Monthly Archives: November 2011

So why not allow some experimentation with restructuring?

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There’s been considerable debate in the Episcopal Church over the past few months about restructuring the church. The problems are clear. We can’t financially sustain the current structure of national church offices, provinces, dioceses, and parishes as they are currently conceived, and it’s not clear that the current structure, even if it were well-grounded financially, serves the current mission needs of the church.

So what to do? Bishop Sauls has offered his proposal, about which I’ve already made comment. Others have also weighed in. Currently, my friend Crusty Old Dean is putting forth a very thoughtful and provocative set of proposals: part I, part II, part III, part IV (I knew him before he ascended the heights of academe). I urge everyone interested in the future direction of the church to read carefully what he is proposing.

At the same time, in the Diocese of South Carolina, a certain restructuring is already taking place. Bishop Mark Lawrence recently issued quit-claim deeds to the parishes in the diocese, essentially granting them property rights to parish property (which canonically is owned by or held in trust by, the diocese). This move has aroused considerable anxiety and outrage among “institutional” (most of whom are progressive) Episcopalians. Mark Harris comments on developments here and here.

I find this response quite interesting. Given that the diocese as an institution is a relic of an earlier age, that the ownership of property is one of the most contentious (and expensive) issues in the conflicts within the church, I wonder what the harm is with making this change? It may go against the constitution and canons, but perhaps they ought to be changed, and indeed, Bishop Lawrence may be right that the current understanding is something of an innovation. Why use the heavy cudgel of authority and constitution to force compliance or membership, when we might all be better served going our separate ways.

One of the chief arguments in favor of restructuring is to allow more horizontal relationships across diocesan and provincial boundaries. Might there be a way that people who share theological perspectives might found solace, strength, and comfort, by creating bonds with like-minded people across the church, at the same time remaining under the umbrella of the Episcopal Church? In a sense, that’s what earlier efforts at providing alternative episcopal oversight to parishes that struggled with their bishop’s perspective were meant to do. No, it’s not a perfect solution. But the question may finally come down to whether the only things that unite us as a denomination are property and the Church Pension Fund.

 

The Messianic Banquet–Reflections on Wednesday in the first week of Advent

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The readings for today from the daily eucharistic lectionary:

Isaiah 25:6-10a
Psalm 23
Matthew 15:29-37

All three scriptures feature meals. The gospel story is Matthew’s account of the feeding of the five thousand. Psalm 23 includes the line, “you spread a table for me in the presence of those who trouble me.” The Isaiah passage begins:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.

The messianic banquet is one of the predominant images for Jewish reflection about the messianic age in the decades leading up to Jesus. Drawing on rich biblical imagery, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sources express a hope that the age to come will include a bountiful feast of rich foods and wines. That image was picked up and expanded in early Christianity. One need only think of the importance of table fellowship in Jesus’ ministry, the numerous times we see him feasting (and the criticism of his and his disciples’ actions). But in the gospels, Jesus also brings about the messianic feast. In the gospel for today, Jesus creates more than enough food from sparse resources, so that everyone goes away satisfied. In John’s gospel, Jesus makes wine out of water after the part had already been going on for quite some time.

At the Last Supper, in language echoed by the gospels’ accounts of the feeding miracles, Jesus takes bread and wine, gives thanks, and gives it to his disciples. The Eucharist is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

Advent is a time when we think not only about Jesus’ first coming, but also about his Second Coming, and the idea of a messianic banquet remains a powerful image in Christian reflection. The Isaiah text is one of the suggestions for Hebrew Bible readings in the BCP Burial Service liturgies, and rightly so. It evokes the rich memories of our own celebratory meals, and looks forward to an even greater celebration in the age to come.

Our holidays are full of celebrations, parties, meals like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day when tables groan from all the food on them. We seldom make the connections between those meals, the Eucharistic feast, and the messianic banquet, but we should. The meals we share together as families and friends are icons of the meal we share when we share Christ’s body and blood.

They are not for ourselves alone to enjoy. For our joy to be complete, our invitation must be shared with all of humanity, our table extended to include who hunger and thirst.

The Peacable Kingdom–Tuesday in the First Week of Advent

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The readings in the daily Eucharistic lectionary for Tuesday in the first week of Advent include Isaiah 11:1-10, the prophet’s vision of the peacable kingdom:

6 The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

It’s one of the most familiar and most beloved images from all of scripture, a beguiling picture of a world at peace with itself, of God’s creatures playing and resting together. For many of us, the most familiar artistic depiction is that by the early American artist, Edward Hicks, who painted 61 different versions. Here is one: Hicks was a folk artist and the naivete of his style seems well-suited to what might seem to twenty-first century readers, a certain naivete in the vision of the prophet. We live in a world which seems much more in keeping with Thomas Hobbes’ idea of the state of nature in which:

where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like the times in which we live are approaching Hobbes’ state of nature. We are certainly in a world where everyone seems to be at war with everyone else.

Does the prophet’s vision continue to offer hope for us in this season of Advent? Can we imagine a world in which we are remade in God’s image, refashioned as loving and creative persons, and perhaps most importantly living in peacable community with one another? Sometimes I think that vision is so far separated from reality that we can no longer imagine it as a possibility as a vision of our future, rather than the rantings of an eighth-century prophet, or the childish images of a nineteenth-century painter.

The prophet’s vision may no longer hold power over us. But the idea behind that vision cannot be tossed into the dustbin of an abandoned faith and a past time. A human race, no, a world, at peace itself, that idea must continue to shape and empower us. What that world might look like, what our vision of that world might look like, may be different from the prophet’s but it must be beautiful enough to sustain us and to give us hope.

In Advent, in this troubled world and in these troubled times, God waits for us. God waits for us to find our way to that peacable kingdom, where we encounter and embody, God’s love.

The Good News Begins in the Wilderness: Lectionary Reflections for Advent 2, Year A

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This week’s readings.

I love the beginning of Mark’s gospel. It’s simple and clear and nevertheless raises many questions: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Now, I suppose professional commentators would tell us that Mark 1:1 is really just a title or introduction to the work as a whole (I don’t know, I didn’t check), but what always strikes me about this verse is the audacity of the gospel writer in beginning this way, and the abrupt transition from v. 1 to the story of John the Baptizer.

Mark doesn’t give us the biographical details that Matthew and Luke provide; he doesn’t give the theological background that John does. He simply begins, inviting us to ask questions: What is the good news? Who is this Jesus Christ? Those are the questions we will ask throughout the gospel, and the questions that will remain at its end, because the ending is as abrupt as the beginning.

This year, as I reflect on the juxtaposition of Isaiah 40 and Mark 1, I’m intrigued by the role of the wilderness. The story of the good news Jesus Christ begins in the wilderness (with John the Baptizer) just as the prophet proclaims the way of the Lord in the wilderness. In the Isaiah passage, written from exile in Babylon, the promise of comfort to a ruined and desolate Jerusalem comes by way of a procession through a wilderness that is made hospitable and a journey made easy.

The idea of wilderness captures our imagination even if we rarely directly experience such places. The desert of the ancient Near East was a foreboding place, threatening existence with its sparse food and water. It was a barren place, a place of exile and a place where civilization and culture were absent. Still it beckoned to those who lived in cities and towns; it could offer refuge for those on the run, and it could be a place of innovation. The crowds came to hear John in the wilderness, perhaps as a curiosity, but also, likely, because many believed religious truth could be found there.

In later centuries, Christians would go repeatedly into the wilderness in their search for God. The monastic movement began with the flight to the desert of Anthony the Great and ever since, monastic communities have sought and found God in the desert, far away from culture and civilization.

Our lives often seem to us to be deserts or wildernesses, places of loneliness and barrenness, places where we cannot find nourishment. And they can be that. But as scripture and great spiritual teachers tell us, deserts can be places where we encounter God, where we can hear the good news of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes it is only when our lives are stripped bare of all essentials, when we are left completely alone in a dry and barren place, that we can encounter and experience God. Sometimes though, even when we are in those places–at our wits’ end–we seem abandoned even by God. Sometimes the promise of comfort rings hollow and meaningless.

In those times, being open to the possibility of God’s presence can be difficult, even almost impossible. The desert can be both forbidding and beautiful and our perspective can allow us to experience something new and powerfully creative in what might seem, from a different angle, nothing at all.

Advent invites us to explore and experience in new ways the wildernesses and deserts in our lives. It invites us to look for good news and comfort in difficult and forbidding places and invites us to rejoice that God is coming to make things new. And that means, even our lives!

Looking for signs of Christ’s Coming: A Sermon for Advent 1, Year B

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November 27, 2011

 Apparently, Harold Camping has given up. He’s retired, quit preaching, and quit setting dates for the second coming. You remember Harold Camping. He’s the guy who predicted the world would end on May 21. His followers bought advertising all over the place, hyped it up, and stoked a media frenzy. When May 22 dawned, Camping regrouped, said that he had got his calculations wrong, and said, no the real date was October 21. After that, he threw in the towel. He has decided that whatever God was telling him, and is continuing to tell him, he will no longer announce to the world that date of Jesus’ return. Continue reading →

The Spirituality of Reading

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Gary Shteyngart recently gave a talk in which he likened reading to religious or spiritual experience. An agnostic himself, he sees the writing (and reading) of books as close to spiritual experience as anything. Responses here and here.

But technology also is something of a religion:

technology possesses a similar strain of divinity as literature: it enables us to overcome our physical existence and to connect. It offers the possibility of transcendence.

In response, Julia Jackson pondered the different experiences of reading physical books and an ipad:

When I read a real book, on the other hand, I leave my cell phone and laptop in the other room and sit on the couch, and suddenly it’s just me and the book and the characters in it. I am truly alone yet truly connected. When I read a real book, I am forcing myself to follow one stream of thought—that which the author committed to paper. In today’s world, this simple act is meditative, even transcendent. I am able to do something that feels very futuristic—cross space and time and peer right into the author’s mind—with a technology that has been around for thousands of years.

In the New York Times, John Schwartz muses on the difference between reading “real” books and “reading” audiobooks, or one supposes, an ipad or kindle:

The truth, it seems, is that the way we read, and our reasons for loving or disliking audiobooks, are deeply personal. They are expressions of self, so tied to who we are. If you belittle the way I read, you’re belittling me.

A couple of things interest me here. First of all, what does this mean for religions of the book like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? If one’s religious life is no longer centered on the physical reading of a text (and I rarely pick up a Bible to read it–I do almost all of mine on line), what is the impact on one’s faith and experience? Second, scholars have argued that it wasn’t only the relationship of individuals with the text that mattered, but rather that, in Christianity communities were shaped by texts, that Christian communities were reading communities (even when the reading was done aloud).

In the midst of this technological revolution, with all of its implications for religious faith and religious community, we may also need to rethink how we approach the sacred text.

Advent

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It is very remarkable that we face the thought that God is coming, so calmly, whereas previously peoples trembled at the day of God, whereas the world fell into trembling when Jesus Christ walked over the earth. That is why it is so strange when we see the marks of God in the world so often together with the marks of human suffering, with the marks of the cross on Golgotha. We have become so* accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Coming of Jesus in our Midst”

From a sermon Bonhoeffer preached on the First Sunday of Advent, 1928, in Barcelona; from The Living Pulpit

Want Catholic art? Fundamentalist Bob Jones University has it

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An article in the Washington Post on the collection at Bob Jones University brought back to mind the odd experience of visiting that gallery in the heart of Greenville, and BJU’s campus. It really is a remarkable collection of Renaissance and Baroque religious paintings and a wonderful teaching tool.

The article leaves one important question unasked, concerning the provenance of the paintings. Given the controversy over the last couple of decades about art that was owned by Jews until the rise of Hitler, I would think the question of how Bob Jones, Jr. was able to amass such a large collection at bargain-basement prices ought to be asked.

There’s another important question asked, but not answered adequately: How is the collection used as a teaching tool? One of the most amusing aspects of visiting the gallery on a Sunday afternoon (when admission was free) was encountering Sunday School classes and other groups from fundamentalist churches touring the gallery. They would approach a painting and compare the artist’s rendering of the scene with the biblical account, interested primarily in whether that depiction was true to the text. There are also several fairly lengthy posted comments (or were the last time I visited) that offered a strongly theological lens through which to view the images. I recall especially a pointed attack on images of the suffering Christ. A “weak” Christ seemed to be against the fundamentalist message.

Still, it’s a great collection. More on the Museum and Gallery here.

Thanksgiving, 2011

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Giving thanks in difficult times.

The Lectionary for Thanksgiving, Year A

We have a noon Eucharist at Grace on Wednesdays. Typically we follow the calendar of commemorations in Holy Women, Holy Men although I am rather free in my adaptation of the calendar. I begin by looking at the commemoration of the day, and then if that doesn’t strike my fancy, I look further afield. In part, I look for a figure about whom I can say something with a minimum of research, so that means I’m more likely to draw on traditional figures than on some of the new (and trial) figures.

November 23 is Clement of Rome and for a few minutes I pondered whether I might go there. Then my mind turned to Thanksgiving. The richness of the texts beckoned to me. I went back through my files, looking for sermons I preached on Thanksgiving, or on its eve, and came across the one I gave in 2008. Reading even the first paragraph was shocking:

Our national mood is very different this November than it has been in the previous few years. The global financial crisis in which we find ourselves has created tremendous anxiety, even fear. No one knows how bad things are going to get and no one knows how long it will last.

We are anxious and fearful, but as a nation many of us are also wondering whether our best years are behind us. In addition to the financial crisis, there is the meltdown in the auto industry and the shock this summer and fall when gas prices topped $4.00 a gallon. We wonder whether we will ever again enjoy the lavish and profligate lifestyles most of us led only a few months ago. There is belt-tightening all around. We are in a somber mood.

As I read that, I was surprised both by the negative tone with which I began, and by the fact, that three years later, our national mood is, if anything, even more somber.

How can we give thanks in such a context? The lessons for Thanksgiving in year A don’t ask that question directly, but when their contexts are considered, that question may be at the heart of the lections. In the first place, Deuteronomy: first written centuries after the events it recounts, it is a call to faithfulness, a reminder of the covenant with God, of God’s promises to God’s chosen people, and of the response to those promises that God demanded. They were given a rich and fruitful land but their possession of it was dependent on their faithfulness to God.

Deuteronomy reached something of the form we have it today in the Exiliic period, when the descendants of the Israelites were living in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat of Judah. They no longer possessed the land and they were having to rethink their faith in God. It would have been easy to abandon Yahweh in that context, but instead they developed a theology that explained their plight and offered hope for a different future.

In the gospel, we hear the story of the cleansing of the ten lepers. It’s a wonderful story, full of drama and puzzling detail. The miracle itself takes place off-stage. Jesus does nothing except tell the ten to present themselves to a priest, in keeping with Mosaic law. As they go, they discover that they are cleansed. One turns back and thanks Jesus. It turns out, he’s a Samaritan. The wonderful bit of this story is that while we are led to believe he turns back out of faith and gratitude, a moment’s reflection reminds us that he had no place to go. As a Samaritan, it didn’t matter if he was cleansed of leprosy, and no priest would certify him so. As a Samaritan, whether or not he was a leper, he was profoundly unclean in the eyes of Jews.

We have a great deal for which to give thanks and these lessons remind us, that whatever our circumstances, it is appropriate, even necessary, to be thankful to God. In these difficult times, we need to remember that God has given us so very much, that it is because of God’s love that the universe was created and us in it, because of God’s love that his Son’s love has restored us to right relationship with one another and with God, that all we have comes from God, and that in the end, all we can do, is be thankful.