All that Belongs to Him

“The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.”  St. Mark 10:39

Jesus often spoke in phrases heavy with meaning.  He used images freighted with symbolic power, ambiguous turns of phrase that force the listener to slow down and consider.  Meditation--a word that comes from the Latin for what a cow does with her cud-- is not merely a pious practice.  We must often chew long on these phrases to draw out their full meaning. 

That can be difficult for us in a world where people try to conduct national policy debates in 280 characters or less.  By and large, we long for the single-page memo, the objective facts distilled out from the spin, the bullet points drained of their adjectives. Many of us seem to be drowning in a sea of words as it is. We don’t think we have time for beautiful rhetoric or the probing syllables of poetry. 

But we can miss a great deal if we rushly too quickly to the point, especially when the words spoken to us are about those things at the core of our existence. 

Zeal and Patience, Part IV

Originally published on Covenant, 19 July, 2017

A similar uncertainty surrounds the affirmations about our essential unity of belief regarding the Holy Eucharist. It is true that This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion affirms “the real, personal, and living presence of Jesus” in the sacramental elements (though “in temporal and relational terms”). However, assorted practices surrounding the celebration and administration of Holy Communion in United Methodist Churches stand at some tension with this claim, as they deviate so seriously from historical norms.

Much of the online discussion has centered on whether the Methodist requirement that Holy Communion be celebrated with “the pure, unfermented juice of the grape” can be squared with the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’s that the Holy Communion be “ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him.” More serious is the nearly universal United Methodist practice of admitting the unbaptized to Communion and the widespread authorization for celebrating Holy Communion by licensed local (unordained) pastors.

Only One Lord

“They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy.”  Hebrews 11:37-38

They stared out from the frescoes on the walls that faced toward the large baptismal font, their eyes determined, confident, serene. The bodies of the saints, wrapped in the vestments of archbishops and abbots, were static and grand, timeless like the figures in most Orthodox ikons.  But there was something unusual in their faces—an unexpected wrinkle here, a drooping eyelid there.  Was that the mark of a scar? 

I asked the guide about them.  They were, in fact, portraits, he said.  Father Cyprian, the master iconographer, had known these men.  He’d done the faces himself.  The saints were leaders of his own time.  Some had been his friends.  Perhaps he’d served alongside some of them at the Divine Liturgy, or they’d sat in the shade to share a glass together on a summer’s afternoon, back before the awful civil war and the ransacking of the monasteries, back when mother Russia was a land of monks and holy men. 

They were the modern martyrs, the guide said, they’d given their lives for the Gospel in that bloodiest of centuries, the twentieth.  The Communists had sent them to glory with the machine gun and the hand-grenade.  Father Cyprian had escaped, and along with the scattered remnants of several other religious houses, he’d helped to found this monastery, Holy Trinity, in the wilds of central New York State. 

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

“So you also must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” 

Romans 6:11

“Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”  We have been waiting six weeks to hear those words, and only just now we proclaimed them, and the lights went on, and we sang a hymn of praise, and read the Easter Gospel.  Alleluia, for Christ is risen!  “Praise to the Lord,” that’s what it means, “Praise to the Lord.”  It’s the same in both English and Spanish, because it comes from Hebrew, the language of God’s ancient people.  It’s the shout of victory, the joyful song of the redeemed.  “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”

Adrienn, our new musician here, has so graciously stepped in to play for us tonight.  And besides her excellent work on the piano and with the choirs, she is an instrumentalist, a teacher of strings.  Because she’s a violinist, she knows a great deal about fugues.  Fugues are musical selections in which a given theme, stated at the beginning, is repeated in a seemingly endless series of variations.  Bach wrote some of the finest ones, and occasionally we hear one as a postlude on Sunday morning.   As we repeat the theme in a fugue, we gradually become aware of dimensions and possibilities within the original melody that we hadn’t noticed before.  The melody comes to take on a new kind of life, with increasing complexity and power.  And as the fugue unfolds, the pace speeds up and grows louder, until it settles on a great resounding chord, all the stops pulled, a sound as big as glory.  That’s what tonight is all about.  It’s all one grand fugue, this Easter Vigil, and here’s the melody: “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” 

Lullaby at the Font

“Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.”  Isaiah 43:4.

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,

Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.

If that mockingbird won’t sing,

Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.

If that diamond ring turns brass,

Papa’s going to buy you a looking glass.

And on it goes, that lullaby, with its gentle tale of generosity, abundance, and love.  It’s a good song to sing to a child, isn’t it?  What it says is this: I love you more than anything in the whole world.  I would give anything to make you happy.  You have nothing to fear, because I care for you.  All will be well. 

It’s a lovely song, one that sets a child’s life on the assurance of a parent’s love, the most solid place of all for a child to stand.  I would guess it was first sung by a poor man, to a baby wrapped in blankets a little too thin.  Men who know the price of diamonds don’t go on about giving them to babies.  There’s something of hope in it, the promise that it will all work out some way, that in the end, there will be grace.

For Meditation: Fire and Spirit

In Your Bread there is hidden the Spirit who is not consumed, in Your Wine there dwells the fire that is not drunk: the Spirit is in Your Bread, the Fire in Your Wine--a manifest wonder, that our lips have received.  

To the angels who are spiritual Abraham brought food for the body, and they ate.  The new miracle is that our mighty Lord has given to bodily man fire and Spirit to eat and to drink. 

See, Fire and Spirit are in the womb of her who bore you, see, Fire and Spirit are in the river in which you were baptized.  Fire and Spirit are in our baptismal font, in the Bread and Cup are Fire and Holy Spirit.

Ephrem the Syrian, qtd. in Bryan Spinks, Do This In Remembrance of Me.  (2013), 80. 

The "Real Doctor's" Message

“And [God] gave skill to human beings that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.”

Sirach 38: 6

“Down in Guatemala,” he told me, “I had to be a real doctor, and it scared the heck out of me.”  Now don’t get me wrong, according to the standards of the American Medical Association and the licensing agencies of his rather lucrative specialty, my parishioner was very much a real doctor.  He had been in practice for decades and was highly regarded in our community, sought out by people in need of surgery.  But things were different, he was telling me, when he went to Guatemala on a medical mission trip with his son’s church. 

They were working in a remote area, with very minimal equipment, you see.  There were no MRI machines and it was a day’s journey over rugged roads for an x-ray.  They could do simple blood tests, and had a few diagnostic tools, and some basic medicines but that was about it.  My parishioner said he had learned all about diagnosis back in medical school, but it was so much easier just to run a test and be sure.  Here in Guatemala, he had to listen to the stories, mark just how people described their symptoms.  It was really challenging work, and he wasn’t certain about a few of the cases he had seen.  There were some maladies he just couldn’t treat. 

Malpractice insurance companies, of course, don’t tolerate this much guesswork here, and that’s probably a good thing.  But it was interesting to me that my parishioner didn’t think of his work within these narrow limits as useless.   “A real doctor,” that’s what he called himself, someone stretched to use all his ingenuity, to listen more carefully, to treat the whole person and not just the symptoms.  He left that time in Guatemala a bit wistful about the more accurate and lucrative way he practiced medicine the rest of the year, and anxious to get back again to a place where he really do justice to his profession.

Commentary: Four Books of Contemporary Liturgical Theology

From The Living Church, Sept 20, 2015

Within Christ’s sadly fractured body, it has been some consolation for the past few generations that at least the liturgists could sing from the same hymnal.  The convictions and priorities of the Liturgical Movement have reshaped the Sunday gatherings of most Christians across the Western world, drawing us together through the use of shared texts, calendars and lectionaries, as well as a common emphasis on active lay participation. 

The Second Vatican Council’s liturgical reforms reclaimed the centrality of baptism, simplified ceremonial and symbolism and exalted early Christian liturgies as a model for contemporary use.  The Roman Catholic Church’s revised liturgies, which debuted fifty years ago decisively shaped a wave of new liturgical resources throughout mainline Protestantism, including the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer (1979).  With perhaps the sole exception of biblical studies among the other theological disciplines, liturgical scholars have been educated together and continued in dialogue across confessional borders, working together to institute change within their respective church bodies. 

But that longstanding consensus is clearly beginning to fray.  The grand promises about reformed liturgy’s capacity to reenergize Christian mission and catechesis have worn thin in the advancing days of secularism.  Historical scholarship has undermined earlier confidence about unified patterns of liturgy within the early Church.  Texts, music, and aesthetic idioms that were exciting and innovative 50 years ago now largely seem banal and gauche.   Roman Catholicism’s most recent liturgical developments have been oriented toward reclaiming Latinity, while mainline Protestants have consistently pushed the envelope in the direction of inclusivity, stressing pastoral concerns.  Evangelicalism’s relative growth has popularized casual and emotive forms of worship untouched by the Liturgical Movement’s influence.  

Master of the Unruly Sea: Sermon for Pentecost IV

“And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."  St. Mark 4:39

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The monument stood right at the waterfront, eight columns of black granite, each year followed by name upon name.  A central column was marked with words taken from today’s Psalm: "Dedicated to the memory of those who have gone down to the sea in ships and who have never returned and as a tribute to those who continue to occupy their business in the great waters."  The small city of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where we vacationed a few summers ago, faces onto the North Atlantic.  With a fine harbor, its wealth has long lay in the region’s cod fisheries, the world’s most abundant for many generations. 

But the sea takes its toll, as those who live on it and by it know better than the rest of us.  Fortunes have been made on the waters, but they have brought awful tragedy as well.  I expect there was a member of every one of Lunenburg’s old families carved on one of those granite columns.  He might have been a seasoned helmsman or maybe a fresh-faced boy who found himself in the wrong place when the ever-unpredictable sea showed its full fury.   Even today, every sailor who goes down to the dock passes by those names—a somber warning of the perils that may lay ahead.  The fisherman must learn to respect the sea, to know his place before it.  It’s no wonder that all the ancient pagans had a god of the sea—and a fierce one at that. 

For Meditation: Jesus is Angling for You

From my morning reading--Cyril of Jerusalem, quoted in John Laurence's The Sacrament of the Eucharist.  

"Perhaps you did not know whither you were coming or in what kind of net you are taken.  You have come within the nets of the church.  Be taken alive and flee not.  For Jesus is angling for you, not in order to kill, but by killing to make you alive.  For you must die and rise again."  (20).

Marked Forever: A Sermon for Easter IV

“I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”  St. John 10:14-15

            “It may well be the only tattoo that pays for itself” read the boldly colored sign.  Last Sunday my family and I were down in North Carolina for my college reunion.  We met up with some friends for lunch at Bull City Burger and Brew, one of Durham’s many new hipster eateries.  The poster on the bathroom wall was advertising the restaurant’s latest marketing campaign, a partnership with a neighboring tattoo parlor.  A Bull City Burger logo tattooed on your body (in one of the authorized forms, measuring at least three inches in diameter) would get you a 25% discount on all burger orders, for the rest of your life.  A new frontier in advertising, perhaps—certainly more staying power than a Facebook ad.  I walked out of the bathroom, scanning the biceps of my fellow patrons, to see if any had decided to take the plunge.

            Of course, when you begin looking around at any establishment that serves a mostly younger crowd, you will see plenty of tattoos.  The most recent stats I discovered indicate that 21% of American adult admit to having a tattoo and the totals for people my age, in their thirties, go up to 38%, nearly 2 in 5.[1]  Tattoo parlors show more growth than nearly any other kind of retail establishment.  Long gone are the days when only bikers and sailors got inked, and increasing numbers of women, professionals and celebrities have gone under the needle in recent years.