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 Book of Ruth

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It’s a pity that last Sunday was All Saints’ because we missed the chance to hear the first reading in the lectionary cycle from the Bok of Ruth. This week’s proper (27) provides a brief synopsis of the denouement, of Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and of their son Obed, who would become King David’s grandfather.

Ruth is a wonderful piece of literature, a short story, or novella, full of drama and written with great skill. Scholars debate when it was written. There are those who argue for the monarchic period because it provides David with a genealogy and because it bears considerable similarity to the Book of Judges, which is when the story takes place. Other scholars argue for a post-exilic origin. Their rationale is that it seems to challenge the post-exilic opposition to intermarriage. And it does spectacularly by giving David a foreign great-grandmother.

It seems to me the provenance is unimportant. What is important is what it tells us about the author’s values. Yes, marriage between Jews (Israelites) and non-Jews is acceptable, but more important still is the treatment of those foreigners, and of widows, the marginalized. Naomi and Ruth are left homeless, without a safety net, but Jewish law provides them with one–the opportunity to glean what hasn’t been harvested from the fields, and the obligation of male relatives to take care of widows.

There is a strong patriarchal bent to the story. Levirate marriage (the requirement that a brother must marry his brother’s childless widow, in order that the family name might be preserved) is predicated on the priority of males, and the notion that a wife is in some sense property. But perhaps in the ancient near east, the alternative was even worse. A widow, who was brought into her husband’s family, could be turned out of that family if she had no sons, and might not be welcomed back by her parents and siblings.

Levirate marriage is alluded to in the gospels as well, in fact in Mark 12:18-27, the Sadducees pose a question of Jesus that presupposes Levirate marriage although it in fact is challenging Jesus about the resurrection of the dead.

The week at Grace

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One of the things I knew would be very different about serving at Grace from my most recent work at St. James Greenville, and at Furman, would be the many encounters with people on the street, and with people who came by the church looking for help. At St. James, we had a few regulars–people who would come by looking for financial support every six months or so–which was the limit we placed on such help. We also dealt with “cold-callers,” people who phoned every church in the Yellow Pages, until they got a positive response. What we didn’t get, or very often at least, were people who just dropped in because they were in the area.

That’s not true at Grace. There’s a constant stream of people coming to the door, looking for help. We’ve got a relationship with a social service agency who screens our requests for us, but still there are people who will show for help on a regular basis. Usually, such requests are simply routine–they need money for a bus ticket, for a utility bill, or for gas. But sometimes, the requests, and the stories behind them are remarkable. And sometimes, people come to Grace, not because they need financial help, but because there’s nowhere to turn.

We’ve had a couple of the latter in the past few weeks, and watching how Grace’s members respond in situations like this is amazing. One African-American family, whose story included both 9-11 in Manhattan AND Katrina, ended up at Grace looking for food. In the few weeks since they first visited, they have been welcomed in, embraced, and have pitched in. Now, the parents have jobs, they’ve moved from a shelter into an apartment, and things seem to be normalizing.

One recent Sunday after services, a parishioner encountered a woman trying to find a way into the church. It turns out she and her husband were visiting from the west coast, and he had a major medical emergency while in Madison. He was in ICU and the prognosis wasn’t clear. She’s been taken in, quite literally, by members of Grace, cared for and helped along the way.

The point is, if Grace weren’t where it is, neither of those encounters would have taken place. Our location can be a burden at times (especially when the square is closed off for an event), but we are in a unique place to do ministry and mission. People come to us; and our only response can be to welcome them in. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Grace so far is how welcoming the people of Grace are to almost anyone who comes in our doors.

How times have changed

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Today, the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s newspaper, has an article about the last time a sitting president came to town. The year was 1950. The president was Harry Truman. The next day, the big photo accompanying the article showed the Trumans, Harry (a Baptist), Bess, and Margaret, descending the steps of Grace Church after attending services on Sunday.

The photo accompanying today’s article showed Truman breaking ground (laying the cornerstone?) for the “Filene Building” on Sherman Ave. A quick Google search revealed no hits for “Filene” in Madison and the article said nothing about what that photo op might have meant.

It’s a curious thing about the marginalization of Religion in American life, but to choose not to run a photograph of something that remains a landmark in Madison, as it has been for 150 years, in favor of a photo of something only the longest-term residents might know, is telling.

I’ll upload a copy of the photo tomorrow. And I’d be very curious to know why the editors chose the particular photo they did.

All Saints’ 2009

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All Saints’ Day

Year B

November 1, 2009

 

 

All Saints’ is one of my favorite Sundays. I love wearing white after all of those Green Sundays of Summer. I love singing “For All the Saints.” I relish the opportunity to pause and reflect over the past year. All Saints’ is always tinged with grief as I inevitably am put in mind of those people at whose burial services I’ve presided in the last year, but it’s also an opportunity to remember them again, to pause and think of all of those people to whom we’ve said good-bye. It is also a glorious celebration. All Saints is a reminder that the community to which belong, the body of Christ is not confined to the living alone, but rather that we are united with those who have gone before in one communion, one Church.

Traces of those who have gone before us surround us. It was they who built, renovated, and preserved this beautiful building, the women and men who were a part of Grace long ago. There’s a closet that’s full of memorabilia of Grace—photos, records and the like that go back decades. Some of that material is on display in the Guild Hall today. For some of us, as we look around at the various memorials, as we go into the Guild Hall later to enjoy the food prepared for us, some of us will remember the men and women whose names appear in the documentation. Some of us may still grieve their passing.

The legacy of the past is not only something to celebrate and enjoy. It can also be a burden. It is a temptation to live in the past, to remember things as they were and to desire a return to a great golden age. History can be a burden in another way; it can be so oppressive that it prevents us from living in the present, and developing vision for the future.

All Saints’ may be a time when we want to look back, remember, and perhaps become somewhat nostalgic. But that is not the primary purpose of this feast. As a reminder that we belong to a communion that is larger than ourselves, larger than this life, All Saints’ challenges us to remake our lives, our community, our church, in accordance with the divine example.

What that means can be different in different contexts. Given what we are doing today in our worship and at our coffee hour, I would like us to think about  our worship and our feasting. You may think it odd that I choose to focus on these things today, but I don’t think it’s obvious, or given, that we worship the way we do. Certainly not in this day and age—when most Christians in America worship in spaces that resemble movie theaters or corporate headquarters rather than the beautiful sanctuary in which we find ourselves.

Some of you may have come because of the Kodaly mass; others may be wishing they hadn’t. After the service, I hope you will join us for the celebration of Grace’s cooks over the last 125 years, the saints who fed Grace all of those years.

It’s fitting given the latter event that our lesson from the Hebrew Bible is a vision of a new day. In fact, the prophet sees a New Jerusalem, a new Zion, but he describes it somewhat differently than does John in the Book of Revelation: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” It is a vision of divine hospitality that moves into speaking of a time when there will be nothing dividing God from God’s people, and where there will be no mourning.

Some of that imagery is carried over into the reading from Revelation. It, too is a vision of the New Jerusalem. One thing that distinguishes the new Jerusalem from the old is that God will be dwell there, “The home of God is with mortals.” Later in this same chapter, John will tell us that there is no temple in this new Jerusalem, there is no need of a temple, because God is present everywhere.

In the New Testament, in Revelation and in the Letter to the Hebrews that we’ve been reading this fall, there is a strong connection between the worship that takes place here on earth with that which takes place in the presence of God. But it’s not just the New Testament—in our Eucharist, we sing “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” Our worship is an imitation of what takes place in heaven. And that’s why beauty is so important.

It’s been interesting for me to see the reaction of visitors who enter Grace Church on Saturday mornings. We all know that it is a wonderful space, but it is also a holy space, a beautiful space, where people can gain a sense of the divine. It’s clear in watching people as they enter, that they are experiencing something new and different, something quite unlike the rest of their lives.

Of course, for us, we know that and we come for the same reason. But our experience is not limited to the visual, and the aural. We also taste and see that the Lord is Good. At the Eucharistic table, we experience God’s hospitality, bread and wine that become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

This fall, in our adult formation program, we have been exploring the connections between our faith and food, both the ethics, and the aesthetics. For many of us, it is hard to see a connection between what we do in the Eucharist, indeed, what we do in worship, and the way we eat. That’s largely because the Christian tradition sought to separate the two, but the Eucharist began as a meal, and in early Christianity, one of the most popular forms of devotion was to throw big parties in the places where the saints and martyrs were buried.

“The Lord of Hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines.” It may be difficult to see the connection between the Eucharist and a feast—after all, the wafers that we eat are only distantly related to bread, and the wine, well the wine is not the finest either. But the Eucharist is a feast and it is important that we see the connection between this table, at which our Lord is a host, and the tables around which we serve as hosts. And I mean it, whether those tables are the ones we set for dinner guests in our homes, or the tables on which the food for coffee hour is spread, or the tables for the meal that will be served to our homeless neighbors tomorrow night.

We also say in the Eucharist “give us a foretaste of that heavenly banquet” For us to worship in ways that not only reflect our needs, desires, faith and doubt, but also reflect the glory of the one we worship, everything we do, our music, liturgy, and yes, the food we eat at this table and at every table, should be beautiful, delightful, and glorious. When we do that, we truly are joining with all the company of the saints. Thanks be to God!

 

Bishop Elections

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I haven’t been keeping up with the Anglican blogosphere in the past couple of years, but it seems to me that one of the very interesting effects of the internet on the Episcopal Church has been the way in which things that once were probably almost unnoticed, have become matters of great significance throughout the Anglican Communion and indeed, often far beyond.

One example of this is bishop elections. I’ve never actually participated in one, on either the lay or clerical side, but I’ve been Episcopalian for nearly twenty years and have never even been cognizant of the politicking involved until the last few. Probably it was the controversy surrounding the consents to the election of the current Bishop of South Carolina that brought elections to the front of my mind. But certainly the failure of the bishop-elect of Northern Michigan to receive consents from bishops and standing committees elevated the profile of elections to a matter of national and international significance.

The slate of candidates for Bishop of Upper South Carolina was announced a couple of weeks ago. I am interested because until mid-September, I was canonically resident in that diocese, and I was nominated, though thankfully not selected to serve on the search committee earlier this year. It’s clear that the internet has changed the dynamics of the election process. There is discussion in various quarters about the relative merits of each candidate, and about the process itself.

On one level, such conversation can help to bring issues of enormous significance to the fore. I do think that the controversy surrounding the election in Northern Michigan was useful to some degree. It remains to be seen, however, whether any candidate can survive close internet scrutiny. We are allowing ourselves to be shaped by the way in which the blogosphere has shaped the political process nationwide. One wonders whether the church will be any better off than the nation as a result. If you want to know more about the candidates for bishop of Upper South Carolina, I commend Deacon Tim Ervolina’s blog.

Tim is a deacon of the church and one of the few voices of progressivism in church and state in South Carolina.

Old Blind Barnabas

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Blind Bartimaeus

Proper 25, Year B

October 25, 2009

With today’s readings from Job and Mark, we are coming to the end of a series. We heard today the very end of the book of Job, and the gospel story of blind Bartimaeus brings this section of the gospel of Mark to a close. As we have heard for several weeks, Jesus and his disciples have been wandering around the countryside. Sometimes their journey has seemed aimless. Occasionally Mark gives us geographical details that seem absurd. But as they go along the way, Jesus seems to be ever clearer on the fate that will ultimately await him in Jerusalem.

As they go, Jesus predicts his suffering and death, and says a great deal about what it means to follow him, to a group of people who have no idea why they are following him. And now, at the very end of this section of the gospel, comes the story of blind Bartimaeus. In fact, this brings us to the end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, because the very next story in the gospel is the story of Jesus entering into Jerusalem, which we remember each year at Palm Sunday. So this story of blind Bartimaeus has enormous significance.

But before exploring that, I want to go back to the very beginning of this crucial section of the gospel of Mark because Mark has done something very interesting here. He bookends this section having to do with Jesus’ death and discipleship with two stories of Jesus healing a blind man.

The first took place near Bethsaida at the beginning of this section. It is a very odd story because it involves a two stage healing process. A blind man is brought to Jesus; Jesus leads him by the hand out of the village. First Jesus put saliva on the man’s eyes and laid his hands on him. After that, Jesus asked if he could see and the man’s response was “I can see people, but they are like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on him again, and the man’s sight was fully restored. Jesus sent home, instructing him to tell no one.

In the second healing, all is different. It takes place near Jericho, only 13 miles from Jerusalem. One important difference is that this man has a name, the only one of all of those healed in all four gospels to be named. Second, in the first healing, the blind man was brought to Jesus, and it was those who brought him who pleaded with Jesus to heal him. Here, Bartimaeus speaks on his own behalf, calling Jesus “Son of David” a messianic title. Then, when he continues to cry out for help from Jesus while onlookers tell him to shut up, Jesus calls to him. Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, runs to Jesus.

Jesus asks him a rather odd question, given that Bartimaeus is a blind beggar. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus asks to be healed, and Jesus responds, “Go, your faith has made you well.” In response, Bartimaeus follows Jesus “along the way.”

Mark uses these stories to emphasize everything he has stressed in these chapters of his gospel. In the first story, a blind man slowly comes to see, he needs extraordinary effort from Jesus, and when he’s healed, he goes back home; he doesn’t proclaim the good news. It’s as if nothing had happened. In fact, Jesus orders him to tell no one.

Bartimaeus is just the opposite. He takes the initiative, first crying out to Jesus, then abandoning everything, even his cloak, in order to have an encounter with Jesus. He asks Jesus for help, and when he’s healed, instead of returning to his home and family, he follows Jesus on the way—to Jerusalem.

Between these two stories of Jesus healing blind men, one who goes back home and one who calls him the Son of David, and follows him on the way, Mark puts much of Jesus’ teachings on discipleship, on what it means to follow Jesus. In fact, Bartimaeus stands as something of a contrast to the disciples, who weren’t really, or didn’t know how, to follow Jesus.

But I don’t want you to think that these stories or only symbolic, that they lack concrete, literal meaning. One of the things that may be the hardest for us to get our heads around in the twenty-first century is that Jesus healed people. The gospels are quite clear on that. He gave sight to the blind, restored the hearing of deaf people, made the lame to walk. He also cast out demons.

Now what precisely these healings consisted in I don’t know, I do know that such healings were relatively commonplace in the ancient Mediterranean—Greek and Roman sources, as well as Jewish materials give evidence that there were miracle workers around. I also know that health meant something quite different in the ancient world than it does to day. Indeed, the Greek word that is most often translated as “salvation” could also be rendered as health or wholeness. In the ancient world, health involved body and soul, not just body. Part of our problem in understanding Jesus’ miracles lies there, we are thinking in terms of modern medicine and science, when the people in the ancient world thought in very different terms.

We are often very uncomfortable with the notion of Jesus healing people of their illnesses and maladies, and yet when we find ourselves struggling with our health, or the health of loved ones, we pray to God for deliverance. Few of us would be comfortable with what seems to be the message of Mark’s gospel in this instance, that Bartimaeus’ faith healed him. To make such a clear link is deeply problematic.

As I was thinking about this story this week, a song came to mind that has been going through my head repeatedly. Perhaps some of you know it. “Old Blind Barnabas” I know from a version the Blind Boys of Alabama sang on an album a few years ago. From the lyrics that I recall, I’m pretty sure it’s based on this story. The name Bartimaeus was changed to Barnabas to fit the meter. The Blind Boys of Alabama came together as a group in 1936 at the Alabama School for the Blind; and the core group sang together until a couple of the members retired in 2006, but Clarence Fountain kept on, and the group continues to sing. I wonder how many times over the decades they sang that song. I wonder how they thought about it, their faith and their blindness.

We know that God doesn’t take away all of our pain and suffering. But many of us may sometimes wonder whether it’s because we don’t have enough faith, or perhaps God is punishing us for something. That of course brings us back to the book of Job, and finally, today, we’ve reached the end of it. I must say, of all the works of literature I’ve ever read, this may be the least satisfactory conclusion to any. It’s as bad as a typical “Hollywood ending” of a movie, where the boy gets the girl, or everything works out ok. Job has gone through all of this pain, all of this intense suffering. His children have died, his flocks and his herds, he’s lost his property, and finally he is plagued with a wretched ailment of the skin. After all of his complaints and challenges to God, after God in the end tells him, “Shut up.” Now this. After all of his trials and tribulations, after all of his suffering, after all of that profound poetry, Job is rewarded with twice as much stuff as he had in the beginning. It makes me sick.

Now let me be clear. The book of Job is not a history book or a biography. It is a morality tale. There was no historical figure named Job. Even though his story seems to be set in the time of the patriarchs, the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on close reading it clearly comes from a much later period. Job is a sort of everyman, he is one of us; and the whole story is intended to help us think about the problem of suffering—theodicy, as the philosophers call it.

Those middle chapters of the book, where Job rails against God for his plight, are meant to be words we might say in a similar situation—Job is speaking for us, and for every human throughout the existence of the human race, who has tried to make sense of why they are suffering. The problem is, the book of Job raises the question of human suffering with eloquence and profundity, but it does not provide an answer.

As we saw last week, when God finally responds to Job, when God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, the answer God gives is, in a nutshell, “Shut up.” Or to put it in the Book of Job’s terms, “where were you when I created the universe?”

Now, I don’t think there is an adequate answer to the question of theodicy, of why bad things happen to good people. I don’t think it’s God punishing us, I don’t think it’s intended to teach us something. Sometimes suffering simply lacks meaning. And when we struggle with our pain, misfortune, or suffering, one of the things we as humans want to do is to make sense of it, to put it in a framework that helps us comprehend it. That’s what the book of Job is trying to do, but in the end, it fails to give an adequate response to Job’s suffering.

And in the end, the story of Bartimaeus, as important as his healing is, is not an object lesson on the power of faith, or miracle, or the nature of Jesus Christ. It, like the chapters that come before it, is a lesson about discipleship. Bartimaeus healed of his blindness, follows Jesus. All of Jesus’ teaching in these chapters was intended to open the eyes of the disciples to Jesus and to the cost of following him. As we have seen these last weeks, the disciples could not, would not open their eyes to Jesus. Like them, we are often blind to what following Jesus really means, to the commitment it requires, to the life that beckons us. With Bartimaeus, let us cry out to Jesus, “Teacher, help us see!”

Some Articles on the Pope’s announcement

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A few days’ reflection offers the opportunity for more insight. I would like to highlight three pieces that came out this weekend.

First, an article by A. N. Wilson, who has previously been mentioned on this blog. He emphasizes the probably unintended consequence of the pope’s move in making England even more secular, and perhaps being the final straw that breaks the camel of establishment for the Church of England. It’s available here.

There’s also an article by Diarmaid McCulloch, one of the great contemporary historians of Christianity in England. His works The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath have been groundbreaking and he has also written a history of the papacy and most recently a history of Christianity in England. His comment is available here.

Finally, a comment from Colin Coward, one of the leading figures in the push for full inclusion of Gays and Lesbians in the Church of England. He points out the hypocrisy of many of Anglo-Catholic clergy in England. It’s well worth a read.

Ecclesiological Reflections on recent developments

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I mentioned in my last post that I view the papacy as the product of a historical development, not the mark of the true church. It may be helpful to make some more comments on this matter.

The history of the church in Rome in the first and early second century is shrouded in obscurity. While it is clear that there was by the late first century an emerging sense of a coherent and cohesive body of Christians in Rome (the letter of I Clement testifies to that), it is not at all clear that there was a “bishop” of Rome, let alone that the bishop exercised authority outside of the city of Rome.

In the second and third centuries, other churches were equally powerful–Carthage in the West, and certainly the bishoprics of Alexandria and Antioch. Rome became most important in the west, because it alone of all the western churches, could claim apostolic foundation. As early as c. 200, Tertullian, writing in Carthage, recognized that Carthage’s claim to apostolicity rested, not in having been founded by an Apostle (as Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, could claim) but in its teaching being consistent with that of the Apostles.

But a half-century after Tertullian, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, could challenge papal teaching and authority. For Cyprian, bishops working together in a synod were more important than a bishop who could claim direct apostolic succession. It is pretty clear that Rome’s supremacy in the church is a product of two things: 1) its unique status in the west as an apostolic foundation, and 2) the importance of Rome as the Imperial capital (the latter explains why Constantinople eventually overtook Antioch, Alexandria, and all other apostolic foundations to become the most important patriarchate in the East).

In the Protestant Reformation, the true church was defined as that community where “the word of God was truly proclaimed and the sacraments rightly administered.” Again, it was largely for historical reasons that the Church of England insisted on the apostolic succession of the episcopacy as one of the marks of the true church. It was a powerful weapon in the conflict with Calvinist polity, but it conceded a great deal in the conflict with the papacy.

It seems to me that one of the key issues for Anglicanism is to articulate a clear ecclesiology that doesn’t merely distinguish it from the Roman Catholic church, but provides a positive rationale for its existence. I’m wondering whether the heart of our current problem isn’t a definciency in ecclesiological reflection.

More on the Vatican’s pronouncement

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Much of the blogosphere’s reaction to yesterday’s announcement has focused on what many perceive to be the challenge it seems to present to ecumenical efforts. I’ve always thought that for the Vatican, particularly under this pope, ecumenism meant all other Christian traditions accepting papal supremacy.

I’m actually more interested in what this provision for allowing the ordination of married Anglican priests says about clerical celibacy and about Holy Orders. Either celibacy is required, or it’s not, but to allow exceptions in certain cases seems to me very odd , indeed. If I were a Roman Catholic priest, who was certain about my call to the priesthood, but uncertain about the charism of celibacy, I would be outraged.. If I were a Roman Catholic priest who married, I would be outraged. If I were a devout Roman Catholic, uncertain of the call to celibacy, but certain of my call to the priesthood, I would be outraged.

For me, there are basically three things that stand in the way of my conversion to Catholicism:

1) the papal supremacy, which I think is a historical fiction and not a necessary mark of the true churcch

2) clerical celibacy, which is a medieval development (product of the Gregorian reforms, although with earlier roots)

3) ordination of women (see Romans 16, where Paul refers to Junia (a woman) as an apostle

There’s a great deal more, of course, but the greater Catholic tradition has always made room for theological diversity, and until the sixteenth century, considerable liturgical diversity as well.

Vatican receives Anglicans! Film at 11:00!

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The Vatican announced today that it has created a canonical structure for Anglicans disaffected by developments in the Church of England. They will be allowed liturgical latitude under the rubric of personal ordinaries. What precisely this all means remains unclear, but some are announcing the end of the Anglican Communion. The New York Times article is here, but more information is available at the Lede and at Thinking Anglicans.

The significance of this isn’t quite clear. In fact, it seems on the surface not unlike the system that already operates in the US, where Episcopal priests (yes, even married ones) can become Roman Catholic priests. Rather curiously, and somewhat inconsistently, they must be reordained.

Whether this will be true in England remains uncertain, and whether married Anglican bishops might be able to serve as bishops in the Roman Catholic Church is highly unlikely.

The importance of this is largely for the English context, where there is an ongoing debate over the ordination of women as bishops. Anglo-Catholics are very resistant to this as they are to the ordination of women to the priesthood, and many people think that if and when the Church of England finally admits women to the episcopacy, there will be a wholesale departure of Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England. We will see.

It is probably not a very important move for the Episcopal Church. Those who have left in recent years include a few Anglo-Catholics, but many more of a more Protestant theological bent, who would chafe at papal supremacy.

I’m sure we’ll hear much more about this.