Discernland

Sermon on Star Wars as hermeneutic

2012-02-12T17:28:00.001-05:00

Sermon for 6 Epiphany B

This week the 3D version of the fourth Star Wars movie, which is actually the first episode, called The Phantom Menace, came out. As a child of the 80s, I can’t help but think that George Lucas is systematically, one movie at a time, attempting to dismantle my childhood. The original Star Wars movies were amazing, and the new ones, well the new ones just stink. I imagine that anyone under the age of twenty might disagree, and they are free to, but of course, they are wrong. They say the sequel is never the equal, but in the case of the Star Wars the prequel ain’t even close.
Not so with our readings today though. What we have in the gospel is something of a movie: Jesus heals someone and tells him to be quiet about it. But the healed man can’t help himself, he goes out, blabbing to anyone who will listen; so that while Jesus wanted to keep things quiet, he can no longer show his face in the towns for the fame that he now has. Jesus is a smash hit for his healings.
Now in the Old Testament, we get the story of Naaman. Naaman is a general who is not a friend of God, in fact he has captured at least one Hebrew woman. Well it turns out that Naaman has leprosy just like the man in the story with Jesus. We could see this reading as a prequel to the Jesus healing story. The woman that Naaman has captured seems like an uncommonly good person, because she has compassion on Naaman for his disease and tells him to go to Elisha the prophet. Naaman does and finally is healed, and commits himself to worshipping God. Here the prequel is the equal, someone is healed and begins to worship God.
So like Star Wars, we have an original blockbuster: Jesus the Healer. And like Star Wars we have a prequel: Naaman being healed and beginning to worship God. But what about the sequel? Is there a Empire Strikes Back to our New Hope? Is there something that comes after Jesus healing that is part of the same story?
Well as a matter of fact there is. It turns out that Jesus made plans for the sequel. In fact he even gave some coming attractions of it. You see, elsewhere in Jesus’ story he talks to some of his friends about feeding him when he was hungry, giving him a drink when he was thirsty, and visiting him when he was sick, or in prison. You remember this. His friends ask him back, “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or sick or in prison?” Jesus answered them: “When you give water or food to someone who is thirsty or hungry, when you visit the sick and those in prison, then you did it to me.” This is the sequel: where we see Jesus in the hungry, the sick, the dying, and the prisoner. The thoughtful film buff might inquire, “If that is the sequel, shouldn’t it be in the same theme? After all we have Jesus healing, then in the prequel we have Naaman being healed, the sequel then should be the same thing: someone should be healed when in the presence of Jesus.
Yes! There is, but this sequel has a twist, often when we think of helping others, we think we do it because it is something that Jesus would do. And of course Jesus did visit and heal the sick, he did feed the hungry. But the twist comes with how Jesus’ described what we see when we help others. When us Christians are helping others, we don’t necessarily act like Jesus, so much as we look for Jesus. That’s what Jesus says, when we help others we are helping him, when we serve others we serve Him. This is the twist and it gets even better. What happens to people when they are in the presence of Jesus? They get healed, and why should we be any different? So the story of healing goes on, we are the sequel; a sequel with a twist. The twist is that we think we are visiting the sick, we think we are being Jesus, but Jesus keeps making guest appearances and cameos, Jesus keeps showing up!
Jesus talks in the Gospels about where we might find him in two distinct places. When we have Holy Eucharist, “this is my Body, this is my Blood.” And we trust that Jesus shows up, that’s why we take the Holy Eucharist so seriously, Jesus is here! The other place that Jesus says he will show up is in the faces and hurt of the sick, dying, hungry and imprisoned. And we take this seriously too, but it’s a little riskier to see Jesus in this way. Sometimes Jesus has a dirty face, or a criminal record, or looks just like someone we bitterly do not want to lose. But Jesus has always been risky, that’s what makes this particular character so compelling. We should be as serious about seeing Jesus in others as we are about seeing him in the bread and wine.
So here we are; we are a sequel people. We live out that theme that God has established in the life of Jesus, the life of Israel, and now the life of the Church. In terms of Star Wars, I guess that makes us The Empire Strikes Back, which is the darkest, and most interesting of all the Star Wars movies. But that also means that God has one more sequel in store, one more chapter in the saga; a Return of the Jedi if you will, where everything is revealed, where God is fully known to us and we truly accept who our Father is.
Until then, until that finale is released; let’s live the story, let’s go out and be healed by Jesus, here in the breaking of the bread and as we care for each other meeting Jesus face to face.

Vessel for holding anointing oil

2012-02-10T11:48:00.002-05:00

pic done on iPhone with Camera+ app, on the altar at Saint John's = 4 prepositions in that sentence, now 5.

Funeral Sermon links for my theology class

2012-02-10T11:37:00.003-05:00

Here are the links to some of my funeral sermons. These are good examples of occasional theology, the occasion gives rise to the theology. Note what I say and don't say re: the afterlife.

Link1

Link2

Sermon for fifth Sunday After the Epiphany

2012-02-07T08:53:00.004-05:00

I hate to admit, but this topic is so thorny, that I didn't write this until an hour before it was presented. Please excuse any formal or theological stumbling blocks.

Sermon for fifth Sunday After the Epiphany year B

I have been simply struck dumb as I’ve dipped my toes into these priestly waters at how the lectionary lines up with the life of the parish. It almost looks like a divine hand that is working through the selection of our readings and the life of this parish. I think this is the best definition of how our scriptures are holy, they work on us to such an extent that we can actually see our lives reflected in them, they make a claim about our lives, and our life together. And today we get a doozy.

Here in our Gospel we have Jesus going and casting out demons and healing the sick. And what did we have this week at Saint John’s? No less than two funerals, several hospital admissions, and one devastating prognosis for our sister Jo Brock. In the Gospel reading the people bring the possessed and the sick to Jesus and he casts out the demons and heals the sick. In first century Palestine, being possessed by a demon and being sick were oft-times synonymous. So if we bring our friends to Jesus in prayer he will heal them, right?

But what happens when that doesn’t happen? What happens when hundreds of Christians pray for the healing of someone and the healing never comes? How can we talk of the unsurpassing power of God, the ultimate goodness of God, and still know that evil and degradation exists?

This past week I had one precocious 9 year old parishioner ask, “If God created everything, then why did God create cancer cells?” Why indeed? Did God create cancer cells, or did God create cells in a world where things can go wrong, where cells can rebel against their natural state and begin to fight with other cells. You see, God created a world that has the freedom to go wrong.

But doesn’t that mean then that God’s power is limited? If God is so powerful, then why would he create a universe that is capable of evil and loss? The answer is freedom of course, but it is so hard to talk about freedom in the culture without having a political discussion. The kind of freedom that God builds into the universe, even into our very souls, is the ultimate act of divine power.

What kind of God would control everything? What kind of powerful God would find it necessary to arrange every little heart and mind toward him? What kind of a powerful God would force us to love him? A monster-God that’s what; only an insecure and ultimately weak God lords his power over his creation.

Our God, THE God, creates a world where the creation can choose Him or not. Our powerful-God creates us to choose. In this freedom, which we are truly free to use to love or hate God, and each other, is the square-one of creation. From there we can move toward God in love, or away from Him in coldness and anger.

But, there is a real downside to this freedom that God builds into his creation. It allows for the existence of evil. I must quickly add that, even though God allows for the existence of evil, he does not will it. Evil is a by product of a finite universe, sin is the by product of freedom. God does not will evil to happen but suffers its existence for the sake of our freedom. Time and time again God does indeed overcome evil, the Bible is case study after case study in the triumph of God over evil: The exodus of the Hebrews from Slavery, the constant call of the prophets to return to God, and finally in the triumph over death by the raising of Jesus. God works through evil to show his ways, to create an Epiphany of himself within his creation.

So here we are: right in the middle of this creation, this free creation which houses bad cells, bad choices, cosmic and everyday evils. So what do we do? What do we do with Jo, and countless others who suffer and die right before our eyes? We do what we always do, we return to God, we don’t have to be cheery about it, we can ask questions, Why Lord? We go to God and we thank him for our creation. We thank him for those he has given us, if even for far too short a time. We thank God for our freedom: that we can choose him. We look to our creator and we thank him, even with pain and loss in our hearts, even with tear streaked faces we can freely go to our creator and sing his praises.

And there, in that moment, we might get a sense of the distinction between healing and curing. When we run to God in our distress, when we cry in his presence then maybe a healing can occur, even if a cure doesn’t.

There is no happy way to end this sermon. We will never be free of the ambiguity of our creation and existence with a powerful loving God in the midst of evil and sin. But we will sing his praises, we will confess our sins to him and each other, we will celebrate his death and rising until he comes again. And we will tell his story, the story of the powerful loving God, who allows for freedom, though we might suffer its consequences.

Join me now as we tell his story in the words of the Nicene Creed: We Believe in One God, the Father Almighty…

Funeral Sermon, again, sheesh!

2012-02-02T16:38:00.003-05:00

Here is yet another funeral sermon. This one for a local young man who had died all to young. I've taken out his name.

What a curious God we have!

How strange that He would create to begin with. How utterly strange are grass, and finches, chambered nautiluses, and seasons.

How strange that He would then create us.

Us: with our emotions, our various chemistries and impulses. How strange that God created us and imbued each of us with reason, skill, memory, and a beautiful bag of skin to hold all of that in.

What a curious God we have, that would work through history to reveal himself. What a strange thing it is for one outside of time to enter time. We see him most at work in the lives of those who are sensitive to his movements, in the life of Israel, in the life of the church. Of course history and our own lives are filled with the stories of those “God-moments,” those thin-places where God sometimes creeps, other times invades.

What a curious God that arranges things, arranges people, arranges meetings and leavings, arranges our coming and going. What a funny God we have that shines-through even in impossible darkness. What a curious God who would begin to prepare M’s family for his death. What a strange and loving God who would make M and his family, at least more prepared, no one is ever truly prepared for this, nor do they ever fully heal;but to begin to greet his death from far off, and then now, all too close. How interesting that God would bring M home from California, would gather in his family like He did; how strange that M and his mother would talk about God and the life of the spirit the night he died.

What a curious God we have that would come to us, to all of creation, as a creation, as a man. What a strange God who gets so weak, who takes on flesh; and comes to us as Jesus. Other gods are not like this, other gods lord their power over their subjects, but this God of ours becomes a subject. How strange that this God would come and take on flesh, only to grow and feel pain, to suffer and finally die. What a strange God that we have, who assumes all human suffering, and says, “I’ve participated in all of this with you, I am with you.”

A funny God he must be too to give us someone like M, at once so lovely and yet so difficult. One so charming and charismatic but also so hard to live with.

Strangest of all of course is that this curious God of ours made the claim and made good on the claim that death is not the last word. This God raised Jesus from the dead.

This is founding of our religion and it is that which allows us to sing alleluia, even here at the grave. It is this God that helps us to hope and know that we haven’t seen the last of M.

Indeed, it is this same curious God who enables us to participate in his own death and resurrection through the even-stranger Holy Spirit. God has made a meeting place for us and Him in the baptismal waters. Amazing things happen there in the baptismal waters: there we are grafted into the life of God, never to be removed.

C.S. Lewis in his novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, gives a beautiful account of baptism and I wonder if there might not be some parallels in it with Matthew.

It seems that Eustace, a young boy who was difficult and, at times, heard to bear, has become separated from his family. In his wanderings Eustace happens upon a dead dragon and in touching it, he becomes transformed into a dragon himself: beautiful and sharp. After several attempts of trying to transform himself back he finally falls frustrated and hopeless. Then Aslan the lion, the allegorical Christ in the Narnia books, arrives and leads Eustace to a pool and tells him to undress. After three attempts of trying to remove his sharp scaly skin he gives up. Aslan then tells Eustace that he must undress him, Eustace tells it this way: p109
“I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do.

The very first tear he made some deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it is worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. . . he peeled the beastly stuff right off -- just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt-- and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking then the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft is a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he called me-- I didn't like that much I was very tender underneath now that I know skin on-- and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. ” Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis, page 109.

What a curious God that would take us in so. What a loving and strange God that would meet us in the baptismal waters to peel off all the scales and sharp edges, and then unite us to his death and new life so much so that when Christ was raised, so were we. And to that we all say, “Thanks be to God,” thanks be to God for creating us, thanks be to God for giving us M and thanks be to God for redeeming us and including us in his death and resurrected life. AMEN!

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

2012-01-29T13:33:00.002-05:00

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Here's my sermon for today, text below, video above (I start at minute 24)

Sermon for 4th Sunday after the Epiphany, year B.
Mark 1:21-28

This past week, on Wednesday night I told this story of Jesus in the synagogue to the little ones. The story of Jesus walking into the synagogue and teaching; and the people being astounded by his authority. Then the arrival of the man who had an unclean spirit and how Jesus cast out the unclean spirit. It was then that, none other than my own daughter, asked what an unclean spirit was.

How do you teach children about demons, about unclean spirits, about a level of the created order that is misty, dark, and malevolent? It reminds me of when I was a teacher, and we were studying World War II. When we got to the Holocaust, it fell on me to teach what that was. Here I was: having to pass on the story of utter hate and destruction, to a new generation, they were hearing this information for the first time. This passing on of the story must happen of course, as the saying goes, those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. Though I prefer the updated version of that phrase, those who do not know the past are condemned to live in the present.

So, my darling 7 year old, asks what is an unclean spirit? I immediately get a flash of Dante and Milton, the Exorcist, , Satan, red tail, and cloven feet. My answer was truthful, but guarded: unclean spirits are bad thoughts about God that people sometimes have.

Unclean Spirits.

I find it interesting that in all the Old Testament there is not a single mention of demons. We have Satan mentioned a few times, but no demons. Then in the New Testament, seen here in Mark the first written Gospel that we have, demons and unclean spirits seem to be a part of life; and such a part of life that are not altogether unsurprising. In another place in the Gospels the people of a region have chained up a man tormented by demons, they feed him and care for him, albeit poorly, but the truth is, he is tolerated. It would seem that contact with a person possessed of unclean spirits would not make one dirty, ritually, indeed that even being possessed is not a violation of any purity code, because in today’s reading the man is in the synagogue. So whatever happened between the writing of the two testaments, one thing is clear, demons abound, and they are part of life and not altogether surprising.

So our scene is dropped into this context of familiar demons and these homely unclean spirits. The scene takes place on the Sabbath. The setting is a synagogue. Enter Jesus. Jesus takes the stage, the Torah scroll is behind him, he begins to teach. We are not told of the content of his teaching but we are told of the style, Jesus does not teach like the hired pros, no he doesn’t obfuscate, or hem and haw, this Jesus has authority! But then a man with an unclean spirit comes in and challenges Jesus loudly. Jesus hushes him and commands the spirit to come out of him. The spirit obeys and the people are amazed and recap the scene for us, in case we missed it: This Jesus is amazing both for the authority of his teaching and for the fact the demons obey him.

But there is one fine point. Did you miss it? I did, I missed it for years. The heart of this reading is hidden in plain sight.

What does the unclean spirit say? “What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” It’s right there. This demon, or demons since they say, “Have you come to destroy us?” Here we are at the front of the first written gospel, still in the first chapter, and Mark gives away the whole story. These two, Jesus and demon, seem know each other. Well, if they don’t know each other, the demon certainly knows who Jesus is. The demon recognizes who Jesus is, he can (sniff) smell it on him, the demon can smell eternity on Jesus, the demon knows his creator when he sees him. I imagine for Jesus this might have been something like flying half way across the world, going through customs, and at the baggage claim, hearing, from among the clatter of all the foreign languages, someone from his home town calling his name The demon and Jesus come from the same place, and here we get a glimpse of the creation as so much more than meets the eye, and Jesus coolly hushes the demon and casts him out.

This scene is about more than an exorcism: it is a clue. This story is a clue about how to be Christ in the world.

And this is tough news. I hope you all have learned that the Good News is sometimes, if not usually, tough news. It’s hard being a follower of Jesus. You see, this life with Jesus just might sometimes look like this scene of Jesus and the Demon in the Synagogue. Folks need to be able to recognize Jesus in us, on sight. People need to be scandalized by our behavior, by our unrelenting love for others and the reason for that love as Jesus in us.

Folks: Jesus should be as obvious in us as he was to that unclean spirit. Because we all need to get away from that old frozen chosen way of doing church, of being the church. We need to get our hearts and minds and actions around the idea that our faith, our discipleship to Jesus, is personal but it is no longer private. We’ve all done it! Our faith is personal; God has come to each of us and indeed wants to know each of us, individually and collectively, as a body, in the church. But all of us have kept it private for too long. How do your teachers know you are a Christian? How do your employees, or your boss know you are a Christian? How does your neighbor know you are a Christian?

And let’s not get too high on ourselves when we think about the world and us here in the church. There is no special border between the world and the church. The world and the church are not separated by some Divine fiat, God didn’t create two separate communities, and He certainly didn’t create one community to be at war with another. No, as one wag put it: the world is simply that which has taken the liberty to not yet believe. The world is that which has taken the liberty to not yet believe. Your classmates, your coworkers, heck even your boss is not an unclean spirit. They are not unclean spirits, but they need to see Jesus in us.

So go out and be Jesus, use words if you have to, be Jesus in the board room, be Jesus in the chemistry lab, be Jesus in the file room, the court room, the gym, and even in traffic.

If you don’t know how to be Jesus, well that’s on us. That’s on the leaders and teachers of this and every church. If the church through the years has shown you a Jesus that is non-threatening to unclean spirits, if we have sold you a Precious Moments, domesticated Jesus that doesn’t demand your transformation, well then, I apologize for that. I apologize if you have been sold the therapeutic Jesus and not the Transformative Jesus.

Let’s welcome our scandalous Jesus, let’s welcome our obviously present Jesus. Let’s go into the world and let all the spirits: clean, unclean, and indifferent, look at us and our lives and say, “What have you to do with us Jesus?”

World as Museum of Awe and Wonder part 1

2012-01-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

This will be a new feature where I put in cool stuff that makes life better.

The Bad Show - Radiolab

Putting the fun in funerals

2011-12-14T19:34:00.003-05:00

That's a cheap pun I know. Several weeks I was speaking with a parishioner and she asked me what my favorite part about being a priest is. I answered, "Funerals."

Why?

I think it is because funerals are emotionally charged events, where people are truly themselves, without guile; and funerals also afford us the opportunity to proclaim the Easter Gospel, even at the grave. I also remember that the earliest Christians were essentially a funerary society: giving decent burials to those who couldn't afford one.

What follows is my sermon for Mike Michael.

Funeral Sermon for Mike Michael 12/10/11
I didn't know Mike. The first and last time I saw him was at Plantation Estates last week when I delivered last rites to him. I had gotten the call that Mike was dying, and I hurried as fast as I could to get out there. One of the secrets of us priests for our dealings with families at the time of death is that you can tell what kind of relationship the family has with the dying person almost immediately. As I rushed into Plantation Estates, Jean welcomed me warmly and introduced me to the receptionist. She introduced me as Father Josh “who was going to help us see Mike off.” “Who was going to help us see Mike off.” It was right then and there that I knew that whoever Mike was, he was loved, he had lived well, and he was prepared for death.
In talking to various long-time parishioners here at Saint John’s about Mike, what was reported to me over and over again was Mike’s enduring kindness. That was the word, kind, not nice. The people didn’t describe him as a nice man, they described him as a kind man. Kind, goes a lot further than nice doesn’t it? Nice, to me is barely civil. But kind, kind carries with it a love and empathy for others that nice just can’t get close to. Mike was kind . . . that and he loved golf.
In my brief talks with Mike’s family I learned that Mike had suffered great loss in his life; the untimely deaths of several siblings, the passing of all his family and his friends. But even in his death Jean had a sense that Mike was going to be with his brothers and sisters again. Indeed in today's Gospel reading Jesus describes going ahead of his disciple's to prepare a place for them. He uses these words, "in my father's house there are many dwelling places." To me this means that God, understands who we are even if we don’t, indeed that there are infinite ways to follow him. It is my understanding that Mike left the church for several years but came back here at St. John's. “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Jesus is letting us all know that we do not know the hearts of people, and that only he does. God knows who we are and how to deal with us, even more than we do ourselves. Mike was something of an enigma wasn’t he? He was not exactly effusive in his emotions, he played his cards close to his chest. But he showed his spirit in other ways, his work with Habitat for Humanity, his lifelong commitment to Jean, his kindness, his devotion to Saint John’s. And today we say goodbye to this kind soul.
The funny thing about death is that we think it is so final. Shakespeare describes it this way: “But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn, No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others we know not of.”Death is the great unknown for those in the world. But for us Christians we tell a different story about death. Our story goes like this: Jesus is not simply the son of God. Jesus is our trailblazer to that undiscovered country, to death, and back again. It turns out that Shakespeare was right, except that one traveler has returned. And, like Jesus tells us today in our Gospel reading, he goes ahead of us to prepare a place for us. We believe that through our baptisms we share in the death of Christ and by dying in Christ, we share in his resurrection. So for Christians, death is simply the door into God. It is of course hard for us to lose our loved ones, for us to lose Mike, and grief is not unchristian. But we are Christians, we are Easter people, not Good Friday people. We are a people who stand, not crushed at a cross, instead we are a people who stand in awe at an empty tomb. And it is this hope that allows us to say Alleluia, even at the grave; even as we see this kind soul off to be with his Lord, where he, with an unveiled face, beholds his Lord. So goodbye Mike, and in the sure hope of Jesus Christ the Risen Lord we will all see you on the other side. Amen.

Bah Humbug! A Theology of Advent

2011-12-02T16:10:00.002-05:00

Here is the audio of my lecture on Advent. Many thanks to Christina for "taping" it on her iPhone and working her techno magic to put it online.

I'll add the PowerPoint as soon a I figure that out.

Here is a tour of that ... more liberal icon of the cosmic Christ. I do not endorse everything that Grey represents here, but I do like his enthusiasm.

Ecoterra | "Cosmic Christ" by Alex Grey from Ecoterra on Vimeo.

Black an White and Read All Over: Reviewing the Nightstand #1

2011-11-18T13:35:00.005-05:00

So I read, alot, and alot of different things. I thought I'd take a stab at reviewing the things that I read and offer some theological insight to my odd reading habits. A warning, I am reviewing a comic which has some, can I say "literally graphic images? There is some blodd and guts, so caveat lector.

First up...

We3. Pronounced We-Three. This is a comic, about 100 pages all told. It is the story of three animals, a dog, a cat, and a rabbit. This is not the WInd and the Willows however; the dog and the cat in the rabbit are all outfitted and ready for battle; check out this picture.

The story is very simple: the animals are modified for battle, the animals are marked for "decommissioning", the animals escape, the animals overcome conflict, the animals find a home. There are several animal stories like this. One thing that was surprising for me was the comment that the story implicitly makes on just war and the use of drones. I find it very interesting that our president Barack Obama is well read in the so-called realist theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr, who was a longtime pacifist finally changed his position during World War II and began to talk about the gospel and its relationship to a liberal society. This position has become the default position of most Christians in America, especially liberal Christians: our society, our government, our military can be used for good, can be used for the spreading of the gospel and for the upbuilding of all humanity. The use of drone attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan and just this week in Pakistan is an interesting turn in this way of seeing the use of military might: we need not respect the sovereignty of any other nation when we can kill whomever we want from whatever distance, no matter how far, without putting any soldiers on the ground. We3 tells the story of "drones" that have some kind of consciousness and rebel against their being weaponized.

What We3 dozen superbly well is tell a story in such a way that only the graphic medium, only comics, can.
Here is an example:

Note that the artist, Frank Quitely has turned the panel into the third dimension to give a sense of the time as this cat is attacking whatever it's attacking. Also notice that the story does not pull any punches in terms of violence, I told you this was not the Wind in the Willows. We3 also does a wonderful job of capturing the "voices" of the characters, the dog just wants to be good in the cat, well the cat simply calls all humans "stink boss."

One thing that I'm always on the lookout when it comes to comics is how the writers resolve their stories. Since the vast majority of the comics industry is steered by the moneymaking machines of comic con international, Hollywood, and immature fanboys, it is unsurprising that most comics are simply revenge fantasies (for more on this see this article on a disturbing trend in the best-selling comics). So I'm very pleased when I read a story that is well paced, action packed, and resolves the conflict on some sort of, if not moral high note, then at least a notion of the complexity of morality and relationships. Grant Morrison, the writer of We3, and lots of other comics that I like, tends to be a very moral writer. Morrison really does deliver the moral goods in We3. I've often wondered about that, maybe it is beause Morrison has a spiritual tradtion that he is actively engaged in, maybe it is because he is so successful that he is now able to do whatever he wants, even be moral.

FYI

2011-11-10T15:26:00.001-05:00

For those in my theology class, we will not meet this week due to the vestry elections. Join me on November 20, in the Rector's forum for my talk entitled: Bah Humbug! A Theology of Advent (provided my wife doesn't deliver our baby.).

Professional

2011-11-05T11:33:00.001-04:00

It's official, I'm a pro writer. Here is the check for a sermon I did for Sermons that Work. I'll link that sermon later.

Theology Class #5

2011-11-04T16:48:00.000-04:00

“Maker of Heaven and Earth…” part 2.
12 A Song of Creation Benedicite, omnia opera Domini
Song of the Three Young Men, 35-65
One or more sections of this Canticle may be used. Whatever the selection, it begins with the Invocation and concludes with the Doxology.
Invocation
Glorify the Lord, all you works of the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

I. The Cosmic Order
Glorify the Lord, you angels and all powers of the Lord, *
O heavens and all waters above the heavens.
Sun and moon and stars of the sky, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and summer, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O nights and days, *
O shining light and enfolding dark.
Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Creation Part Two
Review: Anselmian distinction allows for God’s free choice in creation. This dispenses with pantheism, panenthism, and dualism. Biblical creation is distinct from other ANE stories of creation.

Continuous creation
Biblical contra ANE
Contingent
Deism, dualism, monism (Pantheism)
What is our part in the act of Creation?
What Process Theology says

Biting off alot

2011-11-04T12:16:00.001-04:00

My Friday morning Bible study wanted to study Isaiah. We spent the first hour talking about the issues of reading Isaiah from the empty tomb. Here's what we came up with:

Where I was.

2011-11-04T09:01:00.003-04:00

Here are the Du Bose lectures by Barbara Brown Taylor that she gave at Sewanee last week. I might give my thoughts on these lectures later, until then . . .

Barbara Brown Taylor, DuBose Lecture 1 from School of Theology on Vimeo.

Barbara Brown Taylor, DuBose Lecture 2 from School of Theology on Vimeo.

Babara Brown Taylor, DuBose Lecture 3 from School of Theology on Vimeo.

Theology: class 4

2011-10-20T12:46:00.001-04:00

“Maker of Heaven and Earth…”

Prayers for the World
1. For Joy in God’s Creation
O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works; that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. BCP, 814

Creation: “Before” . . .? Luther and his switches.
Thinking of the beginning as qualitative rather than temporal.
Importance of the beginning in terms of the Anselmian distinction.
Creation = a unique act of God’s freedom.

Biblical Creation
Genesis, composed around 500BC, contrast with Isaiah, 8th century BC.
Two Creation Stories:
Genesis 1:1-2:4 = newer, more sophisticated, Priestly source
Genesis 2:4ff = J source, older, close to the Enuma Elish.
Political and theological: “The interest [in writing the creation story] was not in causal explanations but in a search for meaning, a framework in terms of which life could be lived.” David Brown, Invitation to Theology, 1989.
Other Ancient Near-Eastern creation stories. What is creation and ancient near East cosmologies? What is creation in the Genesis account?

Two analogies when thinking through Creation:

Making:
Stresses transcendence, God’s distinction from the creation and also His freedom.
Biblically based.

Emanation:
Rays from the sun. Important in Orthodox theology.
Stresses immanence.
Allows that Creation is not arbitrary.

Creatio ex nihilo or creatio ex chao? And why does it matter? A thought experiment.

Books for beginner theologians:
The Holy Bible
The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, especially the Eucharistic prayers and the Catechism.
Hunting the Divine Fox: Robert Farrar Capon
The Peaceable Kingdom: Stanley Hauerwas
Praying Shapes Believing: Leonel Mitchell
Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry: World Council of Churches, free online.

Theology: class #3

2011-10-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

“In God the Father Almighty. . .”
Third Sunday of Advent
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

The “final” word on God’s revelation: “God’s outward action, towards his creatures, is anchored in his ‘nature’, i.e. it is a manifestation of his own proper truth, it is his eternal will and not his passing fancy . . . The identity between the revelation and the Revealer, between ‘God for us’ and ‘God in himself,’ is the nerve center of all confessing statements.” – Helmut Gollwitzer
The Doctrine of God, a laughable attempt to talk about God, in 50 minutes:
Or,
Where we learn Father Josh’s favorite theological term:
God as:
Living: God is constant yet responsive; tension inherent, but also the making of dynamism.
Holy: Biblical conception of holiness: separate, called-apart, distinct.
God is holy, wholly other; yet . . .
Spirit: What is spirit?
Nephesh, developmental model of spirit (Matter to Life to Consciousness to Spirit)
Spirit is a holarchy: the highest realm that takes up all other dimensions of reality, includes but transcends the body.
Love: see the New Testament, esp. Johannine Corpus, and Jesus Christ.
Angry/Wrathful:
Marcionism, a pet heresy.
Day of wrath = day of judgement
“You only have I known of all the families on the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” Amos 3:2.
Wrath and anger are “not the negation of love but rather the negation of the negation of love.” Paul Tillich.
Eternal: not simply timelessness, but transcendence of time
God’s freedom to be involved in time can only be accomplished if God is not bound to time.

Personal: What we say when we talk about God: Anthropomorphism in the Bible and theopomorphism in our talk.
Lord: Biblical examples defy exaggeration.
What does Lordship mean theologically?
Distinction = A thought experiment with Saint Anselm (1033-1109 AD).
“God is that which nothing greater can be thought”
Concern over lordship (hierarchy: the feminist gift and burden)
-Anthropomorphism and theopomorphism redux
--All earthly lordships, ought to conform to the divine lordship.
Transcendent: God is distinct from . . .
“God transcends the creation in being distinct from creation; God is not the essence of the creation. While the creation depends upon God, its essence is not identical with God, but distinct.”
Panentheism: another of the thinking Christian’s pet heresy.
Define: panentheism vs. pantheism
Creation is included with God (but not all of God) vs. God = Creation

Immanent: the crux of divine revelation in light of divine transcendence.

The Nativity of Our Lord: Christmas Day December 25
O God, you make us glad by the yearly festival of the birth of your only Son Jesus Christ: Grant that we, who joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, may with sure confidence behold him when he comes to be our Judge; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Theology: class #2

2011-10-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

“We Believe . . .”
Collect for Proper 24
Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Revelation in two parts

Act and Content
Act of Revelation: God’s self-revelation: personal.
Excursus on, “And blessed be God’s vs. His kingdom…”
Example: “Knowing” someone through personal disclosure vs. observation.
Trust as the chief descriptor.
Limitations: finite humans and the utter otherness of God.
Kinds of knowing:
Scientific knowledge: the initiative is on the knower.
-adds to the store of knowledge
Revealed knowledge: Initiative is on the object of knowledge (God).
-transforms (“so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55:11)

Content of Revelation: what God reveals.
Scripture,
Tradition,
Authority and Discernment
The role of the Holy Spirit
Reason (?)

Faith
Traditional model of faith: assent to propositional doctrine that had been dictated by God.
Trust

Natural theology and Revelation
Exemplar: St. Thomas Aquinas: 1225-1274.
Dichotomy between the two: is that dichotomy accurate?
Modern example: Intelligent design does not point to Jesus of Nazareth
Tillich: One cannot argue rigorously from the world to God.

General Revelation
God’s revelation in nature.
-universal moral consciousness, reason, etc.

Special Revelation
God’s self-revelation in Scripture.

Continuing or Dependent Revelation
Always in media res special revelation
-“You can’t get to the Holy Trinity through a rainbow.” Dr. Don Armentrout

Final revelation
-“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
Subject of eschatology

Theology: class #1

2011-10-20T12:43:00.000-04:00

“Getting Our Bearings”

Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Theology: Primary and Secondary
Primary theology is talk to God.
Examples: all kataphatic (via positiva) and apophatic (via negativa) expressions.
Secondary theology is talk about God.
i.e. Good manners
Primary and Secondary is about sequence, not importance; more to follow.
Theology versus Religious studies - The bias of the Church and this course of study.

Understanding begins in medias res.
Contingency as descriptive of creation
“On whatever place one has fallen, on that place he must find support if he is to rise again.”
St. Augustine
No such thing as tabula rasa, or a vacuum.
Theology is always on the menu and it’s all you can eat!

Doxological Spirals, Arch Bishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams
A typology of theological activity: Celebratory-Communicative-Critical
Celebratory
Attempts to use thought, language, and image to express a fullness of theological vision: Primary theology
Examples: hymnody, liturgy, the Orthodox Church.
Communicative
Grows out of a concern that the language of celebration can become too insular.
Communicative theology commends, persuades and attempts to express itself in many structures of thought.
“A theology experimenting with the rhetoric of its uncommitted environment.”
R. Williams.
Examples: Missiology, revival and reformation movements, preaching.
Critical
A critical theology is “alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions,” due to its passage through the uncommitted media of the communicative stage.
Not a circle but a spiral, ever widening. A holarchy: nested spheres which are recapitulated in light of each stage which precedes it.
Review of primary and secondary theology in light of in media res and the doxological spiral.

Contemporary application
Praying, Mary Oliver, from Thirst, 2006.

Theology: Faith Seeking Understanding

2011-10-20T12:41:00.002-04:00

I've been teaching a class on systematic theology at Saint John's for the last several weeks. I will be posting my lecture outlines and hopefully, in time, audio from the lectures.

Saint Paul's Winston-Salem

2011-10-05T17:19:00.002-04:00

Here are some pictures of this magnificent church, or at least the windows. Here for clergy conference.

Well?

2011-10-03T20:23:00.001-04:00

Here are too many examples of the signs I mentioned on my sermon last week.

video from today's sermon

2011-10-02T18:06:00.002-04:00

Sermon starts at minute 34. I make reference to signs in the church. We posted dozens of the same sign, ledger size paper, black with white writing: "Is One God Enough?" I really enjoyed how some of the homeletical heft had been carried in the parishioners by having to wonder about those signs.

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

text from today's sermon

2011-10-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

16th Sunday After Pentecost A

Exodus 20

I saw a poll which said that only 17% of Anglican clergy could name all Ten Commandments. Now that was Church of England clergy, ok? I can’t imagine what that percentage would be among Episcopal clergy, (we could take a poll right now!).

So maybe some review is in order. The Ten Commandments are traditionally divided into God-centric and people-centric commandments. The God-centric commandments are: you shall have no other God’s before me, you shall not have idols, and you shall not take Lord’s name in vain. The people-centric commandments are about taking a Sabbath day, honoring our parents, not stealing, not committing adultery, not killing, not coveting, and not giving a false witness. While there is something to the traditional designation of how the Ten Commandments are divided up, the first three about relationship with God and the final seven about relationship between people, the subject is always God and the object is always us. All of the Ten Commandments are about God and how we, in turn, relate to him.

For our review we can ask if there is any importance to the order of the Commandments? Maybe. What is easier to obey: not murdering someone or having one God? Don’t answer right away, which commandment is easier to obey, not murdering, or having one god? Since the ten commandments are something of a contract, God is leading with the hardest commandment, having no other gods before him, just so we will know what the terms are so that if we don’t agree to the terms we can get out before even the fine print is established. “You shall have no other gods before me.” Get on board here, or head back to Egypt.

It seems easy enough: You shall have no other Gods before me, and you shall not make for yourself an idol. After all, how hard can that be? It’s not too hard being a monotheist these days, and when we talk about God, we are almost universally talking about the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Heck, even the atheists don’t believe in that God. You don’t hear Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens declaiming the pantheon of the Hindus or the Native American Sky Spirit. No, for the atheists, they don’t believe in our God, they are clear about that. The point is that God is God, God is one, this is not a hard piece of information to get behind these days.

The same is likely to be the case when it comes to idols. Nobody here has taken something from the creation, say, some wood or gold and has carved or otherwise manipulated it and attributed divine powers to it. Nobody has a rain god in their pocket, nobody here has a private, personal god that looks over the family. God rules out idols for the Hebrews because they are about to go into Canaan where idols were everywhere and for every purpose: fertility, rain, the harvest, the home, everything. But we don’t have that do we? Well that’s good, we are covered then on those first two commandments: we are a one-God people. And we don’t have idols.

But, it’s just not that simple,

God put a qualifier on the idol part: “you shall not bow down to them or worship them.” On the face of it, that sounds pretty harmless, God is talking about the actual practice of bowing, prostrating oneself in a ritualistic way to these idols. Of course nobody here is literally bowing down to idols. But there are lots of ways of bowing down. There are lots of ways of honoring something in our lives. There are lots of ways to show our true allegiances. And there are indeed lots of gods.

So fess up, who is your god? One god is seldom enough for most people. What do you cling to for help, satisfaction, and security? Who or what do you put first in your heart and mind? The two biggest idols I know of are Career and Children. Oh, boy! Now he’s done it. As one of my friends would say, “Now he’s gone from preachin’ to meddlin’!”

This is the part of the sermon where I make you mad. The secret of preaching, though, is that you can really only say what you know, and believe me I am acquainted with the gods and idols of Career and Children. Career and Children are popular idols because they are so central to our lives. That’s not all wrong though, the problem comes up with their position in our lives, central. God must be central, and when He is not, then you need to ask yourself, “who is my god?” What do you give honor to before you give honor to God? There are countless of lesser idols to worship too: sports, sex, physical perfection, intellectual power, social standing, you name it! The thing about us human beings is that we will worship just about anything.

Personally, I have been tempted in the past few weeks to worship an idol, the idol of health. I have a dear friend, a new friend, who was in mortal danger, but no longer is, she is still going to have a long rough road, but she is out of the woods; and for a time I almost gave honor to the idol of health. See? Idolatry is such a subtle thing. We have a concern and then, just for a moment, we lose perspective, and then we have placed all our concern and hope in the wrong place. Idolatry is too narrow a perspective, I was placing too much emphasis on the health of my friend and not enough on the author of health for my friend.

The problem that has always been with idolatry from the days before Moses up until today is that the idols are right in front of us and are made of the things that we have always needed and wanted. Those ancient people weren’t dummies you know, they went to those idols for the things that they needed: they needed rain, they needed the harvest, they needed children and they needed to feed their families. God is calling us away from our idols to recognize Him as the author of all creation. Doing this was absolutely counter-cultural then, in Moses’ time and it still is. When we leave the idols behind the culture looks and wonders what our problem is. But when we worship God, we say, “God is the Creator.” God creates all the things that we love: health, careers, children, sex, sports, all of it.

The only sin then, the only sin, is idolatry, taking something from the creation and imbuing it with the powers that belong to God, the power to make us whole. Look at those commandments, those, “shall nots” and you will see a person acting as if their own desires were the creator and not God.

When we see that God is God, and that we are not, and neither is anything else, then we are doing something monumental: we are working with the grain of the universe. Do you hear that? Just like woodworkers that submit their work to the grain of the wood, so too do we when we see ourselves and everything else as created, and God as creator. It’s that simple and it’s that difficult. When we finally see God as God, then we are in harmony with how creation was intended to be, we are working with the grain of the universe.

What this comes down to is simple awareness. Awareness that God is the author of all, full stop, and without remainder. God is God. This awareness is never far from us and we need not prepare to receive it. Simply remind yourself that those children were made by God, be aware that God allows your career to blossom, or to dry up. God is our sole source of happiness and satisfaction. Be aware, be mindful of the grain of the universe that God, your one God, has established. And then, like the woodworker, you will live and work, not against the grain, but with the grain that God has established. So, yes, one God is enough.

Baptism

2011-09-09T21:29:00.002-04:00

Here is the service from last week, I preached and baptized my first kid. Amazing. The sermon starts around minute 31.

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Burning bush revisited

2011-08-27T20:30:00.004-04:00

I'm not preaching this week, though the reading the clergy at Saint John's have chosen to preach on is from Exodus, Moses' encounter with God through the burning bush. Below I have reprinted my sermon on this text from a few years ago. In seminary, this sermon garnered a little bit of infamy. It was inspired by an interview I heard with Padgett Powell, who wrote a book called The Interrogative Mood, a novel that asks questions only. At the time of this sermon I did not want to read the book because I didn't want it to influence my approach to the text. Now I am reading the book and I love it. The experience is not unlike deep study and exegesis of Holy Scripture, that is, it makes one rethink reading itself and the effect of a text on oneself. {as an aside I am really working up a weird book on what I have learned about reading the Bible from reading difficult books like, Finnegans Wake, , Cerebus, anything by Tom Robbins, The Invisibles, Testament, etc.}

I think this method is worthwhile, indeed my spiritual director (a PhD in Literature) suggested I do something like this seasonally. So I guess I am saying, people of Saint John's, get ready. Here's the sermon:

What do you seek?

How is God connected to this burning bush? When did the bush stop burning? When, and if, it finally did stop burning, what happened to the goat that nibbled on the burning bush? Did the goat die? Did it not die, as in ever? Should there be such a thing as a picture of the burning bush? Doesn't that go against the whole idea of a burning bush? Can there be an icon of the Unknowable?

Why am I only asking questions? Why won't I make a statement? Can an entire sermon be written in the interrogative mood? Does English have an interrogative mood, or just interrogatory words? Given your own life, would you rather have God talk to you out of a burning bush or something else that burns, "yet is not consumed"? What would it be, a car, a desk, a professor? What defines Moses? Is Exodus in the Old Testament? Did the writer of Exodus think that his or her writing would ever be "old"? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people?

Shouldn't there be some form of introduction? What defines me? Is it that I am Josh Bowron, that I am a husband and a father, and a seminarian? Am I who I am because I am from Atlanta? Why do I love this Mountain? Is this a good idea? Would you like to know me better? What do I seek? Can we know a person by the questions they ask? Shall we continue?

What does it mean in the Old Testament when it says LORD, in all caps? What does taking off shoes on holy ground mean? Why don't we take off our shoes in church? Who were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Why does it matter? Should I care that I don't care? Can God hear? If so, does God hear with ears or is he psychic like that lady in the X-Men? What's so great about milk and honey? If they flow, you know, out of doors, won't they spoil? Wouldn't it stink?

What will happen to all those people that are already living in the land? Is God advocating for ethnic cleansing? What about all those Canaanites, and Hittites? I know some Israelites, but where are all the Amorites? Is "I AM" really God's name? How do I read the Bible anyway? How does the Church read the Bible? Do we have to think the same thing as the church? What happens when the church disagrees? What is my obligation to the church?

Is there anything outside the text? Am I a text? Can I tell my own story? Is telling my own story like biting my own teeth? Does the church read me? Am I on God's night stand?

What do you seek? What does this story of Moses and God in the Burning Bush mean? What is going on, back then and over there? What's it got to do with us, or, more importantly, me? Does God call people? Why does everybody talk about God calling us? Can God nudge? Can God hint? Does God ever say..."pssst!"?

Does God speak in tectonic plates?

Do you assume that I know the answer? Given all the characters in the Bible that God calls, is there a single one who was not offensive or messed up in some way? What is going through Moses' head? Was he afraid, was he nervous? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Can this shepherd be a liberator? Can this yokel be face to face with God? Did it happen? Did it not happen? Does the difference scare you, energize you, leave you flat, or something else altogether? What was Moses seeking, up there, on the mountain? Was he simply curious or did he have any idea whatsoever that he would encounter the long lost God?

What's God's voice like? Is it a tornado, an atom splitting? Is it a Big Bang or more like Yoko Ono? When you look at stained glass do you notice the colors first or the story? Who here will end up depicted in a stained glass window? If God can come to a person as a burning bush, why not as a chunk of bread and a sip of wine? Would the story of Moses and the Burning Bush have been possible without Moses? What I mean is, in any sacrament, we are there, so can a sacrament be a sacrament without us? Do we make it sacred? How important are we to God? Who's we? Why does God bother? Is He serious? Given the apparent cheapness of life, what is sacred?

What do you seek? What is going on with us? I mean me and you right now in this big marble room, are we o.k., you and me? Where, whence, whither, and how does the time go? What are the fundamental differences between Moses and me? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Is there some ulterior motive on God's part for talking to us through stuff, why does matter matter to God? What will tomorrow bring? Did Moses know how to be a patriarch? Do I know how to be an adult? Do I have to be an adult? Did God show Moses how to be a patriarch? Did you ever wonder why there is such a close etymological connection between adult and adulterated? What is my agenda in bringing that up?

Is God a micro-manager? Is God a. . . C.E.O.? Are you tired of questions? Does God tire of questions? Does God tire? Ought there be a moratorium on the word "God," as Bishop Spong suggests? Can you argue both sides on that issue?

Can a sermon consist of nothing but questions? What will my preaching teacher say? Will you tell on me? This is just silly, didn't Desmond Tutu preach here? Should I make a point and sit down? What is the cumulative effect of this barrage of questions? Will I ask a certain question just to get a laugh?

What is air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

What is the what, anyway? Who tells the truth more in Shakespeare's plays, the priests or the Fools? In terms of strict literary definitions, is the Bible a comedy or a tragedy?

Given the state of nature and society why do we still get our hopes up? Is that too pessimistic a question? Another way, given the changeability of life, why do we seek security? Can we remember life before life? Is anybody else here attracted to, and at the same time, utterly repulsed by post-modernism? What's the rush, where's the fire? No really, Church: Where's the Fire!? What's stopping you?

What do you seek? How can we proclaim a mystery? What is the use of experience? What defines you? If we talked for an hour could we come to an agreement on the taste of vanilla? Should we? How do we come to believe? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Is there some ulterior motive on God's part for talking to us through stuff, why does matter matter to God?

How will you meet God at this Table behind me tonight?

What do you seek? What does God seek? What do we seek?

Will we know it when we have found it? Can I find God at this table?

Will God find me at this table?

God, find us at your table.

Today's sermon

2011-08-21T14:02:00.000-04:00

Video to be posted:

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
August 21, 2011

Matthew 16:13-20

Who do you say that I am? It is really amazing how so few words from the right person can ask a question that has absolute implications.

I suppose there are lots of big questions: What happened to the dinosaurs? Who shot J.R.? Jacob or Edward? My favorite philosophical questions are: Who started it? Are we going to make it? Where are we going to put it? Who's going to clean up? And, Is it serious? Ultimate questions: to life, the Universe, Everything. And today Jesus is asking the ultimate question for us. “Who do you say that I am?” And if we can answer this question with integrity and authenticity, then the rest will follow.

Jesus first asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” He wants to know what those who have been watching and listening think of him. Jesus is asking what kind of impression that he has made but also how he is being interpreted. The disciples give him lots of answers, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”

I wonder what Jesus was thinking when he heard these poll results. After all, it’s quite a distinction to be seen as Elijah or Jeremiah: well respected, but dangerous to the powers that be; same for John the Baptist. Of course it never goes well for such as these, as we read about John a few weeks ago.

Or to be one of the prophets, well, that meant to be a person who called people to God. Prophets in the Jewish tradition are not fortune tellers or oracles of any kind. The Rabbis describe a prophet as that voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. Prophecy is a form of living, a crossing point of God and humanity. God is raging in the prophet’s words .

Not a bad showing to be considered one of the prophets. But I can just see Jesus, nodding; he can see why they might think he’s a prophet, he argues with the hypocrites, he invites the poor and marginalized to eat with him. But Jesus seems to know this isn’t quite it. It’s close, at times he is like a prophet, but he’s got something else in mind.

Those people get close, but Jesus presses more. “Well then, who do you say that I am?” This is our ultimate question: Who do you say that I am?

Peter gives an interesting response: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” The problem that we have upon hearing Peter’s confession is that we conflate his response with our own understanding of Jesus Christ as the incarnate God. What we do is hear, “the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” and we add on, Jesus, God incarnate, the second person of the trinity, God from God, light from light, true God from true God. It’s hard not to hear Peter’s response like that when we hear it this side of Nicea, on our side of the creed.

But Peter is saying something a little more nuanced. The concept of a Messiah, is, of course, not exclusive to Christianity, not by a long shot. We have to remember that Messiah and incarnate-God are not the same thing. Indeed, in the Old Testament there are several references to the Messiah, and not all of them were of the chosen people. Most notably, in the book of Isaiah, the Persian king, Cyrus, who was decidedly NOT a Hebrew, is called the Messiah, because he secures peace and freedom for God’s people, he is the shepherd of God’s people, even where the Davidic kings have failed. (Is: 44-45) . The messiah has been several things over the years, and being God incarnate was never part of the program.

Jesus praises Peter for his insight, however. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, Jesus in effect praises God for opening Peter to such an insight. But then Jesus urges his disciples to keep it quiet about the whole, Messiah, Son-of-God thing. Biblical scholars refer to Jesus’ reticence about his Messiahship as the messianic secret. Why would Jesus want to be quiet about his being the messiah? Some have offered that it is because Jesus is trying to protect his disciples: if they go out blabbing about how he is the messiah, that might put them in a bad spot, socially and religiously. The prevalent notion about the messiah at this time was chiefly political, and that meant coming into direct conflict with the Roman Empire. And here’s the rub, Jesus hadn’t been in conflict the Romans, he had been in conflict with his own people, but he hadn’t messed with the Romans.

This is why Jesus is so secretive about his Messiah-ship, it’s because he’s not exactly the messiah as understood by every messiah-seeking Jew of his day. While the people were not exactly cold with the idea that Jesus was a prophet, Peter was definitely getting warmer when he called Jesus the messiah and the son of God. Jesus is pleased that Peter is getting there. And Peter is able to get warmer and warmer about whom Jesus is by the grace of God, God has revealed to Peter who Jesus is.

Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” “Jesus lived 2000 years ago, who said some nice things, but really he has no bearing on my life right now.” You’re ice cold, try again.

“Well, Jesus was a first century Palestinian Jew who preached a message of love and inclusion. Jesus did not recognize the religious and national borders of his day and he taught us all how a human should act, even accepting death rather than commit violence.” O.K., now you’re getting warm, keep going.

“Jesus was sent to earth by God to be a ransom for my sins, to make me righteous in the sight of God. Jesus is my personal redeemer and savior.” You’re getting warmer!

“Ok, Jesus was, and is, the incarnation, the enfleshment of God, Jesus was God on earth. Jesus is the Christ, the second person of the Holy and undivided Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father.” Oh, now you’re heating up, one more time.

“I’m not sure . . . and I don’t really understand what you mean by co-equal and co-eternal, and I’ve never had a born-again type experience, but when I get quiet, someone is calling to me, persistently, calling and pulling me, love is there. I can’t nail it all down certainly, but when I hear these stories, they just ring true, those stories, they sound like the one that’s been calling me. I think, and I feel, that someone is there and, well, all I know is that when I come to the rail to get the bread and wine, he usually shows up there too.” Alright, now you’re red hot!

Like all answers to questions, they are dictated and colored by the question. And the question is in its essence is Jesus. The answer must contain, the power, but also the humble humanity, of the question.

Who do you say that I am?

It’s not enough for us to know what people say about Jesus, and it’s really not enough either to simply know what the church says about Jesus; though it helps. While the church has always proclaimed a common faith, a faith we all share together; we all, each of us need to have some account of who Jesus is for us, as we experience him. It need not be some pat answer; it need not be clear and certain. But we need to have some account. We need to be attempting, always, to get warmer and warmer, to who Jesus is;

you’re getting warmer,

burning up now,

red hot!

Today's service

2011-08-07T21:47:00.002-04:00

I preach and celebrate. Notice at 1:05:00 I do a quick consecration for the gluten allergic acolyte! Props to the other acolyte who found the page for the quick consecration.

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
August 7, 2011
Matthew 14: 22-33
There are essentially two prayers: Thank you and Help! We might add one more prayer to those two and that would be: “I want.” But I would argue that, “I want,” is a sub-species, or maybe a precursor to “Help.” When we ask God for something, when we say, I want, we really are saying, “Help.”
We all pray every day, in some form or another, consciously and unconsciously, formally and informally, we all pray. We pray every day and give God some things to take care of. Sometimes when I am praying I feel like a teenager when it is getting close to my birthday, “Just so you know, God, X, Y, and Z, are going on and well you know, I’d like that, so thanks, in advance.” We give God a divine Honey-do list. And when we pray in this way, the implicit theme, what we really expect, is for God to fulfill our requests: God as Amazon.com. This kind of thinking about prayer is how we talk about prayer too. Raise your hand if you have heard someone talk about an answered prayer. Raise your hand if that story had the person telling it get what they were asking for. I’m not knocking these experiences, I’ve had them, and I will continue to have them. God has answered my prayers in the affirmative, God has given me what I have asked for. But what about when he doesn’t?
A few years ago the satirical newspaper, The Onion, ran a story entitled, “God Answers the Prayer of Little Boy,” the subtitle is: “No, says God.” It’s funny that satire seems to be the last bastion of wisdom in our popular culture. Who here has heard this testimony to prayer? “Oh yes, I prayed to God and he answered that prayer, it was clear as day: ‘NO!’” That’s not such a popular story. I’m not trying to be negative. But maybe I am. I am trying to be positive about God’s negative. We need to remember that God answers ALL prayer, but we don’t always get the answer we want. God sometimes says, “No.” because that’s the answer we need, maybe not what we want, but what we need. God’s, “No,” is just as important as his “Yes.”
When we can recognize God’s “No” as well as his “Yes,” then our “I want” prayer life will look more and more like “ Help,” and “Thank You”. And just to be clear, these two mammoth categories of prayer that I have laid out cover a great deal. I think we would be hard pressed to find a hymn, or psalm, or prayer from the Prayer Book that wasn’t a thank you, a help, or an mixture of the two.
So what’s this all got to do with the Gospel? A lot. Today we hear the story of Peter and Jesus on the water. Once again, Peter gets it so vividly right but he also fails epically. And thank God for Peter, Peter the Rock, the very foundation of the church, messing up all the time. What a model that we have for discipleship, a real human being. Can you imagine how the story might have read if Peter was more than human? Peter walks out on the water, not testing Jesus, like he does in our Gospel reading, nope, Peter knows his Lord when he sees him and simply goes for a stroll out on the lake. End of story, praise to you Lord Christ. No, we have THE Peter, Peter who is the first to confess that Jesus is Lord, but also the same Peter who get’s called Satan by Jesus, do you know that when Jesus is being tempted in the desert he doesn’t even call Satan, Satan, but he does call Peter Satan. This is our Peter, Peter who walks on water but also sinks. And Peter is the one for us to watch today. What is he doing? He tests his Lord by asking him to command that he join him. Essentially Peter is praying a “I Want” prayer, but his “I want” is really a “thank you” in disguise because Peter is trying to be with his Lord. His true prayer is born out of his desire to be with his Lord, a thank you yearning for completion. And Jesus grants him his request. Which raises another point about prayer, sometimes God gives us what we want so that we might have a deeper insight into what we really need. When Peter falls into the water, after noticing the strong wind, he calls out again to his lord and again Jesus grants his request, pulling him out of the water and then saying, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Jesus is really not castigating Peter, the Greek reads more like, “Oh, little student, why are you so worried?” You see, Jesus answers Peter’s requests, his prayers, so that the life of Peter might be a lesson. The prayers are answered, but there is a human component, the context into which the prayers return.
When our prayers return to us, they reenter our lives and then we must respond to God’s answer, which we may or may not be up to. Like Peter, we may not be up to God answering our prayer. It is this dynamic, of course, that all of us live in at all times, the give and take, the conversation with God, desire and satisfaction, thank you and help. Prayer is not a one way street. Prayer is our relationship with God and it is not abstract, it is real and it has a particular quality to it.
Like Peter, our relationship and our prayers with God go a certain way. We feel a pull towards oneness with God and we begin to talk with God. We make petitions, we ask for things, we ask for help, we say thank you, and we might even simply rest in the presence of God. And God answers those prayers: sometimes, yes, sometimes no, many times, wait. We get out of the boat, we walk on water, we sink. But then He catches us. When we fail he catches us. Jesus immediately catches Peter.
Prayer is like a tightrope walker who falls from his rope, only to discover that he has landed upon another rope, and can simply begin again. Thus is our life with God, our prayers goes to him, they come back answered: “yes, no, wait,” and we respond with more prayer. A dynamic interplay of ever escalating transformation, and all the while, Jesus is there to immediately grab us when we fail, to set us right, and when we receive that help may we all have the presence of mind to say “thank you.”

This past Sunday, I preach and celebrate

2011-08-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Service from 7/17/11

2011-07-19T22:14:00.002-04:00

I preach this one, about nineteen minutes in. Note my uneven stole.

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Sermon for 7/10/11

2011-07-10T18:28:00.002-04:00

Proper 10 OT year A
Gen. 25:19-34
As it turns out, names matter. Marion Morrison wanted to grow up to be a cowboy-movie star; Marion wasn’t quite macho enough so he changed his name to the “John Wayne.” Who is more interesting, Stanfani Germanotta or Lady Gaga? She’s the same person, but the name Lady Gaga is more descriptive of the kind of person we are talking about: Lady Gaga is . . . well, Lady Gaga, and what Lady Gaga is, is certainly not a Stephani. Names matter. There is a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction where Butch the boxer is talking to the cab driver whose name is Esmerelda Villalobos. Esmerelda asks Butch what his name means, he answers, “I’m American, our names don’t mean anything”. But they do, names matter! What sounds more dangerous, Randy Poffo, or Randy Savage? Who’s funnier, Caryn Johnson, or Whoopi Goldberg? Malcolm Little changed his name to Malcolm X to make a point about the heritage of slavery in America. A classmate of mine from college was born on July 4th, 1976. Her first and middle names are Sunday America. Names matter.
In the Old Testament, names were usually a pun that described the person or the place, often with crushing wit. Jacob and Esau for example. Esau was evidently born with a reddish hue to him, and was covered in hair. Esau then is a play of a play of a play on two different words that means red and hairy. We hear “Esau,” and think, “OK, so he’s called Esau, this is America, our names don’t mean anything.” But the ancient Hebrews hearing this story heard much more, they heard an ethnic joke, a little bit of history, and something about who they are as a people. Jacob, Esau’s twin brother, wasn’t named Jacob because it sounded nice either, Jacob means “he who grasps the heel,” or “he who supplants”: this is not complimentary. Instead, Jacob’s name is highly descriptive of the kind of person that he was: a person who takes advantage, takes what is not his. Imagine that, going through life as “Cheater,” your parents calling you home, “Oh, He-that-takes-that-which-is-not-his, time to come home!” At the end of today’s reading, Jacob removes all doubt about his designation as the one who supplants, the one who replaces and supersedes: he cons his brother out of his birthright.
And what is a birthright? Most people think of a birthright as some kind of cultural given, “It is my birthright that I cook good Italian food.” But back in the Old Testament times, a birthright was so much more. As the eldest son, Esau, was entitled by law. And in that time it was considered a natural law, something self-evident, that the eldest son was entitled to a double share of the inheritance from the father as well as taking upon himself the leadership of the family, the clan, and the tribe. Having claim to the birthright was a big deal, it made you generationally wealthy, a real leader. And Jacob cheats Esau out of it. Now granted, Esau likely wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, I’m sure he could have scrounged together something else to eat without giving away the store. All that said, as far as Jacob is concerned if you dupe a stupid person, it’s still wrong.
This is our patriarch. Jacob the cheat.
This is Jacob, Jacob as in: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jacob as in the one whose name is changed to Israel. Israel as in Israel: the people of God.
Jacob who argues with his brother in utero! Our patriarch the con artist; who cheats his brother and lies to his father.
But there is this other part of Jacob. Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson to Abraham. Jacob, heir of God’s promise to be a great and called-apart people. All the while that Jacob is conning and lying his way through life, God visits him and renews the promise and blessing that was given to Abraham. Jacob is a mixed bag, he is an absolutely flawed, dangerous person, yet God blesses him, his family, and those around him.
During these escapades, God visits Jacob many times. At one point Jacob wrestles with someone, we don’t know who it is, in fact Jacob asks his name, but the stranger doesn’t give it. He does, however, grant Jacob a new name, a new name that signifies who the stranger really is: Israel, which means the one who contends with God. Jacob loses that wresting match, yet the stranger says that Jacob has wrestled with the divine and has prevailed. It is interesting that he is the one who struggles with God and loses, but he is also the one who prevails.
So we have Jacob, the one who supplants, usurps, Jacob the con man, Jacob the bad news. Then there is Israel, who wrestles with God, Israel the blessed, Israel the patriarch. Jacob/Israel, Marion Morrison/John Wayne, Stephani Germanta/Lady Gaga. In each case they are the same person but with a different persona and promise. Israel and Jacob are the same, nothing really has changed, except God’s promise, which makes all the difference. The funny thing is that when God talks to Israel, when God talks to him and renews his blessing over and over again, God calls him Jacob. Here we see that God knows who he is dealing with. God knows that Jacob is a jerk (has faults). God knows that Jacob will mess up and take advantage of people. God calls Jacob Jacob and not Israel, because he knows who he is talking to.
I wonder if God knows who he is talking to when dealing with us. Do you think God trusts himself to bless you in all your foibles? When you are Jacob, trying to supplant yourself, exerting power over another, when you are Jacob, God will still bless you as Israel. But the thing about this blessing is that it involves some wrestling with God, and some renaming, some identity changing.
I noticed, at the baptisms here, Father Paul says to the parents of the children “Name this child.” When we get named, we get our identity. Our names are who we are, in just a few syllables, we get our identity. The Bible is full of name changes, and when the name changes a new life is initiated: Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah, Jacob became Israel. Jesus continued the practice calling Cephas, Peter, the rock, the petras, upon which his church would be built. Saul, that vigorous persecutor of the church, becomes Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. This new name is a designation that says, what comes next is new.
But God knows, God knows, that the process of living into a new identity, a life of the blessed and beloved by God is never that cut and dry. Abraham still argued with God, Jacob cheated his brother and father, Peter denied Jesus, three times!
We might always be Jacob, we might always be that self-seeking one. But God blesses us anyway. The fact that Jacob acts the way he does, and is still blessed is a remarkable testimony to the faithfulness of God. Does Jacob behave as one who is blessed? No, he acts as if he had to grasp and grab for his future, almost in ignorance of his blessings. Sound familiar? Isn’t this what we all do, we are all so blessed, but we think that we did it. So here we are, most of the time we are a bunch of Jacobs running around conning our brothers. Every once in a while we recognize that we indeed are blessed by God and act like it. We respond to our blessedness with humility and thankfulness. Our faith ought to be a response to His faith. “Oh how I love Jesus, because he first loved me.” Remember that one? Who knew that such a simple little song held such deep theology? Saint Paul says this too in his letter to the Romans, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So God is the initiator, God comes to us first. Thus, our faith is always a response to God’s faith, in us. We are his people, through the waters of baptism, given new names, a new life and identity. God knows who he is dealing with in John Wayne or Lady Gaga, Marion Morrison or Stephanie Germanotta, Jacob or Israel. We are blessed, by any name, we are blessed by God, may we all respond accordingly.

Here's a video of the Holy Eucharist from 6/26/11

2011-07-10T18:09:00.002-04:00

The service itself doesn't start until about 10 minutes in. Extra credit if you can spot the fainting reader.

Watch live streaming video from sjecharlotteservices at livestream.com

Sermon for Second Sun. after Pentecost

2011-06-28T13:25:00.002-04:00

Gen. 22:1-14
Let’s make one thing clear; today’s Old Testament story is a bear. God tests Abraham and tells him to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, and Abraham all but does it. This ain’t no bedtime story, and it’s not for the faint of heart either. Hold on it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Wrestling with this text ultimately forces us to ask one question, “What would it take for me to stop worshipping God?” What would it take? I’m not talking about becoming an atheist. The question is: What would it take for you to stop worshipping God, for you to throw in the towel and say, “No, God, I don’t think I will.”? Is there, in fact, a point at which ethics overrides obedience to God?

But in today’s reading Abraham doesn’t seem to ask this question. All we get from Abraham is his ascent to God’s command, he does what he is told. In our horror we want to know what kind of person even considers such a thing? What kind of a person, takes a three day journey, knowing that at the end of that journey, lies death for his long promised son? What kind of person is Abraham anyway? We know what tradition says, Abraham is the father of faith; a paragon of obedience. We have to remember that this scene is the culmination of years and years of relationship. This is very much like reading the climax in a story with little sense of what led to the conflict. And it is likely not at all an incidental and insignificant detail that after this scene, God never speaks directly to Abraham again. There is something about this scene in the relationship between God and Abraham that seems to leave both parties sour.

So what leads up to this dramatic scene?

We need to keep in mind that God and Abraham have been working together for a long while at this point. Perhaps you remember a few chapters back, when God was getting ready to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham bargains and bargains with God, argues really. In that scene, Abraham reminds God of how merciful God is (Gen. 18: 25), and God relents; indeed, God changes his mind on account of Abraham’s arguments. Maybe Abraham is certain that God would never take away Isaac, after-all this is the long-promised heir, the one who would produce the heirs that would number more than the stars (Gen. 15:5). Is Abraham calling God’s bluff? Maybe Abraham is just humoring God, “Sure, sure, God, oh my son, my beloved? Oh, ok, yeah the one you already promised would give me all those descendents, uh huh, o.k., I’ll go along with this.”

But I’m not so sure. Our text itself offers no help for us in terms of understanding Abraham’s inner being, we don’t know what he is thinking. We don’t know if Abraham is cavalier in his attitude about the sacrifice or if Abraham is resigned to the commands of God. We don’t know if Abraham is torn by anxiety. We don’t know what’s going on with Abraham, we can only guess.

Well, then, what can we know about Abraham in this story? We can look at what he says, what words he uses. Abraham says only two things in the story, but he says one of those two things, three times. Abraham says, “Here I am.” Whenever anyone calls to him, whether it is God, his son Isaac, or an angel, Abraham answers, “Here I am!” Abraham is not trying to hide from God, unlike Adam in the garden who tried to hide from God’s presence when he sinned (Gen. 3:10). Abraham is not hiding, he’s out in the open; he is being honest: “Here I am!” Abraham says only one other thing in this whole episode, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” This is in response to Isaac’s common sense question, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” But again, the text gives us no clues as to Abraham’s tone or state of mind. Was Abraham trying to keep Isaac from panicking by lying to him, was Abraham speaking metaphorically, is Isaac the lamb? Was Abraham just totally convinced that God would supply the lamb? We don’t know what he was thinking really, I am apt to take him at his word, even though Abraham has more than his fair share of guile. We simply don’t know, but what we can say is that 1.) Abraham is honest about who he is, “Here I am!” and 2.) he knows that God provides. He is honest, he is clear about who he is and about who God is and what God does.

So many readings of this story try to sanitize it of its horror. This command from God is too much to bear. I would wager that if we are being honest, most of us hear this command and say, “No! Unfair.!” This is not satisfactory. And just as unsatisfactory is the blind acceptance of the command. This is my biggest problem with Abraham in this story. Earlier Abraham argues with God not to destroy two wicked cities, but when it comes to his son, he clams up. The history clearly shows that God is more than willing to hash things out, if not change his mind, why so reticent Abraham? Why not speak up for what’s right? This kind of conundrum, this making a person choose between obedience to God and family comes up in the teachings of Jesus too. Remember when Jesus says, “Whoever does not hate mother and father, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes even life itself, they cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) What is the deal with the extreme God of ours? It’s almost as if he were asking us to have faith, to trust, in him and him alone. What a strange god, a god that demands not only total trust, but singular trust, trust to the exclusion of all other trust and security.

It really doesn’t matter whether we look at this story with the believing eyes of unquestioned faith, or with a critical eye, the most important thing to remember about this story is the way it did not turn out. Make no mistake, had God asked for and then collected on his demand for the sacrifice of Isaac, we all would not be here. This is the answer to the question that I posed earlier, “What would it take for you to stop worshipping God?” The answer is when God stops being God. God would not be God had he reneged on his promise that Isaac would be Abraham’s heir. Abraham, knows this, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” But let us not be lulled into thinking that Abraham is certain about all this. Abraham is a human being after all. He cannot know for certain that God will provide, but he does have faith that God will provide.

And what is faith? Faith is one of those churchy words that gets used quite a bit, so often, that perhaps the meaning gets lost. Faith is not certainty, nor is faith facts. Faith is trust. And trust is tricky. When we trust someone, we do not have the certainty that we get from, say, mathematics, when we trust someone we are not as confident as 1 + 1 = 2. When we trust, we don’t know the outcome. When we trust we go out on a limb a little, when we trust we don’t have certainty; but we have hope, we have assurance. Hope and assurance are brought about by relationships over time, not facts and figures. And it is the relationship that Abraham has with God over time that has allowed him to trust God, to have faith in God. Indeed to become our exemplar for faith. And not simply the father of our faith. Christians do not have an exclusive claim on Abraham; no, Abraham is THE father of faith. The knight of faith, as Soren Kierkegaard dubbed him, Abraham is the person of faith par excellence, not for his certainty but for his trust, in God.

What characterizes the person of faith is what Abraham says in this story, “Here I am,” and “God himself will provide.” The person of faith is honest about who they are, and they know the source and owner of everything they have.

Which is easier said than done. Faith is about being honest about who you are and who is the source of all that you have, and that same source, has total claim, total claim on you. And this claim is what today’s reading highlights: God has total claim, and will not be denied. This is scary stuff really. We have a God who insists upon trust in him totally and solely. There are to be no other gods before him. And make no mistake there are plenty of other gods. The age of polytheism is not over, there are lots of gods, those things that we put in the place of God, those things that we use to try to make us satisfied and whole and happy. But our God won’t have it. God is the provider, the sole provider of all our satisfaction, wholeness, and happiness; without remainder.

And putting our trust in Him, but knowing he will be there with us. That is the promise God makes to Abraham and to his son Isaac and his son Jacob and to all their descendants. We are part of that line of descendants, we are heirs of his eternal kingdom, and this is the same God that reveals himself to us, provides for us, and has created the means of grace and the hope of glory for us in Jesus Christ. And there simply is no better way to draw near in faith to our Lord than to proclaim our common trust in him, pray to him, confess our sins to him, and finally, celebrate his undying faith in us at the Eucharistic table. Amen.

It's been a awhile!

2011-06-28T13:18:00.002-04:00

Recap since Lent 4:

1.) we have a baby on the way.
2.) found out that our home diocese was not hiring.
3.) found the perfect job in Charlotte, NC.
4.) Ordained to the priesthood on 6/18/11.Here too.
5.) Moved from Sewanee, very very sad.
6.) Moved to Charlotte. Very awesome, so far.
7.) I'll keep up with this blog.
8.) Thanks.
9.) Bye.
10.) ten is a good number.

Lent 4

2011-04-05T10:30:00.001-04:00

John 9
“As he passed by, he saw a blind man from his birth.” This is how John opens the story. Enter the disciples, who consider the blind man, not a man as such, they consider him more as a case: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?”
Undoubtedly you have heard about this notion of sin and punishment. This primitive idea that the consequences of sin are sickness and poverty. Thank goodness we have gone beyond these old ideas. I know that none among us have looked upon the poor, the homeless, the addicted and have definitely NOT thought of God justly punishing them. Well, as it turns out the Jews have never really had this notion of punishment and sin either. The Levitical purity codes were always egalitarian. Yes sin and all manners of uncleanliness could drive God away. But the purity laws and the various codes of cleaning were the ultimate social leveler. Each person was never more than a few days away from ritual purity, no matter their station. One of the points of the story of Job, was that sickness and misfortune are not necessarily linked to sin.
Jesus seems to understand this and says so, “it was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” I wonder what it was like hearing that? The blind man had grown up being told that he was a sinner or that his parents were. Here is a man who was certainly used to having the works of God made manifest in him, but as punishment. Now, someone is saying something new and he has a different tone, he’s not yelling for one, and now this mud.
Notice nobody is asking this man anything. He’s a case. Not even Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be healed?” Jesus just sends him off to the pool to make his mikvah, his ritual cleansing. Exit Blind Man, but John has us follow him, leaving Jesus and the disciples off stage. What follows tells how the-now-sighted man is received into his community after his healing. And it doesn’t seem to go well. Some don’t believe that he is the one who was blind. When he does convince them, and talks about his healing from Jesus, they bring him to the Pharisees who question him all over again, but this time they are asking him, not about his healing , but about the healer. “How did he heal you?” “How can a Sabbath-breaking sinner heal?” Still not sure about all of this, the Pharisees call in the man’s parents. And they just don’t want to get involved so they say, “Look, our son can make his own decisions, he’s of age, ask him.” The man really can’t get a break since he regained his sight, it’s almost as if his community liked him better when he was blind.
And this is where the story becomes less like holy writ and more like Night Court. Remember Night Court? Night Court was a cavalcade of 1980s stand-up comics who took turns making wisecracks, all set up by the judge, lawyers, and bailiffs. The Pharisees are getting impatient now and say: Give God the glory! Meaning: tell the truth! Ok, maybe it’s more like a Few Good Men, because I’m not sure that they can handle the truth. The man tells them what happened again, they press further and he asks “Why do you want to hear it again, Do you too want to become his disciples?” The Greek here is in on the joke, the man expects a “No” answer. His question might read more like, “You don’t want to become his disciples do you?” The Pharisees revile him and kick him out saying he was born in utter sin, putting us right back at square one.
Right back at square one, where we find Jesus. And if we read carefully, we see that the man does not recognize Jesus at sight or sound. Jesus asks, “Do you believe in the Son of man?” The man answers, “Yes, can you tell me who that might be.” And Jesus, ever the punster, playing on the man’s recent ocular improvement says: “You have seen him and it is the one speaking to you.” And the man worships Jesus.
And finally one last confrontation, this time between Jesus and some of the Pharisees. It’s the coup de grace on the whole affair, as if this entire passage were leading up to this exchange. Jesus says, “I came to judge the world, so that those who are blind might see, and those that are sighted might be made blind.” “So what, we’re blind then?” ask the Pharisees, and somewhat enigmatically Jesus answers “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.”
The End. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you Lord Christ.
Boy it sure feels good to be on the right side of that exhortation, doesn’t it? Good thing we’re not like those Pharisees. But you know the implication is on us. It always has been, and it is now. Like those Pharisees, we need to question this blind man who is no longer blind, but we need to go further and watch him and see what develops.
This blind man. This man who was not asked if he wanted to be healed, this man who defended Jesus’ actions without ever seeing him, or knowing what he was about, except that he was from God. Here is a person surprised by an uninvited Jesus. Here is a person that has an encounter that he just cannot understand, and this encounter does not hold up to the scrutiny of his family, his culture, even his own past. But, here’s the rub: as our blind, then-sighted, friend shows us, that kind of understanding, the intellectual and societal pigeonholing, is not really necessary. The understanding of how healing and God works in the structures that have come before, even in inspired ones, is not the point.
Here we have a story of the acts of God, we have a story of God’s works being revealed in a person! And what surrounds that person? Questions: Who, what, when, where, why, how; the questions are coming from people of faith, people of faith seeking understanding. It’s not that the Pharisees are asking the wrong questions, they are doing their due diligence; they are literally testing the spirit of what Jesus has done.
What is going on, I think, is that they don’t yet have the skills to relate with the blind man or with Jesus. There were those Pharisees who did seem to have the right skills, who could engage Jesus and the phenomena that came in his wake, Nicodemus for example, and in our story today the Pharisees were divided, meaning there were some who were trying to hear all this through.
But Jesus doesn’t make it easy on the Pharisees, and on us, when he drops this doozy: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see, may see, and those that do see may become blind.” This puzzling phrase is rendered clear by watching this blind-man-who-isn’t-blind; what happens with him is the key.
Jesus didn’t just give the man sight. He gave him his blindness as well. Blind from birth! If you are blind from birth, can you even understand what it means to be blind? What have you got to compare it to? The sighted among us can close our eyes and at least imagine, however weakly, what it might be like to be blind. When you think it through, this man didn’t even know what blindness was until Jesus gave him sight. Blindness then, is not a condition of being, as much a lack of ability. Which is obvious, but it needs to be said in light of this reading because we tend to overly spiritualize these readings. We talk a lot about spiritual blindness, as if that were some kind of natural category. Jesus gave the man an ability to see his blindness. And in his mercy he will give the sighted blindness so that they may obtain perspective on their sin.
The healing then is a bestowal of a skill, a skill to see one’s blindness. To see where one has chosen, or been made, to be blind to one’s own injustices to ourselves and our neighbors. Where are you blind? Where are those subtle ways that you have hardened your heart to yourself, your neighbor, and your God? You are blind! Whenever you hear that one person and know, you know that the next thing that comes out of their mouth is going to be all wrong: you are blind. Remember that time when that jerk cut in line, remember? You kept your cool, you didn’t cuss him out, but you still carry that no account, ill-mannered, fool in your mind, you are blind. This hasn’t happened to you or me, but I’ve heard of it, when someone, no one here of course, when someone tears down another person, usually behind their back, and smooth’s it over with “Bless her heart.” That’s blindness!
But Jesus doesn’t seem to fault the blind, that’s the good news, Jesus doesn’t fault the blind: “If you were blind you would not have sin.” But, here’s the rub, Jesus heals blindness, and in that healing you receive sight to see how you were blind. Jesus grants the skill so that we can begin to reckon our blindness.

Funny thing is that sightedness and blindness in today’s gospel look a lot alike. Jesus also grants blindness, grants blindness, to those who in their pride say they see but show by their actions and understanding that they do not. There is this cycle that Jesus puts us on of sightedness and blindness, back to sightedness.
The common denominator though is Jesus, he is the one who gives us the skill, the sight to see our own blindness. Know this, you cannot encounter Jesus Christ and come back unchanged. Paul, blinded. Lazarus , raised. Mary of Magdela, set free. Changed. Andrew, Peter, James, John, Josh, Don, Jane, Bill: changed. It happens. What better place than the Church, and what better time than Lent, than to look and ask ourselves where we have been blind?
May Jesus come, even uninvited, come to find us where we are: when we do not have the sight to see him, find us in our blindness, and give us new eyes to see our blindedness and behold only him and the gift of new life that we have through him. Amen.

Sunday's Sermon

2011-02-13T22:14:00.002-05:00

Epiphany 6
Deut. 30:15-20
Matthew 5: 21-37

So, here we are at Epiphany Six. It’s been great hasn’t it? For the first two Sundays we had accounts of Jesus’ baptism. Undoubtedly we heard sermons that made us all think hard about our own baptisms and what it means to be a Christian. Then in the third Sunday after Epiphany we learned about the beginning of Jesus’ mission, how he called his first disciples; and we heard sermons about following Jesus. So far so good. Very good, in fact. Then, two weeks ago, Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount, a masterwork of teaching and consolation for the early Christians and for us: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” That week we learned about the Kingdom of Heaven and how it reverses the fortunes of the world. Finally, last week we continued with the Sermon on the Mount and we learned about how we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We may have even sung “This Little Light of Mine.” I like this stuff, it makes me feel good. But it is not to last.
Today Jesus gives us some pretty tall orders that cause every one of us to look at our shoes, shuffle our feet, clear our throat, or more likely to say, “Well Jesus doesn’t mean that, he’s using exaggeration and hyperbole, he’s saying something outrageous to prove a point.” Jesus says, “I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister,* you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult* a brother or sister,* you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell* of fire.” That’s exaggeration you see, Jesus asks a lot of us, but to be that nice to my siblings, neighbors, or fellow church-goers is unrealistic.” Right? I’m not so sure. What about this doozy that got Jimmie Carter into so much trouble, “‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” 28But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
It’s hyperbole, it’s unrealistic. He doesn’t mean it.
What happened? We were on board with Jesus saying blessed are the poor in spirit, we were right with him at the baptism stories, and the part where he said, “Follow Me!” What happened? Now that we get to the part of the sermon that gets specific, we attribute hyperbole to Jesus. Now that Jesus says, “Now listen up my disciples, here’s what this life with me looks like, this is what I expect” we say, “He’s exaggerating.”
Well there are two points here that I will try to convince you of. The first is that I don’t think Jesus was exaggerating. I am one of those rare Bible scholars that think that the writers of the Gospels knew what they meant when they wrote it. Of course there are all kinds of rhetoric and tricks of genre, but I think Jesus means, plainly, what he says here. The second point is about who this Sermon on the Mount is for.
You see these teachings are for disciples. Jesus is not really trying to win over new converts here, he is preaching to his followers, to us in the church. And how do I know that?
Well, who was the Bible written for anyway? Who wrote the Old Testament? Was it a group of Hebrews out there in Palestine, writing to all the gentiles to have them become proselytes? No. The writers of what became the Hebrew Bible were writing their story of their life with God, for their tribe and community, for their fellow God followers.
And the New Testament, who wrote that? One of the first things that I learned upon arrival at seminary was the fact that the New Testament, all of it, the Epistles and the Gospels, were written by and for people who went to church. That may be nothing new to you fine people here at Nativity, but for me to realize that Church folk wrote the Bible was a mind-blower. The Bible is the Church’s book. You see, I always thought it was the other way around; that the Church had somehow spontaneously sprung from the writings. The truth is, and the facts are, that the New Testament was written by people who were grappling with the Jesus story, who were caring for each other, and were making and receiving the Holy Eucharist together. That’s who wrote it, and they wrote it for each other, to form their community and their story, and eventually we arrived, and it is our story too.
What’s all this got to do with being liable to the fires of hell, being thrown in prison, tearing out eyes and all that?
My point is that the Bible was written for disciples of God, if you think about it for a second; the Bible is not primarily an evangelical text. It is a book for disciples. That’s a tough one, the Bible is a book for disciples. Jesus is outlining the mode of behavior of a disciple, of the church. The world just doesn’t get this kind of behavior. And no, I actually don’t think Jesus is exaggerating, he might be trying to awaken a long slumbering moral imagination, awakening it to activity. Jesus is upping the ante on the laws that his disciples knew so well. He is making interior what might have been done only externally. Yes, don’t murder, Moses covered that. But when Jesus goes inside he knows about the internal seeds of anger and he raises the stakes to the limit.
Why, why all this hellfire and tearing out? Because it matters to God. You can bet money that whenever Jesus starts talking in graphic terms, like tearing eyes out, unquenchable fires, and the world just generally coming to an end, it is important to him. And if it important to the Son, it is important to the Father.
What Jesus is doing here in this part of his Sermon is to teach us sin. That’s a funny way to say it, “Teach us sin.” There is no doubt that Jesus is teaching us ABOUT sin, but he is also teaching us sin. Sin is not a natural category. We can’t arrive at the notion of sin by just thinking hard. It’s not evident from just looking at nature. There is a whole branch of theological enquiry that says, “When we look to nature, we can learn about the character of God. There is some information about God in this rainbow, this season, this bird.” That’s called Natural Theology. But I don’t know of a Natural Theology of Sin. Of course one only needs to read the newspaper, watch TV, or have a conversation to see that the world is filled with sin; but we are seeing that from the Church’s perspective. The world doesn’t believe in sin. It might believe in evil, and entropy, and brokenness; but not sin, because sin is an offense to God. And since the world doesn’t have sin, the world can’t forgive.
But Jesus is teaching us sin, because we have to be taught what sin is. Let’s look again at what interests Jesus. Yes murder, but really anger and resentment. Yes, adultery, but really Jesus is talking about respect. That’s what Jesus is preaching: respect, patience. In other words, how to be a community that thinks like God. And what is a disciple but someone who tries to think and relate to the world like God does? And what is the church but a group that thinks alongside God?
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus starts by saying, “OK, I’ve described the Kingdom of Heaven, the reversals, and I’ve begun to sketch out what it means to be a disciple: you know, salt, light, righteousness. And now for the fine print.” What it means to follow Jesus is to actually respect people, to have patience with ourselves, and our neighbors. In short: to be at peace. Imagine it. Life, as if people mattered. But let us not be naïve, peace ain’t pretty. Getting to peace can be messy and painful.
But it is here, in Christ’s church, that we can learn the lessons of this Jesus Ethic. It has been said that the Church does not have an ethic, it is an ethic. How do we learn the lessons that are required for what Jesus is demanding of us? We come together, here, we tell the stories that inspire us to live virtuously, we receive the sacraments where we learn that God is reaching across space and time to bring us again and again closer to him. So in this community of story and faith we are brought out of ourselves to see our fellow creatures as something deserving of respect.
This is what our Lord is saying today: “Act like I act, think like I think;” which is also what God himself says in our reading from Deuteronomy, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity . . . choose life.”
Obeying God, following his commandments, for the ancient Hebrews meant to live in the light of God’s mind, to literally imitate God. Should we imitate God? You bet your life we should. But, imitation does not mean that we look at Jesus of Nazareth and point-for-point make our lives his. That life has been lived. We are not Jesus, we are not the messiah, we are not the crucified and risen one. Yet we are his people, living his story as our own, making his story our story. We are inspired, in-breathed, by Jesus to go beyond our attempts to control and exploit everything and to begin to imagine a different way of seeing the world and our relationships: to be like God.
So, let us proclaim our common faith in the One who calls to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, pray that we might orient our story to his. Confess our desires to exploit and control our brothers and sisters. Receive His blessing, and finally come to his table, being utterly reconciled to him and each other.

Actual Size

2011-02-11T10:38:00.001-05:00

The universe is only so big, but is it ever big. Here is a link to a "sliding scale of the universe."

Creativity

2011-01-08T11:25:00.006-05:00

While taking the General Ordination Exams, I was struck at how important being creative is for me in my work, any work. When I was writing my answers to some of the questions, which were the cognitive equivalent of being painted into a corner, I even got a little depressed because the questions were so limited. Anyway, those are over and I now have a little time to think about some other ideas. I've been working on an idea about iconography and comic books, I've even secured a little grant to do this, and I'll be doing something at the School of Theology this semester. Here is a great interview by a truly great comics artist, she has a lot to say about creativity and the process of creating. Follow the link and you can read it or listen to it.

I've been thinking about writing something about preaching and comics art too, specifically how comics work and how their artist/writers work. There is much that preachers can learn from this visual medium. Enjoy.

2010-12-22T22:47:00.001-05:00

Some pics from my diaconal ordination

2010-12-21T21:48:00.005-05:00

The Only Advent Hymn You'll Ever Need

2010-12-10T11:25:00.003-05:00

Check this out. There is a music group in England who is covering John Cage's 4'33". A work that bears listening for this time of year. Listen and ponder the Advent season. The genius is that the music group is trying to have this song on the top of the pops type Christmas single.

Morning Prayer Sermon in COTA

2010-11-10T10:20:00.002-05:00

Read this first, really, read it: Luke 15:1-10
No, no, no!

No Jesus. In fact, if I had one hundred sheep, and lost one, I would NOT go looking for it. And neither would anyone else!

Jesus, look, I know you are just a carpenter, and I guess that others handle the money for you, or something, they must, because you show complete ignorance of the realities of a market economy.

One sheep for ninety-nine? Are you kidding? It’s too risky! Now I know that you are from Nazareth! One sheep, that’s a one percent loss, one percent! That’s acceptable, that’s better than acceptable, that’s great!

Rabbi, you cannot be serious! You would leave the other 99, really? Please. You’re talking about a shepherding situation here, right? So what happens to the others, sheep aren’t corralled you know? You just leave them alone to get the one? What about wolves? What about thieves? What about the general stupidity of the sheep? You would honestly leave the other sheep? You know, it’s not fair to those sheep!

That’s it! You’re being unfair. The one sheep does not deserve to be looked after in such a wasteful manner. It’s extravagant!

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Now, now, no, no, don’t change the subject. I don’t want to hear about some lady’s lost coin, let’s talk about these sheep. Look, I get it, ok. You’re trying to making a point about you eating with these sinners. But your premise is all wrong, don’t you see that? It makes no sense. The risk! Don’t you see that there is no utility, no virtue, and certainly no duty in going after that one lost sheep? One percent!

Jesus, please listen to reason, it is not right for us to be here with these sinners. You see, these sheep, . . . I mean theses sinners, they don’t deserve . . . Jesus, really, you’re a good rhetorician, I like your style, I like your stories, but this one, this one with the sheep and that utterly irresponsible and ultimately unfair shepherd, it’s too much. It’s just too much to believe.

You would do better, in this story to secure the other 99, have the shepherd corral those sheep first, you see. That would remove all doubt about the foolishness of that shepherd, change that and you’ve got something. No, Jesus, what you really need is an editor. That shepherd, he’s just too much; he’s unfair and dangerously risky.

I mean, in your example, who is this one sheep? Might I assume that I, a Pharisee, that has lived under, and expanded the law, am fully righteous in the eyes of the Almighty, what about me? Am I a one or a am I a 99? Am I the lost, that God comes to find, or am I one of the 99 that get left?

What? Say again.
I might be the shepherd? But that’s . . . well I . . . but. . .
That shepherd, me? That shepherd, he’s too much, me? But, he’s so risky!

Well, I think I interrupted you back there, you wanted to change the subject, something about a lost coin . . .

An Icon of Time

2010-10-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

My Greetings from last night's gala dinner for the VC of Sewanee

2010-10-12T11:38:00.002-04:00

Dr. and Mrs. McCardell, I bring you greetings and prayers from your seminarians at the School of Theology. The students at the School of Theology are very pleased that the university has chosen a historian as its Vice-Chancellor, a person who is well acquainted with the many ghosts and saints of this storied place. We are also happy to see, in thought, word, and deed, that you are a devoted churchman. And, I will warn you, as leaders in the church you can expect us to approach you about serving on a committee very soon. I can’t really say that I’m kidding about that.

But more importantly, we recognize that you speak our language. You do not use words of our tradition for rhetorical affect. No, you are enrolled in the story of God and we thank you for your proclamation. We see you in chapel. We are glad that you worship with us and hope that you will consider the Chapel of the Apostles a place of spiritual nourishment.

Thank you for praying with us. Thank you for listening to us. Most of all, thank you for joining us in our work, in God’s work, of letting the Gospel of Jesus Christ loose on this broken, yet blessed world.

Hub bub

2010-09-28T17:14:00.002-04:00

a lot of it online today about this quiz. Give it a shot, then post your score, if you dare.

Not for nuthin', 100%! I'm just sayin'.

This is us . . .

2010-09-15T17:29:00.000-04:00

Perhaps another icon.

What if this were an icon?

2010-09-09T10:35:00.001-04:00

What would it say about God?

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

I've been radically reshaping my ideas of iconography, especially visual perception. What would this icon have to say about God and humanity?

Speech, Speech!

2010-08-27T17:17:00.003-04:00

Here's the address I gave to the University of the South, on the occasion of the "Celebration of a New Year." I spoke, the president of the Student Senate, the Order of the Gownsmen student leader, and the Vice-Chancellor.

Good afternoon, my name is Josh Bowron, I am the student body president for the St. Luke’s community, also known as the School of the Theology at the University of the South. It is an honor to be asked to speak on behalf of the seminarians about our upcoming year.

First, a few words of introduction: The student body of the school of theology is comprised of 70 full time students ranging in age from the early 20s up to . . . something past the early 20s. We hail from Alabama to Atlanta, Maryland to Miami, from California to Korea.

One thing we all have in common is that we are being prepared to serve the church, although in many different capacities. This is the student body. But the seminary is also made up of families, spouses, and dozens of children. All who have left lives built elsewhere to lay down roots on this mountain. While the seminary is an academic institution it is also a place for people and families to be formed for the ministry of the church.
Now, when I was asked to give a preview of our year, many thoughts went through my head. I could talk to you all about the academic rigor. How in our first year we are to, in the words of Dr. Benjamin King, “Learn every event that ever happened in the history of the Church.” I could tell you about the experience of reading the Bible again, but for the first time in the language of the original writers. I could tell you about the mind-blowing and heart-wrenching activity of doing theology. I could tell you all of this: how seminary, much like college, is so thorough and so rigorous that it is, I think, by design, impossible to accomplish on one’s own, so we lean on each other. We help each other. I could tell you all of this.

But I won’t.

Instead I’ll tell you what we are really looking forward to this year.
What we are looking forward to this year is nothing less than a daily encounter with the Creator of the universe. What we are looking forward to this year is to be infused with the dynamic and Holy Spirit of life and growth and love. What we are looking forward to this year is nothing short of a daily visitation with Jesus Christ who is both our dearest, closest friend and our God.

These daily encounters are called grace, and the church recognizes certain ways that grace is to be sought. One is to study, and study we will, along with the undergraduates. Individually we will study within our discreet disciplines but all of us are seeking the same goal: the truth.

Another way we grow in grace is to pray and worship, which we do 15 times each week. Please. Join us. Everyone is always welcome. We will also gather in this Chapel, to celebrate, pray, and yes, to consol each other in those unavoidable tragedies that come with life lived together.

Finally, we can grow in grace in that hottest of hothouses of grace: a community. In case you haven’t noticed, community is a big deal up here, and it’s not just an advertising campaign, it’s real. We are a community: the college, the seminary, the old-timers, the newcomers, the LAND, all in community.

We believe that God can be encountered through the simple give and take of community, whether in the classroom, on the sidewalk, on mission, in argument, at the library, or in line at McClurg.

This is what we look forward to this year: to encounter God in our studies, in our prayer together, and with each other in this place.

My orientation sermon

2010-08-10T16:09:00.002-04:00

John 12:24-26

A seed.

A tiny seed.

A seed, by all appearances: nothing more than a speck of wood.

Hidden compactly within the wood is a vast expanse of DNA which can lay dormant for thousands of years. This DNA is triggered with soil and water, it doesn’t even need light!

The seed awakens.

The seed begins to order its environment, the seed takes the dirt and the water and it reconfigures their chemical structure into a plant. When the plant reaches sunlight it uses the light to further reconfigure soil and water into more and more useable resources.
The plant, all under the initial impetus of the seed, flowers and attracts pollinators, which leads to fruit and more seeds: a thousand-fold.

Finally the seeds are shed from the life giving plant, the gentlest breeze sends them off into the world. The many seeds die and lie cold through the winter, and then the Spring comes . . .

Jesus, of course, didn’t simply heave this mini parable upon the crowd, without a context. This is one of the dangers of the lectionary, we might be forgiven for thinking that Jesus commonly springs into figurative language without connection to anything else. Jesus: the divine non-sequitur. In fact, Jesus’ teaching on the seed is something of a crescendo of chapter twelve, which is turning point in the Gospel of John.

John’s gospel is divided into two main sections, the Book of Signs and the Book of Glory. The Book of Signs, as you remember, is a collection of seven signs, miracles, of Jesus’ authority, which is his Sonship with God the Father. The first sign is the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, and the seventh sign is the raising of Lazarus, which happens at the end of chapter 11, just before today’s reading. After this, we enter the Book of Glory, and it is important to remember that in John, glory is always death, death and resurrection.

So here we are at the beginning of the book of Glory. There are nine more chapters to go in the book, and John throws in Palm Sunday. Right here, in about the middle of John we get Jesus entering Jerusalem and beginning to talk of death, his death, his glorification.
Why does John do that? Why does John take all that triumphal imagery, which the other gospel writers save to ratchet up the tension, and put it smack dab in the middle? Is John a bad story teller? Is he a bad historian? Doesn’t John know the rules of drama: tension, action, climax, and denouement?

Personally I think he does, and very, very well, but the point is that John is doing a different thing from the other gospel writers; John is making a claim about Jesus as lord from before the beginning and throughout all time. There is no messianic secret in John. Jesus knows who he is what he is about, all throughout John.

But it is after Palm Sunday that the Greeks begin to come to Jesus. Seeing this, Jesus says, “Now, it is time for the Son of Man to be glorified.” John is saying, “The world now recognizes Jesus for who he is, and now it is time to finish the Work.”

Thus, Jesus begins his Glorification, but before he dies he teaches about his death and what it means to follow him in light of that death.

Again, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Now I don’t want to be too specific, or personal to the people in this room who are about to start their seminary careers; but I feel lead to, at least, briefly note that in this parable, Jesus is talking about his own death. Ok? Jesus is talking about his own death. It is not for us to die. And there are lots of ways for us to die, but here, Jesus is talking about his death. I think this is really important to remember, sometimes there are particular actions that are for Jesus only and we enjoy the benefit of those actions. It’s called gratitude.

"But preacher, isn’t one of the themes of the Christian life about giving up ourselves, our souls, and bodies over to God, like Jesus did? After all, today we remember Saint Laurence, who, when demanded by Roman officials to reveal the treasures of the church brought in the homeless, the sick, the widows, and orphans, and declared, 'Here are the treasures of the Church.' For that they killed him, isn’t that how were supposed to be?"

Yes, but I think that witnessing to Christ is what Laurence wanted more than anything, which, in his circumstances, meant witnessing to Christ in his death. Which is why Laurence died to himself, much earlier than he died at the hands of the Imperial torturers. Martyrs don’t seek physical death, martyrs are not spiritual death-wishers. Death is never sought for death’s sake, in Jesus’ death there is great meaning. And all Christians are martyrs, witnesses, to the death and resurrection of Christ. Here, in this parable, Jesus is the seed.

And we are the fruit.

“That’s all well and good preacher, but what about verse 25: Those who love their life lose it and those who hate their life in this world will keep it in eternal life.”
Alright, since you brought it up. Is Jesus asking us to hate our lives? Is Jesus asking us to hate our lives just so we can have more of what we have hated, but then eternally?
Does not compute; especially when we consider the importance that God places on life and incarnation. There are two key words here life and hate, that need our consideration in their Semitic contexts.

As an aside, you should never use Greek or Hebrew terms in your preaching, it makes you sound pretentious.

The Greek word for life in this text is psuche and the word for hate is misone. Psuche doesn’t simply mean life as in this plane of existence, life as cradle to grave, it means the animating principle, the nephesh, the breath of life. Psuche is equally used for soul throughout the New Testament and other contemporaneous literature.

The problem is our culture, greatly shaped by Greco-Roman culture, but mostly our own fault, that sees a bifurcation in the human person between body and soul. To the Jews of Jesus’ time, there is no such division, life is simply a continuum of being, with Body and Soul being poles along a spectrum, but fundamentally connected and interrelated. Jesus is doing something more here with yuch, than a kind of Gnostic life-hating. Afterall, why would a God who incarnated Himself be so against life?

Misone, hate, as well offers a dilemma when we remove it from its Semitic context. To the ancient Hebrews, their word for hate had more to do with disregard and detachment. In terms of holiness, hate has to do with holding onto something necessary for living but not grasping, lest we fall into that source of all sin: idolatry.

Jesus is saying to hold loosely to this life, this soul. Hold, but do not grasp. Perhaps God chooses not to manhandle us, but only works with that which is held ever so lightly. This might be what Jesus means in when he says the grain must fall and die. Seeds hold on just barely. This is so they can fall off and be of some good. But the seed that holds tightly to the plant, no matter how devoted, ultimately does not serve itself or the plant.

Paul says it well in 2nd Corinthians today, the one who sows sparingly will reap sparingly. The one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Can you imagine a sower who grasps the seeds? That’s just a madman out in a field, flailing his arms around.

This brings us to the final verse of today’s reading; it is a trademark Johhanine whirligig of pronouns:
“Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”

Right. Almost makes you want to draw a flow chart. But this is the beating-heart of the gospel and it is repeated over and over throughout John. What is means is that when we follow Jesus, we become like him and are identified with God. A daunting proposition to say the least.

But fear not. The acorn does not fear its “oakness.”

And here we come to the conclusion of the sermon and I can think of no other place to go for our new seminarians than advice. And here, I promise, is the only, unsolicited advice that I will give you: Hold lightly what you think you are. Hold lightly what you think you are capable of. Hold lightly your past and credentials.

The Sower stands ready in the field, seeds in hand.

Anne Rice and J.C.

2010-08-09T12:30:00.003-04:00

Hmmm . . .

Things like this blog and the penchant that Anne Rice has for declaring everything she does and thinks gets a little tiresome.

The gist of the above interview is that Anne Rice doesn't like the way the Roman Catholic Church is meddling with secular affairs, especially related to gay marriage. I'm right with her. But I think she makes (ironically) the great Protestant mistake: She has divorced her insides from her outsides. What I mean is that too many people think that we must be Jesus lovers and the rest get the pieces. Christianity and, more importantly, following Christ are necessarily communal acts. We must be the Church and find the body of Christ among eachother.

It's too bad that Anne Rice didn't raise such a ruckus over ecclesial abuses that she got herself excommunicated. Instead of calling much attention to her complaint she has quietly bowed out with not much more than a squeeky facebook post and excommunicated herself.

Sermon from this past Sunday

2010-08-05T22:14:00.003-04:00

Read: Luke 12:13-21

or watch:

The scene is a typical rabbinic one. The teacher sits amid the crowd and they challenge him with various legal and ethical quandaries. While Jesus is not a rabbi in the strictest sense, his reputation for authority has spread and now someone in the crowd approaches him.
“Teacher, settle this family dispute, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Now, we know nothing of this man, whether he is entitled to his fair share or not, whether he is just or a thief, we are given nothing of the circumstances. But Jesus seizes the opportunity to teach about what makes a life, or, more precisely, what life isn’t made of. Jesus says that life does not consist of the abundance of one’s possessions. Then he illustrates his point with a story.

A rich man has a good year. He wants to hang on to what’s his; he gets great satisfaction from his abundance. God steps in and announces that the man is going to die and the things, in which he once had so much satisfaction, are nothing.

Note two things from the outset: it is the land, not the man that produces abundantly. Second, the man is rich before the land has a good season. These are red flags for Jesus’ hearers. “AH!” they say, “This man is doubly blessed by God, rich and with good, fertile land.”

Then the rich man begins to deliberate: What shall I do with my windfall?” To the ideal man of Jesus’ listeners, the man should of course give generously to the widows, and the orphans and to the undocumented immigrants of his community because they are the ones who are on the fringes of the economy, they have no place in the system. God clearly lays this plan for the poor out again and again in the voices of the prophets.

But it isn’t to be. The man says, “I’ll do this, I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and I will store up all my goods.”

How extravagant. It’s not enough that he builds an extra barn. No, he is going to tear down his barns. Then he will build bigger ones. This is where we see Jesus as the great storyteller. He has baited his audience with a man who, by all available evidence is blessed twice over by God, only to blow it. I can only imagine the mischievous joy that Jesus experienced in turning the blessed character of the rich man into such a dolt.
Jesus’ listeners, shake their heads in disgust over the rich man’s crass denial of God’s will. One man in the audience spits on the ground and says, “We don’t do that!”

Jesus nods gravely, and then continues…

The rich man then makes an introspective turn, “Soul, you’ve done alright, you’ve got everything you’ll ever need, relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” This spiritual turn inward is what gets God’s attention, indeed, God finishes the famous maxim, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you WILL die! And what will you do with all that stuff?”

This is a lesson we all need to hear, again and again: Life is not what we have. But it’s not that simple, Jesus adds a conclusion that is supposed to summarize the entire parable, but to me it just confuses things: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Rich toward God? What does it mean to be rich toward God? If this is a summary of the parable, maybe we’ve been looking at it only in one way, maybe the parable of the Rich Fool is about more than the accumulation of things. I think that part of the answer lies in how the man addresses his soul. This is the part of the parable where the man goes from being a greedy jerk, to setting up a personal theology based on his own desires. “Soul, you have ample goods, laid up for many years.”

What does a soul need ample goods for? A soul only really needs the minimum of goods to keep its body healthy. I’ll repeat that, a soul doesn’t need much to keep its body healthy.
The bumper sticker says, “I am a spiritual being, having a physical experience.” This belies our sometimes overly spiritual bearing. Although we believe in the incarnation and the ascension, and all that they entail for us, too often we want to escape the body. But the church teaches that it goes the other way too, our souls have bodies. Part of the parable is a teaching on incarnation, flesh and spirit are intertwined and not opposites, but poles along the great spectrum of being. And for that we say, thanks be to God.
But the fatal mistake of the rich man is that he thinks his soul can be satisfied with more. More stuff, more doing, more searching, more saving. The rich man is under the impression that he can find spiritual fulfillment within himself, on his terms, with what he’s got. Thus, the rich fool is a kind of narcissist.

Narcissus: one of the great love affairs, the love affair between himself and himself. Most of us know the story of the man who was in love with only himself. But that is not the whole story; the myth says that many loved him. The problem was that Narcissus loved no one, indeed he was known as the scorner of love. Thus he was cursed to love only himself. Cursed. And what a horrible curse: to have love solely for oneself. The ages have memorialized Narcissus with the flower that blooms near the reflection of water, forever cursed to gaze upon his beloved.

The rich fool is our Narcissus, finding spiritual satisfaction within himself, he stands cursed. The rich fool goes inward when he ought to go outward. The Christian life is a matter of introspection, at times, but always at the service of going out. In terms of physics, the life of the spirit is centrifugal and not centripetal. We go out continually from a strong force at the center, casting a wider and wider circle. Being rich towards God is about letting go of everything, whether for our soul or its body, so that we can become more like God: spontaneous, generous, merciful.

Being rich towards God means taking every part of our lives to him. So take your disputes to God. Take your greed to God. Take your abundance to God. Take your deliberations to God. Take your foolishness to God. Take your soul and its body to God. Take your very life to God, who demands it.

Yet, God doesn’t simply take away what we bring to him. God is not greedy. God transforms and blesses what is brought to him. Just like the prayers, and the bread and wine we are about to offer, God works to make holy whatever is brought to him.

When we kneel to confess our sins, and when we receive the sacrament, may we all be rich toward our God, offering ourselves, our souls, and bodies to Him who transforms and makes all things holy.

Mercy

2010-07-28T17:40:00.002-04:00

Ohio to Minnesota Time Lapse from Dave Lucius on Vimeo.

I find it to be one of God's greatest mercies that we are finite. This video reminds me of a lot of things, but mostly that we don't know the whole of our lives, and that is good. The nighttime scenes here are especially telling of how we only see a few moments ahead and never the whole journey. But the whole trip can be made this way...

OMG!?

2010-06-15T22:33:00.000-04:00

JESUS2000 from jesus 2000 on Vimeo.

Create your own caption:

2010-06-15T14:39:00.002-04:00

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

2010-06-13T01:02:00.001-04:00

I like really big categories to think in: here's 6 new ones.

A perk of...

2010-05-18T08:43:00.003-04:00

the three year, residential seminary: Picking up the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA. How often does one get an 1.5 hour conversation with the PB?

Wonder is the beginning of all theology

2010-05-18T08:43:00.002-04:00

This semester has been crazy. I bit off more than I could chew. I made a big mistake by taking on so much. I loved it all individually, but came to resent most of it collectively. This semester I really went against one of my core values: leisure. I hold leisure in high esteem, not because I am a slacker (which I can be) but because leisure is so very important. Simply having the time to reflect and make sense of life is the promise of the modern age, so why don't we make use of leisure? First there is this sense that we need to be productive and fill up our time. Second, the scale, not the pace which is often the culprit, of modernity is too big. We sometimes travel more in a single day than our great-grandparents did in their entire lives, we see to many images, and talk too much.

My spiritual director has assigned a time for me to stroll aimlessly each morning. I do this when everybody is still asleep, except the birds and the occasional frog. This time has reacquainted me with the pace and scale of human life: the walking footstep, the human hand.

This "getting slow and small" is the proper kind of prayer and where all theology starts. There is great lessons in seeing and experiencing a different perspective of time, this is really what meditation imparts.

Here's yet another perspective on time: objectively sppeding up to subjectively slow us down.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

2010-05-11T16:47:00.001-04:00

All I know is that this picture was taken in a Beijing mall.

Questions: What is your first reaction upon seeing this?

Is it appropriate that this image is in a mall, in China, with Mickey's head?

What is being conveyed in the image and context (the mall, in China)?

In Praise of Media

2010-04-25T22:51:00.003-04:00

I'm getting into finals these days, but for some reason I have been more aware of my media diet. Usually I think if media as fat, tasty but it really ought to be taken in moderation. Indeed, in the past I have gone on media fasts, no reading of magazines, no news, no t.v. But these days I have been feasting, gorging, on media.

It is not a far cry to link the way that people use and create media and how we think about God. The best theology is a narrative, which is a media. For more on this see the Bible.

Here's a run-down of what I've been reading, looking at, and listening to:

Watch this, it's a good example of how little it takes to tell a full-blooded story.

My friend Mike sent me some comics. The first was American Virgin, a excellent story of a fundamentalist coming to terms with theodicy. The second was Invincible, the most lovingly rendered super-hero comic that I've ever read.

All this comic reading sent me back to the work of Scott McCloud, he is comics' greatest interpreter. Reading McCloud again, I just had to finally get his masterpiece, Zot!, and I did, it does not disappoint. Browse this beautiful collection right here:

If you are a snob and think comics have nothing real to offer, watch this.

Apart from Comics, I've been reading for classes, especially alot of Liberation Theology, Kenneth Leech in particular. I met Kenneth Leech when I interviewed at Sewanee, I think he is my hero.

I've also been getting into the Gospel according to John, in the greek. Instead of the blazing speed that I need get through the material for my classes, when I go through John, with my professor we go slow, sometimes spending 15-30 minutes on a single word. I always thought of John as strictly a theological document, but now i see it as a midrash on the Old Testament, told from this side of the Resurrection.

There is also this blog, and this blog, and don't forget this one.

Also I've been playing a storytelling game, over email, my friend Jonathan created. It has taught me about economy of language to convey as much information as possible, a technigue many preachers could learn alot from

There's alot more, but as you can see I've been a glutton...

Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

2010-04-20T00:26:00.001-04:00

Hmmm...interesting idea from two media addicts.

selling souls

2010-04-16T11:41:00.002-04:00

Souls as part of a license agreement.

Gospel of Venkman

2010-04-16T10:56:00.002-04:00

John 3:31-36
“He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.”

Invocation+

This evening we get a pretty good summary of John’s gospel in the mouth of…somebody. Who’s speaking anyway, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Nicodemus, Jesus? It really doesn’t matter, what matters is what is said. Essentially, the speaker says, God is God and the creation is the creation. The creation can’t comprehend God, God is utterly unknowable to the creation. Yet, God has revealed himself to the creation, to us, in Jesus. When we know Jesus we know God the Father.

This is the theme of John’s entire gospel. The writer never grows tired of saying, “The father and the son are one.” “All mine are yours and yours are mine.” “As you, father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

What John sets up and reinforces throughout his gospel, from the beginning to the end and beyond, is that God’s holy spirit has been an ever-flowing stream in all creation, Jesus came to do the works of the Father and show God in the world, so that we might believe,
…and in believing…what? To receive the Holy Spirit and receive it without measure.

Bishop Spong says. . . and this will likely be the first and last time you will ever hear a quote from Bishop Spong from this preacher or this ambo, for that matter. But, Bishop Spong describes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as an overflowing tub of water in a basement, there is no controlling where the water goes, and it gets all over everywhere, splashing under things and into the darkest neglected corners. God gives the Spirit without measure, it is all, and I mean all, or nothing. God is extreme in this instance, wasteful, decadent.

So when we believe through Christ, we become identified with Christ through the Holy Spirit, and with Christ, God.

So we believe that God became a person through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. All Christians agree, I hope, that in Jesus Christ a bridge was made between God and humanity.
But that bridge. That bridge between God and us. Is it a one way bridge? Is the bridge between God and us just for the Holy Spirit to go down, from God to us? The ladder that the angels ascend and descend upon Jesus, is it just for angels or is it for us too?

What was Athanasius talking about when he said that, “God became human that we might be made god.”?

In the great American cinematic masterpiece, Ghostbusters, there is a scene that might have an insight.

It seems the Ghostbusters have tracked down the big bad, Gozer, a powerful lighting fingered demon-lady who greets the guys with, “Are you a god?”

One of the Ghostbusters considers the question and says, “No.”

Gozer answers, “Then die!” She zaps the guys thoroughly, leaving them hanging off a skyscraper.

Finally, one Ghostbuster says to the other, “When somebody asks you if you are a god, you say YES!”

We are all created in the image of God, and lest we forget, God is a trinity. The God image that we bear is the image of dynamic and spontaneous love. No matter what happens to us or what choices we make, that image of dynamic love can never be removed. But through God’s giving of the Spirit, without measure, just might make us gods too.

Now, before I get harassed for heresy. Let’s look at what capacity people might have for divinity. First we all bear the image of God. But since we are creations with a creator, we are distinct from God. God is outside of time and space and utterly Other. Yet this other God, reaches out to us.

The Orthodox say that we can know God’s energies, not his essence. We can seek and achieve union with God, yet we retain our distinctiveness, our personhood. Our union with God is sanctification, not annihilation. While we don’t become God in essence and nature, we can become divine by grace. By the grace of God.

In our western arm of the church, we would have been toast against the question, “Are you a god?” For our eastern brothers and sisters they say,”Yeah, that’s pretty normal.”
Of course we will all achieve our full deification upon the consummation of all things and us Anglicans love to proclaim the eschatological horizon of the church.

But Jesus, here in John’s Gospel, is repeatedly inviting us into the divine life NOW. Yes, we still sin, we still fall, but we don’t fall alone. We are made in the image of the triune God whose property it is to love; therefore our deification is possible when we live the Trinitarian life, a life with, and for others.

So, while we might not be fully ready to answer yes to the question, “Are you a god?” We might, through faith in the measureless pouring of the Holy Spirit, stand with Christ and say, “I’m with him.”

The Gospel of Alice

2010-04-13T15:50:00.001-04:00

Here's link to a related Easter/Alice in Wonderland Sermon:

Good Friday Sermon

2010-04-02T16:53:00.000-04:00

Good Friday Sermon
John 18:1-19:37
The Death of Jesus, the Death of God?

Today is our second day on the Triduum. The Triduum, which began last night on Maundy Thursday with the institution of the Holy Eucharist. Our three day journey with Christ will culminate with us gathering at the gloriously empty Easter-tomb. For now, today, we are at the cross. Yet, we know how this ends. We know that the cross is not the ultimate fate of Jesus, indeed it is the penultimate.
I have a friend, and perhaps you do too, who always reads the last chapter of a book first. I have asked my friend why she does this and she says that she likes to know what she is getting into before she commits to the entire book. Some of us like to know the ending first. Others don’t want to know how the story ends. Instead, they trust the author to bring them along and lead them to discovery. No matter the story, no matter the ending and how we get there; we crave closure, we desire the tidy ending.
But today, perhaps we could hold off on our need for closure and resolution. Let us not wish away Good Friday to get to Easter. Yes, we know the story brings us to the Risen Lord; but today, this morning, I invite you to dwell on the cross, to live with the reality of the death of Jesus, to settle into the insecurity of our God, crucified. Might we, in our minds and imaginations, put ourselves in the shoes of the disciples who lived and endured those insecure shaky days from Friday until Sunday; those days when “Our Teacher, Our Master, Our God has died!”
The question remains: Does God die on the cross; indeed, can Nietzsche be right, just for one day? There is a heresy, patripassianism, which maintains that when Jesus Christ suffers, God the Father suffers. This presents a problem with the Church’s doctrine of the impassability of God, the doctrine that God is beyond creation and unable to be diminished or changed. The church rejects the notion that God can be changed through the suffering of Christ, but it holds a similar yet more nuanced view. Since Jesus has both human and divine natures, one which is corruptible and one which is unchangeable. It is Christ’s human nature, not his divine nature, which suffers and dies. The rub really comes when we ask what happens to the suffered humanity of Christ. Does it simply die away and leave us with a fully divine Jesus Christ? No, what happens to the sufferable humanity of Christ, and even mortality itself, is that God assumes it; God takes in humanity and death, and He redeems it. One of our church fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus said that “whatever Christ assumes, Christ sanctifies.” In other words, it is precisely in Christ’s human suffering and especially in his death that we are saved.
This statement of orthodoxy is extremely helpful for beginning to understand what happened on the cross. But the church’s teaching was developed over 500 Easters, for us, standing here in the disciples’ shoes, we here on the First Friday, we don’t have the benefit of orthodoxy. Perhaps one of the purposes of Good Friday is to imagine, however briefly, a world without Christ; an insecure world where we thirst for God, but get no guarantee of any impending Easter. Can we reside in a faith, a true trust in God, despite the blatant facts of life and death? Can we be confident in our unknowns?
Let’s not jump to the conclusion. Forget the last chapter.
Just for today, rest uneasily in the unresolved ambiguity of Christ crucified, died, and buried.
And that God inexplicably walks with us into death, even death on a cross.

Written on a wall...

2010-03-30T17:36:00.004-04:00

"The Church is a TARDIS, it is bigger on the inside."

Discuss.

Sunday Sermon on the OT reading

2010-03-08T16:14:00.001-05:00

I kinda went on a limb with this one, please comment.

What do you seek?

How is God connected to this burning bush? When did the bush stop burning? When, and if, it finally did stop burning, what happened to the goat that nibbled on the burning bush? Did the goat die? Did it not die, as in ever? Should there be such a thing as a picture of the burning bush? Doesn't that go against the whole idea of a burning bush? Can there be an icon of the Unknowable?

Why am I only asking questions? Why won't I make a statement? Can an entire sermon be written in the interrogative mood? Does English have an interrogative mood, or just interrogatory words? Given your own life, would you rather have God talk to you out of a burning bush or something else that burns, "yet is not consumed"? What would it be, a car, a desk, a professor? What defines Moses? Is Exodus in the Old Testament? Did the writer of Exodus think that his or her writing would ever be "old"? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people?

Shouldn't there be some form of introduction? What defines me? Is it that I am Josh Bowron, that I am a husband and a father, and a seminarian? Am I who I am because I am from Atlanta? Why do I love this Mountain? Is this a good idea? Would you like to know me better? What do I seek? Can we know a person by the questions they ask? Shall we continue?

What does it mean in the Old Testament when it says LORD, in all caps? What does taking off shoes on holy ground mean? Why don't we take off our shoes in church? Who were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Why does it matter? Should I care that I don't care? Can God hear? If so, does God hear with ears or is he psychic like that lady in the X-Men? What's so great about milk and honey? If they flow, you know, out of doors, won't they spoil? Wouldn't it stink?

What will happen to all those people that are already living in the land? Is God advocating for ethnic cleansing? What about all those Canaanites, and Hittites? I know some Israelites, but where are all the Amorites? Is "I AM" really God's name? How do I read the Bible anyway? How does the Church read the Bible? Do we have to think the same thing as the church? What happens when the church disagrees? What is my obligation to the church?

Is there anything outside the text? Am I a text? Can I tell my own story? Is telling my own story like biting my own teeth? Does the church read me? Am I on God's night stand?

What do you seek? What does this story of Moses and God in the Burning Bush mean? What is going on, back then and over there? What's it got to do with us, or, more importantly, me? Does God call people? Why does everybody talk about God calling us? Can God nudge? Can God hint? Does God ever say..."pssst!"?

Does God speak in tectonic plates?

Do you assume that I know the answer? Given all the characters in the Bible that God calls, is there a single one who was not offensive or messed up in some way? What is going through Moses' head? Was he afraid, was he nervous? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Can this shepherd be a liberator? Can this yokel be face to face with God? Did it happen? Did it not happen? Does the difference scare you, energize you, leave you flat, or something else altogether? What was Moses seeking, up there, on the mountain? Was he simply curious or did he have any idea whatsoever that he would encounter the long lost God?

What's God's voice like? Is it a tornado, an atom splitting? Is it a Big Bang or more like Yoko Ono? When you look at stained glass do you notice the colors first or the story? Who here will end up depicted in a stained glass window? If God can come to a person as a burning bush, why not as a chunk of bread and a sip of wine? Would the story of Moses and the Burning Bush have been possible without Moses? What I mean is, in any sacrament, we are there, so can a sacrament be a sacrament without us? Do we make it sacred? How important are we to God? Who's we? Why does God bother? Is He serious? Given the apparent cheapness of life, what is sacred?

What do you seek? What is going on with us? I mean me and you right now in this big marble room, are we o.k., you and me? Where, whence, whither, and how does the time go? What are the fundamental differences between Moses and me? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Is there some ulterior motive on God's part for talking to us through stuff, why does matter matter to God? What will tomorrow bring? Did Moses know how to be a patriarch? Do I know how to be an adult? Do I have to be an adult? Did God show Moses how to be a patriarch? Did you ever wonder why there is such a close etymological connection between adult and adulterated? What is my agenda in bringing that up?

Is God a micro-manager? Is God a. . . C.E.O.? Are you tired of questions? Does God tire of questions? Does God tire? Ought there be a moratorium on the word "God," as Bishop Spong suggests? Can you argue both sides on that issue?

Can a sermon consist of nothing but questions? What will my preaching teacher say? Will you tell on me? This is just silly, didn't Desmond Tutu preach here? Should I make a point and sit down? What is the cumulative effect of this barrage of questions? Will I ask a certain question just to get a laugh?

What is air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

What is the what, anyway? Who tells the truth more in Shakespeare's plays, the priests or the Fools? In terms of strict literary definitions, is the Bible a comedy or a tragedy?

Given the state of nature and society why do we still get our hopes up? Is that too pessimistic a question? Another way, given the changeability of life, why do we seek security? Can we remember life before life? Is anybody else here attracted to, and at the same time, utterly repulsed by post-modernism? What's the rush, where's the fire? No really, Church: Where's the Fire!? What's stopping you?

What do you seek? How can we proclaim a mystery? What is the use of experience? What defines you? If we talked for an hour could we come to an agreement on the taste of vanilla? Should we? How do we come to believe? Why do you think God chooses these counter-intuitive ways to speak to people? Why does God continually insist on calling the unrighteous and the broken? Is there some ulterior motive on God's part for talking to us through stuff, why does matter matter to God?

How will you meet God at this Table behind me tonight?

What do you seek? What does God seek? What do we seek?

Will we know it when we have found it? Can I find God at this table?

Will God find me at this table?

God, find us at your table.

Last Friday's Morning Prayer Homily

2010-03-07T22:23:00.001-05:00

And the disciples had places to be.

So they left Jesus while he was telling yet another parable about the Kingdom of God. The disciples got into the boat and shoved off, Thomas looked over his shoulder and thought, "I think we forgot something...oh well." "And a great storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling." The disciples began to bail out the water, but the waves, did mightily crash against the boat.

The disciples cried out, "Where is the Teacher, does he not care if we perish!?"

Thomas said, "Verily, I remember now! We left Jesus on the shore."

"Well...we had somewhere to be." explained one disciple.

"And now we're sunk." complained another.

The scene I describe is not the biblical account of Jesus calming the storm, but you recognize the story I told, as your own...don't you?

How often we have heard the actual Gospel account of this story preached: the story of the panicking disciples, Jesus calming the storm, and his chastisement of the disciples for their unfaith. How often we hear the preacher lambasting the meager faith of the disciples. Since Jesus excoriates the disciples for having no faith, it is open season on those poor guys, "The disciples really ought to have had faith, tsk tsk tsk."

But, not so fast, the missing piece happens before the storm. "And leaving the crowd, they took him with them into the boat." They took Jesus in the boat with them. All the parallel accounts agree, that it is Jesus that goes with them into the boat. They don't go with Jesus, Jesus goes with them. It's a fine point, but an interesting one, Jesus goes with the disciples, they lead...at least in this instance.

But for us, more often, we leave Jesus on the shore. We don't bring him into the boat with us.

Jesus is the rebuker of winds, the calmer of stormy seas. But can He do that if he is not in the boat?

All metaphors are limited of course. I recognize that there is a problem with suggesting that Christ must be invited to work in our lives. Yes, Christ is co-eternal with the Father. Yes, Christ acts out of his own spontaneous mercy, not out of propitiation, or any other works-righteousness.

But leaving all those doctrinal issues aside for a moment...you know what I mean. We leave Jesus on the shore. We get into our boats, we get to our schedules, to our thoughts, to our ambitions. We get to our service to our fellows and to the church; and eventually the storm hits. The storm hits and we look around for Jesus. We look around and we don't see him asleep in the stern, we look around and find him where we left him: on the shore.

This is not another, "Let go and let God, " homily. This is a call to the sober reality that sometimes, in the storms of our lives, we forget the one that deals with storms. Our God is not a pie in the sky god, we have a flesh and blood, practical God who wants to be in the thick of it with us.

Yes, Jesus can calm our winds and raging seas. But today's reading shows me that Jesus is so ...VERY ... comfortable in the turmoil, in the roiling waters. So comfortable, in fact, that he can nod off in the midst of the chaos!

Bring Jesus on board with you, before the storm hits, he'll be the quiet one, sleeping, back there, in the stern.

Sermon from Sunday, in the raw.

2010-03-04T10:37:00.001-05:00

Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18

Invocation+

Abram, Abram,
Not AbRAham, but Abram
Abram, who was called out of his hometown by, who, God?
Did Abram know all that we know about God?
Abram is the first person God has spoken to since Noah, several hundred years prior.
who, or what is this voice that calls to Abram?
Yet, Abram listens to the voice and heeds the call.
The next several chapters of Abram's life, chronicled in Genesis, is one swirling adventure after another
Abram leaves his hometown, takes a wife, Sarai, not yet Sarah.
Abram goes into Egypt, allows his wife to be..ahem...compromised, by the very icon of ancient political power, the Pharoah.
because of his deceit about not claiming Sarai as his wife the Pharoah and his house is plagued, Pharoah knows what's going on and sends Abram and Sarai away.
Abram the trickster.
Abram prospers along with his nephew Lot
they prosper so much they need to split their holdings so as not to despoil the land.
Where Lot goes, there is military intrigue, he is kidnapped.
Abram assembles a crack squad of warriors.
Abram gets Lot back.
Abram is praised by the mysterious Melchizedek.
The kings of the area try to reward him, but noble Abram refuses.
Through all this adventure: (raise the tension)
Call
Movement
Prospering
Deceit
Plague
Settlement
War!
Pursuit
Praise!

and then we are met with these quiet words:
"The LORD came to Abram in a vision"

And God says to Abram:
"Fear not"
A few weeks ago, our Chaplain, Annwn Myers, noted that "Fear not" is one of the most common sayings of God in the Bible.
Now, being a seminarian, I was immediately seized with the hermeneutic of suspicion, so I, of course, looked it up.
and...she's right
there are hundreds of instances where God, or an angel says, "Fear not."
And the funny thing is, when God says fear not, the ones hearing it...the ones hearing GOD...SPEAK...well, they FEAR NOT.
And Abram fears-not and listens to and even talks with God.
We read the most amazing things in the Bible,don't we, just hear that again, "Abram speaks with God."
What follows is a story with extrodinarily potent imagery.
There is a vision
Abram argues with God
God widens Abram's perspective to a literally cosmic scale,
"Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them."
"So shall your descendents be."
But Abram needs more, he still wants to know how he can trust God.
Then God, and it is hard to tell whether what follows happens in the physical world or within the context of the vision,
such are the misty-myth-realities of God-encounters
But God tells Abram to take select animals, and in a very specific manner, slaughter them, each laid, "half over against the other."
to us this a strange thing for God to ask
But to Abram, he is thinking: God is speaking my language!
God is implementing a covenant ceremony so solemn, so permanent, that our pre-nup-divorce-broken-lease-culture cannot even come close to understanding it.
God is linking his destiny to Abram's destiny.
God is linking His destiny to Abram's.
All theology starts with mystery.
God is so very big, and we are so very small.
God is God, and I am not.
Our Arch-bishop of Canterbury says that we come to theology with "wounded knowledge," the wound in our knowledge of God is the essential incomprehesibility of Him.
When asked what God was doing before the creation of the universe, Martin Luther, responded that God was whittling switches for people who ask such useless questions.
Since God exists outside of creation as its creator, He is ultimately unknowable.
Met with such a large and wholly OTHER God, we can almost be forgiven one of our great sins
the sin of abstracting God,
the sin of seeing God as force.
the sin of knowing God's ways as if God were a reducible formula.
But the rub is that... God.... meets us.
God came to Abram.
While the infinite, eternal Creator God is absolutely unknowable
that same God meets us, comes to us, reaches out to us,
is destined to bring us to him.
The Unknowable God makes himself known.
Julian of Norwich called this unknowable God that makes himself known, the Courteous God.
How courteous of God to make himself known to us!
How merciful that God doesn't let us flounder in our being.
Instead, God mercifully makes himself known, and not only that, but he lets us know in no uncertain terms, indeed,on our terms, like he did with Abram, that the foundation of the entire creation and the motivation of the creator is Love.
This is the greatest glory that we can experience of God, not his power, but his presence,not his majesty, so much as his ministry.
From the first covenant with Abram to the new covenant through the Word made Flesh, the same refrain rings throughout all space and time: Emmanuel. God with us.
How merciful that God is so courteous as to regard us to be his companions.
Incidently, it is worth noting that the derivation of the word, companion, means someone you break bread with.
May all of us here, and all creation, come to know our Unknowable Companion.

2010-02-22T21:02:00.001-05:00

Could Lent be more than chocolate?

Could Lent be less than discipline?

Could Lent be the addition of subtraction,
the blaring silence?

In the Begining...

2010-02-11T23:17:00.002-05:00

For your enjoyment:

In Doctrines class we have been discussing the doctrine of Creation. It is amazing how such a simple word can have such powerful implications. The video above reminds me of sitting in the class and, in a cavalier fashion, we paint the entire scope of EVERYTHING with a very broad brush. When we say the creed, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, CREATOR of heaven and earth, of things, seen and unseen." Do we ever stop to think about what we are saying? It's big stuff, and it's not enough to say, "God made us and that settles it." What does it mean to believe that God created the Universe? Why? What is his relationship to creation? Does he need creation? And what is the "unseen" stuff?

Vid from an Emergent Church presentation

2010-02-10T18:19:00.000-05:00

The Ethics of Villainy

2010-01-08T16:39:00.005-05:00

Here is the wonderful "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" I cannot recommend this highly enough. It has wonderful music, smart, subtle comedy, and a certain darkness that is a trademark of all Joss Whedon's work. The best part about all of Whedon's work is that he has the moral fiber to tell stories that are not the normal fair for t.v., movies, comics, internet, whatever. If you care to, watch all the episodes, and we can discuss it in the comments section of this post. I will offer a spoiler alert for the comments section, so watch before you read.

Act 1 part 1

Act 1 part 2

Act 2 part 1

Act 2 part 2

Act 3 part 1

Act 3 part 2

The (Not-Just-a) Rebel Jesus

2009-12-23T17:32:00.002-05:00

Here is a version of a song that I haved loved for years. I first heard this song on the wonderful Chieftains Christmas record. Great message from "a pagan."

Let's Discuss

2009-12-17T12:39:00.002-05:00

After seeing thise images read about it here, then comment.

My paper on Anglican Identity

2009-12-17T07:30:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty sure my arch-conservative prof. will hate this, but here it is:

Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and their Experience

One of the defining characteristics of Anglican Identity has been the so-called three-legged stool: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. In order to understand what is meant by "three-legged stool" we must understand the historical and theological context in which scripture, tradition, and reason were established. Once we understand the context then we may begin to look at how the Anglican understanding of scripture, tradition, and reason has shaped its identity. Then we must take into account new findings in thinking, postmodernism, about the creation, reception, and interpretation of scripture, tradition, and reason. Then we can consider Anglican identity through scripture, tradition, and reason. Looking at the postmodern contribution is not to find new way in which scripture, tradition, and reason can be integrated into Anglican identity, but rather to understand how scripture, tradition, and reason has been, is, and will be assimilated. By no means ignoring Dr. Lytle's instruction to consider experience as an addition to our stool, thus rendering it a four-legged stool, it is my thesis that indeed experience is shot through scripture, tradition, and reason enabling them to work dynamically in people, in the Church, and in the culture.
Richard Hooker is usually credited with developing our three-legged stool. It must be always kept in mind that Richard Hooker was "par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethen Settlement of 1559 . Simply put, Hooker charted a course through the European reformation that at once absorbed reformation ideas while keeping the radical reform movements of the Puritans at bay. Thus, seeing Scripture as the first, if not primary, facet of the identity of the Church in England demonstrates the chief concern of the Reformation: sola scriptura. Hooker, and other reformers, saw that the Church had veered significantly from scripture and the reformation can be seen in one light as an attempt to bring the church under the Holy Scriptures.
Hooker's vision, however, was not sola scriptura but perhaps, scriptura et cetera. Hooker thought that a strict literal reading of the scriptures did not answer the problems of "modern life." At the time, the radical reformers did not participate in English civil life because of their prohibition, Biblically supported, against waging war and taking oaths. For the Puritans, only that which is to be found in scripture is to be practiced. Hooker found this untenable since scripture leaves so much open, in terms of the evolution of cultural and political realities. Therefore tradition is included in his identity of the Church in England. For Hooker, as well as subsequent Anglicans, tradition is the continuing discernment of the Church to live its life as a people of the eternal God living within the confines of history and culture. Here again, with the addition of tradition, Hooker blazes a middle path between the extremes of sixteenth century Roman Catholic abuses and Radical Reform ideals that do not account for the innovations of modern civil life.
Finally, Hooker included reason as a defining characteristic of the Church in England. With the addition of reason, Hooker does two things. First, Hooker is including the use of reason which was so important to the early modern period. But he also included reason because the two extremes simply were not using reason. The Roman Church, used Church doctrine to shore up its arguments. The Reformers used scripture only to establish their position. Both extremes, on the continent, and to some extent in England, were resorting to violence and outright warfare; which the Elizabethan settlement was designed to stop. The inclusion of reason along with scripture and tradition was as if to say: Here are the moderated and useful aspects of the represented extremes of the reformation: scripture and tradition. Now, let's use our heads (reason), before we all lose them.
The above shows the historical which birthed the peculiar Anglican amalgam of scripture, tradition, and reason. Oddly enough, the formation of the three-legged stool within the fiery crucible of the Reformation has, by and large, shaped Anglican identity up to the present and without too much change. That is, at the time of the Elizabethan settlement, scripture, tradition, and reason was a sufficient summary of how Anglicanism works and it still holds today. What I will attempt to do now is cast the suspicion of postmodernism upon scripture, tradition, and reason in the hopes that we can establish a hermeneutic of the experience of scripture, tradition and reason.
The great postmodern contribution to human understanding is that it showed how the modern paradigm of representing the world (whether physical, moral, spiritual, or aesthetic) was severely limited. The modern worldview describes a subject looking at an object and describing what it sees. The postmodern worldview claims that the modern view was limited in that it did not include the subject as part of the object which it was describing . This postmodern discovery has had tremendous impact on all of human endeavor, including biblical studies, theology, liturgy, and most especially philosophy.
We have come to understand that all scriptures are situational. That is, each Gospel, letter, and apocalypse was written by a person to a community in a certain context. The work of Christopher Bryan and Paul Holloway attest to this: we must understand the occasion and genre of any given text to understand it better, or even understand it at all! We also interpret texts out of our own experience as well, and all previous commentators have interpreted the biblical texts out of their own experiences. Thus we have a collection of books, the Bible, that has been interpreted through experience at every stage of writing, translation, interpretation, copying, marginally considered, retranslated, and recopied. Yes, the Holy Spirit may be at work in all of this, which is another context added to the mix of interpretive experience.
Tradition too, perhaps more than scripture, takes place within contexts. The history of liturgy is filled contextual mapmaking. A glance at any Orthodox church, or, for that matter, an Anglican/Episcopal church, will quickly demonstrate the ethnic context which birthed both the liturgy and the ecclesiology. Tradition is an attempt at faithful living within contemporary culture. Since Christianity is an incarnational faith, one could say that tradition is a necessary component to the faith. Anglicans, as well as other Christians, view the Bible as the Church's book. Since those who wrote the New Testament did so under a tradition namely, Christ crucified, risen, and ascended, and within the keeping of the Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:23-26). Tradition then is the continuation within the lives of the faithful of that same spirit which inspired the scriptures. Therefore, tradition is sacred scripture writ off the page and lived in the life of the Church.
What of reason then? Was Martin Luther onto something when he called reason the devil's bride, "that pretty whore"? Is reason also subject to the contextualization of the postmodern critique? Yes, and postmodernism was not the first to see that reason itself is subject to the vagaries of existence, but indeed it was the modern view, the enlightenment that first brought us the scientific method which first lifted up the ideal of clear objective reasoning. What postmodernism has brought to reason is the conviction that the thinker and the thought cannot be separated. In science this idea was brought to light, pun intended, in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle whereby one cannot know the location and velocity of an atom simultaneously because the photons from the light needed to observe the atom changes both its speed and its location.
It might be useful to summarize the postmodern idea in Derrida's phrase, "There is nothing outside the text." While this phrase is sometimes unfairly interpreted as a nihilistic platitude, I think he more accurately means that there is no objective view; there is no view of reality outside of our interpretation. I argue the postmodern critique not to submit all our beliefs to the postmodern abyss; instead I want to show how our ideas of scripture, tradition and reason, and our language surrounding them, is essentially modern; that is, we simply say, "scripture" or "reason" as if these things were static and immutable. Scripture, tradition, and reason are not static objects that we can observe and describe, instead, they are mediated from, by, and with our experience and interpretation.
Does this recognition of the modern world-view’s limitation mean that we should proclaim nothing but postmodern relativism? To quote St. Paul: By no means! As Christians we believe that the Holy Spirit has "caused all holy Scriptures to be written" (BCP 236 proper 28), and that God is at work in tradition and is the fount of all wisdom. What Christians can draw from postmodernism is not a slavish allegiance to denouncing all "meta-narratives," instead we can better understand the impetus and reception of our scripture, tradition, and reason; and know that we interpret them in our own contexts, but that does not necessarily dictate our theology (CC).
Therefore, to return to the original question, would I include experience along with scripture, tradition and reason? My short answer is no. My long answer is it is impossible to separate experience from either scripture, tradition, or reason. First, experience is an ontological fact; we must experience to exist, to even recognize what something is and that it is. Second, in a more epistemological sense, we experience reality through our interpretations. To be a person is to be a hermeneutic person. Experience and interpretation are utterly bound together, this is the postmodern contribution. I argue that on the surface, and at the core, of the church today we really are using a modern model for looking at scripture, tradition, and reason. What passes today for discourse in the church is simply two camps vying for the left and right extremes of an outdated model of understanding .
All the above raises the question: What about revelation? I believe that God speaks through scripture, tradition and reason. But I also know that when God spoke, and speaks, His words land in a context, a sticky, complicated, human context. While God’s word may be pure, our ears (our contexts) are not so holy. My thesis has been that the very act of being cognizant of scripture, tradition, and reason proves that experience is included in the “three-legged stool.” And since we experience scripture, tradition, and reason, we interpret them. It is our interpretation that effects a change within us however, which in turn changes our interpretation. Therefore, to approach scripture, tradition, and reason is to enter into a dynamic relationship, one that changes us. And yes, we experience, through scripture, tradition, and reason, none other than the incarnate God.

The welcoming Roman Church

2009-10-29T10:46:00.001-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Holy Water Under the Bridge - Randall Balmer

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Religion

Interesting?

2009-10-21T19:35:00.001-04:00

Read this, gotta go and actually minister to some folks...my two cents to follow.

An urban faith

2009-10-19T23:06:00.002-04:00

Christianity is an urban faith. Paul really helped spread the faith in cities more than anywhere else. Here's a link from a newspaper article about a class a friend of mine is taking, be sure to click on the audio portion and you can hear my contextual ed. professor speak.

Poetry

2009-10-07T11:45:00.002-04:00

Poetry is on my mind. Just the sounds of harmony and discord (dischord?) of the spoken language. My homiletics class is a study in the structure of messages. But it is just the sound of words that's been hitting me lately. A Clockwork Orange does sound well, so does Ginsberg: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night

I've got no real theological message here, except that God has a word too, a Word. When God uses a Word, it is a person, and it changes everything...

Homily

2009-10-02T12:22:00.004-04:00

Here's a homily I wrote on John Chrysostom for my Anglicanism class, I know his day is Jan 27, but here it is now.

Morning Prayer Homily on St. John Chrysostom.

Readings: Psalm 49: 1-8, Jeremiah 1:4-10, Luke 21:12-15

Today we remember Saint John Chrysostom. It should be noted that Chrysostom, “the Golden-Mouthed” was an appellation given to John after his death, though he undoubtedly earned the title during his earthly life.

John Chrysostom was born in 347, in Constantinople. His mother, a widow since John’s early childhood, insured him an excellent education at the feet of the great orator Libanius and he received the finest theological education under Diodore of Tarsus, the leader of the Antiochene School. John was a good boy too. He took care of his ailing mother, forestalling his desire to live as a monk. At home he followed a strict rule of life and later became a hermit for eight years under the Pachomian Rule, one of the earliest monastic rules that has carried tremendous influence for monasticism and Christian life up to today. John was so austere in his asceticism that he had to leave his hermit life because his health had debilitated.

John was a fiercely devout man whose tongue may have been more fire than gold, and he was ordained deacon in 381 and priest in 386 by Bishop Flavian. Flavian rightly discerned a fire for Christ in John and appointed him to the ministry of preacher. Starting in 386, John preached every Sunday and in some seasons every day, for 12 years. Scores of his sermons still survive; many are full commentaries, sometimes an entire sermon will consist of John’s meditation on but one verse. For example, John spent three, one hour sermons, exegeting and meditating on John 1:1.

What is startling about John’s sermons is how pastoral they are; John never shies from asking questions of the text and of Our Lord. But these questions are all to the service of the growth and strength of the gathered faithful.

John also opposed the allegorical interpretation of scripture, which was so favored in the Alexandrian school of hermeneutics. Instead, John, along with his Antiochene teachers, interpreted the Holy Scriptures, historically, or as we say today in much misunderstood and maligned language, literally.

Today’s readings, Jeremiah and Luke, give a perfect model of the life of St. John Chrysostom. By all accounts John lived the injunction from God to “not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” When John was made Patriarch of Constantinople in 396, very much against his wishes, he set about to reform the infamous city and garnered the ill-favor of Empress Eudoxia who took his reforms personally. John was brought up on charges of Origenism, which was trumped up, considering his distaste of the allegorical method of biblical interpretation. It seems also that the Golden-Mouth was also exceedingly tactless in his comments about the Empress which guaranteed his banishment, thus thrusting John into the literal living out of Luke 21, “they will arrest you and persecute you…you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.” Banishment wasn’t enough for the powers that be though, and when John did not perish soon enough he was further banished to a harsher area, where he was executed by forced march. His last action in this life was to receive Christ in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist.

And there is the rub. We cannot metaphorically live the gospel. It will not do to allegorically proclaim Christ crucified and risen. While our interpretations of Holy Scripture can and should bear our most literal, historical and, yes, even allegorical scrutiny, it is impossible to live the life of Christ in any way but literally. There is no life, no risk, to be found in the purely cerebral, cogitation of Christ. Obedience is not to be found among the metaphors. “Follow me” is not a figure of speech. The living out of Christ, crucified, and raised, can only be truly lived when done literally.

Amen.

Theologizing the computer

2009-09-23T10:58:00.003-04:00

I got a new computer, here are the words I have added to my Word dictionary this week.

-homiletic
-deutero
-christology
-thelema (greek)
-eschaton
-lectio
-divina
-kerygma
-churched
-Grossteste
-Primanaerie
-Ehrman
-Intimemes
-Thessalonian
-Apocalypticism

2009-09-15T22:02:00.002-04:00

hmmm...I can't tell if this is sublime or hopelessly misguided.

Do the Hoaxy Pokey

2009-08-31T00:12:00.002-04:00

At church this morning the priest centered part of her sermon on the Prayer of St. Francis. It is found in the book of common prayer and on cross-stitch and calligraphied framed art everywhere. The BCP rightly calls the prayer "A Prayer Attributed to Saint Francis." Why "attributed"? Because Frank didn't write it, and the prayer itself can be traced back to 1912, not the 13th century.

This brings up the issue of legend and reality, and how the border between the two is so easily blurred.

When I was growing up, I went to a missionary Baptist church and I was very involved in the youth group. One day, one of my teachers put a copy of the Arkho Volume in my hands. For those who don't know it, read a brief introduction to the Arckho Volume here. The Archko Volume is essentially a (fake) account of interviews with the members of the Sanhedrin who convicted Jesus and even an interview with a shepherd who saw Jesus' star! It is an utter fabrication, an amatuerish one at that, and I believed it without question as a young adolescent. The book was originally written, in my opinion, to convince skeptics to become Christians without the burden of having faith.

I could write for hours here about the importance of demythologizing our culture-religion and starting again with a trusting relationship with God, one with pitfalls and uncertainty. But for know I think I will simply say that the truth of the church is always stranger than fiction, and more importantly, God and the Holy Scriptures can and should stand up to our most rigorous examination. Thanks be to God!

High Church Musical

2009-08-28T08:39:00.012-04:00

My 4.5 y.o. daughter has recently become interested in High School Musical. Saying "interested" is something of a understatement. For the longest time, about 30 years, I hated musicals of any kind,The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins (which has deep theological import, see here), if it had Rogers and Hart, or Hammerstein, or even Sondheim in it I wouldn't give it a chance. That was before the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer episode, "Once More With Feeling."

.

This episode showed me the importance of song for the expression of what can't be simply said. Now, I'm kind of a fan of musicals, I still don't care for the Sound of Music; but I'm open to the idea, I really liked Moulin Rouge, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along blog.

Musicals communicate a depth of feeling that words sometimes can't, music itself, its rhythms and harmonies (not to mention the cumulative associations we all bring to how music makes us feel, which coincidently, there are real biological reasons why minor key songs are wrenching for us emotionally. It has to do with overtones that harmonize nicely, and minor keys clash with that, causing cognitive dissonance) amplify the message.

What strikes me as funny, but also poignant, about musicals is that the characters simply break into song, then go about their lives as if the song was just the thing to do.

We do this in the church too, especially when we chant. We break into song. "Come let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation." Singing that carries more meaning, and involves more of my physical body, than simply saying the words.

Singing, in chant, hymns, and South Pacific, all mean one thing: These words need more, these words say what I mean, but they need my complete abandon, my emotional nakedness!

Breaking into song, there is something very true in that phrase. We break from the standard politeness of regualr speech and communication, into something more vulerable and concentrated.

Feeding of the 450.

2009-08-20T08:29:00.003-04:00

Here's a little movie about this past weekend's mobile food pantry. I was very excited to volunteer there, but was a little disappointed to see only three other seminarians there.

My feelings on the event ranged along the spectrum with my physical energy. We worked from 9-4, and were able to distribute food to 450 people (250 more than anticipated).

Jonathan Daniels

2009-08-16T12:07:00.005-04:00

Here is my sermon from Friday, my first preached at Sewanee.

Invocation+

Context is everything.

In biblical studies, we learn of the importance of context. What is the historical setting of the text? What are its cultural assumptions? What is the inter- and intra-textual organization of the entire work? Why did the writer put pen to paper in the first place? How did the original audience hear the text?
As we learn about scripture, or any communication for that matter, we learn that some messages are high context: messages that need unpacking. For example, the Old Testament is high context. It needs careful study and comparison and it helps a great deal if you can read biblical Hebrew: High context.
A smiley-face, by contrast is low context. No real explanation or special language required.

Last year’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz is high context. If the reader is not highly conversant with the world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Doctor Who, Dungeons and Dragons, and Marvel Comics, much of the depth of that beautiful story is simply lost by the non-nerdy reader. High Context.

The Real House Wives of New Jersey is low context. Anyone watching that show quickly sees the meaning of it: That these people are horrible. Low Context.

Why was it written, what did it mean? What is the context?

But there is another context.Not just the context of the words spoken, but that of the words received. There is this context [book].There is our context [us]. And there is my context and yours, as individuals. Indeed, each individual is a veritable constellation of contexts, shaped by time, situation, genetics, and nutrition to name but a few. Did you ever wonder why it is that we are hear the same words and some are brought to tears, while others are brought to sleep? It’s our contexts.

One night, in 1965, many seminarians at the Episcopal Theological School, now the Episcopal Divinity School, went to evening prayer. Jonathan Daniels, one of many, followed the liturgy and chanted the Magnificat with everyone else. “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”

Jonathan Daniels likely could have used his newly acquired Greek to parse out each declension of each word of Mary’s song. Or perhaps he, or one of his classmates, while chanting the words “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed,” may have speculated on the historicity of the Magnificat. Even more likely, Jonathan Daniels and his classmates simply went to evening prayer. Perhaps they went out of piety, or a sense of duty, or perhaps coercion by the faculty. Or maybe, some of them harbored that old George Herbert inspired pastoral fantasy. Whatever the case, most of the students there at evening prayer just went; they went and said the words. No care or concern for the context, either their own or for the words they sang.

Just saying the words. This is a great hazard of life in the church, and it can hardly be overstated, but of course when we overstated something, it is no longer heard, which is the problem. For us in the church, we say history’s most astounding things…everyday. For example, today’s Epistle:Galatians 3:27for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

“No longer male or female”? One with Christ? Really? No victims no boarders?
Maybe the problem is not the context of the words, but the context of where the words land.

But that night in 1965 at evening prayer as Jonathan Daniels heard the Magnificat, he heard its words. And those words entered a context, the subversive, apocalyptic, loving context of Christ at work in Jonathan Daniels that had only one response: Yes.
The context of Jonathan Daniels that night was subversive in Christ; subversive because Mary’s words described God’s reign, God’s way of doing business, bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly. Mary was talking about Selma, Alabama. Right there in evening prayer, Jonathan Daniels stood at the nexus of apartheid in Selma, and, it must be noted, the segregated Episcopal Church there; and God’s subversive upending of all that seems to be. Daniels said, “Yes,” and was resisted by sheriffs, mobs, priests, bishops, and ultimately a shotgun blast. Daniels was an “outside agitator” because he believed and acted as the subversive God, heralded into this world, this context, by the song of a virgin. God made man, to make good on God’s own promises.

The context of Jonathan Daniels that night at evening prayer, in 1965 when he sang the Magnificat, was apocalyptic. Apocalyptic is not a word we use to describe the Christian life very often, but you had better believe that apocalyptic is an exact definition of what we do up there at that table [point to altar].

Eugene Peterson writes:
In its dictionary meaning, apocalypse is simply “revelation,” the uncovering of what was covered up so that we can see what is there. But the context in which the word arrives adds color to the black-and-white dictionary meaning, colors bright and dark—crimson urgency and purple crisis. Under the crisis of persecution and under the urgency of an imminent end, reality is revealed suddenly for what it is. We had supposed our lives to be so utterly ordinary. Sin-habits dull our free faith into stodgy moralism and respectable boredom; then the crisis rips the veneer of cliché off everyday routines and reveals the side-by-side splendors and terrors of heaven and hell. Apocalypse is arson—it secretly sets a fire in the imagination that boils the fat out of an obese culture-religion and renders a clear gospel love, a pure gospel hope, a purged gospel faith.” (The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson)

That night in 1965 at evening prayer the context of God met the context of a brash, self-absorbed, 26 year old man. I have no romantic illusions about Jonathan Daniels. I don’t think he went happily to his death. I think he would rather have lived; and I know his beleaguered mother would have had him live. But the context of God’s word met the Christ prepared context of Jonathan Daniels and the world responded in the only way it knows how, with a cross.

Go and the Sin No Mores

2009-07-31T22:33:00.007-04:00

This is the name of a doo-wop band we should start here at the seminary.

So this week was a big milestone for me, my first confession. Confession is called the rite of Reconcilation in the Episcopal Church. Reconciliation is the key for me, to understanding sin in this day and age. For a long time, 32.5 years, I wasn't really sure what sin was/is. The prayer book isn't much help here:

Q. What is sin?
A. Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of
God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other
people, and with all creation.

Here we are given a definition that presupposes knowledge of another thing, namely, the will of God. It's like answering a question with a question. What is sin? Well, what is God's will?

I think that most thoughts on sin come from a misreading of the Old Testament. A literal reading of the OT would have us see sin as obeying rules and the violation of said rules lead to repentence and ritual satisfaction, i.e. purity laws. The Hebrews actually saw these rules, this Law, as a gift from God. Following the law equaled walking with God, closeness with God. Breaking the Law was a seperation from God and the community. This is were my new understanding of sin comes in (from Paul Tillich), sin as seperation. Sin is seperation from ourselves, our human community (neighbors), and our seperation from God (experienced subjectively).

So with an understanding of sin as seperation, can we back-track and develop what God's will is? If sin is seperation, maybe God is connectedness, intimacy, LOVE. A quick aside: God is love and intimacy. But God is also personal. While it is good and fine to be in love with the universe (as New Agers might say), the universe doesn't love you back, or love you first!

But sin and God are not polar equals. God always wins, God's mercy perseveres. I am one of those wacky people who think God's love wins the day, the last day, no matter what. Demons, devils, Dick Cheney, and even that most hallowed god (free will) cannot resist God's love. Sorry.

The great satirist Terry Pratchett hit the nail on the head in his book Carpe Jugulum:(This is an converesation between a man and his grandmother and is best read in an English accent).

"There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example."

"And what do they think? Against it are they?" [said Granny]

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's alot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are alot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

Amen and 'nuff said.

D025 passed

2009-07-14T22:56:00.002-04:00

Here's how history is made, quite boring. At 5:46 you can barely hear my bishop voting yes. D025

Theology Geek #2

2009-06-21T09:17:00.005-04:00

For part one in my sure-to-be-way-too-long series on science fiction and spiritulity see here.

Part two involes the story Article of Faith by Mike Resnick. You can listen for free here, either on computer or Mp3 player. It is a pretty good story and I really like the host of Escape Pod, Steve Eley, he's a very thoughtful guy. The story itself reminded me of Robot Dreams from Isaac Asimov where a robot has a dream in which it is a Moses figure freeing the enslaved robots. For this dream, the robot is destroyed.

In Article of Faith, a robot and preacher learn about faith and the resulting disaster. I say disaster because I believe when faith is real, when we say, as Phylis Tickle does, that is Jesus is God not guru, there will be a shake-up in life. The preacher has to make a decision about what a soul is and what a member of his church can be. It reads a little like a story of racial prejudice, a few years delayed. In fact it sounds alot like an experience that happened in Americus GA back in the 60s with Clarence Jordan and some of his friends from Koinonia Farms.

At its worst sci-fi is humanistic paternalism with technology as the savior. At its best sci-fi can give us new images to think about age-old human problems. Which, in my opinion is the definition of good theology: new images of thinking about the fundamental issues of human existence.

Commentary

2009-06-13T09:03:00.002-04:00

Here's a comment from an interesting post I left on theolphilics. Astute Sewanee folks will hear echoes of KN, from church history and Joe from ethics.

2009-06-01T18:56:00.004-04:00

Well, it's been a month. A few thing have happened: Finals, two deaths, end of the first year of seminary, start of my summer-long chaplaincy.

Instead of a blow by blow, I'm just going to pick up where I am, "to begin in the middle of things" to quote the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I started my Clinical Pastoral Education last week, CPE for short. I am a chaplain at the local hospital and the nursing facility down the road. I was lead to believe that the nursing home was for old folks but it's actually a facility for people with dementia and other mental issues i.e schizophrenia, bipolar, etc.

I've had some amazing and frightening experiences already, just in the first week. But the real take home for me initially is the closeness of these pocket worlds of pain and suffering. I live on a mountain, The Mountain. This place is a paradise. Sometimes I feel like Samwise Gamgee waking up in verdent Middle Earth, all is well. But a three minute walk from my front door leads me to the hospital. In that hospital there is a woman who screams alot, nothing can be done for her. There is a lot of pain, frustration, and forgetting there. There are many of caring souls too, families gathering, and I think God is there too.

But simply saying God is there is such a bromide, so pat an answer that I feel sad saying it. I do believe God is there, but couldn't he make himself known? Platitudes help no one, especially the speaker. Actually, I think formulaic speaking is a defense mechanism that protects the speaker from engaging in real life.

Entering into pain with people is an honor and a challenge. When the people I speak with share their story with me and reveal themselves a sacred space is created; all the alarms and blaring t.v.s fade into a cloud of forgetting as a human connection is formed. The challenge comes with me when I enter the room. What will I witness? Are they friendly, hostile? Oh God give me words! Being a chaplain is a master class in mindfullness of speech. How easy it is to fall into the old patterns of talking. Just think how hard it is to start a conversation when you take out, "How are you?"

So, back to my original thought, the closeness of these places, hospitals, nursing homes, hospice, to "regular life" is strange. These places to me are like people, we go by them everyday never knowing what goes on inside, or if we do we avoid them. About 10 years ago I got my first hard lesson on not knowing what is going on inside a person when my friend Marcus died. Oddly enough, it was his funeral which led me to the Episcopal Church, it was an Easter Liturgy, these people had the right idea. Anyway, we can never know what another person is thinking or living through. It is the mystery of not knowing that is humbling and a sure cure for complacency.

I guess this is where Jesus comes in. Jesus says, "Trust me, the knowing is going to be complete someday, death and suffering are not the final words..." This is what I believe and it is a mystery too. The mystery is hard to live with, and as Flannery O'Connor says, "the mystery is an embarrassment to the modern mind."

God grow my capacity for your mystery, grant me ambiguouity, so that I may walk in your many ways.

Liturgy of the Word

2009-05-01T11:41:00.004-04:00

Today, in New Testament, a group of seminarians performed a portion of John. There were 8 people perfoming, seven read and one drummer. They read, very dramatically and artistically, Here's the music they used, along with their reading of the death, and resurrection of Jesus, adn his appearance to the disciples and Thomas. The performance was most effective, and drove home the utter easterness of Christianity.
finally, here is a poem I wrote called liturgy of the word.

Liturgy of the Word

A hymn, psalm, or anthem may be sung.
The processed, but unwitting, griot; flanked by fire.
Holding forth with wind, reeds, and tongue.
The people sit, this brood, the words: their sire.

Puttin' some English on it. Throwing out
A proportion, ratio of chaos-God-life.
Scandalous breath-shapes to the lout,
Born and born again these words in strife.

Clanging in the new ears undopplered.
Thoughout space-time, atmosphere now sounding.
Translated, to this human-soul, the Word!
The fleshing starts in the ear's pounding.

Anamnetic consciousness in crisis,
Meets in slow delight of duty gnosis.

Another final project

2009-04-28T23:01:00.002-04:00

Here's a small portion of my Greek final, the so-called twleve year old version. We have an actual child in our class who we present our translatiosn to. First we translate the passage then reword it so it can be understood by a young person. Here's my version of 2nd and 3rd John:

2nd John:

From your old teacher,
To the special Lady and her members: Am I alone in loving and acting on the Truth? I’m not, because everybody knows what truth is, because truth is inside of us and always will be. Grace, mercy, and peace will be with you from God and his Son, Jesus Christ.
I was so happy to hear that the members of the church are on their best behavior and acting like they were taught to by the father. I’m writing, not about something new, but about love, and you all have loved each other from the start. Love is living your life in line with the teachings of the father, which you have always done, and lived your whole life that way. But there are some out there who lie about Jesus. These liars say that Jesus didn’t really live on Earth! Be careful, don’t mess up what we’ve done together, let’s finish our work and get paid. Whoever lies about Christ doesn’t know God, but whoever tells the truth about Christ has the Father and the Son. If somebody comes to you and is lying about Jesus, don’t invite them into the church or say, “Have a good day!” Even if somebody says, “Have a good day,” they help the liar.
Even though, I’ve got so much to write to you, I’d rather come out and see you all and talk face to face, that will be awesome!
Goodbye to my friends and the Lady, the special one.

3rd John:

The Old Teacher to Gaius, my best friend, whom I love,
Friend, I wish you the best in everything! I was so happy to hear from everybody about what a great guy you are. It makes me so happy to hear that my old friends are doing like they should. My friend, you take care of our friends and strangers, who all say, in front of the whole church, that you took good care of them before sending them off, and they didn’t need anything from anyone! We owe these guys a lot, because they love God, just like we do.
I’ve already written to you, but “Mr. Bossy,” Diotrephes, didn’t let us in. Because he’s such a jerk, I’m going to have to come over there and I will talk about his bad behavior: he says bad things, gossips about us, and that’s not enough for him. No, he doesn’t let our friends in the church, and the ones who want to join, he kicks out! My friend, do not be a copy-cat to bad behavior, but copy good behavior. When somebody is good, it comes from God, when they are bad, they don’t even know what God is!
Demetrius on the other hand, he’s just as good as you, Gaius! Everybody talks about how good he is; you’ve seen it.
I have so much to say to you, but I don’t want to with pen and paper. I will see you very soon and we’ll talk, face to face. Hope all is well, say, “Hello!” for me to everybody personally for me.

Project central

2009-04-28T16:53:00.003-04:00

I've been doing lots of final projects. Here is part of my presentation on Tobit. My group decided to do a presentation on the apocrypha, because we get nothing on it here. Tobit is an awesome book, and I hope my little character sketches will inspire you to read this hilarious and inspiring book.

Introducing Tobit
Five of the many unusual characters from the book of Tobit.

Tobit:
Shalom! I am Tobit, I have walked in righteousness all the days of my life. Even when my kindred and I were taken captive into Assyria, and all my people sacrificed to calves, I kept the law completely. No orphan, widow, or stranger ever went hungry in my sight. When the Assyrian king began killing my kinsmen and leaving them outside as examples, I buried my brothers in violation of the king’s law, under the cover of night, I was a vigilante for the Lord! One night I slept and the sparrows also slept, but their fresh droppings fell into my eyes and I was blinded. I prayed for God to end my life. I sent my son Tobias to my cousin to retrieve money I had left, when he returned I was healed through magic and I met an angel. Blessed be the God who lives forever!

Tobias:
Hello, I am Tobias son of Tobit. I went on an adventure with a kinsman, Azariah, to retrieve money for my father, my dog came along too. On my adventure I was bitten by a fish, which I hauled right out of the Tigris! Azariah taught me how to use the fish’s organs for magic. While getting the money for my dad, I found my true love, a fully lawful marriage too! I used the magic Azariah taught me to free my wife from a demon and heal my father’s blindness, also, I met an angel!

Sarah:
I used to be unlucky in love. My first seven husbands all died on our wedding night. The source of my bad luck was Asmodeus, the demon. I prayed that God would take my life so I would no longer disgrace my father. But along came Tobias, whom I loved at first sight. He did a strange thing: Tobias, on our wedding night, cooked fish liver and heart in our room, it stank to high heaven. After that though everything was peachy, Tobias even survived our wedding night!

Raguel:
I am Raguel, Tobit’s cousin. I held money in trust for Tobit which his son Tobias retrieved. Tobias married my daughter Sarah. I’ll admit I was worried he’d be yet another dead husband. I even had my servants dig his grave after the wedding. When I sent my wife to check on them, the boy still breathed! I had those servants fill in the grave, maybe this one will take?

Raphael:
I am the archangel Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord. I carry your prayers directly to the Holy One, I carried Sarah’s and Tobit’s prayers to the Almighty. God sent me to restore faithful Tobit’s family. I disguised myself as Azariah and led Tobias on adventures and taught him some tricks with fish organs; which drove Asmodeus the demon to Egypt, I caught up with him and bound him there. When I finally disclosed that I was an angel I said, “Do not be afraid; peace be with you. Bless God forevermore.” That’s good advice, take it from me, I’m an angel.

Senior Sunday

2009-04-28T07:14:00.002-04:00

This past Sunday was Senoir Sunday at All Saints' Chapel. It was a time to recognize the seniors who have contributed to the worship life at Sewanee, both undergrad and seminary seniors were recognized. In conjunction with Senior Sunday is Senior Prank Day: a time for seniors to mess with the liturgy. It was all in good fun and I think it shows how much they love and are comfortable in church, here are some highlights.
1.) Moving the row of seats for the priests and chalice bearers (me) to the very edge of the platform. We had to move them back during the first hymn.
2.)(My favorite prank of the day) The seniors have kindly placed a copy of Dianetics in the priest's chair, nothing like the bible of Scientology to brighten a christian priest's day.
3.)Placing limeade in the priests' glasses.
4.) Leaving a plateful of a hardy breakfast in the preacher's nest.
5.)Screaming AMEN! every time the congregation said amen.
6.)Recessing during the final hymn with a hymnal in each hand.

It was fun to watch and be a part of, it sure kept me on my toes, and to expect the unexpected, a too often forgotten sentiment in the church.

La Fabuleaux Destin de Amelie Poulin

2009-04-24T07:04:00.004-04:00

One great thing about living on the mountain is the cultural opportunities. Usually we miss alot of them, but last night I couldn't resist. The single screen movie theater was playing one of my favorite movies: Amelie. I have a copy, if anybody wants to borrow it. This movie is utterly magical and life affirming. Here's a clip: Amelie has found, buried in her apartment wall, toys of a former resident, and has found him...his reaction at :56 withers me.

Colbert vs. Ehrman

2009-04-23T09:26:00.002-04:00

Here's Bart Ehrman, scholar, with no sense of humor. I also think that Ehrman only goes so far in his thoughts, most of what he says is true, but he doesn't try to explain himself in light of Jewish or church tradition. One thinks he might have an agenda...nah!

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bart Ehrman

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Gay Marriage Commercial

Biblical inerrancy

2009-04-18T10:46:00.001-04:00

Birth of a Sacrament

2009-04-10T09:04:00.004-04:00

Britt and I had the honor to do the eucharistic bread for the Maundy Thursday Service and the Easter Vigil. A sacrament is simply defined as a synthesis of matter and spirit. In my opinion this definition can be problematic in that it hints at a division of spirit and matter: dualism. But the sacrament shows how reality really really is. John's Revelation most boldly shows this as the new heaven and the new earth joining, with heaven descending to earth, not the other way around. The eucharistic bread is just that: bread. It is not wheat, or olives, or any other naturally occuring thing. Bread is made, through the skill, knowledge, and technique of people. Same with wine. We, our best and worsst, are tied intimately in the sacrament. It would not be a sacrament without us.

Happy Birthday Joseph Campbell

2009-03-26T10:56:00.003-04:00

Reading Joseph Campbell and hearing his lectures and interviews changed my life. I'm not being hyperbolic. The thoughts and insights of this great man helped me tremendously in developing the proper use of my imagination for the understanding of living with a text in community, in my case, the Bible in the Church. His book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, is still, in my opinion the best introduction and explication of Jungian psychology out there, he explains Jung better than Jung does.

Campbell helped me see the golden thread that binds all human culture, indeed he said that "Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths." As one storyteller, said, the essential thing that separates animals and people, is that people tell stories about animals. Myths are stories that reveal more in their telling than if informaton had simply been disclosed. This is why I think Jesus taught in parables, a story commands interaction and interpretation. Anthony DiMello said that the fastest route to the truth is a story.

Campbell also indirectly had a HUGE impact on my childhood, because George Lucas learned alot about storytelling and myth from him for his development of Star Wars. (too bad Lucas forgot all his learning in the latest Star Wars movies, utter dreck!)

Does this sound like Luke Skywalker to you? Jesus?

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Learn a little more