Guest Post: A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C: March 3, 2013

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Our sermon yesterday was preached by Lauren Gallant Cochran, our Christian Formation Director. Here’s what she had to say:

I find deep spiritual comfort in believing that our God is a God of paradox, a God who is the possible version of impossible. I believe God is unchanging, and ‘still speaking’. I believe God is three, and one.  I believe God was then, is now, and will be in the future. I think God is unknowable, and yet intensely intimate in my life… everywhere and nowhere all at once. I take comfort in these contradictions because while I will never fully understand everything there is to know about God, God still approves of my questioning and desire to learn and understand.  I thank God every day for the opportunities to talk about these paradoxes of God with other people: those who agree with me, and those who do not.

In the Presbyterian Church, every candidate for ordination must write a very concise statement of faith, and I have just read you the opening paragraph of my statement.  It seems a bit self-righteous to quote myself, but I want to talk about the paradox present in our scriptures today, which points to the paradox of Lent, and the paradox of our God. I want you to start thinking about all the things in our faith that are opposites but both true and complete all at the same time.

Last week Father Jonathan asked the question “what does Lent mean to people today?”  He said traditionally it has been a time for people to focus on an angry God who demands repentance—but noted that that’s not really what it seems to be any more.  The lectionary texts- including last week where Jonathan highlighted that God’s covenant with Abram was both terrifying and trustworthy—the lectionary texts of Lent are handing us paradoxes.

Let’s look first to Exodus—to the burning bush.

Moses finds himself in a scary situation.  Here he is, peacefully keeping his flocks of sheep when he stumbles across the burning bush.  God yells out Moses name and commands him to remove his sandals.  The presence of God is so overwhelming that Moses hides his face in fear.  Moses knows that this is the same God he has been hiding from after killing a man back in Egypt.  But even beyond the wilderness, God has found him and now commands him to return to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh free the Israelites.  When Moses musters the courage to respond, he asks “well who should I say sent me?”— God responds “I AM WHO I AM”.

I would be terrified.  God in these verses is very powerful, demanding, and frightening.  But don’t forget, I want to talk about the paradox in this passage.  It was hard for me, at first, to recognize that there is more than a powerful and scary God in these verses… But then I realized that I was thinking about this story with preconceived notions that didn’t have anything to do with the real words of scripture.

It’s even a little embarrassing to admit what these notions were.  First, is that when I was 12 years old, the animated movie The Prince of Egypt was released.  I loved that movie, and the scene of Moses and the burning bush is what I picture in my head when I read this passage.  It is a dramatic point in the movie, of course they chose to make it seem very powerful and slightly scary.  Once I found out that the actor Val Kilmer voices the roles of Moses AND God, it seems a bit more comical to me when I picture Val Kilmer talking to himself.  But, the point is that an animated movie with dramatic effects was placing a lens over how I read this story.

Secondly, every time I read this scripture—as silly as it may sound—the capitol letters “I AM WHO I AM” always make me think that God is yelling those words.  Scholarship tells me that the use of capital letters signifies that God’s name cannot be clearly translated, so in order to get all of this fictional yelling out of my head, I decided to read the passage to myself in the most calm and loving tone that I could.

I imagined God as a mother speaking to her son who is wandering beyond the wilderness, trying to bring him back to help him and their family.  “Moses… Moses… “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey”.

This presents a completely different picture of God– now it should be also noted that nowhere in this conversation does God ask Moses to repent for his sins.  Nowhere are there any conditions for Moses to change—Moses sins aren’t even mentioned.  In this light, the passage is not an angry God looking for repentance of sins.

Here is our first paradox.  God in this passage IS all powerful, and certainly makes a point to Moses about God’s power to free the Israelites—and Moses is scared.  Moses hides his face.  But God is also reaching out to Moses, God has compassion for the chosen people serving as slaves in Egypt.  God is the shepherd reaching out to a lost sheep from his flock.  God is I AM WHO I AM, and I am who I am.  God is showing Moses that this task will not be easy, but with the power of God it will be done.

And so we come to the paradox of a parable from Luke.

For our youngest children here at Grace, the Godly Play curriculum (loosely based on the Montessori System) shares the Bible in a story telling format, including the parables of Jesus.  All the parables are stored on their own shelf, and each is kept in a special white box.   Gwen, their wonderful teacher, patiently shares each story with them, but before they begin she reads these words about the parable they are about to experience.

“The box is closed.  There is a lid.  Maybe there is a parable inside.  Sometimes, even if we are ready, we can’t enter a parable.  Parables are like that.  Sometimes they stay closed.  This box looks like a present.  Parables were given to you long ago as a present.  Even if you don’t know what a parable is, the parable is already yours.”

I think these words can give us comfort as well when faced with a parable such as this.  These verses also show a powerful God in a frightening way.  God has the power to remove us from the vineyard not only because we might do something wrong, but also because we have not done anything at all.  And then we are left with a cliff hanger ending.  I don’t think a more terrifying literary tactic exists- we are left wondering about the fate of the fig tree, about our fate if we lead unfruitful lives.  Don’t forget that immediately before the parable, Jesus left us with the words “unless you repent you will all perish”.

Because Jesus was a man who frequently used agricultural metaphors in his parables, he probably knew that it can take up to five years before a fig tree bears fruit, much longer than the 3 years the owner of the tree has come looking for figs.  The point is clear, we must be fruitful and we cannot wait to do it, otherwise we are wasting the precious soil in the garden.

So this parable shows us a powerful vengeful God, who demands active fruitfulness.  But there is a character that I have not mentioned yet.  The gardener.  If the parable portrays God as the owner of the garden and the fig tree as you and me… then who is the Gardener?  The first time I heard a sermon that suggested the idea that Jesus is the gardener, I thought… Whoa… That changes everything!! Here is Jesus! Interceding on our behalf.  But who is Jesus other than God himself?  Thus we arrive at the second paradox.  God is expecting great things and threatening to throw us out, while still giving us another chance, giving us the nutrients we need to make it happen—fighting for us to stay.

As I shared with you at the beginning of this sermon, I find comfort in believing that God is a God of paradox, that God can be many things at once.  Both the owner and the gardener of a vineyard, both a powerful burning bush and a loving mother calling out into the wilderness, both terrifying and trustworthy.

Our reading from first Corinthians reveals that Paul felt the same way.  “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.  God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure.”

It is not a coincidence that our scriptures confront us with so many paradoxes during the season of Lent.  Lent is a time to repent, but also a time to take joy in our forgiving God.  Lent is a time to prepare for the death that we know is coming on Good Friday, but also a time to prepare for the resurrection that comes on that mighty Easter Sunday.  There is talk of darkness and light, ashes and life, our pasts that sometimes haunt us and the future of the kingdom to come.  Lent is a paradox in itself, leading us to the moment of Easter, preparing us to entertain the notion of an empty tomb.  Lent is preparing us to experience the paradox of a God who dies, and rises… for us.

Stanley Hauerwas, Diana Butler Bass, and the future of the Episcopal Church

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This past week I attended the annual conference of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes. It may sound pretentious (and to be honest, there’s more than a little pretension to be seen around) but it’s an exciting opportunity to hear from some of the best minds inside and outside of the Episcopal Church and to hear from others how they are innovating and responding to our rapidly changing culture.

 

I was especially intrigued when I saw that Stanley Hauerwas and Diana Butler Bass would be presenting back to back on the conference’s last day. I’ve long been an admirer of both and expected to be challenged to think in new ways about the role of the church in twenty-first century America. Although I had to leave before the end of Bass’s presentation, listening to the two of them on the same morning provided some gist for thought as the twitter hashtag emerged: #HauerBass.

 

As I listened to Hauerwas’ lecture, I puzzled over his intent. He spent much of his time revisiting the history of Liberal Protestant theology. Hauerwas has long been critical of the American church’s embrace of nationalism and easy acceptance of American culture and he sounded those themes again. He railed against the privatization of religion that is one of liberal theology’s hallmark, as well as the high value placed on toleration. The critique of liberal theology led him back to Karl Barth and that earlier critique of German liberal Protestantism. For Barth, the shock came when leading German pastors and theologians, including his own teachers, signed a declaration in support of the German effort and Kaiser Wilhelm II at the outset of World War I. Over against this assimilation of Christianity to the German war effort, Barth began to articulate a theology in which the Word of God stands in judgment of all human effort, including religion. That theological position would ultimately lead Barth to pen the Barmen Declaration in which he and others set out their resolute opposition to the idolatry introduced by Hitler.

 

Hauerwas seemed to want to suggest to his audience that we are in something of a similar cultural situation. Certainly Protestant hegemony is over; Christendom has come to an end, but as he points out the liberal state demands our allegiance and wages war in which we are complicit. Hauerwas argued instead that the claim “Jesus is Lord” is a political assertion and if we are serious in making that claim, our allegiance is not to the liberal state, but to the Reign of God that is breaking in upon us. He also asserted that “Jesus is Lord” is an absolutist claim and that it does not brook “toleration.”

 

On one level, none of this is new. As I listened to him, I thought back to workshops I had attended over the previous days, as well as my pastoral experience in Madison. At the heart of Hauerwas’ project is a view of the Christian faith that begins in absolutist claims like “Jesus is Lord” and assumes total allegiance. The Christian community he envisions is a gathered community, in conflict with the dominant culture and open to martyrdom. He looks back to the early church and sees Constantine’s conversion as something of a watershed, perhaps even a “fall.” Unfortunately, none of this describes the lived experience of most people living in America. Perhaps it should. On the other hand, most people experience a host of competing claims, from job, family, financial security, and the demands of the marketplace, to the ongoing search for meaning in life. Christianity, for better or worse, is only one claim among many. A common theme in the workshops I attended was the importance that we (as clergy, as communities of the faithful, as the Episcopal Church) find ways to engage people as they seek meaning. I wonder whether in the American context, for many, if not for all Americans, Hauerwas’ assertion that “Jesus is Lord is an absolutist claim” makes any sense whatsoever.

And this is precisely where I wanted to hear Diana Butler Bass reflect. For the culture she is describing has very different contours than the one Hauerwas described. She too talked about the decline of Protestantism in America, pointing out that according to the latest Pew Survey, the percentage of all Protestants has declined to below 50% for the first time in US history (I presume she wasn’t thinking about Native Americans when making this claim). The percentage claiming to be mainline Protestant is now lower than the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation whatsoever. This is a culture in which there are multiple claims on our allegiance, religious and otherwise and negotiating among those claims, making meaning in the midst of those competing claims, is difficult, demands nuance. I think it also inevitably requires allowing a certain amount of ambiguity, if one is at all self-reflective.

I don’t find Hauerwas’ construction of “post-Christendom” Christianity particularly helpful. It might work for certain Anabaptist or neo-Anabaptist communities, but the Episcopal Church is situated differently, and Anglicanism, whether or not the Episcopal Church survives, offers a different stance toward its cultural context. We may be able to develop committed communities of faith made up of disciples seeking to follow Jesus Christ, but we also welcome strangers and seekers who encounter Jesus Christ in our liturgy and may not, for a multitude of reasons, ever make the sort of deeper connection we want and hope. They may never be able to experience and submit to the absolutist claims of “Jesus is Lord” because they encounter other absolutist claims from other sectors of our culture. We must be able to minister to them as well. We must be able to find ways of helping them make meaning in their lives, whether or not they are able to fit into the membership boxes we want to stuff them in. It’s more important to speak their language than to expect them to speak, and accept, ours. Because if we are able to help them find meaning in the contexts in which they live, they will also be able to find God there, and to experience the redemptive love of Jesus Christ.

The Martyr Complex of Early (and contemporary) Christianity

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I saw a review on Salon of Candida Moss’s new book, “The Myth of Persecution.” I had one immediate reaction, “She’s got a great publicist.” I’d never heard of her before, which isn’t surprising since she received her PhD only in 2008 and her first book came out in 2011, after I left the ivied halls of academe.

What drew my attention is that this is a case of someone popularizing what has been basic historical consensus for decades, if not longer. When I was a grad student (now 30 years ago), the myth of widespread Roman persecution of early Christians had already been debunked. Christians were not thrown to the lions in the Coliseum, and there were in fact very few periods when there was a systematic attempt to suppress Christianity by the emperors.

So why all the attention to this book? Well, because Moss is making a connection with the persecution complex of contemporary Christianity. Miller’s review in Salon begins with another debunking, that of the story of Cassie Bernall, one of the Columbine victims, who quickly became famous as a Christian martyr. Moss is interested in the persistence of martyrdom and persecution as themes in Christianity. That’s an important topic, in part because the idea that one might have to suffer for one’s faith is so powerful, even attractive. In early Christianity, there were many examples of Christians who sought out martyrdom, and the same is true throughout history.

And she’s also right that the notion of martyrdom can raise conflict, whether among different Christian groups, or between Christians and an unsympathetic culture, to apocalyptic fervor. If you take an unpopular position and rouse the ire of opponents, that’s a certain sign that you are being faithful to Jesus Christ.

An interview with the author.

It’s true that those who were killed for the faith in the centuries before the toleration of Christianity were smaller in number than imagined by most contemporary Christians. Similar debunking has been done for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and “Bloody Mary” in sixteenth-century England and also for Anabaptists on the continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Martyrdom cut in different directions, too. If you were unable to make the ultimate sacrifice for your faith, if you recanted, there were potential problems. If you survived, your community wasn’t always quite sure what to do with you. Had you sinned, or did you simply lack the charism of martyrdom? At the same time, there’s probably some truth in Tertullian’s statement from the early second century, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Even in the sixteenth century, rulers worried whether public execution of Anabaptist martyrs might draw spectators to that movement because of the inspirational witness of those who were willing to die for their faith.

In some respects, a worldview that sees inherent conflict between us and them, the forces of good and evil, of light and darkness, of Christ and Satan, is both comforting and safe. Much harder is to live in a world where there are shades of gray and disagreement is not a matter of life and death, and being faithful means negotiating among several possible options.

Respecting the dignity of every human person and the refusal to be complicit in torture

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I have posted a great deal over the years about US use of torture. As an Episcopal priest, I have also posted several times about our baptismal covenant, and the vow we make in it “to respect the dignity of every human being.”

As a priest, I also struggle with how our liturgy connects with people’s daily lives. Do they find in our worship help in making sense of the moral and ethical decisions they face? Does our worship help them find meaning in their lives? I wonder about those questions and occasionally, as in today’s sermon, I explored how the rituals of Lent may or may not be meaningful to most of those who attend our worship services.

Of course, I never know and can often not tell what sort of impact either or worship or my sermons have on those who attend. I was amused today when greeting some visitors to learn that they had attended one previous service at Grace, a year ago, and they remembered my sermon–they remembered that I had once worked for a seafood processing company. So we don’t know the sort of impact our words and our worship have.

But then I came across this story of Lt. Stuart Crouch, who refused to prosecute prisoners at Guantanamo who had been tortured. He talks about his anguish as he learned the “harsh interrogation” techniques used on prisoners. But what cemented the decision for him was one Sunday when he attended a service at an “Anglican” church, where a baptism was celebrated:

I was wrestling with these—with this legal issue and with this ethical issue. And then, ultimately, you know, one Sunday when I was in church, it all kind of came together. I describe myself as an evangelical Christian. I was attending a church service in the Anglican tradition, and it was a baptism of a child. And anybody who’s ever been to one of these services knows that at the end of the baptism all of the congregants in the church stand up, and the pastor goes back and forth with basically the tenets of the Christian faith. And one of those tenets was that we would respect the dignity of every human being. And it was at that time, when I was professing that on Sunday, begged the question to me, if this is what you believe as a Christian, then how does that inform how you’re going to act the other six days of the week? And that really, for me, was the moral point that I came to of what I had to do next.

And what I did next was I went and met with the chief prosecutor for the Office of Military Commissions. I told him my legal opinion. I told him my ethical opinion. And then I stated in—you know, I have a moral reservation at this point that what’s been done to Slahi is just reprehensible, and for that reason alone, I’m going to refuse to participate in the prosecution of his case. Shortly, within a couple of days, I reduced that—those positions into writing. I provided them to the chief prosecutor. And then, after a few days, I was told to transfer that case to someone else and for me to get busy on my other cases.

Our liturgy is not “just ritual” or rote, or cute things we do on Sunday. The liturgy matters. It helps orient us theologically and ethically, and occasionally, it can be a powerful witness all by itself, to the justice and mercy of God. Sometimes it can be a sign of God’s reign in the world. Thanks be to God!

Mother Hens and Smoking Fire-Pots: A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, 2013

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One of the interesting aspects of the season of Lent for me is that my earliest and in some deepest encounters with Lent came not through the liturgical cycle of contemporary Christianity, Episcopal or otherwise, but rather because I was trained as a historian of Christianity. Lent’s roots grow deep in the Christian tradition, dating back to the practices of early Christianity. In the fourth century, and perhaps earlier, it was common practice for baptism to occur primarily at the great Vigil of Easter, the wonderful celebration of Christ’s resurrection that begins in darkness on Saturday night, and traditionally ended at the first light of Easter Day. In preparation for baptism, those who had committed themselves to undertake initiation prepared by a season of fasting and learning. Continue reading →

The American Jesus: Reflections on Djesus Uncrossed

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Conservative Christians are outraged, outraged, by the SNL parody of Tarantino films: “Djesus Uncrossed.” Yes, it’s over the top as Saturday Night Live always is. It’s in poor taste, but how could it be otherwise, since it’s parodying the tasteless violence and gore of Tarantino. Still, I love the line: critics rave “A less violent Passion of the Christ.”

And a great deal of the outrage, I suspect, is because the parody hits rather too close to home. For many American Christians the image of Jesus Christ presented in the skit is very close to their own–a violent savior who will destroy his enemies. There’s some biblical warrant for such a view:

Then I looked, and there was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like the Son of Man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand! Another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to the one who sat on the cloud, ‘Use your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.’ So the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped.  Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Then another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over fire, and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, ‘Use your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.’ So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles. (Rev 14:14-20)

Or this image from popular American Christianity:6a00d83451c45669e20134896b9de5970c-800wiAs David Henson points out:

We have tried to arm him with our military-industrial complex, drape him with our xenophobia, outfit him with our weapons, and adorn him with our nationalism. We’ve turned the cross into a flagpole for the Stars and Stripes. We have no need for Tarantino to reimagine the story of Jesus into a fantasy of violent revenge. We’ve done it for him. We’ve already uncrossed him, transforming him from a servant into a triumphalist who holds the causes and interests of our country on his back rather than brutal execution.

The SNL sketch reveals the paucity of American popular theology with its camouflage and flag-draped Bibles that segregate the story of God for American patriots only. It pulls back the curtain and shows us just how twisted our Jesus really is: We want a Savior like the one SNL offers. We want the Son of God to kick some ass and take some names. Specifically, our enemies’ names. And maybe the names of a few godless Democrats. Definitely the Muslims. And the atheists. And the … I could go on.

Christianity in America has become so intertwined with nationalism and patriotism that American conservatives have fashioned an image of Jesus Christ that conforms to their patriotism and to the cult of violence. That image is shaped by popular culture, especially by film. Note the allusion to both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in the billboard above. And just as our popular culture is wedded to the myth of redemptive violence, so too is the Jesus of conservative Christianity like the lead character in so many of our action films, leaving blood, destruction, and mayhem in his wake as he rides through the scenery.

The myth of redemptive violence and the image of Jesus in that myth has been shaped by the language and imagery of Revelation. It’s misleading for critics of that myth and that image of Jesus to deny its presence within scripture. But it’s also important to point out that the Jesus we encounter in the gospels bears no resemblance to the destructive and revenge-seeking Jesus of conservative Christianity. The Jesus of the gospels was killed by an oppressive and violent empire that bears more similarity to our own Empire, than many of the self-proclaimed followers of Jesus today bear to Jesus’ teachings and first followers.

Sure, the SNL parody was in poor taste but it also held a mirror up to the image of Jesus worshiped by much of conservative American Christianity. The more that image is exposed for the idol it is, the better.

A Smoking Fire Pot and a Flaming Torch: Lectionary Reflections on Lent 2, Year C

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This week’s readings are here.

One of my most memorable worship experiences is connected with this story from Genesis. I was still a layperson at the time, member of an Episcopal Church.  I remember looking around the congregation and as the description of the covenant ceremony was being read, catching the eyes of a parishioner on the other side of the church. Her eyes grew wider and wider, a look of puzzlement on her face. She wanted to know something about this strange story. The reading ended. The service continued, and the preacher got up and had nothing to say about it, or as I recall, any of the other lessons read that day. That experience cemented for me the conviction that one of the preacher’s greatest obligations is to engage directly the hard questions raised in or by a text.

The story tells of the covenant Yahweh made with Abram. It’s a promise by God to give Abram a son, to make of his descendants a mighty nation, and also to give to them the promised land. Although covenant is a key theme in scripture, it’s almost as strange a notion to moderns as the subsequent description of the ceremony. We might think of it as a treaty, for in many cases, biblical covenants share a great deal with ancient treaties that have been discovered. At its heart is God’s promise. As we see in this text, Abram has a hard time trusting in that promise. He wants to work out his descendants on his own (here in c. 15, later with Ishmael, too). Here, Yahweh shows him the stars in the sky, and says, “So shall your descendants be.” And in that powerful verse used later by Paul, “Abram believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

Then comes the ceremony. Abram splits animals in half, lays them out, and “a smoking fire pot and a torch passed between these pieces.” In ancient covenant ceremonies, parties to the treaty passed between similarly-killed animals and promised that if they broke the covenant, the offender would be destroyed as these animals were killed.

In this eerie story, we encounter both the otherness of the text and the otherness of God. Various details contribute to its spookiness–Abraham falls into deep sleep, there’s a terrifying darkness. The story’s ambiguity contributes to its strangeness. Does this take place in a dream, a vision?

In spite of all of that strangeness and other-ness, relics of a far distant age, there is also reassurance. There is God’s promise, and those wonderful words, Abram believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Here “righteousness” doesn’t have to do with holiness, but rather with being in right relationship with God. Whatever his doubts now or in the future,  Yahweh’s promise to Abram will remain true, and Abram will know that God is with him, and he with God.

It’s a reassuring message in Lent as well. Invited to reflect on our lives, we are also encouraged to encounter and experience God’s promise to us of salvation, and the grace that is offered us in Jesus Christ.

 

 

A word of forgiveness in Lent

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I had one of those encounters yesterday that brought me up short. A homeless guy was hanging around the church after the early service and said he wanted to talk with me. There was something concrete I could help him with, but then he began telling me his story, telling me what burdened him. Many years ago, he had done something terrible to another human being and for all that time, his actions and what resulted from them preyed on him. He told me that he had asked God for forgiveness many times over the years, but that he couldn’t be sure he had been forgiven. We talked and prayed, and at the end of our meeting, I said the words of absolution while laying my hands on him:

Almighty God, have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, keep you in eternal life. Amen.

As I said them, I prayed that he might hear those words as words of consolation and forgiveness, words of assurance of God’s love for him. I hoped they could be words of comfort in the midst of a difficult life and at the end of a long road. As I said them, I thought of the Great Litany that we had recited earlier that morning. I thought too of Ash Wednesday with its litany of penitence. Ash Wednesday and Lent are times when we are encouraged to reflect on ourselves, our sins and shortcomings, repent of them, and seek God’s forgiveness. All of that can be hard work. It’s difficult to be honest with oneself, to admit one’s humanity, weaknesses, and faults. It’s difficult to repent of them—to say, yes, I’m sorry I’m that way, or that I’ve done those things. I’m sorry I continue to do them. It’s hard to lay oneself bare before oneself or before God.

But it’s also hard to ask for and accept God’s forgiveness. Sometimes that word of forgiveness is lost in the midst of our own pain and self-loathing. Sometimes the grace of forgiveness seems overwhelmed by our own suffering and the suffering we have inflicted on others. Sometimes, God’s forgiveness seems impossible. Sometimes we resist the amazing grace offered by God. Do the words of absolution, the offer of God’s forgiveness come as words of good news and grace in the midst of our lives? When we resist them, how can we open ourselves to the possibility that through God’s grace and love, we might experience new life in Christ?

The message of Ash Wednesday and Lent can be hard indeed, but harder still for us to hear and receive may be the message of God’s forgiveness. Lent should also be a time when our goal should be to experience that message fully. It should be a time when we open ourselves to the joy of God’s grace.

He was tempted in every way as we are–A Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, 2013

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I often wonder what visitors think when they visit an Episcopal church like Grace on the First Sunday of Lent. Actually, I often wonder what most members or regular attenders think when they come to Grace today. We have endured the oldest piece of liturgy written in the English language—the Great Litany, with its comprehensive list of petitions on behalf of everything and everyone under the sun. We have chanted and prayed at length, listened to readings, and now finally you’re settling in for a few minutes of respite from what will be six weeks of relentless reminders of our humanity, sinfulness, and need for repentance. Is it any wonder some people give up church for Lent? Continue reading →

Why priests? Ask Garry Wills, but don’t ask a priest

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Randall Balmer’s review (BTW, he’s an Episcopal priest):

Central to the priestly claims to authority, Wills says, was the importance of the sacraments, especially celebration of the eucharist, which could be performed, the church declared, only by priests. “The most striking thing about priests, in the later history of Christianity,” the author writes, “is their supposed ability to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”

This exclusivity, according to Wills, derives from Thomas Aquinas rather than Jesus. The Thomistic view of the eucharist understands the Mass as re-enacting the sacrifice of Christ, from which all other graces devolve to the believer. The church, following Aquinas, vested the power of transubstantiation — the bread and wine of holy communion actually becomes the body and blood of Christ — in the priesthood. With that magical power, the priesthood increasingly set itself apart from the laity.

Kevin Madigan’s review in The New Republic (he’s not a priest, he’s a historian of Christianity):

Although the Catholic Church has for centuries maintained the opposite position, it is simply false—from an historical perspective—to assert that Jesus instituted the priesthood. Not only was Jesus not a member of the priestly class; it is simply anachronistic to say that any of Jesus’ apostles were imagined in priestly terms, either by Jesus or the apostles themselves.

I remember many years ago when I was lecturing on organization in early Christianity at the School of Theology at Sewanee, and said something like “presbyteroi–whatever that means” and 23 first-year students shouted back at me “priest”–to which I replied, “tell that to Calvin.”

I doubt I’ll read Wills’ book, but my guess is, he’s probably right on. The understanding of priesthood in the western church is directly related to the elevation of the understanding of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. As Ballmer points out, Luther offered a powerful critique of that view from early in his career, one that continues to challenge our understanding of priesthood and the sacraments. It’s part of the reason why he was so opposed to an understanding of the mass that involved sacrifice. For Anglicans, that we’ve retained the language of the sacrifice helps to explain why we continue to lift up the office of the priest, but we might well ask whether there are downsides to it.