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. 

The Most Natural Burden

“Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”  Exodus 20:12

I lost my two remaining grandparents last year.  There was nothing particularly dramatic or unexpected about their deaths.  They departed this life after extended struggles with disease and debility, looking ahead in hope.  They died holding the hands of their children.  

My mother and her siblings were alongside them through so much of the dramatic change, and it’s been moving for me to watch this from the sidelines.  For them it was a year of sitting in dozens of doctor’s offices, heating up dinner, writing out notes to guide confused minds, sorting the bills, arranging a last family picnic on a sunny July day.

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.” 

The faith of an alto: remembering Grandma

“Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night within his temple.”  Revelation 7:15       

Grandma was an alto.  I learned this when I joined the choir as a ten year old, before my voice changed.  Mom placed me on the second row, between grandma and grandpap.  The joke was that this was for the sake of public order.  It took advantage of the fact that grandpap could only hear well in his right ear.  It kept me at a bit of a distance from those other tenors and basses who always had a joke to tell at the wrong moment.  But really, I think, it was so I would learn from grandma what it meant to be part of a choir.

Altos don’t get to sing the melody, like the sopranos, and they aren’t generally given dramatic leaps or catchy rhythms like basses.  They hold the middle voice and keep the beat.  Sometimes they will sing pretty much the same note for whole lines of music.  The other voices rise and fall, but altos are steadfast, anchoring the other members of the choir and drawing them together into a sound that is all the richer and more vibrant for their humble contribution. 

There isn’t any choral singing without altos—just lots of performers vying for attention, delighted in the sound of their own voices.  The blend is the truly beautiful thing about choral singing.  It relies on listening to each other, and requires that some must take the humbler place, offering their best as a form of service to the whole, giving what they have in love that does not seek for recognition or honor. 

Ponder: true justice is the fruit of bounty

"A curious thing happens to the spokesman of justice in this parable.  He is accused of envy.  What a reply to one convinced that he has suffered an injustice!  Instead of hearing as he expected, that untamperable right will be restored, he must learn that his real motive for intervening was inferior!  Yet if we accept Scripture as God's holy word, we learn a strange rule about human nature: that when it becomes necessary to invoke justice, that irreproachable value and crystalline motive, almost always something is rotten in Denmark.  To often 'justice' is used as a mask for quite different things.

Human justice is highly problematical.  It is something a man should strive for but not lean upon.  Perhaps we come closest to the true sense of the New Testament if we say that genuine justice is not the beginning but the end, and the other justice so pompously displayed as the fundament of morality is a dubious thing.  True justice is the fruit of bounty, and practicable by man only after he has been initiated into the school of divine love where he has learned to see people as they really are, himself included.  Before one can be just, one must learn to love."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 261.

The Man of Pride

“Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”  Exodus 1:8

There are seventeen people named in the first section of the book of Exodus, from which today’s Old Testament lesson is taken. The author of the book, which we will be reading from on Sundays for most of the next three months, does a fine job of setting up his story.  He begins with Jacob, the last of the great patriarchs, who resettled his family in Egypt.  He gives the names of all twelve of his sons, from whom Israel’s tribes are descended.  He recounts the birth of Moses, the eventual hero of the story.  His older sister, Miriam is named, and we’re even introduced to Shiprah and Puah, the midwives who delivered him.  Seventeen people are named, but the narrator can’t quite recall just who was king in Egypt.

 This is certainly intentional, and highly ironical.[1]  Because the king of Egypt—probably the Pharaoh Rameses II—was undoubtedly the most important man in the world at the time.  He held absolute power in the world’s most aggressive state.  He was owner of all property in the world’s wealthiest state.  The art and literature of the world’s most advanced culture celebrated his exploits.  If he was, in fact, Rameses II, he had a harem so large that he left behind at his death a hundred sons and fifty daughters, whose descendants formed a social class, the Ramesids, that dominated Egyptian society for decades after his death.[2]  He was worshipped as a god in life, and a massive monument honored him in death.  His was not a name anyone of his time could forget.  But to the narrator, he is simply “a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” 

Ponder: "the secret of thanksgiving"

“If the soul very early learnt to say, ‘thank God,’ its troubles would be almost at an end.  There is a homely principle, if a motor skids, turn it in that direction.  If when troubles come, we turn them into thanksgiving our soul returns to balance at once. There will be sweetness, strength, honey in the mouth of the lion. There is no greater secret than the secret of thanksgiving, even thanksgiving for everything except our failures.  Even then, we may thank God for the humiliation failures bring.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 56.

The Gift of Limits

“God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty…That no flesh should glory in his presence.”  I Corinthians 1:25, 27

A few days after I accepted the call to serve as your rector, I met up with Kathleen Alexander for some orientation to our new home.  Just before I left, she told me that she had some reading material for me—and I’ll say she did.  She presented me with a stuffed jumbo-sized three-ring binder entitled, “The New Century Project,” circa 1998.  This was followed by a tall ream of printed sheets.  These were the collected comments from your rector search survey and a transcription of all that had been written on newsprint sheets posted around Saint Francis Hall at a big parish meeting held just about a year ago.

I went home and dutifully set to work, and I read it all.  And as you would expect, there was a great deal of continuity.  At the beginning and end of nearly two decades marked by great change, the people of Saint Francis placed their central focus on faithful Anglican worship, beautiful traditional music and inspired preaching.  Then and now, you wanted to learn together, to grow in your relationships with each other, to form the young, and to serve the poor.  Of course, many of the people who were leading the projects and making the comments were the same, a remarkable thing in a part of the world where everything often seems to be in flux.

But there were also great differences. 

A Taste of What Could Be

“This will give you an opportunity to testify… for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  St. Luke 21:13-14

The senior warden and I were having lunch a few weeks ago over at the Hunter’s Inn, and I asked the waiter if the reuben was any good.  I am, you see, a one sandwich man, and that sandwich is the reuben.  If it’s Friday, I’ll have the fish and, on occasion, the special.  But if I’m out for lunch, it’s usually a reuben.  If I’m to live here for many years to come, I need to figure out who serves the best reuben in Potomac. 

So, I asked the waiter the important question: “is the reuben any good?”  And he was that rare bird, the waiter of probity.  He answered me, “Well, people like it.  But I’m from New York, and they toast it here instead of grilling it.  It’s just not the same.” 

And I thought to myself, I know just what he means.  Because I, too, have been to New York, even unto Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where they make reubens of Biblical proportion. 

Ponder: "Cynicism is always a practical failure."

“Christians will not quite be able to agree with President Obama’s statement that we are all Americans first. But Christians in our country are at least Americans second, and we should strive to be good ones as the president has urged, by presuming the good faith of our fellow citizens and seeking common ground whenever and wherever these may be had. Prescinding from the process, perhaps to keep our hands clean, is not helpful, and cynicism is always a practical failure, rooted in spiritual despair.

These are, in fact, Christian encouragements that we should know well and be expert in exemplifying, modern political democracy being, after all, a Christian bequest to the secular world in the wake of our own wars of religion and recrimination. The school of Christian unity-in-truth, indeed the gospel itself, includes politics properly practiced in the classical sense, and in the sense presumed by our commitment and call to good order, governance, and shared faith (see Eph. 4).

It would be hard to think of a better theme for the season of Advent, which inculcates preparation for the promised apocalypse of our Lord: the final revelation and unveiling of his return, judgment, and right ordering of all things. As Scripture and our tradition teach, these are always upon us, in this time between the times, and they form our faith and hope for both justice and mercy. Their practical payoff is due “fear” that leads to humility and awe in the face of our fleeting and fragile lives; repentance for our sins, not shifting blame to others (Luke 18:9-14); resolve to remain focused on the most important, ultimate concerns; and the commitment to living faithfully in the interim, that is, with courage, joy, and confidence in the promises of God.”

Christopher Wells, “Come, Lord Jesus; Get Back to Work.”  Covenant. 11 Nov. 2016

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. 

Ponder: "Thou didst stumble to a throne"

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. 

“Jesus of the Scars” by Edward Shillito, qtd. in Liz Hoare, “A Reflection on Philippians 2:1-18.”

"Get your butt in church"

“Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.” St. Luke 10:5-6

Sally[1] was our most effective evangelist at a parish where I once served.  She would warn me ahead of time when she was bringing another one with her.   I’d walk into the chancel Sunday morning and look back at her pew, on the aisle halfway down the right side, and see a new face.  The newcomer might be slightly puzzled, a little uncertain; but also glad to be right next to someone who obviously knew what she was doing.  Most every time the bishop came, Sally would present a candidate or two for confirmation, someone she’d walked alongside in the journey to faith, another person who had found peace with God and the gift of new life. 

Sally had no advanced degrees in theology.  I couldn’t even get her to come to Bible study.  She was a humble woman, without great wealth or social power.  She had what I secretly regarded as one of the most unpromising opening lines in the history of evangelism.  I heard her use it at least twice, and winced a bit both times.  She would look people right in the eye, sigh a bit, and simply say, “you need to get your butt in church.”  You should know that this phrase is not from the New Testament, and I’m sure it’s not recommended by the Episcopal Church’s canon for evangelism.  But over and over again, through the unseen work of the Holy Spirit, Sally said it and it worked. 

Sally had more than her share of opportunities to use that line in her job.  For much of my time as her rector, she was a waitress at Frank’s,[2] a diner much loved by locals, because it was about the only restaurant in our tourist town that stayed open all year round.  When you suffer through an upstate New York winter, it’s not hard to become very loyal to the one place that serves bacon cheeseburgers the second week of February. 

Ponder: "withdraws itself for our good"

"But sometimes, whilst the mind is sustained with the plenitude and richness of a gift so large, if it enjoys uninterrupted security in these things, it forgets from what source it has them, and imagines that it derives from itself, which it sees to be never wanting to it.  Hence it is that this same grace sometimes withdraws itself for our good, and shews the presumptuous mind how weak it is in itself.  For then we really learn whence our good qualities proceed, when, by seemingly losing them, we are made sensible that they are never preserved by our own efforts.  And so, for the purpose of tutoring us in humility, it very often happens that, when the crisis of temptation is upon us, such extreme folly comes down upon our wisdom, that the mind, being dismayed, knows nothing how to meet the evils that are threatened, or how to make ready against temptation."
Gregory the Great, Morals in Job, II.78.

Ponder: "by his patience, laid low the cruel one"

"Thus blessed Job, when stricken with the loss of his substance and with the death of his children, forasmuch as he turned the force of his anguish into praise of his Creator, exclaiming The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away; as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done; blessed be the Name of the Lord: by his humility, struck down the enemy in his pride, and by his patience, laid low the cruel one.  Let us never imagine that our combatant received wounds and yet inflicted none.  For whatever words of patience he gave forth to the praise of God, when he was stricken, he as it were hurled so many darts into the breast of his adversary, and inflicted much sorer wounds than he underwent, for by his affliction he lost the things of earth, but by bearing his affliction with humility, he multiplied his heavenly blessings."
Gregory the Great, Morals in Job, II.21

Ponder: alive until the end.

Creation calls for self-surrender,
Not loud noise and cheap success.
Life must be lived without false face,
Lived so that in the final count
We draw unto ourselves love from space.

So plunge yourself into obscurity
And conceal there your tracks.
But be alive, alive your full share,
Alive until the end.

Boris Pasternak

I believe in the Catholic Church

“Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven… and each one heard them speaking in his own language.  And they were amazed and wondered, saying, “How is it that...we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." Acts 2:5-6, 11

Theologian Brian McLaren wrote a noted book a few years ago with this very wordy subtitle: “Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.”[1]  He’s not schizophrenic, I think.  And I don’t think that he had a particularly checkered history of joining different churches.  He was just trying to make a point about how the truth about God and Christ often transcends the divisions and labels we like to use.  I think he could have saved plenty of ink if he had just titled his book, “why I am a Catholic Christian.” 

If he had used that subtitle, though, plenty of people would have misunderstood him.  They would have expected chapters on the pope and prayer to the saints and purgatory and all sorts of other things that he wasn’t prepared to discuss in his book.  In the minds of many people, Catholic means only one branch of the church, the branch more properly called “The Holy Roman Church.” 

Ponder: "a dramatic climax"

"Some of the watchers were drooping from weariness, but not one showed any wish to go home.  Watching beside a death-bed was not a hardship for them, but a privilege,--in the case of a dying priest it was a distinction.
In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance.  It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene.  Among the watchers there was always the hope that the dying man might reveal something of what he alone could see; that his countenance, if not his lips, would speak, and on his features would fall some light or shadow from beyond.  The "Last Words" of great men, Napoleon, Lord Byron, were still printed in gift-books, and the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were listened to and treasured for their neighbours and kins-folk.  These sayings, no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance, and pondered by those who must one day go the same road."
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 169-170

Ponder: Doubt a little of his own infallibility

“Perhaps all of us, and especially Trump, could take a page from history, from the words of Benjamin Franklin after the writing of a new Constitution.  The debate had been hot and heavy.  There were deep feelings on all sides, and many were expressing strong reservations about signing it.  In calling for ratification, Franklin said, ‘On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Were we to doubt a little of our own infallibility, perhaps we might find it within ourselves to listen, to give a little more care to viewpoints that differ from ours, expressing the hope that those who voice them care just as much for and believe just as firmly and fervently in their causes as we do in ours.  We might find the gift if a solution.”

William Brock, The U.S. Political Devolution.”  The Washington Post 11 Dec. 2015, A25

Ponder: A clear alternative that demands we all grow up

Yale’s Halloween costume hubbub is not specifically about Christianity; but it is about community. The wisdom of the Benedict Option for this situation is in its unwavering insistence that cultural trends are only going in one direction, and if you want safety and flourishing, the Church is your best bet. We, as Saint Benedict did, are looking out on a world that is eating itself alive. We pity it and we pray for it. We remain cheerful, equipped with the armor of light. We offer a clear alternative that demands we all grow up. We define ourselves by the light of the Gospel, and we bend our knee to the king of kings. In obedience to his gracious rule, we find both our safety and our self-worth. In the hard work of true diversity within the body of Christ, we learn humility. We strengthen what we have by common prayer and faith in action. We expect our communities to grow. And we wait."
Andrew Petiprin, "The Benedict Option and Yale."  Covenant, 4 Dec. 2015