Video from this morning’s preview is here:
Get your Lent on! Pancake Races at Grace
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Monthly Archives: February 2013
The Abdication of Pope Benedict XVI
It’s remarkable, of course, completely unexpected and one has to look into the distant past for historical precedent. Though as George Weigel points out, we might have seen it coming:
Pope Benedict XVI has said on numerous public occasions including his most recent interview book that were he to come to the judgment that he did not have the physical stamina left to give the church the leadership it deserved, that he would abdicate.
Although many cite 1415 and Gregory XII as the most recent example. His resignation was forced by the Council of Constance in an attempt to overcome the Great Schism that had given rise to first two, then three, claimants to the office.
Celestine V was 79 years old when he was elected pope in the midst of a bitter conclave and deep divisions within the church. A hermit famous for his ascetical life, he was ill-suited to the office and stepped down after five months. He was succeeded by Boniface VIII who eventually imprisoned him. Celestine died after 10 months in prison.
Celestine became a figure of fascination in religion and popular culture. In a time of deep divisions within Christianity and among the European monarchies, his abdication and death became a matter of speculation. Did Boniface have him killed? Franciscans who had resisted that order’s accommodation with papal authority and church hierarchy saw in him a kindred spirit and some “spirituals” as they were called, regarded him the “Angelic Pope.” There were those who regarded his papacy as the last chance that institution had to be a spiritual, rather than a political and economic power.
Many see in lines in Dante’s Inferno III, 59-60, a reference to Celestine’s abdication, which Dante may have regarded as cowardice. Of course, while traveling through hell, Dante encounters a place already prepared for Boniface VIII, who was still alive.
Boniface was embroiled in conflict with King Philip IV of France that ended with his humiliation, a beating, and finally death.
When we contemplate the conflict within Christianity in the twenty-first century, it’s useful to remember that it’s hardly a new phenomenon.
It’s Shrove Tuesday, that means Pancake Races!
Before Ash Wednesday, there’s Shrove Tuesday. At Grace, that means pancake races:
As a member of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, Ferris helps organize the church’s annual Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper and Races, to be held this Tuesday. Pancake races also are part of the Shrove Tuesday Anglican tradition, one that finds “all my fellow parishioners letting their hair down,” Ferris said.
Racers on the indoor course in the church’s reception hall first sprint to an assortment of British housewife clothes and don aprons, scarves and hats. They dash back to the starting line, where they get a frying pan with a pancake. They then run the course a second time, flipping the pancakes as they go. If the pancake hits the floor, they must start over.
It’s a time to “shake your sillies out — something Anglicans, like conservative Lutherans, are not commonly accustomed to, so it makes for quite an interesting sight,” said Jody Kapp, a church spokeswoman.
The whole story’s here (behind a pay wall)
Listen to Him: A Sermon for the Last Sunday of Epiphany, 2013
February 10, 2013
Epiphany is a season during which we are invited to explore the ways in which God’s glory appears to us. This year, brief as it is, we have seen God’s glory in the Baptism of our Lord, in the miracle of Jesus Christ turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana. Each year, on the last Sunday of Epiphany, we hear a different gospel version of the same story, Jesus’ transfiguration. It is a story that breaks in upon us, just as God’s glory breaks in upon us, and in its details, its eerie nature, and its resonances, it breaks in upon our sense of time and reality, and invites to look forward to the resurrection, and back to the Hebrew Bible, to Sinai and to the prophets. Continue reading
The Mission of Sacred Space
The first draft of Grace’s Master Plan was released this week. You can read more about that here: gracebeyondgrace.net. On the surface, the master planning process seems to be all about physical plant, renovations, and the like. But underneath it all are fundamental questions about mission. What does it mean to be God’s people in this particular place, Madison’s Capitol Square?
The Master Plan envisions a courtyard garden that remains beautiful but also becomes a place for mission and worship. With a labyrinth at its center, with opportunities for gathering, and with less permeable barriers between inside and outside, the garden would invite spiritual and human relationships.
It’s important to remember that Grace’s interior spaces have changed over the years. Our nave has been altered in keeping with the aesthetic and liturgical values of previous generations. Here are several historical shots:
1876
1926
As I reflect on the nature of sacred space, on Grace’s physical plant and on our rapidly changing culture, I focus on several questions:
1) How do we use our spaces to help our neighbors connect with God? Whether or not they ever join Grace Church, can we invite those who live, work, and play in downtown Madison to find at Grace ways to explore their relationships with God? How do we also create opportunities for them to share Christ’s love with the world?
2) And how do we move from those initial connections and encounters with the divine to deeper relationships? How do we invite and encourage people to join with us as we seek to know God more deeply and to follow Jesus’ call more closely? How do we create opportunities for bible study, formation, and discipleship that are appropriate to the twenty-first century?
3) What is appropriate stewardship of our physical resources for the 21st century? Is it appropriate to have so large a worship space, located so centrally to Capitol Square, that is used so little on a regular basis?
4) How can our worship extend beyond our walls to help people encounter God in their daily lives and help people encounter God who would never imagine attending Sunday morning services?
Others are raising interesting questions about space as mission.
The case for creating a front porch at a church:
I like the metaphor of the front porch, an intermediate space between street and interior, a place for casual interaction that might grow.
How can churches build the front porch, creating a space where people can develop relationships before coming inside?
We’ve got one, it’s our courtyard garden. How can we make use of it?
Even Catholics are asking these questions:
Indeed, it may not make any sense at all to pour limited resources into buildings used for a few hours on Sunday when what the neighborhood needs is a retreat house, a day care, or a community garden.
That doesn’t mean we stop creating places to celebrate Sunday Mass. It just means that maybe we do it in buildings tied in new and creative ways to the works of justice, mercy, and freedom the Eucharist calls us to in the places we find ourselves in.
Silence on the Drones–updated
By and large, the silence continues. There are reposted articles on Christianity Today and Religion & Ethics from years ago (I won’t link to them because it can’t be that difficult to find someone who can write 1000 words on Just War Theory and Drones in light of the new information we are receiving.
But a few voices are beginning to be heard (not on religion sites, on the Washington Post, for example, but they’ve not exactly exercised responsible journalism on this issue (or on the larger issues of war and terrorism). Huffpo Religion promises a conversation on drones tomorrow afternoon. And total silence from the Episcopalians, so far as I can tell.
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes in the Washington Post:
One of the most inspiring and even profound speeches on both Just War theory and Just Peace theory I have ever heard was President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In that speech, I argued, “The president said that the ‘old architecture’ of thinking about war and peace is ‘buckling.’ What is required now, argued the President, is to ‘think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of just peace.’” I called this the “Obama doctrine.” I was wrong.
David Gushee of Mercer University, in the Post:
The United States would never accept it if another militarily sophisticated country-China or Russia come to mind-developed a policy in which they routinely launched “targeted” attacks on our soil seeking the deaths of those they identified as “imminent threats” to their national security, accidentally killing innocent Americans on a regular basis.
There is a disturbing combination of American arrogance and self-righteousness at work here. We alone, the exceptional nation, the beacon of freedom and justice, can be trusted with the power to kill our own and others around the world in the name of national self-defense (and global security). And then we concentrate the execution of that policy in the hands of individual officials in the executive branch not subject to external review. This sounds like a people that have forgotten the old biblical claim that “no one is righteous, not one.” Every nation and every individual needs someone looking over their shoulder and checking their exercise of power. All are fallible. Even us.
If you want to understand a little bit of why I am so angry about this, note that today in the hearings for John Brennan, Senators cracked jokes about waterboarding.
Outside of the Christian community, progressives and human rights activists are speaking out. David Cole has 13 questions he wishes the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would ask John Brennan during his nomination hearing.
An earlier piece by David Cole on the released memo addresses moral and legal questions raised by the use of drones:
In fact, the capabilities of drones raise a number of related questions that go entirely unasked in this paper. Drone technology has made it possible to use lethal force in many situations where we could not or would not have even considered it in the past. Unlike conventional military operations, drone attacks require no “boots on the ground,” and therefore do not pose a risk to American lives. Unlike bombings, they have pinpoint accuracy; they therefore reduce the collateral costs of killing and may be easier to disavow. Because drones can effectively travel the world while being controlled remotely from home, they permit the “war” to move far beyond the battlefield. And drones have made it possible for the US government to do something that was unthinkable before, and should be unthinkable still—to kill its own citizens in secret. In short, drones radically reduce the disincentives to killing. And that may well make a nation prone to use military force before it is truly a last resort. That certainly seems to be what has happened here.
Lenten Resources 2013
Lent is a week away. As observed in contemporary Christianity, it is a time for renewed focus on one’s spiritual life, an opportunity to explore more deeply Christian faith and to enter more deeply into one’s relationship with Jesus Christ. Many people adopt spiritual disciplines during the period of Lent, fasting or “giving something up.” Others take on spiritual disciplines–reading, a more regular prayer life, or making a retreat. The internet offers many innovative ways of observing Lent. Here are some I’ve found (I’ll continue to update this post in the coming week or so as I learn of new sites).
Lent Madness (Here’s a description of it; and here’s coverage of it from USA Today)
From Episcopal Relief and Development
The Huffington Post collected wonderful materials related to Lent last year. You can visit that site here. We hope they will do the same in 2013.
The Daily Office for your computer; and for your smartphone: St. Bede’s Breviary
Busted Halo’s online Lenten Calendar for 2013
Daily videos from the Society of St. John the Evangelist
And a plan for daily readings from the Church Fathers for the 40 days of Lent
From Nadia Bolz Weber: House of All Sinners and Saints’ 40 Ideas for Keeping a Holy Lent
From Episcopal Charities and Community Services (Diocese of Chicago): A Lenten Devotional Calendar
Silence on the Drones: Another Moral Failure of Progressive Christianity?
With the release of the government’s memo laying out the case for the extra-judicial assassination by drones of US citizens, the media have finally begun to take a closer look at the whole drone war. Greg Mitchell has a useful summary with links.
Tom Junod’s piece is must-read:
The white paper offers a legal opinion, not a moral one, but the questions that it tries to answer are moral indeed:
Do “informed, high-level officials” have the power to kill their own citizens?
Are “informed, high-level officials” acting in the interests of the state ever liable to the accusation that they have committed murder?
These are the moral questions that the Constitution was written to address by means of a legal framework. The leaked white paper seems to address them in a different way, in a kingly way, in an almost pre-constitutional or perhaps post-constitutional way. And so when we read it, we recognize it for what it is: the kind of document that has always been proferred to power. The kind of document that always ends with somebody dead.
But there’s silence among progressive Christians. Not a word yet on Huffington Post Religion. Not a word yet on Religion Dispatches. Not a word yet from Episcopal Cafe.
My questions for all those outlets and for the people who write regularly for them: Where’s your moral and religious outrage at this raw use of unconstitutional power? Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize (remember that?). He’s been hailed as a close follower of Niebuhr. His Second Inaugural the manifesto for a new progressive American Civil Religion.
Obama has refused us as a nation the necessary conversation and come to terms with our use of torture. He has refused to make those who permitted, advocated and conducted accountable for their actions. Three days after he was inaugurated in 2009, he began using drones to kill people he and his administration claimed were enemy combatants.
Christians need to challenge his claims and his administration’s actions. We need to hold him account just as many of us want to hold the previous administration to account for all of the evil it perpetrated. We need to remind him–he is a Christian, after all–of the moral and ethical obligations of following Jesus Christ and we need to offer a clear, consistent, and loud prophetic voice against this evil program.
The Washington Post does have a piece from a Roman Catholic exploring the memo’s use of Just War Theory.
And there’s this from Lawrence Garcia (who is currently attending Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University):
We, as the followers of the unjustly-crucified Terrorist, should, of all people, be vocally against this inhumane use of military might. After all, our King was also the victim of such imperial tactics and realpolitik, and he calls his disciples to sympathize with his fellow sufferers-under-empire. Remember, the cross is not only where sin was dealt with and where Satan was defeated, but also where empire revealed itself for what it truly was, dispenser of injustice; no matter how much Pilate continues to wash his hands
Christians and Gun violence
Today is the Inter-Faith Call-In Day to Prevent Gun Violence. The Episcopal Church is participating in this effort in a number of ways. The Presiding Bishop has released a letter in support. The Episcopalians Against Gun Violence group is on facebook. There’s information in all those places on how to participate.
There’s ongoing debate about “God, Guns, and Christianity.” Andrew Sullivan is worth paying attention to on this. He points out, for example, that if one is pro-life, one ought to be opposed to easy access to handguns. Just as an example: Among the over-20s, 60 percent of gun deaths are from suicides, compared with 37 percent for homicides. The presence of guns in a house makes attempted suicide more likely; and increases the odds that an attempt will be successful. The presence of a gun in domestic violence situations increases the likelihood of a killing.
Sullivan also responded to the outrageous and remarkably ahistorical assertion that “Jesus would have backed the Second Amendment. But many Christians disagree and the Arkansas house of representatives has just passed legislation allowing “concealed carry” in churches.
I think we are sometimes inured to how pervasive violence has become in our culture. Apparently, since 2009, there has been at least one mass shooting every month. Every month! This graphic from Slate reminds us of the approximate toll of gun violence in the US since Newtown.
In Madison, I will be participating in a candlelight vigil at First Congregational Church on February 7 at 7:00pm. More about that here.
Today, President Obama spoke about his efforts to reduce gun violence.
What’s Love got to do with it? A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
What’s love got to do with it?
One of my professors Krister Stendahl, the great new testament scholar, churchman, bishop of Stockholm, once produced a list of the ten commandments of preaching. One of them was, don’t use the word “love” in your sermon unless it’s in the text. Well, it’s in the text today, so here goes.
I Corinthians 13, the so-called “love chapter,” is among the most familiar texts in all of scripture. We hear it most often at weddings, when its language becomes at least in part, a set of instructions for the couple: Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not arrogant or boastful or rude…
But this lovely chapter was not meant to be read at weddings. Paul writes it nearly at the end of a lengthy letter to the congregation at Corinth that he had helped found. He was no longer there but he maintained a close interest in what was taking place there. There’s evidence in this letter that earlier letters had passed back and forth between Paul and Corinth. We also know that he sent messengers to Corinth, and they in turn sent people back to him. Some of this is to be expected. As the congregation’s founder, Paul would have continued to be an important figure, an authority to whom this fledgling group of Christians would turn for advice and support.
It doesn’t take a very close reading of the text to discern that the relationship between this Christian community of Corinth and Paul is strained. There have been challenges to his leadership and to his version of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This tension would grow, I Corinthians doesn’t resolve it at all, and by the time of the correspondence that would eventually become II Corinthians, the two are barely on speaking terms. In fact, Paul implies that during a visit to Corinth, he got in a shouting match with one of its members.
So there is conflict. Some of it is personal. It’s absolutely obvious from Paul’s letters that he wasn’t an easy guy to get along with. Some of the conflict has to do with matters of faith and doctrine, and it’s here that we see some of the deepest disagreements. Many of these disagreements seem strange to us in the 21st century, like the question whether it was OK to eat meat that had been sacrificed to the Greek or Roman gods. Some of the issues are downright bizarre—like Paul’s outburst at the fact that one of the members of the Corinthian congregation is living with, presumably having sexual relations, with a woman identified as his father’s wife. Some of the issues cut closer to home for us, like how to behave in worship, well, how women should behave in worship, and for today, the issue of the nature of authority in the congregation and the relationships among various spiritual gifts.
The last three weeks, we’ve been hearing how Paul tries to explain to his readers the fundamental idea of the body of Christ. All of this conflict has been tearing this little community apart, and from a distance, Paul is trying to remind them that they are all one in Christ. In chapter 12, he is addressing the particular problem of spiritual gifts. The Corinthians seemed to have seen such gifts in a hierarchy with the more spectacular, ecstatic ones, being evidence of a higher spiritual attainment. Paul denies such a hierarchy of gifts: there is a variety of gifts but one Spirit, he says.
Then he appeals to a familiar image, the human body. In 12:12, he writes, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” He continues by pointing out the importance of each member, each body part to the body, and then concludes this section with the observation that no one body part, no one gift is more important, and that not all share in all of the gifts. And then he writes, a verse that oddly is omitted in either last week’s or this week’s reading, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” That’s Paul’s introduction to chapter 13, today’s reading. And it’s worth pointing out the significance of that little sentence. I will show you—this is the language of Epiphany, promising that God will be made manifest to us. And “the more excellent way” suggests that what will unfold before us is a journey. As we will see, that journey will culminate in seeing God, “face-to-face.”
But first, a little more about the chapter as a whole. It is pure poetry, richly cadenced and carefully constructed to build toward the climax. There are four sections, verses: the first a series of contrasts between conditions with and without love: “f I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” The second, a series of statements about the qualities of love: love is patient and kind. The third, a series of contrasts between the perfect and imperfect, the complete and the incomplete: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. And then the conclusion—the climax, the pinnacle: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Paul’s writing about life in community, life in the body of Christ. He’s writing about the love that binds the body of Christ together just as our bodies are bound together by muscle and tissue and tendons and nerves. We can’t be in community together without love; that love which binds us together in Christ, which is a gift of God in Christ. But there’s more here, too.
In the end, Paul is saying that the love we experience together in community, is like the love that we will experience in the presence of God. Our life together in community is like, it’s a foretaste, a simple, a reflection, of the full and complete life lived in God. We see that now, dimly; we experience it, in ways broken by our own fallenness, imperfections, and the fallenness of all humanity. But when we catch sight of it, we are also catching sight of the presence of God.
It was a hard message, hard words to hear in that first century community in Corinth. As I said earlier, Paul’s relations with that congregation would deteriorate after writing this letter, deteriorate so far and so fast that he didn’t dare come to Corinth for fear of what might happen.
It’s also a hard message to hear in this day and age. We know conflict all to well—we know it here at Grace and in the larger community, nation, and world in which we live. Conflict is so prevalent, so much a part of humans being in community that our tendency is too withdraw in disgust, anger, and exhaustion. That’s true of our connections with all sorts of institutions; it’s also true of our attitudes toward the church. Our anger, disgust, and exhaustion often results in us withdrawing from the body of Christ, to seek our salvation on our own, or to cultivate that relationship as individuals, silently, pursuing our private vision of the divine.
Paul understood that all too well. The beauty of his writing here points to his deep and profound dis-ease with life lived in the body of Christ—those words “But now I see in a mirror dimly, then I will see face to face.” Those words testify to the pain between the experience he lives now and the experience he hopes for in God’s presence. But at the same time, he knows that he cannot remove himself from the body of Christ, to do so would be to be cut off from life itself, and from love.
That tension is at the heart of the Christian faith, in the first century and in the twenty-first. To see the other, even in the midst of the most painful and divisive conflict, to see the other as part of Christ’s body, that is the hard work of being God’s people. To see the other—the one we’ve never seen before, the stranger, the alien, the outcast. To see them as part of Christ’s body, to welcome them in and shower them with love, that too is the hard work of being the body of Christ. And when the work becomes simply too hard, the way forward impossible, when there is only pain, or dark, or noisy gongs, at that point of spiritual emptiness, to open oneself to God’s love in Christ, to open oneself to the love of the body broken, that is, to use Paul’s words, to know that “faith hope and love abide; these three, and the greatest of these is love.”
Preaching Grace on the Square 