Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

The dust settles on the Primates Meeting

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It didn’t take long, for there wasn’t much dust. It seems little happened, or in ABC-speak, “conversations took place, relationships were deepened, yada yada yada.” George Conger, Paul Bagshaw, and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church comment.

There seem to have been some important developments, not least the recognition (finally, what took so long) that the role of the primates differs widely from local church to local church, that their power and office are often structured quite differently, all of which make unified action impossible.

Bagshaw makes two comments which seem on target, and which reflect on ongoing development in the Anglican Communion. One is that “it is an ever more clerical communion.” It’s not clear to me why, and given the enormous cultural shifts throughout the world, a narrowing of the power and role of the laity seems both wrongheaded and against the tide of history. The second comment is that, given the changes in roles for the Lambeth Conference, the Primates Meeting, and the sidelining of the Anglican Consultative Council (all of which I think are taking place and have been taking place for the last decade), power is centralizing in the Archbishop of Canterbury and in the Anglican Communion Office–as Bagshaw terms it, an international bureaucracy. This, too, seems odd to me, and somehow roughly parallel to developments in the European Union, where power has centralized in the bureaucracy, not in any deliberative bodies.

But more important than any of this may be the absence of a significant number of Primates, for whatever reason. For many of them, what the Archbishop of Canterbury does, the meetings he calls, are meaningless. Conger and Bagshaw agree that “the Anglican Communion as we knew it no longer exists,” what isn’t clear is what precisely is coming into existence. And so long as there is no lay voice at the highest levels of international meetings, I don’t think the Episcopal Church should spend time, energy, or money, trying to remain a part of it.

Salt and Light: A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

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February 6, 2011

Let me repeat the last words of today’s gospel, in case your mind was wandering as they were being read: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There are some very hard statements in the gospels, things Jesus says that seem, if taken for face value, to offend us, challenge us, perhaps make us rethink everything we do. This is one of those statements. Spoken directly to the disciples, Jesus seems to be telling them that the Pharisees, who seek to keep the law as faithfully as possible, are exemplars of moral behavior for the disciples, that indeed, the disciples must do better than the Pharisees, or risk damnation.

When confronted by such texts, we are inclined to respond in one of several ways. We might discount it, giving reasons why it can’t mean what it seems to mean, that it can’t apply to us or our efforts. We might also take it as a challenge, seek to be more righteous than the Pharisees, to live as Jesus taught his disciples to live. A third alternative would be to worry that because we can’t be as good as that, it must mean we will one day burn in Hell. These are the sorts of questions that the Gospel of Matthew confronts us with, and will continue to confront us with, for the coming months. And in these weeks, we are in the heart of that challenge. At the same time, we all also need to confront our own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses to Jesus’ challenge. Continue reading →

The theological significance of grits

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I’ve mentioned grits in at least one sermon in the last year, so I suppose I ought to link to this:

Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog | Faith & Leadership | Richard J. Mouw: The theological significance of grits.

Although I would take issue with the appearance of grits on a plate (not to mention Waffle House) as having anything to do with God’s grace; something about the fallenness of creation, perhaps.

I will eat grits, but they should come from Anson Mills.

Tide goes in, tide goes out

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In the annals of those defending Christianity against the arguments of atheists, Bill O’Reilly’s is among the lamest:

“I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out,” O’Reilly said, in all seriousness. “Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the tide goes in…. See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.”

Made numerous times, most recently in an interview with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O’Reilly’s brilliant argument came under fire from callous sophisticates.

His rejoinder:

“Okay, how did the Moon get there? How’d the Moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How’d the Moon get there? How’d the Sun get there? How’d it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn’t have it? Venus doesn’t have it. How come? Why not? How’d it get here?”

Well, here’s the scientific explanation for it.

H/t: The Washington Monthly.

More on the Atonement–update on McCormack’s Croall lectures.

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Darren at Via Crucis has given us summaries of Bruce McCormack’s lectures. I’m not going to go into great detail because much of the material relates to theological debates in which I have little interest. However, it seems to me the fourth and fifth lectures do provide some food for thought. In the fourth, McCormack deals with the views of Barth and von Balthasar as examples of his typology of theories of the atonement “which order the person of Christ to his work.”

According to MCcormack, no theologian has stressed so highly as Barth the importance for understanding the meaning of the cross of Jesus’ last words in Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

For Barth, what is most important in the cross is the death of the sinner in the person of the God-Human.

Further:

Again, it is vital for the ontology undergirding Barth’s soteriology that the subject of the cross is God – not in a qualified or diminished sense, but really God. God hands Himself over to man’s contradiction of Him, places Himself under judgment. If this is really so, then the cry of dereliction holds the key to the meaning of the Incarnation: God the Son has taken the place of women and men by enduring the deepest and most extreme consequence of sin, which is separation from God.

For McCormack:

Barth is suggesting that the passion and death of Jesus are human experiences which God does not simply find a way to go and do, but which take place in God’s own life (without compromising the being of God). If His being is in His act, then it must be in the act of suffering and dying a reconciling death, as well – no, God’s being is especially this being.

Balthasar does something similar by focusing not on the cross, or Jesus’ dying, but on his death, on Holy Saturday:

the descent is the final moment in Christ’s defeat, and its significance is found in the depth to which he goes in separation from God the Father – the full separation that we are due in our death for sin.

In lecture 5, McCormack turns to his own view. He begins again with Jesus’ last words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” McCormack says what I think has to be said about Mark and Matthew:

If we deal with the cry seriously, without trying to explain it away, McCormack says, we must face the fact that Mark and Matthew seem to want to say that God remained silent when called upon.

He then  makes a move I’m not sure I find convincing, arguing that “Jesus fears not death itself but the eschatological tribulation that is sure to accompany it.” God had to judge and condemn sin, in doing so, had to abandon Jesus so that the Son might die. In the end, the gradual withdrawal of the Holy Spirit from Jesus in the passion, with its culmination in Jesus’ cry, “Into your hands I commend my spirit is a loss of communion with the Father.

I do think that an adequate theory of the Atonement must begin with Mark’s gospel, with Jesus’ sense of abandonment by God, and God’s silence. That silence was temporary and in the resurrection we see both the vindication of Jesus, and humanity restored.

“What’s a church’s economic worth?”

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Thanks to the Call and Response blog, an article discussing a study that has attempted to assess the economic worth of 12 congregations in the Philadelphia area. Total estimated value: more than $50 million. Some of this is conjecture of course, like the $375 “for teaching social values” to a child. But some of it is real, like the economic impact of salaries, outreach efforts, and building repairs. The range in values for different churches is quite wide, from $1.4 million for a Presbyterian congregation (with an annual budget of $265,000) to $22.4 million for a Roman Catholic parish that has 7,000 congregants, a school, and a community center.

One of the study’s directors said:

The study shows the contribution of religious congregations “to be 20 to 30 times bigger than we knew,” said director Jaeger. It “will give congregations dozens of new ways to articulate their value, broaden their constituencies, and survive and grow.”

I wonder where Grace would come out? I wonder, too, whether attempts like this to quantify economic impact of a congregation do help “give congregations ways to articulate their value, broaden their constituencies, and survive and grow.”

 

“Can spirituality exist without religion?”

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The Guardian asks the question. Mark Vernon gets the first shot. The question is in response to a new book by Nicholas Humphrey: Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. According to Vernon, Humphrey

discusses life in a “soul niche”. Fish live in a water niche, bedbugs in a blanket niche, humans live in a soul niche; the “territory of the spirit”. This is the magic of human consciousness. To have soul is to enjoy the beauties of the cosmos, the responsibilities of free will, the comforts of prayer, the illusion of life after death. Evolution must have concocted such a grandiose dream-world for us for a purpose – probably, according to the author, to make us feel special. That encourages us to give of our best and so is good for our survival and the survival of others.

Vernon finds Humphrey’s view reductionistic and offers a primer on a deeper notion of the soul in which mind and body are linked. It’s a notion that goes back to Aristotle. He concludes:

To put it another way, perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that the hard problem of consciousness is not primarily to do with consciousness, but is to do with materialism. Perhaps consciousness is thought hard from this point of view because, in fact, energy, information or something quite like consciousness is the basic stuff of the cosmos? Matter might be the epiphenomenon, not mind. As Keith Ward entertainingly puts it in his new book, More Than Matter: “Minds are not illusory ghosts in real machines. On the contrary, machines are spectral, transitory phenomena appearing to an intelligible world of minds.”

You don’t have to be spiritual or religious to entertain such thoughts. Physicists do so quite routinely these days. It’s hardly avoidable when you deal with subatomic particles – the stuff of “matter” – as waves of probability rippling across fields of energy.

I’ll be interested to read the other responses, and the Ward book that Vernon mentions above.

I find this question or the related one having to do with those people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” interesting on theological grounds. But it is also an interesting question pastorally. I was intrigued by the recent essay from the Alban Institute on how religious organizations might reach out to the “spiritual but not religious” market, although I think many of the questions at the end of the article are focused on trying to fit the spiritual seeker back into an institution that may not be the focus of their spiritual search. The spiritual seeker, I think, tends to be very individualistic, at least in the quest aspect of their lives; and it may be more important to help them find ways to encounter the holy, and at the same time to do active outreach, than to offer bible studies and the like.

I’m looking forward to the other responses to this question.

 

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A

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The Foolishness of the Cross
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
January 30, 2011

I love to bless stuff! I’ve made something of a joke of it over the years. I’ll bless anything. In part, that’s because of the priests I’ve worked with, one of whom always seemed to have an aspergillum near to hand. Aspergillum—if that word is unfamiliar to you, think of it as a “holy water pot.” Around here, I’ve blessed the new freezers and coolers in the food pantry, the youth room space, animals of course, on St. Francis’ Day, and most recently the new dishwasher.

For some, such stuff smacks of superstition or silliness, but it’s not, or only sometimes, and on the surface. Blessing is important, even the blessing of inanimate objects reminds us that they are set aside often, for important uses. Blessing is not a ritual cleaning, or a magical act. To bless things, whether it’s a dishwasher, a dog, or the food before we begin eating, underscore the sacred nature of all of creation and that even ordinary things can be set aside for holy use. Continue reading →

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen

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I was intrigued last fall when I read the NY Times review of this film by Margarethe von Trotta so we went as soon as we found out it was playing in Madison. Hildegard is a fascinating character–a Benedictine abbess who had visions, wrote music, visionary works, as well as books on healing and nature. The film is by one of Germany’s most important directors. It’s not a great film, by any means, but for the most part it comes across as a fairly decent historical depiction of Hildegard. The film does a good job of showing the interplay of religion, politics, and family ties, and also highlights the patriarchy of the Middle Ages and of the medieval Church. At times, it seems to be something of a catalog of Hildegard’s activities, moving from scenes showing her instructing her nuns on the healing powers of herbs, to composing music, to writing. The visions are a constant and von Trotta also subtly raises questions about the relationship between Hildegard’s physical ailments and her religious experiences. She also hints that Hildegard may have used faked illness to get her way.

It’s definitely worth seeing if you are interested in medieval history or German cinema, but if you’re looking for action and excitement, the most you’ll get are a few scenes of monks and nuns flagellating themselves, a practice Hildegard criticized.