Bearing with Us

And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

Genesis 9:16

My uncle told me recently that he’s in the market for an alternator—or maybe it was a fuel pump or a carburetor.  I’m not so good with that sort of thing.  He’s been scanning eBay and reading collectors’ magazines, because you can’t just call up NAPA to ask them to order you one. 

He’s restoring his grandfather’s 1947 Packard, and the old one has given way.  It’s at least the second time he’s had to overhaul with that old car, and he said he’s wondering if it’s really worth all the fuss.  It’s not quite old enough to be valuable, and it really isn’t all that stunning, the chariot of a second-rate insurance salesman.  It’s never been all that reliable, and I think you can guess what the gas mileage is like. 

He Remembers We Are But Dust

Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves;

they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them.  Exodus 34:7-8

Last week, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.  Thaler will go down in history as the man who slew homo economicus. 

If it’s been awhile since Econ.101, you might not remember that homo economicus was that mysterious creature that sprung fully formed from the brain of classical economists: the person who made all his decisions based on careful calculation and enlightened self-interest.  Homo economicus would plan carefully for retirement by setting aside savings early to benefit from compound interest.  If the price of gasoline dropped, he would use the discount in other areas of life instead of buying more expensive gasoline. He will value his own possessions accurately and sell them if there is an opportunity for gains. 

Richard Thaler suspected that many people were not quite so logical.  So he started asking them, conducting studies.  What he found is that people are predictably irrational about their economic decisions.  They make different choices when they are afraid, or when they have developed attachments.  They maintain habits even when they are destructive. They spring for the quick pleasure and ignore the long term need.

Human beings are not as strong, wise or noble as economists had expected they were.  

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.

Ponder: the spacious dome of mercy

"Justice is good.  It is the foundation of existence.  But there is something higher than justice, the bountiful widening of the heart to mercy.  Justice is clear, but one step further and it becomes cold.  Mercy is genuine, heartfelt; when backed by character, it warms and redeems.  Justice regulates, orders existence; mercy creates.  Justice satisfies the mind that all is as it should be, but from mercy leaps the joy of creative life.  That is why it is written that heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over a hundred just who have no need of it.  High above all the stupidity and evil of mankind arches the spacious dome of mercy."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 259.

Love and Reason

“And the LORD said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Genesis 25:23

What does she see in him?  Surely, like me, you’ve sat in the congregation at a wedding more than once, staring the couple before you.  It couldn’t be the looks or the brain power, to be sure.  Wouldn’t be the prospect for success or the pleasant disposition.  Surely, she could do better for herself. 

And yet those promises are made.  Such bold things they are to say to another person, who is surely to change, and not always for the better.  “Will you have this man, this woman?” Love which must choose, if it is to be love.  What does she see in him?  Isn’t it merely that she sees him, and that is enough. 

The blindness of love: it must be about the oldest of all jokes.  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Titania awakens to fall in love with Bottom, recently turned into a donkey, he gets the best line: "And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.[1]”  Pascal may have been mulling over higher things, but he was making the same general point when he wrote: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.[2]”

Taking Easter Home

“Behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him.”  St. Matthew 28:7

One of the special things about settling in the DC area for Allison and me is spending time in the city where we fell in love.  Back in the summer of 2003, I had just finished my studies at seminary and was getting ready to begin as a teacher at a boarding school near Hagerstown.  Allison was a public policy student completing her mandatory student internship at a organization on Capitol Hill.  I’d meet her after work in the grand hall of Union Station and we’d head off to one of those free concerts at the Kennedy Center or we’d sit and talk in one of those pleasant little parks near the Capitol, or share a meal in that most exotic and romantic locale, the food court in the basement of the train station.

Sometimes, when we’ve got the kids in the backseat and we’re headed off to a museum on the Mall or to see a friend who lives across town, we’ll drive by one of these places and tell them a little about what it meant to us then.   So much that has happened since then that we never expected, but many of the good things we do enjoy now were planted there.  Going back to those places, we fall in love again, or at least we understand something valuable about the love we share now, something we can only discover there, where it all began.

It Would Have Been Enough

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”  St. John 13:1

Maybe you saw the article in the Washington Post last week about matzoh man’s visit to Farragut Park[1].  Maybe, at least, you remember the unforgettable picture.  Matzoh Man is a rabbi, Shmuel Herzfeld of Synagouge Ohev Sholom in Northwest.  About this time every year he dresses in his matzoh suit and kippah, which are white with brown spots.  He revs up the matzoh mobile, a Crown Vic wrapped in a vinyl coating that makes it look like the ubiquitous Jewish cracker. 

And he drives downtown to pass out boxes of the unleavened bread, all the while wishing people a happy Passover and reminding Jews to keep the Seder at home this year.  He’s ready to give you the matzoh you need, to invite you to the community seder at his synagogue, to do everything he can to awaken the consciousness of America’s increasingly secular Jews to remember their ancient traditions and to celebrate God’s faithfulness once more this year.

The Post reporter, who was obviously having a great time with the article, asked rabbi Herzfeld why he does it.  And as I was reading, I thought to myself: “this guy is going to say he was a performance artist in his former life, or that he finished last in the rabbinical council’s fantasy football pool.”  Why else would a well-educated, successful religious leader go downtown dressed like a Saltine to shame his fellow Jews into keeping the Seder. 

Ponder: "according to his own great goodness"

“Shall I withhold a little money or food from my fellow-creature, for fear he should not be good enough to receive it of me? Do I beg of God to deal with me, not according to my merit, but according to his own great goodness; and should I be so absurd, as to with-hold my charity from a poor brother, because he may perhaps not deserve it?  Shall I use measure toward him, which I pray God never to use toward me.”

William Law, A Serious Call, qtd. in Stranks, Anglican Devotion, 185-6.

Bringing Back the 'Gesimas: A Liturgical Proposal

From Covenant, 10 Feb. 2017

My mother is a church organist, and my brothers and I spent many Saturday afternoons roaming freely around the church’s dusty corners while she worked out her footpedals and chose her stops for the next morning’s selections. Sometimes, when rehearsal was finished, we would help her find the numbers for the hymnboard that hung over the pastor’s chair.

The wooden box that held the hymn numbers also had a section for the words that made up the Sundays and festivals of the Church Year. We were Reformed, but the liturgy’s patterns were still important for us, and I knew most of the words on the black cards well enough: Advent and Lent, Christmas and Pentecost, New Year and Harvest Home.

The longest cards, though, at the back of the stack, were always a bit of a puzzle. They were shinier and less crinkled than the others, and obviously hadn’t been used in a long time. The names were certainly unusual: Quinquagesima, Septuagesima, Sexagesima. Young boys have rather vivid imaginations; I wondered just what kind of religious undertakings were intended for such occasions. Exotic ones, to be sure. Mother didn’t really know. The names sounded Latin, she thought, and maybe someone had sent our little church the Church Year cards intended for the Catholics or Episcopalians.

Ponder:"as the First Man partook of it, so must the last"

"Christian Redemption is God's mercy to all Mankind; but it could not be so, if every fallen Man, as such, had not some Fitness and Capacity to lay hold of it.  It must have no Dependence upon Times and Place, or the Ages and several Conditions of the World, or any outward Circumstance of Life; as the First Man partook of it, so must the last; the learned Linguist, and the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb have but one and the same common Way of finding Life in it.  And he that writes large Commentaries upon the whole Bible, must be saved by something full as different from Book knowledge, as they were, who lived when there was neither Book nor any Alphabet in the world...It must be something as grounded in human Nature, as the Fall itself is, which wants no Art to make it known; but to which the common Nature of Man is the only Guide in one Man, as well as another.  Now this something, which is thus obvious to every Man, and which opens the Way to Christian Redemption in every Soul is, a sense of the Vanity and Misery of this World; and a Prayer of Faith and Hope to God, to be raised to a better State.

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

Ponder: "the first proclamation must ring out over and over"

"The kerygma is trinitarian.  The fire of the Spirit is given in the form of tongues and leads us to believe in Jesus Christ who, by his death and resurrection, reveals and communicates to us God's infinite mercy.  On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: "Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.'  This first proclamation is called 'first' not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things.  It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment."

Pope Francis, Evangelium Gaudii, 164.

Ponder: "suddenly stripped clean of everything that once seemed so important"

“So then, Charlie was to receive the last rites in full: he would be anointed, he would make his confession, he would receive Holy Communion—the old ritual that sees us from this world.  And as I watched the Franciscan go up the stairs, led by Helen, who was holding the prescribed lighted candle, and followed by the young doctor, once more I was almost overcome by the special feeling of this moment, this profound and unique movement that is like no other in time, this moment that is suddenly stripped clean of everything that once seemed so important, and in which nothing now matters but the limitless mercy of God.”

Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness

He came to himself

“He came to himself and said… ‘I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.’” St. Luke 15:17-18

At first, of course, he blamed everyone else.  We would do the same, sitting there by the pigs, our bellies gnawing with hunger.  It had been quite a ride for a while: sharp clothes, fancy meals, all the wine he could drink, fast women.  He was on top of the world, a friend on every corner.  No rules, no boundaries, no regrets.  How in the world could it all have come to pieces so quickly? 

He blamed his parents, of course.[1]  Half the inheritance--they’d promised that’s what it amounted to, but it sure didn’t seem like very much.  And what about that responsible brother of his—if he’d have come to mind the books, well it wouldn’t have all slipped away so quickly.  He blamed all those who called themselves his friends, and sponged on his good nature, all those who’d tricked him into schemes and promised to pay him back in a month’s time.  Who wouldn’t blame a thief—the dealer with the weighted dice, the pickpocket who snatched the sack from his coat, the women who left his bed before dawn.  It was the fault of tailors who made shiny clothes that wore thin too quickly, tavern men who overcharged for cheap food.  And this wretched famine—who could have seen it coming.  This master he was serving—surely he could pay more.  Surely he could find some work with more dignity.  He cursed his lot.  He cursed his enemies.  He cursed life itself, and then stared back at the pigs, and he would have climbed down into the trough beside them if he could.

He was miserable, of course.  But there’s a kind of steadfastness that can come with misery, especially when we are so certain it’s all someone else’s fault. 

For Meditation: A Kind Woman in Heaven

"Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night.  He was able to feel, kneeling beside her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood.  He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth.  Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.  Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack.  The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest's heart like a sword."

Willa Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop,216-217.

"Good Lord Deliver Us:" The Blessings of the Great Litany

Originally published in The Living Church, 22 Mar. 2015.

Just after the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, the students and faculty at General Seminary in Manhattan gathered in the chapel. The seminary is less than a ten-minute drive north of Ground Zero, and for the students and faculty it was a moment of great confusion, anxiety, and fear. The Rev. Teresa Daniely, now an Episcopal priest, was in her first week of studies at General that day. “I did not know if I would live through that day; I assumed that I would not,” she wrote in 2010 for the Grace Prayer Network’s weblog (is.gd/U77vAr). “We got on our knees and prayed the Great Litany, a series of prayers that includes prayers of confession and prayers in preparation for death.

On that day, when the world seemed to be falling apart, the people of General Seminary found in the Litany the only fitting words for their deepest anxiety and hope. They were in good company. The Litany is a text forged out of tragedy. The eruptions of fourth-century volcanoes, the perils of the Black Death, and wars of the 16th century all left a mark on its historical development. It is a text that speaks to pastoral need, the Church’s gift for times of crisis. When you do not know how else to pray, there is always the Litany.

Jesus Holds the Scales

“If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” St. Matthew 18:17

There is very little direct teaching in the Gospels about the church and its life. What there is, though, is found in Jesus’ discussion with his disciples in the central chapters of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, from which this evening’s lesson is taking.  These chapters have come to take on a kind of special importance, especially among Christians who try to base everything the church does on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

For example, this three step process that Jesus describes for dealing with a member of the church who sins against another has been treated by some as judicial proceeding. First, confront the person with the sin. Then bring some witnesses. Then present the person for judgment before the entire congregation. One commentator[1] compared it to reading someone his Miranda rights—did you “Matthew 18 him?” one Christian might ask another in talking about how an inter-church controversy unfolded.

Made for Praise-Why we need the Daily Office

From the WORD, the newsletter of Saint Timothy's, Herndon

“Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” 

 Ps. 51:15.

I was talking with one of our vestry members this week about his prayers.  He told me that each day he tries to set aside some time to review what has happened to him.  He’s looking for the good things, the unexpected blessings, the little joys that might otherwise go unnoticed: a child’s smile, a conversation that went surprisingly well, a moment of tenderness.  “I see them, and thank God for them.  They show me He’s always working in my life.” 

It can be easy to lose track of just how gracious God is to us.  We never forget to turn to Him when we’re in pain or afraid of dangers ahead of us.   We quickly remind Him when we’re disappointed.  But we often take His kindness for granted.   Even when we notice a blessing, how many times to we remember to offer our thanks?  How often do we praise God for the ways in which a particular good thing reveals to us His wisdom and love?

 

We are made to sing God’s praises.  He opens our lips, the Psalmist says, so that we can respond to Him with joy.  Our minds are designed to catalog His mercies, our creative gifts to communicate His beauty to others in music, art and movement.  Our final purpose, the destiny for which God is equipping us now, is to join with saints and angels in the great Alleluia around His throne in heaven. 

For Meditation: There and then this Lamb shall mary me

From my morning reading, John Donne's sermon preached at St. Clement Danes (May 30, 1621).  The sermon was delivered at a wedding, and in this section Donne considers the marriage between Christ and each member of His Body.  This passage imagines that, as in the Church's marriage liturgy, there might be a moment in the contracting of the spiritual bond in which others might justly object.

"This is a mariage in that great and glorious Congregation, where all my sins shall be laid open to the eye of all the world, where all the blessed Virgins shall see all my uncleannesse, and all the Martyrs see all my tergiversations, and all the Confessors see all my double dealings in Gods cause; where Abraham shall see my faithlessnesse in Gods promises; and Job my impatience in Gods corrections; and Lazarus my hardness of heart in distributing Gods blessings to the poore; and those Virgins, and Martyrs, and Confessors, and Abraham, and Job, and Lazarus, and all that Congregation, shall look upon the Lamb and upon me, and upon one another, as though they would all forbid those banes, and say to one another, Will this Lamb have any thing to doe with this soule? and yet there and then this Lamb shall mary me, and mary me In aeternum, for ever, which is our last circumstance"  (82-83).

For Meditation: God's love and our sin

From my morning reading, Hughson's "With Christ in God"

Man's reaction to his own sin is to flee from God in fear; God's reaction to man's sin is to draw near to man in love,  The more we sin, the more do we need His love, and the more generously is that love offered to us.  The vivid illustration of this is found in our Lord's first Word on the cross.  "Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."  The verb said is given in a form which implies continued action: "He kept on saying."  As their blasphemies and mockings increased, He increased His cry that they might be forgiven.  He would not let their sin outdistance His love.  And so has He ever been.  So will He ever be.  (p. 33-34).

A Word of Mercy: Sermon for Easter II

“Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." St. John 20:21

            “The doors were locked for fear,” Saint John tells us.  The disciples were huddling in the dark that first Easter evening, ducking and covering from all the drama that the spectacle at the empty tomb was likely to unleash.  It’s a rather odd postlude to the joyful news of Easter morning.  By sunset, there were no alleluias in sight.  An angel had proclaimed His resurrection. Christ had appeared to Mary Magdalene.  But the disciples didn’t really know what to make of it all.  Their initial excitement had deflated as they tried to come to terms with what the announcement might really mean for them.

 St. John remembered that they were frightened of the Jews, the religious authorities, who had a court and a police force of their own.  Jesus had seen the rough end of their justice a few days earlier, and once the news got out that there was no body in the tomb, they’d be out looking for someone to blame.  Tomb robbery was a serious crime, and though the disciples were innocent of it, the Sanhedrin didn’t seem to have much trouble rounding up false witnesses.  Announcing that the true Messiah had been raised by God, that the new creation had begun--that was even more dangerous, as some of them would find in a few weeks’ time.