. There's some logical connection between the two (which sort of connection might become more rare when the Episcopal Church amends its lectionary beginning December 3.) It's obscure, though.

In the Old Testament reading, Elijah (E1) passes on his authority to Elisha (E2). E1 wants to go off in the wilderness alone, but each time E2 insists on accompanying him. In passing over the Jordan, E1 simply strikes the water with his cloak and the waters part. E2 asks for a share of E1's spirit, apparently his prophetic and miracle-working power. E1 promises him just that if E2 actually sees E1 being taken away. The prophet E1 knows that his departure will not be through death. Then came the fiery chariot, swingin' low. E2 saw it. Returning to Israel over the Jordan, E2 takes the cloak that had dropped from E1 in his ascent and, yes, again the waters part. E2 has received what he asked.

In the New Testament, Jesus, after feeding the 5000 in the wilderness, sends his disciples out to sea while he ascends the mountain to pray. Reminds one of Elijah wanting to be alone. In the middle of the night, Jesus walks to the disciples on the water. It is windy. When Jesus enters the boat, the wind ceases. When they arrive at Gennesaret (not at Bethsaida, where they were originally headed), Jesus is mobbed by those who want to be healed, even by touching the hem of his garment.

There is a common connection in the power over the water, over natural forces. Elijah even escapes death; Jesus--though he will die--is clearly Lord over the powers of death, symbolized by the raging sea. His cloak, like Elijah's, has power. A strong correlation must also be noted between the Ascension of Jesus and that of Elijah. Elijah leaves his cloak to a prophet-successor that mediates his "spirit." Jesus leaves the Holy Spirit to his community of apostles, sending them out to preach, baptize and heal.

Before long, in Mark's telling, Jesus will meet Elijah face to face at his (Jesus') great Transfiguration. Happily, that shall be our reading next Sunday on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration. The space between now and then is the time of sanctification, becoming more and more like our Lord. Here in Mark 6, the disciples are awed. Mark suggests that their response is less than faithful. They don't understand what happened at the feeding of the 5000. Their hearts are hardened.

What we're watching in Mark is some of Jesus' interiority, so rarely discussed in the Gospel. It's evident in the strange comment that the Lord, walking on the sea, "meant to pass by them." We cannot make any conclusions. Perhaps it is enough to see that Jesus made transitions, developed in his faith and grew. This is important not so that, in some hauling-him-down-to-earth way, we might say, "See, it's OK that I'm where I am. I'm growing, too." We can hardly say it too much: It's not about us. Rather, we see the even more mysterious truth of Christ, fully God and fully man. He is not finally accessible to us, at least not so that we can understand him. Yet, he does stop to care for us. We are his; perhaps it's a little too brash to say "he is mine." He is God's. He calls to us, "Take heart, it is I; have no fear."

All things new

2006-06-24T14:36:00.000-04:00

"When anyone is in Christ. . . a new creation. Old things have passed away. . . the new has come." With his characteristic broken thoughts, St. Paul tries to put into words the movement from old to new in Christ. (it is possible that the final phrase, which comes with some additional words in many ancient manuscripts, is to be translated: "All things have become new." Similarly, the opening sentence might be "He"--that is one who is now in Christ--"is a new creature." The words "creature" and "creation" are not easily distinguished in Greek.)

The phrases to follow are stunning. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. He (God) made him (Christ) sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.

All this comes from tomorrow's second reading, 2 Corinthians 5:14-21. There is really no finer letter in the Scriptures than 2 Corinthians. I mentioned that St. Paul has broken thoughts. It is almost as if the wonder of the truth breaks apart the sentence structure. Although he's also known for his endless sentences, he's got plenty of fragments of praise, truths and beauties like the few quoted above.

These are endless joy for theologians who will try century after century to fit them into a coherent, rational form. This is part of the wonder of Christian tradition. "One died for all," Paul writes, "therefore, all have died." "Why did he die for all?" (Here I'll get a little looser in translation) "So that while we live we might live for the one who died for us and rose again."

How it is that "all have died" is, of course, a metaphorical leap. Paul realizes that we still live. Yet, someone has died with Christ. Who is that dead someone? It is the "old self," the self that lived for him/her self, the coveting, lusting, angry, indifferent self. The self who lives is given over to God. Living for him who died and rose, Paul must add. See, our life is not merely given over to the memory of a good man who died for us. This one who died also rose from the dead and that makes all the difference. His death has the power to transform us. Has the power to grasp our old life and kill it off and bring to life our new self. Paul says much the same in that fine, fine verse Galatians 2:20: "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."

One's head spins with these words. They really cry out for a flesh-and-blood example.

Perhaps the example we seek is in Mark 5:1-20 which, together with Mark 4:35-41 make up our second lesson for tomorrow. A man was possessed by a "legion." Six thousand Roman soldiers made up a legion. The man was filled with uncleanness, with violence and demonic force. The literal legions were like that, men commanded by a violent empire that sought to dominate the world through force of arms. There is the old self, dominated by the dominator. We feel "in charge" of our lives, doing as we wish, being free, but we are in fact beside ourselves, supplanted by a demonic enslaver who introduces lawlessness and corruption through us into the world. That self, in Christ, dies. It runs into the sea and is drowned in the story. The Legion is dead. In its place is a free man, clothed and in his right mind.

Think about it.

The Holy Trinity

2006-06-10T17:08:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, June 11, is Trinity Sunday. We celebrate the revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Folks think that this is so mysterious and unknowable that we needn't even talk about it. Of course, the doctrine of the Trinity, which reveals truth about God, is exactly what can be known so that the ultimate unknowability of God is preserved. That is to say, the doctrine helps us to know that we don't know everything.

Unitarianism is the belief that God's oneness ultimately trumps anything else we might discover about him. Thus, to a Unitarian, if God reveals himself in different ways to different people, those differences are not reflecting anything true about God. They are only different ways of talking about the same thing. We may be "diverse" as the popular lingo has it, but God is not. This finally means one of two things. Either every specific revelation of God is illusory, hiding the truth of God's oneness behind the differences--which means that we cannot trust what we see and hear; we can know nothing else about God but that he is unknowable--or it means that the specific revelation of God that we have is the only one out there and that all others are false.

Christianity does indeed declare that God is one. Therefore, we share in both these approaches. All claims of divine revelation need to bow before the one revelation of God in Christ Jesus. Also, God is finally unknowable in his essence. But wait. How can we hold both the central tenet of the Unitarian/Universalist Church (God is unknowable) and that of Islam (God's revelation of himself is availablein history) at the same time?

Because we are Trinitarians. Oneness is not the final, basic truth about God. Love is the final, basic truth about God. Yes, God is one God. God is also three persons, and the "threeness" of God, whereby he eternally exists in self-emptying love, is just as basic to who he is as the "oneness."

So, as in Islam, God has definitively and for all time revealed himself in history. But, unlike Islam, that revelation is not words in a book. It is the Word made flesh. God has revealed himself in a person, Jesus, who is fully God and yet fully human.

And, as in Unitarianism, God is ultimately unknowable. But, unlike Unitarianism, this is not because every revelation from God is some sort of mask or illusion disguising his true identity. Rather, God's unknowableness is a revealed unknowableness. Precisely as a person in all of his or her depth is ultimately unknowable, even by him or herself, so is God unknowable--as a mystery calling forth our love and wonder, not as a chameleon hiding himself behind thousands of masks. God, like another person, can be both revealed and unknowable. We do not comprehend him. We enter into his presence with thanksgiving. We see him fully in the face of Jesus Christ.

Tomorrow's readings are Exodus 3:1-6, where he speaks from the burning bush to Moses; Romans 8:12-17, where the Holy Spirit communicates with our spirit to elicit the cry of "Father" from us making us one with Christ, the Son; and John 3:1-16, where our new birth in water and the Spirit leads the writer to that great verse: God so loved the world that he gave. . . .

Here's a letter I wrote to the local newspaper.

2006-06-10T16:57:00.000-04:00

Religious faith can be rational

To the editor:

Your June 6 “Mental Health” column by Grace MacDowell raised red flags for me. In writing about a dying man, she spoke of his belief in a world to come that gave him peace of mind, a peace which assisted his family’s adjustment to the man’s impending death. She then tucks in a short paragraph acknowledging that there are “some who would say that he held irrational beliefs of an afterlife.”

Why the bow toward materialists here? Materialism is the belief that matter (and the energy that accompanies it) is all there is. Physics will ultimately explain everything. Such people believe that any belief in non-material reality is wrong. But materialism is itself a belief that cannot be proved. There are strong arguments for believing in a non-material reality: Where do such ideas as goodness, beauty, service and self-sacrifice come from? Isn’t free choice real? How can material processes alone account for self-reflection and self-transcendence? Why is there something rather than nothing at all? I can’t prove there’s a God who created us and reveals himself to us in human history, but it is not an irrational belief. Materialists can’t prove they’re right either.

Theology is a complex field of study devoted to articulating a rational and coherent set of truths consistent with sources of divine revelation that are dizzyingly diverse extending through millennia of history. Maybe Ms. MacDowell’s patient did hold irrational beliefs as nearly all of us do on some level. There’s nothing inherently irrational, however, in belief in life after death. It can be one aspect of making sense of a life and a world that are finally greater than we can comprehend.

Ms. MacDowell then goes on to answer materialist objections by saying, “Does it matter? So what if he had false hopes?” She seems to fall into the trap of believing that religion exists for the purpose of making our lives more comfortable—a popular idea even among religious people. But the question of religion is the question of truth, as the courage of those facing execution for their confession of Jesus demonstrates.

If our oncologist believed that cancer was caused by space aliens, would we say, “Does it matter?” What if our airline pilot thought that angels flapping their wings gave loft to the plane? “So what?” Whether death is our end, whether a creator created us for a purpose and whether our inclination to recognize right and wrong comes from that creator matters greatly. It changes the way we live and shapes our life in any world to come.

Although we always might be wrong—about aerodynamics or cancer or God—we owe it to ourselves and our desire for integrity (where does that come from, I wonder) to do our best to discover a rational and workable grounding in the truth about human existence. Some believe they’ve found that in materialism. Most do not. None of us should settle for believing something just because it makes us, or those around us, feel better.

The Right Hand of the Father

2006-05-27T16:43:00.000-04:00

This is Ascensiontide, that 10-day period between Jesus' Ascension into Heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit. I like to think of the Sunday after Ascension Day as the day we celebrate the Creed's phrase "and is seated at the right hand of the Father." Jesus has been exalted into Heaven. That means, for us, that he is no longer present in the same way. In fact, we must bluntly say that he is absent. But then, he becomes present to us again in the Spirit. That, however, is different than his presence to the disciples following his resurrection. He is present in his absence. Make any sense? We might find a weak comparison in something like the strong recollection of a deceased friend that seems by that recollection to be in fact present. Yet the sense of that one's absence is reinforced by the recollection. This is a weak comparison. Jesus is not dead. He is truly present to us by the Spirit in his Word and Sacraments. He is present in such a way that he controls his being with us. (It is not a figment of our imagination.) Nevertheless, we recognize that he has not yet appeared. At his Ascension, the apostles are told by angels to focus not so much on recollecting his former presence in a sentimental way but rather to look forward to his future presence, what we call his "second coming."

Immediately after his Ascension, the apostles get to work in filling up their number by appointing Matthias to take the place of Judas who killed himself. This story from Acts 1:15-26 is our first reading tomorrow.

We finish up this year's readings from the First Letter of John with a reading from 1 John 5:5-15. Here we see the meaning of the Ascension for us. Jesus' Ascension is the motivation for our worship of him. His resurrection is not just a private approval by God. He is the representative of all humanity at God's court, so to speak. So much so that God receives him not only as our attorney but makes him our judge--seats him at his right hand. We worship the one who, through his cross, has raised our humanity up to Heaven and who displays to all the world the immeasurable love of the Father. There are 3 witnesses, John writes: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree. The water and the blood no doubt refer, as in the Passion according to John when both flow out of Christ's pierced side, to the Church's sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. That the call to repentance is heard and responded to in Baptism is a "witness" to the power of Christ, to his being seated at the right hand of the Father. Again, the ongoing constitution of a Church in the sacrifice of the cross that, to quote John once more, takes away the sin of the world is another "witness" to Christ's unending Heavenly authority. But the motivation behind both of these visible witnesses is the invisible Spirit who inspires our love and worship of Jesus as Lord. This is what John calls "the testimony of God." Christ's lordship, revealed by God the Holy Spirit, draws praise from us. Worship belongs to him.

Tomorrow's Gospel reading is taken from the long prayer Jesus offers just before his arrest and crucifixion. The prayer takes up the entirety of John chapter 17, but we shall read only a third of it, the middle third, verses 11b-19. The reading is highly appropriate because Jesus speaks as though he has already ascended. ("While I was with them, I kept them in thy name.") There is here a brief reference to Judas as the "son of perdition." We might call him the "son of destruction" or the "lost one." Jesus says that he has not lost one of those given him by the Father except the "lost one," that is, the one destined to be lost. (The construction "son of" can often refer to one's destiny or pre-determined identity. As always in Scripture, we recognize Judas's real choice and the opportunity he had, like everyone else, to be saved. Yet, once he acted, he is found to be filling in the role of that one who "must" set in motion the sorry events of Jesus' passion. As we know, our free choices have the capacity to make us quite unfree. We become pawns of wickedness when we begin to worship and honor wickedness.

We are, then, confronted this Ascensiontide with two kinds of worship. Worship of the self, leading to a slavery to the evil one and worship of the Lord Jesus, leading to freedom of the Spirit and belonging to the free community of Heaven. As Jesus prays for his disciples in John 17, he prays also for us, that, while we are in the world we are not of or from the world. The world can be saved by Christ but only because he is not from this world.

Perfect love

2006-05-20T09:14:00.000-04:00

There is hardly a more splendid passage on love than 1 John 4:7-21, our first reading for tomorrow. I know you will quote to my 1 Corinthians 13, which I certainly do not want to diminish, but 1 John 4 is intimately tied to the revelation of God's love in the person of Jesus Christ. Love is not our love for God (paltry, sporatic and mixed) but his love for us (vs. 10).

Four times John speaks of "perfection" in this section. We often mistake this idea, thinking that it refers to flawlessness. The word, however, has a connotation of time. That is, the word for perfect, teleios, comes from the word for end, telos. The end or goal of things is their perfection. John is not talking about flawlessness but about our becoming conformed to Christ, our goal to belong fully to him.

First, in verse 12, "If we love one another, God dwells in us and his love is perfected in us." That is, his love finds its goal when we love one another, when we are all caught up in the perfect love of the Father for the Son, when we are all brought into that perfect exchange of love by loving one another, God's love finds its end, its goal. Then, verse 17: "In this love is perfected with us: that we have confidence on the Day of Judgment because just as he is so also are we in this world." It's similar to the comment in the Gospel of John 5:24: "The one who . . . believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment but has passed over from death into life." In First John, we are reminded that the goal and end of our love is fellowship with God. We shall be like him. Love is perfected, that is, it comes to its final goal, when we arrive at the Day of Judgment having let God's love freely given to us to cleanse all our sins and to bring us to perfect union with his glory.

"Perfect love casts out fear," we're told in verse 18. Fear, apparently, is the block that keeps us from loving one another. Later, the verse has, "whoever fears is not perfected in love." We might relate this to the perfection of love we heard about in verse 17 and point out that our union with Christ on Judgment Day will be without fear. We might also mention that while the Bible frequently tells us to "fear God" it also points out that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We begin with fear and end with no fear. However, it seems that the fear spoken of here may also refer to our fear of others and the way it blocks us from loving them and, therefore, from receiving in our own lives that perfection of love he spoke about in verse 12. And why do we fear others (thus leading to anger, envy, selfishness and the rest)? Because we fail to see that we ourselves are loved. So our writer reminds us. Love of others is not some kind of great accomplishment that we have to achieve through much labor. Instead, it is the gift that comes from knowing we are loved: "We love because he first loved us." (verse 19)

Tomorrow's Gospel is John 15:9-17. Again, the stress is on loving one another. It is Jesus' parting gift to us--the gift of love for the brethren (brothers and sisters), the ones that Julian of Norwich called our "even-Christians."

The Shepherd and the Hireling

2006-05-06T13:10:00.000-04:00

John 10:11-16 should strike fear in every pastor's heart. The hireling (that is, the one who works for wages) doesn't really care for the sheep. They''re not his, after all. When the wolf comes, the hireling runs away. Jesus knows that he himself is the good shepherd, not a hireling. He lays down his life for the sheep. What are we "pastors" then. (Everybody knows that the word pastor means "shepherd," right? As in pasture and pastoral?) Are we hirelings or true, good shepherds? Do we lay down our life for the sheep? Only so shall they be "ours" for only so do we belong to Jesus.

Our middle reading tomorrow is 1 John 3:1-8. It begins with one of the Bible's most plangent looks to the second coming of our Lord. We shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. (vs. 2) Then begins a passage that expresses the Bible's perfectionist strain. "No one who abides in him sins." The Greek verb indicated continuous action. We could translate it "no one who keeps on abiding in him keeps on sinning," and that might make us feel fleetingly better ("OK, that means that my repeated sins are simply evidence that I'm not always abiding in him-- I knew that anyway) but we'll have to still realize that not to dwell in Jesus is not to belong to him and thus not to be saved at all. It's the view of what we might call the unbelonging sheep. Here it's the sheep, not the pastor, who are doing the disowning.

Perfectionism in the Bible scares us for psychological reasons. People who try to be perfect generally set themselves up for enormous disaster in life. Admitting one's weaknesses is a sign of health. Here, however, there is no case of not being weak. It is the constant dependence on God, the constant abiding, that is the key. What the Bible avoids is the idea that "a little sin won't hurt you." Any at all extinguishes love. It fails to abide in Christ. It is of the devil.

The first reading, Acts 4:23-37, tells of Peter and John again. They've gone back to the disciples and they pray, not for the overthrow of Christ's enemies in the Temple hierarchy, but rather that they themselves might have courage to speak boldly. Part of what strengthened their boldness was the sharing of livelihoods and the unity in "heart and soul". Not to mention that the room shakes when they conclude their prayer.

Peter and John

2006-04-22T16:22:00.000-04:00

Since our parish church is called (on account of a merger 20 years ago) Saints Peter and John, we take special delight in stories such as the one in Acts 3:1-26 in which Peter & John act together. It's odd that there are virtually no churches named after these two while there are many named after Peter and Paul. The latter are thought to be twin pillars of the Roman church since both were reportedly martyred in that city, yet in Scripture Peter and Paul do little but argue. Peter and John, on the other hand, seem to be the earliest example of Christian fellowship. The two heal the lame man here in Acts 3, get thrown in jail together in Acts 4 (and get released) and travel to Samaria to put down the first reported heretical development in Acts 8:14-25. In Luke 22:8, Jesus sends Peter and John to nail down the upper room for the Last Supper. If one takes the traditional view (I do not) that the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel of John is John himself, then the occasions of Petrine and Johannine collaboration are even more numerous, involving their secret conversation at the Last Supperin chapter 13, their race to the tomb in chapter 20 and their rivalry in chapter 21. Then there's the fact that the letters of Peter (2) and of John (3) take up an important part of the non-Pauline letters of the New Testament.

The Episcopal Church, no doubt wanting to keep services shorter, appoints only some of Acts 3, leaving out everything specific to the lame man himself. All we have left are the speeches of Peter about Jesus. We're left with a message but without any power. Happily, I am free to add back in that material and I do, making for a long reading. (It's the entire chapter.) Our Gospel reading is also quite long, and is focused on yet another disciple, Thomas. It is John 20:19-31.

One of the most engaging aspects of the sermons of Peter and, later, Paul in Acts is the way that they grab a great assortment of Old Testament passages to understand what has happened in Christ Jesus. The guy they knew, whom they denied, who, bearing plenty of other denial and abuse from the leaders of God's people, who was thought to be safely dead, is alive again in a way that is both comforting and scary. One might think he would show up again to execute vengeance on the high priests, the cowardly disciples, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Judas (oh, whoops! Judas already executed the vengeance on himself through suicide.) Something like the Terminator. But instead, this man of extreme power (for anyone who has defeated death is by definition the most powerful man ever) chooses not to exercise his right to destroy his enemies. He chooses to share that power with a group of them. We call that group the Church. This is clearly not some bizarre occurance that just erupts out of nothing and returns to nothing, a strange footnote to history. Instead, this--if the Scriptures are in fact the Word of God--must be something foretold in that Word, something that reorders the whole of human history, even the whole of the created order. There have got to be pointers and signs in the Bible that formerly were misinterpreted or, more often, simply left to lie unexplained, even undetected, until now. Peter finds them everywhere.

Here, in chapter 3, Peter's use of the word "servant" might mean that he has in mind the famous passage from Isaiah 52:13--53:12 about the "suffering servant" by whose wounds we are healed. The fact that this reference is blatent in 1 Peter 2:22-25 makes this even more likely. Peter claims that "all the prophets" said that the Christ would suffer (3:18) and that a time lay ahead for God to establish, again, all that he spoke through the holy prophets. (3:21) In other words, this event is the beginning of the fulfillment of all the prophecies regarding both God's judgment and the coming age of peace and reconciliation. Confirmation of this movement Peter finds in the prophecy of Moses that God will raise up another prophet like himself, a prophecy found in Deuteronomy 18:15-20. The excitement of Peter is almost palpable to this day as he rapidly concludes that "all the prophets" from Samuel on looked forward to this day. The day has now dawned in Jesus. The ancient promise to Abraham that all the families of the earth shall be blessed in your (Abraham's) "seed" (descendants) has now come to fulfillment. (Genesis 22:18) The seed, it would appear, is Jesus himself. In him, all the nations are blessed.

Offering up our Sickness

2006-04-03T10:28:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's readings were exquisite. Jeremiah 31:31-34 is the clearest place where the New Testament ("new covenant" in the Revised Standard Version) is found in the Old Testament. The new covenant God will enact will be an engraving of his law on our hearts rather than on tablets of stone. Suprisingly, there will be no more need for teachers. Everyone will know the Lord. The distance between us and God will be erased. Jesus takes these words and add the crucial words "in my blood" with "this cup is the new covenant in my blood." (1 Cor. 11:25) The road to that new land where everybody knows the Lord will pass through the cross of Jesus. Although I didn't use Jeremiah in the sermon, the realization that Jesus takes the words of Jeremiah and converts them into his act of self-oblation shows us how the offering up of one's trials and difficulties is engraved on the heart of the Christian gospel. The New Covenant or New Testament is a testament in blood.

Hebrews 5:1-10 has to do with Jesus being our great high priest "after the order of Melchizedek." Mel, as Hebrews clarifies in chapter 7, is a priest of God from Salem, the city of Peace. He offers bread and wine. He ministers to Abraham. He is, therefore a foreshadowing of Jesus who, though not from the priestly family of Levi, nevertheless by his offering of himself has become a high priest forever, not to be supplanted by another in the levitical line. He is, like Mel, unique.

What's most interesting about this passage, though, is the part about Jesus' suffering, it would appear that the suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane is intended. It portrays Jesus "offering up" (the word signifies the priestly offering) prayers, supplications, tears and loud cries. Nowhere else outside the Gospels themselves does the New Testament speak of this psychic torment of Jesus for us.

Another take on Gethsemane is the Gospel portion from John 12:20-33. John has Jesus not in the Garden and night but in the open, teaching, by day. His "soul is troubled" and, as at Gethsemane, he rejects the temptation to seek an escape from his calling. Instead of the words "Thy will be done" as at Gethsemane, he says, "Father, glorify thy name." (It is fascinating that both versions are connected to different petitions of the Lord's Prayer.) Jesus, lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to himself.

As John Keble wrote:

Is it not strange, the darkest hour
That ever dawn'd on sinful earth
Should touch the heart with softer power
For comfort, than an angel's mirth?
That to the Cross the mourner's eye should turn
Sooner than where the stars of Christmas burn?

I mentioned that the extreme Protestant elements wanted to remove "which we now offer unto thee" from the Great Thanksgiving. Actually, they've succeeded in England. The very first American Book of Common Prayer, 1789, included the words. They were taken from the Scottish book of 1735 and, since our first American bishop was consecrated by bishops in Scotland, he made sure that the first American BCP contained certain elements of the Scottish church's rite. In some of the 1789 books, the words were written in capital letters, a sign of the importance seen in them. They convey that our oblation, our offering up of our lives for the sake of the world, is not some worthless exercise, but that God, combining it always with the offering of Christ, receives this sacrifice as a sweet-smelling savor.

2006-03-28T20:24:00.000-05:00

Hey, I know. I haven't had much to say online lately. Sorry. I've also fixed my email address. Now when you go to my complete profile and click to contact me, you'll get me.

The last 2 Sundays have involved St. John's Gospel, 2:13-22 & 6:4-15. We might want to note that each of them begins with "the Passover of the Jews was at hand." Since Jesus is later crucified at the Passover, it is from John's Gospel that we get the idea that Jesus' ministry lasted 3 years. John is probably signaling something else to us. This is, after all, the Jesus whom John the Baptist proclaimed as "the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" (1:29). Jesus is the Passover Lamb. These two incidents, Jesus clearing the Temple yard of buyers and sellers and Jesus feeding the people with miraculous bread are both pointers to his crucifixion and resurrection. He becomes the new Temple, replacing the old one. The temple of his body, John calls it. Similarly, he is the bread of life who gives life to the world. His death and resurrection is the true Passover which establishes a new locale for the forgiveness of sins (the Body of Jesus) and that Body is given to us for food that lasts unto eternal life. Both the death (temple) and the resurrection (bread) of Jesus are foreshadowed in these Passover passages, just as, at the original Passover, there is the lamb's death (along with the deaths visited on the Egyptians) and the giving of the Law, a sign of the freedom bestowed on Israel by her God.

My sermons have not focused on these matters, however. On March 19, I looked at the 10 Commandment from the Old Testament reading, Exodus 20:1-17. All the other commandments deal with the exterior life. No. 10 deals with the heart of darkness behind our sins. This is not my idea. St. Paul says as much in Romans 7:7-8: "What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.' But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead."

In this matter, I was deeply influenced by the Englishman Thomas Traherne. He wrote:

To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell, I would say upon Earth: To prize them and not to have them, is to be in Hell. Which is evident by the effects. To prize blessings while we have them is to enjoy them, and the effect thereof is contentation, pleasure, thanksgiving, happiness. To prize them when they are gone, envy, covetousness, repining, ingratitude, vexation, misery. But it was no great mistake to say, that to have blessings and not to prize them is to be in Hell. For it maketh them ineffectual, 33as if they were absent. Yea, in somerespect it is worse than to be in Hell. It is more vicious, and more irrational.

48
They that would not upon earth see. their wants from all Eternity, shall in Hell see their treasures to all Eternity: Wants here may be seen and enjoyed, enjoyments there shall be seen, but wanted. Wants here may be blessings; there they shall be curses. Here they may be fountains of pleasure and thanksgiving, there they will be fountains of woe and blasphemy. No misery is greater than that of wanting in the midst of enjoyments, of seeing, and desiring yet never possessing. Of beholding others happy, being seen by them ourselves in misery. They that look into Hell here may avoid it hereafter. They that refuse to look into Hell upon earth, to consider the manner of the torments of the damned, shall be forced in Hell, to see all the earth, and remember the felicities which they had when they were living. Hell itself is a part of God’s Kingdom, to wit His prison. It is fitly mentioned in the enjoyment of the world. And is itself by the happy enjoyed, as a part of the world.

Traherne's amazing. Instead of supressing our wants, we need to learn to want what is given to us. And that which is given is everything. To desire what we have is to enjoy, to be thankful and even to imitate God who, he says, wants the world, desires it.

This world, folks, this world

2006-03-14T20:38:00.000-05:00

What would it mean to redeem the world if the world simply dissolved away? What of God's great act of creation if his final purpose were merely to dispense with it? Why would he make us struggle through life in this world if we were really designed for another? Is this life just a test, like the SAT, in which we simply need to answer enough questions right in order to advance to the real show?

Sadly, there is a strong and long Christian tradition that this world is just that, a proving ground for souls and nothing more. Fit only for burning. We're made for eternity, some say. This world is not my home, sings the song, I'm just a-passin' through. There's a better home a-waitin' in the sky.

The Bible gives very little support to this way of thinking. The New Testament is convinced that Jesus is coming back here, not to snatch us away but to claim his rightful rule, with his sanctified ones (his saints) over this long-rebellious world. The rebellion is to be finally destroyed so that the "new heavens and the new earth" might emerge. The story of the Bible is not about us "going to heaven" but about heaven coming to us. (See Revelation 21:2, 10.)

The claim of the Gospel is that God, against what seems impossible odds--even for God--, has defeated the prime enemies of his creative project. He has redeemed the world. Those enemies are sin and death. As the Old Testament people of God knew, to participate in even the smallest way in God's redemptive plan was to be blessed. To fall away from his plan, purpose and power to save the world was to be cursed. What they did not for the most part see, however, was any way to overcome the curse of death. Death cut one off from God's final redemption of the world. The one possible way to remain connected with God's intention was through posterity, through one's bloodline. Thus it was that childlessness was among the very worst curses.

In Christ, however, death is truly defeated. As he rises from the dead, so we also will be raised to participate in fact in God's final redemption of the world. Now we know that everything we do toward that glorious day of redemption is not done in vain. Not because our acts necessarily have an effect on events in the manner of an historical influence, but solely because we are preserved to the end. It is no coincidence that St. Paul ends his great discourse on resurrection, 1 Cor. 15, with this: "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord."

Keep in mind, dear readers, the basic meaning of redeem: Just as with our coupons, to redeem something is to make it valuable. God redeems our lives through the cross and resurrection of Christ and thus makes our lives valuable. We shall not be cut off. We are blessed. That means, too, that we are called to bear our cross. We engage the battle for holiness, for a life purified and transformed for God's kingdom.

Carry the Wood

2006-03-09T15:39:00.000-05:00

Funny thing about the lectionary (that's the list of readings to be used on any given Sunday.) It seems that all the great readings get crowded into a few weeks while vast stretches of time (in the summer and fall, often) cover biblical minutae that are almost impossible to preach from. Yet we try.

This week we get the famous story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son, Isaac. Or, rather, his non-sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham intends to sacrifice the boy; God tells him to sacrifice the boy, but right at the moment of ritual murder, God (or an angel) yells out to Abe. Stop. Don't. Use this sheep caught in the bushes instead.

The whole thing's a test, we're told. Genesis 22:1-14 tells us that God wanted to test Abraham. So the most obvious lesson is that God tests us. He sometimes lays before us tasks that he really doesn't want done just to see if we're committed enough to go through with it. Abraham had faith, by this reading. He didn't doubt God.

But there's the rather obvious question. Shouldn't God's will be discernible by its goodness? Why would Abraham construe this command as a command of the Lord? Was he just then learning who the Lord was? Perhaps this order was received by Abraham as a divine command but it arose from the paganism around him and not from God himself. The moment on the mountain, then, is when Abraham finally meets God in all his (God's) glory. Significantly, at that moment, God provides a way out. He provides the ram. The ram, then, is a type of Christ, an image that points to Jesus. Jesus is often seen as the "Lamb of God" (John 1:29 and Rev.) and is connected to the Passover Lamb whose blood was applied to the Israelites' doorposts so as to prevent the Angel of Death from killing . . . the firstborn son!

A final typological connection to our Lord Jesus is that Isaac carries the wood for the burnt offering up Mount Moriah just as Jesus carried the cross to Calvary. In the Gospel reading from Mark 8:31-38, we are told by Jesus to take up our cross and follow him. So Isaac is a type not only of Jesus but of the disciple. The father commands; the lamb provides; the fire consumes. As Isaac obeyed his father unto his being bound on the sacrificial altar, as Jesus obeyed his Father unto his being tortured and bound to die on the cross, so we obey our Father unto our being bound in the predicaments and impossibilities of our lives, appearing to die, until the death of Christ the Lamb intercedes for us and we receive the light of the sacrifice, the life that is ours through the Spirit of grace. God provides a way out. This simple verse from 1 Cor. 10 seems so perfectly to fit the story of Isaac's sacrifice:

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
The final reading on Sunday is Romans 8:31-39, another blockbuster passage. Here it is Christ who intercedes for us. God did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all. And here's a most interesting verse. After taking note of "tribulation, distres, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword" Paul quotes Ps. 44:22: "For thy sake we are being put to death all the day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." One hardly knows where to stop in finding these repeated resonances within the Scriptures. We are, one might say with Paul, bound up by all sorts of difficulties, yet not defeated. Like being done to death, but still we live by grace, by the sacrifice of the Lamb. Alleluia.

On the wings of a dove

2006-03-02T14:29:00.000-05:00

Somewhere (I can't remember where) I read about the dove that Noah let out from the ark (Genesis 8:6-12) that, after two unsuccessful tries, never came back being symbolically connected to the dove that descended upon Jesus at his baptism. That dove is a form of the Holy Spirit that descends on him there. Then he goes out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. (Mark 1:9-13)

The connections are intriguing. There's water in both cases. The water is dangerous; it can drown us. Jesus taking upon himself the sins of the world, opening himself to that weight and power may drown him. For all it appears to us, it did drown him, on the cross. But God raised him up and us with him. This happens as the power of his resurrection life is applied to us by the Holy Spirit. Noah's flood did not destroy Noah and his family, as our second reading, 1 Peter 3:18--4:2, reminds us. In the same way, we pass through our baptism and we don't drown; instead, we live but we live through Christ. Through his suffering and his power. To say, as Peter does that "baptism saves you" (3:21) is perhaps a shorthand for saying that you are saved through baptism in the same way that Noah is saved through the water. Death, rejection, sin, impotence and suffering are not able to destroy us because we are crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20). We are "buried with him through baptism into death" (Romans 6:4).

As Peter says, the symbolism of baptism is not washing: "not the removal of the flesh's dirt but the appeal to God for a clear conscience." Perhaps that is to say that the early church sees baptism not as the "washing away of sins" but as drowning. Drowning in the pain, confusion and contrariness of life, but. . . with Jesus who survived. Who was raised. Who will raise us with him. We go through the wilderness, but we are not consumed. We are not undone. Christ goes with us and we come out on the other side. The clear conscience we appeal for in baptism is for that power of the Spirit (the dove again) that applies the sanctifying power of Jesus' resurrection to our lives. For the defeat of the enemies of our life is perhaps above all a defeat of our own bad conscience, the knowledge that we are ourselves responsible for much of our life's pain.

The passage from 1 Peter contains that most nettlesome problem of Christ being said to have gone and preached to the "spirits in prison" who were unfaithful in the time of Noah. (3:18) This has traditionally been taken as the proof text of the Apostles' Creed's sentence "he descended into hell." That strikes me as unlikely. I know I'm up against a lot of tradition here of Christ's harrowing hell, freeing the Old Testament believers from bondage, but it doesn't exactly fit this passage. Actually, I accept the harrowing of hell. It just doesn't correspond to this verse.

Instead, we are here dealing not with dead human beings, but with "spirits," that is, demonic spirits that were working in Noah's day (by fathering children with human women -- Genesis 6:1-4) and are working still to foment disobedience to God. Jesus, after his resurrection, "in the spirit," that is, in the power of the Spirit, went to them (probably, these spirits are thought to reside in one of the lower heavens, just as St. Paul speaks of the devil as "the prince of the power of the air," (Ephesians 2:2) perhaps in the process of his ascension, to proclaim to them his victory over their evil (not necessarily to "preach" to them in order to convert them.)

See beyond the walls

2006-02-28T07:52:00.000-05:00

I visited a fellow in the jail Saturday. I can't see beyond these walls, he said. He meant that his perspective was skewed now that he had been locked up so long. His world had shrunk to a very small one. That's it! I thought. That's the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. We rarely can see beyond the walls. Little things loom large. For a moment, at the Transfiguration, Jesus, Peter, James and John saw "beyond the walls". The world was bigger than they imagined. In fact, it was that "world without end" that some prayers refer to. Not this visible world alone, but this world augmented and, ultimately, renewed by the Holy Spirit in obedience to Christ. The words "world without end" are a translation of the Greek "unto the ages of ages" found in the New Testament. Newer prayer books now say "for ever and ever." Okay, but the older translation is more vivid. This world does come to an end in the same way that the ocean comes to an end at the shore. This world is limited and bounded by a larger world. We belong to both, both to the world that has an end (history, we might say) and that world beyond this one which nevertheless includes this one. That one is a "world without end." Transfiguration.

Power & Perserverence

2006-02-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

The Christian life is about power, God's power, to change us and to make us new in him. True, sometimes we have to suffer many difficulties and weaknesses (remember St. Paul's famous "thorn in the flesh" from 2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Nevertheless, we are victorious through Christ. So it was for Naaman. He was healed! Let's not minimize God's power to heal.

At the same time, we need to strive and struggle against sin and temptation. Let's make is more simple still. It must be not what we want but what he wants.

The angel Gabriel tells Mary that "with God all things are possible" in Luke 1:37, a truth that sticks with God's people found in Genesis 18:14, Job 42:2; Matthew 19:26 & Mark 14:36.

Olympic Glory

2006-02-11T14:10:00.000-05:00

What are the chances of reading this week's second lesson, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, while the Olympics are in session? Pretty remote, it would seem. The passage uses sport as a metaphor for the spiritual life: "Run to win," the Revised English Bible puts it. Just as war is a fitting image for the battle against temptation so also athletics serves to remind us how we need to exercise ourselves constantly, to persevere, and to learn self-mastery and self-control in our journey through this world. Athletes do all this to receive a temporal wreath (remember the wreaths at the Athens olympics?), but we strive in order to obtain an immortal crown. The image of the crown is a widespread New Testament concept.

Our long Old Testament reading from 2 Kings 5:1-16 tells the story of Naaman the Syrian who was cured of his "leprosy" by the prophet Elisha of Israel. The humorous story has him crying foul: Come all this way and not even see the prophet, only to have his servant tell me to go wash in the Jordan River? What's wrong with Syria's rivers? Why couldn't he come out and wave his hand over me? Where's the drama? Where's the spectacle? I deserve a real healing! Elisha is coy. We find out later that Elisha will not take Naaman's expensive gifts, but Gehazi, Elisha's servant, will. He eventually contracts leprosy himself for his greed in wanting the Syrian's filthy lucre. It's true, you cannot serve God and Mammon.

The Gospel reading is Jesus healing the leper (appropriately). As with Naaman, this man is instructed to go and receive a quiet healing. It's as though Jesus is saying, "Don't go off and become a Christian. Remain in the place where you were when you received your call. Go to the temple, and to the priest.

The Dark Night

2006-02-06T15:48:00.000-05:00

The story of Jacob's nighttime struggle with the messenger is found in Genesis 32:24-32. It seems to reprise some of Jacob's earlier nighttime vision in Genesis 28:11-17.

There are five nighttime stories in the Gospel of Mark, each of deep significance. In addition to ours from Mark 1:32-34, in which Jesus goes off to pray in a deserted place and then renews his mission, Mark 4:35-41 tells of Jesus and the disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee and encountering a violent storm. Jesus is asleep in the boat. They wake him impatiently and he speaks a word of calm, stilling the sea. In Mark 6:45-52, the disciples are again on the boat and again there is a strong night storm. This time Jesus is not with them. However, he comes to them walking on the lake. When he enters the boat, the seas calm. Mark 14:17-25 is the evening meal before Jesus' crucifixion, the "Last Supper." It takes place at night (as John 13:30 so starkly tells us.) In the Gospels, this event is charged as much with the betrayal of Jesus as it is with the Eucharist that the early church will later find there. The night is the time of danger and of decision. Finally comes Jesus' burial, at eventide, in Mark 15:42-47.

I am tempted to say that in each case, a burial is followed by a resurrection. Nighttime is the time to bury the old self and receive from God our new, daytime self.

Since, as I pointed out yesterday, Revelation 21:25 tells us that there is no night in the New Jerusalem, I wonder how we are to understand Las Vegas. There is no night there, either. At least, you can go play slot machines in the casino at 3 a.m. surrounded by others as though it were day. Just a thought, but could it be the infernal counterpart to the heavenly Jerusalem? An endless, "everlasting" extension of this present life, the (symbolic) wiping away of death--and therefore of night that signifies death--that still does not save. After all, to simply extend the present life into infinity is not paradise. It is hell, for we shall that way never be free of our sins. Well, just a thought.

Organized Religion

2006-02-02T18:11:00.000-05:00

There's hardly a more unpleasant term among us than "organized religion." It connotes smarmy and hypocritical clergy and laity arranging for their own little spheres of power and glory at the expense of hapless, needy people who fall into their clutches. How much brighter seems the idea of "one's own spiritual path" or just "spirituality." My quip in return is usually, "What. You'd rather have disorganized religion??"

For now, we might just note the degree of organization found even in the earliest Christian movement as evidenced in Paul's discussion of ministerial pay in 1 Corinthians 9:14-23. He firmly endorses pay for preachers and then resolutely argues why he won't take any. He wants to maintain the freedom of the gospel that is his inheritance in Christ. As a prescription for preachers it seems rather bad advice, but Paul is not any old preacher. And there is always that restriction of freedom any employed preacher might feel about proclaiming God's judgment against a particularly sacred cow of his congregation. As usual in Paul, a discussion that seems very wonkish and uninteresting becomes a profound theological exploration. Note his sense that "the Gospel" is a power and a movement, not just an idea. And look out for the dangerously wrong taking of "all things to all [people]" as some sort of general advice for getting along int he world.

There's a need for some organization in our Gospel reading from Mark 1:29-39, too. As happens repeatedly in Jesus' early ministry, the crowds are overwhelming him. He doesn't begin seeing the public until sundown, when Sabbath is over, and then he sets to healing, teaching and exorcising. Then he wakes up, before dawn, to go up into the mountain to pray but his disciples interrupt him there and beg him, it appears, to return to the next batch of the sick and demonized of Capernaum. Jesus refuses, not so that he can pray in peace, but so that he might go into other villages and preach. That, he says, is why he "went (or came) out." He's got a plan. Which sounds like organization to me.

The story of Elisha's healing of the Shunammite woman's son in 2 Kings 4:18-21, 32-37 is chosen, no doubt, to parallel Jesus' healing powers. It reminds us of the power of the Gospel and that Jesus was, and was early-on seen as, a prophet in the Elijah-Elisha tradition.

Unclean & Holy

2006-01-30T17:10:00.000-05:00

Your usual study Bibles will divide Leviticus into the part about clean and unclean (my Oxford Study Bible says "Purification and atonement"), chaps. 11-16, and holiness, chaps. 17-27. A quick look at a concordance finds the word "unclean" 93 times in chaps. 11-15 (none in chap. 16) and only 11 times in chaps. 17-27. The word "holy" is found 15 times in chaps. 11-16 (8 of those in chap. 16 alone) and 39 times in chaps. 17-27. The point is that "unclean" and "holy" are not opposites in the Bible. Unclean is the opposite of clean and holy is the opposite of ordinary or profane. They deal with somewhat different matters. Yet the powers lie in unclean and in holy. That is, they have the force, the power to spread like an infection. Their opposites, clean and profane, are weak, neutral realities simply taking up space. You cannot stop the power of unclean simply with clean. Clean loses that battle every time. Likewise, profane cannot overpower holy. The only way to fight against unclean is by the power of holy. Thus the unclean spirit in the synagogue in Mark 1:23 is only overpowered by "the Holy One of God," namely, Jesus.

Jesus introduced the reality that holiness was not a static quality to which one might aspire. Instead, holiness is a power that can sweep through a community. That's exactly what happened in Jesus' day. Holiness, for the people of God, is a recovery of our calling, our mission, to serve the world with the Gospel message. That power of holiness is ours--by the Holy Spirit--as we call upon God to ignite us to be his instruments of love and labor in a fallen, "unclean" world. The power of uncleanness, on the other hand, is the infectious power of sin in our communities and lives. It is the way that disobedient and untrusting habits become ingrained in us and in our communities and churches when we forget our calling and focus only on ourselves.

Peter quotes the great refrain of Leviticus, "you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy" in 1 Peter 1:16. However, in Matthew 5:48 Jesus uses the same formulation in encouraging us to do the hardest thing of all, to love our enemies. Why must we do such an impossible thing? Because God does, for he sends rain on the just and on the unjust. And we must be "perfect" (that is, completed and fulfilled according to God's intention for us) as our father in heaven is perfect.

The quotation from Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to receive is found nowhere in the Gospels, yet Paul in Acts 20:35 recalls it for the Ephesian Christians. People knew it as one of Jesus' sayings.

Boilerplate

2006-01-23T09:25:00.000-05:00

A jeremiad is often boilerplate stuff. It's very easy to pick on television and advertising in sermons, for example--not that that stops me from doing it. I just feel a little guilty afterward.

The revelation for me was the fact that Jeremiah 3:21-25 shows the inability of the people to truly repent. The amazing St. Augustine's Prayer Book specifies the sin of Shame (hurt pride) as "sorrow for ourselves because our sins make us less respectable than we like to think we are, or because we fear punishment or injury to our reputation, rather than sorrow for what sin is in the eyes of God." That's where Israel is in Jer. 3. Worn out with the sterility of sin, but still unmoved to turn toward God in love. It's one thing to turn away from sin, another to turn toward Jesus Christ.

T. S. Eliot's entire poem, Ash-Wednesday, is here.

More and more I see the gift of "true repentance" as a wondrous gift from God. If there's a good side to being a sinner, it's being able to come to the Lord so humbly, so empty and receive his grace enacted for us on Jesus' cross. Wish I'd said that yesterday.

Circumcision?!

2006-01-21T14:49:00.000-05:00

One oddity of biblical religion is the frequency of circumcision in the text. We might be able to handle it better were it nothing more than the ancient ritual that signifies God's covenant with his specific (circumcised) people. But it is more than that. It appears in the Old Testament not only as a primitive law but as a metaphor for obedience and self-sacrifice before the Lord. "Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked" reads Deuteronomy 10:16, showing that physical circumcision is a sign not only of the Covenant, but of our response to that Covenant, a response of obedience and, shall we say, pliability. No more stiffnecked which is to say no more hard-hearted, not bitter, not vengeful, not defensive, but open, teachable, compassionate. This is the Covenant at work in us, drawing us into the very personality of God. Jeremiah repeats this idea in the reading for Jan. 22, Jer. 3:21--4:4.

St. Paul uses the Deuteronomy idea in certain places, but in the Jan. 22 reading from 1 Corinthians 7:17-23 circumcision plays that difficult role as the marker between Jew and Gentile, a problem for the churches and ministry of Paul. We are one in Christ, so then how can we be any longer two--Jew and Gentile, slave and free? Paul's answers to this problem are not entirely consistent. In Acts 16:3, Paul has Timothy circumcised "on account of the Jews," that is, the scandal of fellowship, especially table fellowship between Gentiles and Jews. Yet here, writing to the Corinthians, Paul tells the uncircumcised not to seek circumcision but for everyone to remain as he was when he was "called." (This probably means what we would call "converted" or "saved.") He doesn't want to imply that the Gentiles need to be circumcised in order to belong to Christ and in this he agrees with the Council of Jerusalem and the whole New Testament. However, there may be some latitude in terms of prudential strategy.

This raises the question of the other example he uses here, that of those called as slaves. They, too, are to remain in the status wherein they were called. However, verse 21 has an interesting comment. It might be: "If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity" as we have it in the Revised Standard Version or it may be the opposite: "If you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition instead." This is an alternate reading in the margin of the RSV. We who are exercised about the bible being "correct" on its view of slavery will prefer the former. And we might note that the passage ends with this ringing endorsement of freedom, "Do not become slaves of men!" Nevertheless, Paul is not concerned with societal norms and laws, but with the inner freedom of actual Christians. You are free even if you are a slave, he is saying. Free in Christ, that is. So also you are "circumcised" in your heart in Christ even if you are not physically circumcised. The only thing that counts is keeping God's commandments.

The Gospel, Mark 1:14-20, is Jesus' first preaching. It's very simple: the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the Gospel. Can we believe this Gospel, the Good News of the coming Kingdom, or are we jaded, stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart?

New Things

2006-01-05T17:42:00.000-05:00

We come to the Baptism of Jesus on this, the First Sunday after the Epiphany. The day is filled with power as Jesus (whose name is in Hebrew Joshua) reprises the role of Joshua of old, the successor to Moses who led the children of Israel out of their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness and into the Promised Land to possess it for their own. The Spirit of God is given to Jesus in the form of a dove and the Father's voice is pronounced over him: My Beloved, in Thee I am Well-Pleased.

None of this is new in the sense that it is a novel idea. Here, the writer of Ecclesiastes is right: there is nothing new under the sun. God's people need--in Joshua's day, in Jesus' day and in our day--to be delivered from aimlessness and sin's punishment and to take possession of the land God gives us. That "land" is the holiness, the sanctification of our lives and of our world that is perpetually promised God's people.

But Jesus is not just another deliverer in a long string of deliverers. He is The One. He is the one to whom Joshua's ministry pointed. Joshua did not bring peace. He only signified it. Jesus is the real deliverer, the real Joshua. So, just as Joshua led Israel across Jordan River to occupy the Promised Land, Jesus now returns to that River to be baptized by John "for the forgiveness of sins." It's been a puzzle: why must the sinless one be so baptized. The answer: he bears in his body the sins of the whole world. This is a new thing, as Isaiah says: "the former things have come to pass [could these be the judgments against a sinful Israel found in the earlier parts of Isaiah?], and new things I now declare." What is new is God's definitive deliverance of the whold world through Jesus.

The ecumenical, or transnational, aspect of his salvation is emphasized throughout. In Isaiah 42:1-9, the "servant" of God, presumably Israel herself, is proclaimed as the "covenant to the people, a light to the nations." Now Jesus assumes Israel's burden so that, focused in him, the promise of Israel's servanthood can finally be realized. He will address his ministry to Israel. He will be rejected. Yet, in that very event, Israel's sin will be forgiven and Israel's mission to be a light to the nations will be achieved.

Likewise, Peter preaches to the first Gentile convert, Cornelius, in Acts 10: 34-41 of salvation in Christ Jesus: "In every nation any one who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to him." We might think this is reason not to preach Christ. After all, we become acceptable to God simply by doing right (actually, "doing righteousness"). Peter sees it as a reason to preach Jesus and, later, to baptize Cornelius and his household.

The story of Jesus' baptism, briefly told, is our Gospel, Mark 1:7-11.

Terrorism for the Lord

2006-01-02T18:47:00.000-05:00

One more thing on Exodus 32-34, the story of the golden calf worship. The story contains one of the Bible's more horrifying passages. Moses, having come into the idolatrous camp, calls out "Who is on the Lord's side?" and the tribe of Levi (its men, anyway) come forward. Moses tells them that God tells them to go through the camp killing "every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor." (Ex. 32:27) It sounds like something out of Cambodia's killing fields, or the slaughter in Rwanda. We're even told that this is how the Levites were consecrated to the priesthood, showing their loyalty to YHWH even above the ties of kinship.

We can only "translate" such passages to our context through the example of Christ who did not take up the sword against his accusers. Peter wanted to do so and Jesus forbade it. In the strange economy of the cross, we--who now bear Christ's cross--receive the blows and swords of the enemies of the truth; we do not deliver them. The power of Christ is "authority . . . for building up and not for tearing down." (2 Corinthians 13:10)

The Golden Calf

2006-01-02T17:15:00.000-05:00

The first thing we need to understand about the tale of Israel's apostasy (apostasy means a "standing (stasis) apart (apo), hence heretical or, as we might say today alternative behavior and belief) is that they believed that the golden calf was YHWH, Jehovah, the God who delivered them from Egypt. It was not the first commandment (no other gods) that Israel was breaching in the wilderness, but the second, No Graven Images. The story runs from Exodus 32 to Exodus 34. Pay no attention to the plural, gods, found in Ex. 32:1 & 4. I'm not a Hebrew-reader, but I'm guessing that we're getting the same plural word for the divine that we find, associated with the true God in Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our image." In other words, one of Hebrew's words for God, elohim, is plural. There is, after all, only one golden calf, not two. Israel clearly intended that the calf represent the one true God of Israel, as evidenced in Ex. 32:5, "Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD." The four capital letters signify the appearance of the proper name of Israel's God, YHWH, Yahweh, or Jehovah.

The reason this matters so much is that is bears resemblance to apostasy in our own day. People claim "God" or "Jesus" or "the Holy Spirit" for beliefs and behaviors that directly contradict God's revelation of himself to Israel and to the Apostles (contained in our Old and New Testaments). Apostates don't nowadays just run off to worship Baal or Thor. Well, some might. But plenty just load up the name of the one true God with the baalism and thorism and call it Christianity or Judaism.

The drama and beauty of Exodus 32-34 is sublime, even though there are a number of strange insertions (like the bit about the Tent of Presence in 33:7-11 that seems out-of-place, though it refers to Moses intimate converse with the LORD.) Throughout the passage is an ongoing dialogue between Moses and God regarding that stiffnecked people Israel and God's intention that they come to Promised Land. The LORD, upon Israel's sin, first says that he simply will destroy them. Moses talks him out of that option. God twice refers to the people not as his own people whom he took out of Egypt but rather as thy (Moses's) people whom thou brought out of Egypt (32:7; 33:1). God is disowning them. There could not be harsher language than this.

Running throughout the section is the matter of God's presence. Even though he is not going to destroy them, there is a question as to whether he will accompany them with his "presence." In 32:34, he agrees to send his angel to go before them A further clause suggests that God's presence will now destroy them because of their sin. That is, his holiness will consume them. This idea is stated directly in 33:3, and the people mourn the bad news, being, presumably not the news that by absenting himself from them, the people might be spared but rather the news that God will not be going "before them" in person. Then comes the passage on the Tent of Presence which is pitched outside the camp (to preserve the people from God's holiness?). This passage then elides into another scene of Moses on the mountain, pleading in words very similar to those spoken by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, about "finding favor" with God. He begs for a vision of God and, significantly, that God would "consider that this nation is thy people." God agrees. He says, "My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest." The words can hardly be said without hearing the gracious words of the Savior, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you (do not be "stiffnecked"), and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matthew 11:28-29)

I looked around Sunday morning for the one who said, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." I thought it might be Dostoevsky or even Solzhenitsyn. It is Doestoevsky's character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. A very fine essay on this topic can be found here by a great theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg.

The character of God that is revealed to Moses in Ex. 34:6-7, "The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, 'The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation,'" is known in Judaism as the 13 attributes of God. It's a little hard to add it all up to 13, but the idea is that these are not attributes that divide us from God, like his omniscience or eternity, but rather those we can ourselves imitate. The part about not clearing the guilty speaks of God's respect for history. We don't live in a magic world where God can make things done somehow undone. That's not what his forgiveness is. Instead, his forgiveness initiates an imitative process of forgiveness among us. The deed is not erased from history, nor are its consequences. Yet, we can know him and his peace through the practice of forgiveness.