Not Changing the World

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?”  St. Matthew 25:37

“Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Change the World.”  For some years this was the official tagline of the Episcopal Church, the slogan you would see on the denominational website, the mantra repeated by the Presiding Bishop at official gatherings.  Under the leadership of our current presiding bishop, Michael Curry, the new tagline is, “The Jesus Movement.” But the “change the world” language does get trotted out from time to time.  It has an enduring to stir people’s hearts and to get them thinking big about the implications of following Jesus Christ in the life of the Church.

Some of you will know that Fr. Mac and I do a fair amount of writing for The Living Church’s Covenant blog, and this week there was a compelling article by our friend Dan Martins, the Bishop of Springfield, about this slogan, “Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Change the World.[1]”  Bishops Martins acknowledged, “It’s catchy, it’s memorable, and you can’t really argue with it without sounding hopelessly curmudgeonly.” 

Sharing the Word of Life: New Technology in the Church

From the Sounds of St. Francis, September, 2017

Then another book was opened, which is the book of life.”  Revelation 20:12

The Book of Revelation is perhaps the Bible’s most dramatic and mysterious section.  Revelation 20 recounts the climax of the story, the great Day of Judgement, when our Lord will return to speak the truth upon all humanity and make all things new.  It’s easy to miss the fact that the author is also noting a significant change in communications technology.  The Lamb, that is Christ, has a book, a book of life—a book, and not a scroll.

Books—codices is the technical name-were new-wave technology in the first century.  The first mention of a codex in literature is by the Roman poet Martial, who was born a few years after the death of Christ.  Before codices there had been tablets of wax and clay, as well as scrolls.  The codex was a handy technology.  Its covers protected the contents and it was easy to find one’s place.  The paper could be written on both sides, so it was more economical as well.

It took the codex a few centuries to surpass the scroll.  Religious officials were inevitably among the holdouts, with their preferences for the venerable, the beautiful, and the familiar.  In synagogues today, they still read the Torah from scrolls. 

But Christians were different. 

"A Birth Like Death": A Sermon for Epiphany

“And being warned of God a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” 

St. Matthew 2:12

Two different couples my wife and I know well have become parents for the first time in the last few weeks.  It’s been exciting to watch this very special time unfold in their lives, as they find themselves changing in ways they could never have understood.  One of the new dads told me the other day that he was supposed to head out of town for a conference next month.  But he just didn’t know if he could handle being away from his son for that long, that long being three days.

Our friends find love and joy drawn out of them in new ways, even as the demands of an infant bring all sorts of complications to the relatively well-ordered lives they had been leading before.  Enterprising, well-educated people aren’t used to having responsibility for creatures who cry and cry, but don’t give the slightest indication about what they really need.

Sleeping schedules, meal times, ways of socializing, eventually the furniture and the layout of the house—everything must be altered to accommodate the baby’s needs. “Having a baby changes everything.”  We told them this before, and they nodded politely, as you do at those transitions in life when everyone seems to feel entitled to pose as an advice columnist.  But now I’ve heard it from their lips as well.  I’ve seen that knowing look in their eyes.

Keeping the Cradle

“With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant.”  Ecclesiasticus 44:11

For the last two weeks, our life at the beautifully renovated Saint Francis rectory has been pretty well hemmed in by cardboard boxes, packing tape and picture hangers.  We’re delighted to be here, but not really settled yet.  Moving is a chore of many agonies, as most of you will know well. 

But it has the advantage of forcing us to take stock, to declutter, to start again with a little less baggage than we were carrying before.  We pulled out some clothes that are too small for Peter, our five-year-old.  We figured out which Tupperware pieces really didn’t have lids and which socks were never to be matched again.

But we kept the cradle.  Even though it gets underfoot in the guest bedroom. Even though we don’t necessarily expect a third. Even though I’m mildly nervous I might come home one day to find our poor dog bundled in blankets inside it.

It was a gift from a kind, shy old man, Bud Miner, a member of Saint Paul’s Church in Sharpsburg, Maryland, the country parish where I first served as a rector.  Bud made it out of walnut in the little shed behind his house, polished it until it shone brightly and carved an M on the outside of the footboard.  It was presented to us at the end of the shower given for us by the good ladies of the ECW a few weeks before Philip was born.  Bud died years ago, not long after we sent him a picture of Peter being rocked in it, as his brother had been before. 

The cradle is beautiful on its own, and it’s beautiful as a sign of the love extended to us by the people at Saint Paul’s.  It may not be practical, and I expect the organizing gurus would tell us to snap a picture on the smartphone and move on.  But we keep it as a reminder of the good things of the past and our hopes for the future.  

Right Place, Right Time, Missing the Point

Roger was lounging in the lobby as I checked into the Hotel Sandy, a cheap hostel just down the street from Rome’s Termini Station.  It was nearly suppertime, and he was yawning and stretching, as if he’d just woken up.  I asked him if he knew where to find a good pizza, and in a high-pitched New Zealand accent, he said he knew just the place if he could come with me. 

We were unlikely dining companions: me, an earnest theology student, making my rounds of the shrines and ancient ruins; Roger, an accomplished carouser, wandering from club to club until the break of dawn.  He woke up just in time for supper.  But somehow, it worked.  For five days, every evening we’d meet again in the lobby and head out for pasta, and share what we’d been discovering in the Eternal City.

The fourth night, Roger announced he would be leaving soon, and wanted some advice on what he really needed to see.  His pious Catholic grandmother had suggested Rome, it seems, hoping it might nudge him a bit in the right direction, and he didn’t want to turn up in her parlor entirely empty-handed. 

 He needed to see the Sistine Chapel, I insisted. 

To Completion--A Sermon for Pentecost V

“It is best for you now to complete what a year ago you began not only to do but to desire, so that your readiness in desiring it may be matched by your completing it out of what you have.”

  II Corinthians 8:10-11

As you would expect, there has been quite a bit of sorting going on in the Rectory these past few weeks.  We will move to our new and much smaller home in Virginia next week, and we’re using the situation to draw a clear line between the things we really need and those we can do without.  We’ve plumbed the depths of the cellar and the dusty corners of the attic, and pulled down all those boxes from the highest shelves of the closet.  And it’s amazing what you find in the process.

I’ve uncovered the relics of so many abandoned past projects.  There was a box of papers from my plan to write a proper scholarly history of my hometown, and cross-country skis and poles to go with those bindings I never bought.  There were bottles, tubes and corks from my summer as a home winemaker; Thackston’s Introduction to Syriac, and the list goes on and on.  I can hold these things in my hands and remember how excited I was to begin the project they represent: that crisp January day skiing around the golf course, picking and pressing all those fragrant mulberries, my hopes for new discoveries in early Christian liturgy.  But of course, over time, things became more difficult.  I gathered dozens of pages of notes for my history, but couldn’t find a unifying argument.  I produced wine from six different fruits, and it was uniformly undrinkable—no matter what color, it tasted exactly like musty Kool-Aid.  To my untrained eye, four of the letters of the Syriac alphabet looked identical, which makes getting through the sentences in the second lesson almost impossible.