Monthly Archives: November 2012

There will be signs: Lectionary Reflections for the First Sunday of Advent, Year C

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This week’s readings are here.

The first verses of this week’s gospel are full of foreboding:

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

How many Christians over the centuries have seen in the world around them signs of Jesus’ imminent return? How many times have Christians declared the day and hour of the Lord’s coming, only to be disappointed? The image in that first verse, the “roaring of the sea and the waves,” may sound particularly familiar and ominous to those who lived through Hurricane Sandy and are still suffering in its aftermath.

In this passage, Jesus calls us to be vigilant, to be alert, to look for signs of his coming. The problem is that signs are often open to interpretation. Some aren’t of course–a stop sign offers a pretty clear meaning; but when a traffic light turns to yellow? Is a massive hurricane like Sandy a sign of God’s judgment, Jesus’ Second Coming, perhaps evidence of Global Warming, or just a random event?

Interpreting signs requires careful attention, something that may be difficult in the month of December, during the season of Advent. We are busy with our preparations for the season. Academics, whether students or professors, are focused on the hard work of the end of semester. It’s often the case that our lives are so busy we can’t find time or energy to look around us and pay attention to the signs of Christ’s coming. Of course, on one level, it’s impossible to avoid those signs. Christmas decorations and holiday music have been around for a couple of weeks already. But what about signs of Christ’s coming in our lives? Signs of Christ’s coming in the lives of those we love? Signs of Christ’s coming in our daily life? Do we have time to pause and pay attention to that? To pay attention to Christ coming among us at work or school? To pay attention to the ways we might be a sign of Christ’s coming to those we encounter and those we love?

Advent Resources 2012

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The Presiding Bishop’s message for Advent.

A good word for the world in Advent:

Too often I’m left feeling shamed and abandoned by the church in this season, because I’m a human being like the ones I hear derided from the pulpit. I may not line up at 12 midnight on Black Friday, but I do get all caught up in commercialism and I am needy and I do want things and I do feel pressure to spend and I am certainly no Virgin Mary in Advent, rapt in pregnant contemplation in the quiet candlelight of my room during these four weeks. And if I, being a committed religious professional and all, feel shamed and condemned by anti-consumerist, world-deriding sermons, I can only imagine how it feels to a secular person who wanders into the pews to be told with divine authority that their secularity has rendered them unfit for Christmas.

Daily Meditations for and by college students and young adults

The Advent Conspiracy

is an effort to refocus our attention on the season, not to ignore the commercialism but to seek in it the deeper meaning of Christ’s coming. How to plot your own Advent Conspiracy has more:

Advent Conspiracy is about giving presence, which is often more costly and more meaningful than material presents. The movement is generating hundreds of powerful stories and creative gift ideas, many of which can be found at AdventConspiracy.org. Holder mentions just a few examples: The son who gave his father a pound of coffee beans with the stipulation that the father can only enjoy the beans when he’s with his son, who wants to hear his voice and get reacquainted. The dad who gave his daughter two blank journals—one for him to fill, and the other for her as she headed off to college; they would exchange the journals the next Christmas. And the 84-year-old woman on a fixed income who made donations to a charity in the names of her family.

Sharon Ely Pearson has compiled a list of online Advent Calendars and some background info.

Her list includes:

  • The Institute for Christian Formation (Cincinnati, OH) has devised a calendar for 2013: Year of Grace (December 2, 2012 – January 13, 2013) that includes activities and resources for each day.
  • Trinity Wall Street‘s offers a new calendar every year – What are you waiting for?
  • A variety of calendars in English and Spanish from Living Simply.
  • An Advent Devotional Calendar for downloading from Thomas Mousin of Massachusetts.
  • Paperless Christmas from the UK in 2011 is still lots of fun!
  • Busted Halo has a more off-tradition calendar.
  • Loyola Press offers an online calendar or downloadable version for children and families.
  • Praying in Color offers templates in which to create your own Advent calendar.
  • The Society of St. John the Evangelist (Cambridge, MA) has offered a daily mediation via Pinterest.

Living Compass, offers a free daily meditation booklet for Advent. You can download it here. Its goal is:

The goal of these days of Advent are not just to get our homes decorated and the shopping done, it is to help us prepare our whole selves, our hearts, souls, strength and mind for the gift God so freely gives us: God’s Love as revealed in Jesus. It is a gift that might get overlooked if we aren’t prepared to receive Christ.

A weekend of prayers

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We prayed last weekend. It was a roller coaster of prayer, medical information, emotions, and prayer. On Friday, we prayed in the emergency room for a friend, then continued to pray in the ICU. When we were told he wouldn’t last the night, that there was nothing that could be done, we prayed: in anger, fear, hopelessness, and grief.

On Saturday, as they began weaning him off medications and his condition seemed to stabilize and improve, we prayed. We celebrated the Eucharist around his bed in the ICU, giving thanks for his faithful witness, a fierce and abiding love, for long and deep friendships, for a life well-lived. We prayed in tears, with faith and hope. We shared Christ’s body and blood around the bed. The altar was the bedside table.

On Sunday, after our 10:00 service, we gathered at the altar rail to pray. Were there forty, fifty of us? I didn’t count. Again we prayed. We prayed our emotions: anger, shock, fear, deep and abiding love, and faith. We prayed at Grace while a few blocks away we thought a conversation about hospice care was taking place in the room where we had been praying for two days. We gave thanks for a life committed to beautiful music and to Jesus Christ, we prayed for someone who had done so much to help the needy, here on Capitol Square and in Haiti. We prayed for strength for ourselves, for understanding.

Did we pray for healing? I don’t know. I do remember that in the face of the dire assessment of medical professionals, praying for health and recovery seemed pointless, the words a meaningless gesture. But later in the day, we learned that what the doctors had said seemed to have been incorrect; that the cancer was treatable, that there was hope for the future.  Was it a miracle? I’ll let others decide.

I do know that our prayers were “desperate prayers.” Tom Long writes in the Christian Century about such desperate prayers:

Resurrection and prayer are not violations of the so-called laws of nature but are woven into God’s ongoing act of creation, as fully as gravity or the tides. Our intercessions, then, far from being naive, are a participation in the very life of the ever-creating God. God, as the psalmist says, is “enthroned on the praises of Israel” and sustains the world in part through the prayers of the faithful.

But what about foolish prayers, trivial prayers and selfish prayers? Karl Barth is comforting here. “We do not know what proper prayer is,” he admits, and it is actually a sign of our faith that we run to God in prayer with “haste and restlessness.” To do so reveals a trust that we are in communion with God, who intercedes for us with sighing too deep for words, who hears and answers prayers “quite apart from our weakness or strength, our ability or inability to pray.” In prayer, said Barth, we stand beside God as friends.

Foolish, trivial prayers? We prayed some of those this weekend as well. As I was leaving for the hospital to celebrate the Eucharist on Saturday, my wife was speaking on the phone with our vet, pleading with them to remain open long enough to see Margery, our 18-year old cat. There was some blood on her chin and we feared the worst. In the examination room a few minutes later, as the vet looked at her and did a few things, I thought about what was happening in the ICU a few blocks away, about the little group of people waiting for me, and anticipating a final Eucharist with a husband and friend. I felt guilt for sitting with a sick cat, for praying for a sick cat in the face of that other suffering, pain, and grief. But Margery is a creature of God, a beloved companion and friend. She has been a comfort in affliction. And so we prayed.

Anne Lamott writes about praying for a dying cat in a selection from her new book:

When I pray, which I do many times a day, I pray for a lot of things. I ask for health and happiness for my friends, and for their children. This is okay to do, to ask God to help them have a sense of peace, and for them to feel the love of God. I pray for our leaders to act in the common good, or at least the common slightly better. I pray that aid and comfort be rushed to people after catastrophes, natural and man-made. It is also okay to ask that my cat have an easy death. Some of my friends’ kids are broken and their parents are living in that, and other friends’ marriages are broken, and every family I love has serious problems involving someone’s health or finances. But we can be big in prayer, and trust that God won’t mind if we pray about the cat and Jax’s tender heart.

Amen.

The Winter Day Shelter is open!

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As of 8:00 am today. It’s located on E. Washington and operated by Porchlight. It’s been a long struggle and kudos to all those who have kept pressure on the city and the county. Thanks too to the County Board of Supervisors who overwhelmingly voted in favor of its funding. Linda Ketcham of Madison Area Urban Ministry has been one of the leaders of the effort and deserves a shout out.

The work is not done. The shelter is looking for volunteers to help with staffing and they also need a lot of donated items.

Here’s the job description if you are interested in volunteering: volunteeringatthewinterdayshelter

And here’s the list of items they need: Warming day shelter wish list

Here is your king: A sermon for Christ the King, Year B

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We are at one of those places in the year where our liturgical and secular calendars diverge significantly. That divergence is particularly striking this year because Advent begins a week later than usual. Instead of the first Sunday in Advent occurring Thanksgiving weekend, we have another full week of ordinary time ahead of us. Meanwhile, it’s Christmas in the stores and on the commercials on TV; it has been since what, Halloween? And our national frenzy of the holidays with our rituals of overeating, Black Friday, conspicuous consumption, and football, is well underway.

For some reason completely inexplicable to me, the last Sunday of the liturgical year is Christ the King Sunday. It encourages us to reflect on Christ’s kingship in the middle, or usually the very beginning of the holiday season. Christ the King is a difficult theme for us to reflect on because the very idea of kingship is alien or archaic. We have trouble imagining what kingship might mean in our context, even if we sing the hymns with gusto. So the incongruities abound—the very image of kingship in a representative democracy, the out-of-synch calendar. And to top it all off, our lectionary returns us to the story we heard months ago, on Good Friday, the story of Jesus’ passion according to John.

Our gospel allows us to focus for a day on an episode of the story that probably typically gets short shrift. On Good Friday and in the season of Lent, our attention is directed at the overerall arc of the story, the inexorable move towards Golgotha and the crucifixion. Often details get ignored by our single-minded focus on the drama of cross and resurrection. So the opportunity to pause and reflect on a particular incident like this may help us look at the story in a slightly different perspective, to see it with new eyes.

Even so, the choice of this particular episode for our reflection on Christ the King Sunday may seem somewhat odd. Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Typically, Jesus’ response is another question: “Do you ask this on your own or did others tell you about me?” It’s a question about Jesus’ identity and as such it calls to mind another question about Jesus’ identity asked in the gospels. In Mark, as  Jesus and his disciples walk near Caesarea Philippi, in a region dominated by Roman imperial power and imagery, Jesus asked his disciples “Who do people say that I am?” Then he asked, “But who do you say that I am?” These questions were the occasion for Peter’s brash confession, “You are the Christ.”

Now, in a direct confrontation with the agent of imperial power, the question of Jesus’ identity is raised again. “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus, and we, suspect that Pilate is not asking the question honestly. He does not know, or care who Jesus is. In fact, he seems most interested in finding some way to avoid responsibility for what is taking place. And Jesus seems willing to help Pilate avoid what is to come. As the gospel of John tells the story, Pilate will make every effort to avoid condemning Jesus to death. He moves back and forth between Jesus and the other players in the drama—the crowd that according to John seeks Jesus’ death. He offers to free Jesus, but the crowd will have none of it. Then he stages a mock ritual of coronation with the purple robe and the crown of thorns.

He asks Jesus again about his identity, “Where do you come from?” When Jesus doesn’t answer, Pilate tells him that he has power to release him and power to crucify him. Jesus points out that whatever power Pilate has derives not from Rome, but ultimately from God. Finally, Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd and declares, “Here is your King!” Jesus is then crucified under the inscription, King of the Jews, and Pilate leaves the inscription on the cross after Jesus’ body is removed.

So in the space of a few hours Pilate moves from asking “Are you the King of the Jews?” to declaring to the crowd, “Here is your king!”

Here is our King! Before considering what all this might mean, I would like to draw on one other episode from John’s gospel. Back in chapter 6, which we read this summer, Jesus feeds the 5000 and then offers a lengthy discourse on the meaning of that sign. Immediately after the feeding, John says, “When Jesus realized they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

Here is your king! These are the words Pilate used when presenting Jesus to the crowd. The crowd responded, “Crucify him!” And then, “we have no king but Caesar! Pilate’s declaration, the exchange between Pilate and Jesus, the purple robe, the crown of thorns, the crowd’s response, all of it presents us with the imagery and symbolic power of kingship. And as we read and reflect, we are invited to wonder about what Christ’s kingship for us in the twenty-first century. And what is our response when we see the image of Jesus in purple robe and crown of thorns, about to be crushed by Roman imperial power? What is our response when Pilate says to us, “Here is your King?”

The exchange between Pilate and Jesus is about kingship. Jesus responds to Pilate, “my kingdom is not from this world.” It’s easy for us to side with Jesus, to confess him as King and to realize that his kingship was something quite different than either the Roman or the Jewish leadership understood by the term. We get that. We may not have any trouble proclaiming our allegiance to Jesus’ kingship, even if we do not fully understand what that might mean and even as we may not really want to live as if our primary, our only allegiance is to Christ’s kingship.

The problem for us is not proclaiming Christ’s kingship. Rather the problem is living as if we believed that Christ is King, that our allegiance to him transcends every other allegiance or commitment or connection. The problem for us is that although we pray the words, “Thy Kingdom come” we don’t really mean it.

The problem is that we suffer from the same malady that plagued Pilate. Throughout his dealings with Jesus in this gospel, Pilate reveals himself as deeply cynical. One can’t read any of his statements as coming from his heart, being sincere. He is always looking for ways to negotiate through the situation in order to preserve his power and avoid difficult decisions. He mocks Jesus and the crowd when he presents Jesus to them and says, “Here is your King!”

It is that temptation that confronts us today, every day. The temptation to confess with our lips, but deny with our lives that Christ is King. We are surrounded by such cynicism—the manipulation of images, our feelings, our values for financial or political gain. It is hard for us not to succumb. But in that image of a scorned and mocked Christ clad in Rome’s imperial purple with a crown of thorns, in that image Pilate was using for his own purposes, to rile the crowd, to deflect his responsibility, in that image there was one who was pure, one who was sincere. It was Jesus Christ, who went from there to the cross, died and was raised, Jesus Christ our King who demands our allegiance, our truth, our all.

Sarah Coakley on Women Bishops

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Sarah Coakley, the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, has written an insightful theological critique of the measure that went down to defeat this week. She contends that the vote against women bishops was a vote for theological incoherency. She made the argument to the House of Bishops earlier this year. It consisted of three main points:

  • we cannot compromise on the historic theology of the bishop as locus of unity;
  • we must return afresh to our distinctively Anglican notions of reason and tradition to solve this crisis, not lapse into rational incoherence; and
  • we must resist in the Church the supervenience of bureaucratic thinking (with all its busy political pragmatism) over theological and spiritual seriousness.

So what we have created in the past twenty years is a theological anomaly which has insidiously been made to seem normal: a whole cadre of priests – a third of our priesthood now – who are supposedly intrinsically disabled from exercising the charisms of spiritual unity and authority historically associated with the episcopate. It is here that the main theological scandal still lies: the implicit creation and normalization of second-class priesthood. The terrible danger is that this may now be extended into second-class episcopacy.

She appeals to Hooker:

First, the status and place of reason in the Anglican hierarchy of theological criteria acts, or should act, as a point of resistance to any forms of theological compromise which are actually contradictory: p and not-p simply cannot co-exist in such a framework. Thus, one cannot simultaneously hold what might be seen as a Donatist theology of taint in relation to women priests or bishops, and an Augustinian theology of objectively valid sacramental orders, and hope to maintain a coherent theology of the church. When provisions are made for those who disagree within the Church, then, it cannot be on the basis of such an actual internal contradiction – or else our beloved Church of England will indeed have finally lost her reason.

On the other hand, and secondly, however, Hooker’s perspective does indeed allow for novelties in the rational reception of Bible and tradition: the plastic nature of Hooker’s conception of reason, and its deep understanding of historical embeddedness, does allow for creative development in response to the primacy of Scriptural authority and the deposit of tradition, without the danger of a merely historical or moral relativism. There is nothing in Hooker, then, that would give credence to the slogan that “nothing new is ever true.” But there is everything to suggest the possibility of hopes for future creativity and renewal.

Her points about “theological incoherence” and the “supervenience of bureaucratic thinking over theological and spiritual seriousness” should be considered by the Episcopal Church as we deal with divisive issues as well. Where have we allowed compromise to get in the way of serious and difficult theological work.

Institutional Failure: The Church’s internal struggles and growing irrelevancy

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Yesterday, there was the shocking news that the measure to allow women bishops in the Church of England went down to defeat. Last week came the next step in the dissolution of the Episcopal Church as we’ve known it with the secession of the Diocese of South Carolina.

Outside of Anglicanism, also last week the American Roman Catholic bishops met. They were licking their wounds after a resounding defeat at the ballot box. Having put financial resources and considerable pressure, their efforts to prevent the passage of same-sex marriage failed in four states. The presidential candidate favored by most was defeated, apparently by a majority of their flock. They met with a convicted felon in their midst but no mention was made of his presence or the systemic problem underlying his conviction.

The Protestant religious right, too, is now trying to figure out what went wrong, what God is telling them, and how to move forward. Fortunately, Franklin Graham provides insight for all of us, as he speculates that God intends a total economic collapse in the US in order for us to repent and amend our ways.

Many of us who are passionate about our faith, passionate about the Good News of Jesus Christ, and about building up the Body of Christ, are also deeply committed to and passionate about the institutional church. It has nurtured and shaped us. It is one of the means through which we experience God and the love of Jesus Christ. But the institutional church, like every human institution, is deeply flawed, oppressive as well as life-giving. It can diminish us as human beings as well as enable our flourishing.

It’s pretty clear by now that many (all?) of our institutions are in crisis. Our political system is broken; our economy falters; higher education, the military, you name it. The structures of the Church, the institution of the Church is not only meant to be the means through which we come to know and love God through Jesus Christ but it is also the Body of Christ. It makes Christ present to the world and unites us to Christ’s body throughout history and across the world.

There have been times throughout history when it is very difficult to see how the institutional church incarnates the body of Christ. This may be one of those times, a period when because of human fallibility and social upheaval the institutions of the churches no longer bear witness to the fullness of Christ but have fallen prey to narrow human interest. At such times, prophets and reformers have risen up to breathe new life into old institutions or to create new ways through which God can break in upon us. It may also be that in local settings, in new media and new ways that people come together, we are already seeing hints of the new creation that God is calling into being.

In the meantime, we have to wait patiently, mourn the ways in which the churches and we ourselves fall short of God’s call, and continue to seek God’s will in the present and future. The danger is that our local efforts are ignored while institutional credibility and relevance collapse on the national and global level.

Back to women bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken publicly on the measure’s defeat. Thinking Anglicans provides full coverage of that as well as a press round up and reactions from various interest groups.

Reactions are beginning to come in. From Andrew Brown on Guardian: “I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide. It was a very long and very boring process.”

A view from Scotland (Kelvin Holdsworth):

Looking on at the passion of the Church of England from outside, one finds oneself trying hard to substitute compassion for pity.

There are many fine women priests and the cause for treating them equally in Canon Law is an easy one to make but one which has not been made often enough. Those female clergy deserved better than this measure. The whole church deserved better than this and now has the chance to try to find its way towards it.

The Church of England gets its chance to prove that it worships at something other than the altar of compromise.

No women bishops for Church of England today

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The Church of England’s General Synod failed to approve the motion to permit women bishops. The measure passed overwhelmingly in the houses of Bishops and Clergy; failed to achieve the required 2/3 majority in the house of laity.
I’m sure there will be a great deal about this in the coming hours and days. I’ll try to post some of the most compelling comments.

“Thy Kingdom Come:” Lectionary reflections for Christ the King Sunday, November 25, 2012

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this week’s readings are here.

The last Sunday of the liturgical year is Christ the King Sunday or “Reign of Christ” Sunday. It’s rather odd in some ways because we are looking forward to Advent and Christmas. It’s odd because this week’s gospel takes us back to Good Friday when we heard all of John’s passion narrative, from which these few verses come. It’s odd too because language of “kingship” and the scene of Jesus’ appearance before Pilate calls to mind all manner of political imagery that we’ve been bombarded with this election season.

Even though an image of Christus Rex (Christ the King) hangs from the ceiling of our chancel, the notion of Christ as King is probably uncomfortable for most of us. It’s not just that the idea of “king” is alien to our culture; it’s that religiously it’s not an image that resonates with us.

The gospel reading points to the complexity of the image, and the way in which Jesus himself (and the gospel writer) deconstructed and reconstructed it. In the synoptics, Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus replies, “You say so.” His response seems to be an acceptance of the title. Jesus’ reply in John is directed differently, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” In other words (perhaps), “why are you asking this?”

In the end, Jesus is crucified with the inscription, “King of the Jews.” Whatever it meant originally, for us we are invited to see his kingship here, on the cross. It’s another explicit rejection of other notions of kingship whether implicit ( perhaps like that intended by Pilate) or explicit.

In fact, in John’s gospel, Jesus has rejected the title of king once before, in chapter 6. After feeding the five thousand, John comments “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself (6:15).”

In the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Thy kingdom come.” The words are familiar but do we know for what we are praying? Are we praying for a Christ who will be a powerful king and ruler, intervening on our behalf in our political struggles? Are we praying for a Christ who as king will offer us bread and circus? Or are we praying for the king who died on Calvary, whose kingdom offers an alternative to every human political system, draws its citizenship from the whole world, and embraces its enemies with love?

Warming Center Approved

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The Dane County Board of Supervisors approved the warming center last night

My testimony:

I speak in support of the warming center. This is a long overdue and much needed addition to the services provided for homeless people in Madison and I look forward with excitement to the possibility of a permanent daytime resource center. The fact of the matter is without such space this winter, homeless people will look throughout the city for other places to keep warm and when they are turned away from private property like stores or office buildings, they will huddle in doorways and no doubt some will die.

No one in this room knows better than I the frustrations, nuisance, and potential danger posed by the presence of homeless people around one’s property. At Grace, we deal with it every day. Just this fall, we have found feces in our stairwells, vomit on the sidewalk, not to mention petty harassment from panhandlers.

You probably know, or could, guess that people are released from prison or jail and sent directly to the shelter at Grace—in the clothes they were wearing when they were arrested, even if that was in July and it’s now November. I doubt many in this room realize that people are discharged from our hospitals directly to the homeless shelters—all of our hospitals, including the VA. I don’t know how often it happens but it seems like every few weeks I’ll encounter someone who has been brought to Grace from a hospital before the shelter opens for the night. It’s happened in hot weather; it’s happened in cold weather. It happened on Christmas Eve last year. Where is such a person to go to wait until the shelter opens that evening? Where is he to go in the morning, especially if, as is often the case, he’s barely ambulatory?

There are significant gaps in our services to the homeless. Some of them are problems like addiction, mental illness, or the healthcare system that have no easy or obvious solutions. Others are relatively straightforward like providing shelter from the elements. For too long we relied on institutions like the Central Library to provide that shelter during the day, to the detriment of its core mission and its users. We have an opportunity now to make a small step in the right direction, to offer warmth, a place to sit, perhaps some services. I hope this step will be followed up with a permanent facility soon.

Is the proposed location the ideal site for a daytime warming center? Probably not. Here we are in mid-November with no viable alternative. I believe that with the staff proposed for the center and the plans for neighborhood outreach and security, many of the problems that plagued the neighborhood last year can be prevented. And I am happy to offer whatever help I can to the service providers and to the neighborhood to see that problems are resolved quickly and with satisfaction.

I am passionate about ministry to the homeless because I am passionate about the Gospel of Jesus Christ that has at its heart ministry to the downtrodden, the widow and orphan, the homeless and hungry. I am also passionate about ministry to the homeless because how society treats the downtrodden is a reflection of its values. I hope that I live in a city and a county that seeks to make sure no one dies on the street because of exposure, that no one lacks a place to sleep, or food to eat.

I urge you to support this important initiative.