Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Sacrament of Love: A Homily for Good Friday, 2011

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April 22, 2011

“There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.” (Jn 19:18).

We come today to remember the death of Jesus Christ almost two thousand years ago. It is part of the central drama of our faith that takes us to the heart of our human existence and to the heart of God. We come here to hear the story again, to reflect, through word, music, and gesture, on the meaning of that event; meaning that eludes us after all these years. For us, as Paul says, the cross is stumbling and scandal, the foolishness of God. Continue reading →

Thou, who at thy Eucharist didst pray

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O thou, who at thy Eucharist didst pray
that all thy Church might be for ever one,
grant us at every Eucharist to say
with longing heart and soul, “thy will be done.”
O may we all one Bread, one Body be,
through this blest Sacrament of unity.

Words by William Harry Turton, 1881. Full text here.

A denomination is dying near you

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The Episcopal Cafe had this headline a couple of weeks back, but it referred to the Presbyterian Church of the USA, from an article that appeared in Christian Century.

One of the comments on the Episcopal Cafe’s post pointed out that there had been many articles about the “dying church” in recent months on the Cafe.

There’s another one today, written by George Clifford. Clifford gives all of the statistics: the high percentage of over-60s in our pews and on our membership lists; the number of churches in small towns or rural areas where population is declining; the overall decline in Average Sunday Attendance.

But he also has some hopeful things to say, including this:

Yet, we in TEC have some cause for hope. The Episcopal congregations most likely to have experienced numerical growth in the past decade are large and very liberal congregations, according to the 2010 Faith Communities Today Survey.

Clifford argues that perhaps the most important key to growth is creating a vision and agenda for change, something we don’t work on very much. Instead, our attention seems focused on organizational and structural issues.

I read his piece shortly after reading the weekly email from the Alban Institute, which has some very similar things to say in an essay entitled Determining Ideal Board Size. The author, Susan Beaumont, begins with the observation that:

Effective boards in every size congregation must tend to three types of work: fiduciary (tending to the stewardship of tangible assets), strategic (working to set the congregation’s priorities and seeing that resources are being deployed in accordance with those priorities) and generative (problem framing and sense making about the shifting environment of the congregation).

The important takeaway from both her article and Clifford’s is the need for strategic and visionary thinking. We, clergy and lay leadership, often get so bogged down in the day-to-day running of the church, that we have no time or energy to think creatively about the future and how we need to change to meet the needs of a changing world.

Where do we stand? A Homily for Palm Sunday, 2011

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April 17, 2011

Palm Sunday brings us back to that familiar place and that familiar story. We have entered Holy Week and are walking with Jesus and his disciples through the last week of Jesus’ life, commemorating day by day the things that took place that week two thousand years ago. Holy Week is full of drama and emotion and if you participate in the services this week, especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, you will experience the depths of human suffering and pain, even as we all look forward to the joyous celebration of the resurrection. Continue reading →

The Budget Debate and Christianity

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I came across this quotation from Paul Begala in an essay by Robert de Neuville:

The budget is a moral document. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.

The budget debate continues and Christians of various stripes weigh in. Here’s Jim Wallis.

Andrew Sullivan is also struggling:

I believe the federal budget crisis is real and must be tackled by a radical reform of tax and spending soon. I also find it morally hard to deny vulnerable people healthcare that is available and far more effective than ever before in human history.

After quoting the National Council of Catholic Bishops on the debate, Sullivan observes:

But a humane concern for the poor, sick and elderly is integral to the Gospel message and spirit. And my own gut-unease about withholding available healthcare – perhaps more than any other good – from the needy is rooted, I think, in this Catholic admonition.

Debating the Existence of God

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Nathan Schneider’s report on a recent debate at Notre Dame between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. He also talks about it here. Perhaps more importantly, he points to an essay by John O’Callaghan of Notre Dame who reflected on the debate before it took place. I agree with his advice to Harris that he should read Augustine before going much further.

Giles Fraser reviewed Harris’ The Moral Landscape in The Guardian. It’s worth reading. Fraser gets it right when he says:

First, the atheism. On that useful quadrant – interesting and right, interesting and wrong, uninteresting and right, uninteresting and wrong – Harris is mostly in the uninteresting and right category. Uninteresting because he is concerned only with the narrowest definition of religious belief, and right because the moral and intellectual crimes he pins on this form of belief – its ignorance and prejudice – are so obvious to the western secular imagination that they do not require argument, and certainly not a PhD in neuroscience. Given his definition of religion, his attack on it is the philosophical equivalent of taking sweets from a baby. These things are wrong: “female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice”. The list goes on. With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist. An all-powerful eternal despot is still a despot.

He concludes:

For all this, it is not so much that I disagree with Harris. Rather, I am scared of him. And not his atheism, which is standard scientific materialism with the volume turned up. But scared of his complete lack of ambiguity, his absolute clarity of vision, his refusal of humour or self-criticism, his unrelenting seriousness. Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don’t. Which is why I fear Harris in just the same way I fear evangelical Christians, to whom he looks so similar. Like them, he is in no doubt about his faith. Like them, he has his devoted followers. Like them, he wants to convert the world. Well, I’m sorry. I am not a believer.

A new, mass-marketed “Christian” movie

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At least it’s not “The Passion of the Christ.”

Reviews:

  • From America.
  • From Christianity Today: Money Quote:
    Some of the blame must be put on the screenplay, which does manage to nicely honor Bethany’s own real-life hard-won resolutions, but hits some clunky stretches getting there. Oddly, the writing seems to have fallen not only to director Sean McNamara, but to a large team of collaborators whose chief collective credits are Hawaiian Baywatch episodes. This story deserved a better brain trust.
  • From Patheos.

But to secular reviewers, the movie doesn’t seem to stand up; nor do “Christian” movies in general. Andrew O’Hehir asks, “Why are Christian movies so awful?”

There’s a larger question here. O’Hehir is right to point out that:

But when we use the buzzword “Christian” in contemporary American society, we’re talking about a distinctively modern cultural and demographic phenomenon that has almost no connection to the spiritual and intellectual tradition that fueled Dante and Milton and Leonardo and Bach.

It’s also a question asked by James Davidson Hunter in To Change the World, where he argues that contemporary Christians have largely abandoned the arts.

This phenomenon struck me as I was reading an article by Alex Ross on Bach in The New Yorker. Writing about John Eliot Gardiner’s massive project to record all 200 of Bach’s sacred cantatas, he concludes:

There is no way to tell from the sound itself that “Christ lag in Todesbanden” is being played in the Georgenkirche, in Eisenach, next to the font where Bach was baptized, in 1685. Once you know it, though, you cannot forget it. A sense of occasion, of ritual time, is sustained throughout. Gardiner adds layers of significance in his spirited liner notes, which are based on a tour diary: he speaks of visiting Buchenwald, outside Weimar; of a Leipzig pastor’s resistance to East German oppression; of French soccer fans blasting their car horns moments after one performance ended; of a spooky old cleric congratulating the musicians on having administered a good beating to the Devil. Most of all, this mammoth project—an act of devotion worthy of Bach himself—lays bare what is most human in the composer’s enterprise. Listening to “Christ lag,” I pictured Bach’s parents looking on at the baptism of the infant and wondering whether he would live. They had no idea.

At one point, he says, he listened to 50 of the cantatas during a lengthy ride through Australia and says,  “far from getting too much of a good thing, I found myself regularly hitting the repeat button. Once or twice, I stopped on the side of the road in tears.”

The arts created by Christians should have the power to evoke that response in anyone.