Years ago I took a course from a Catholic woman theologian, a rare breed. Think about what it must be like as a female theologian in a male-dominated church! During the course, she made a comment that has stayed with me: the feminine ideal that the male hierarchy holds up to Roman Catholic women is an impossibility: a virgin mother, Mary. It was an illuminating statement that revealed much about the current state of Catholicism.
It is not enough that the Bible records one virgin birth, that of Jesus. Roman doctrine interprets Mary’s statement in Luke that she “has not known a man” as a declaration of lifelong celibacy. The various references in Scripture to Jesus’ brothers and sisters are then said to mean cousins. The end result is the Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, a model no mother can follow.
But enough Protestant rant. What about that first virgin birth, that of Jesus? It, at least, is attested by Scripture. Yet is the idea of the miraculous conception of Jesus at all tenable anymore? Should it be taken literally? Metaphorically?
Luke doesn’t seem to hint that his story should be taken at anything but face value. Commentators have worked hard to show that it was pasted together from various sources, or that it has pagan antecedents, or that it is really “just a story” invented to make Jesus more exalted. One gets the distinct impression that they have already made up their minds about its veracity, and then proceed from their assumption that it can’t possibly be true.
Yet what if it is true? To the people around him, Jesus Christ was unlike any other person they had ever encountered. Something extraordinary had come into the world with his birth, something so beyond human comprehension that human language was not up to describing it. Like John, the author of the book of Revelation, Luke had to put into words an idea that could not be bound by words, the Word of God himself. Luke wanted to be sure that we knew that this child to be born was divine as well as human, and he expressed that in the best way he could.
The virgin birth is not an incidental matter; where one comes down on that reveals a lot about what one believes about the divinity of Christ. But getting all wrapped up in the virgin birth takes us away from the main thrust of the story. The angel Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary follows on the heels of a similar prophecy about Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptizer. When John’s father, Zechariah, doubts Gabriel, he is struck dumb. When Mary doubts, she gets a fuller explanation. It’s a good thing Gabriel lets her keep her tongue. She still has to say, “Yes.”
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” is what Mary actually says. “Here am I.” That’s the response of Abraham, of Moses, of Isaiah, of all the great ones who have been given a commission from God that they think they can’t possibly fulfill. “Here am I.” It’s a statement of submission to God’s will, a statement of trust in something incomprehensible. It is not an agreement to submit to all authority, as is sometimes placed on women through Mary.
Mary can be a model for all of us – but not a model of mere submission or virginity. Instead, she is the God-bearer, the Theotokos of the Greek Church, one who shows us all how to say “yes” to God and thus bear God within us. We do that neither literally nor metaphorically, but in a way that is beyond words. Only after saying “Here am I” do we begin to get a glimpse of that power, that light, that love which can be born within us, just as it was within Mary so long ago.
[Advent 4: Luke 1:26-38.]
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Hold Fast That Which is Good
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” I Thessalonians 5:21
That appears in my father’s handwriting at the end of an inscription in A Lutheran Prayer Book edited by John W. Doberstein. The rest of the inscription says, “Presented to John Charles Horn on his Confirmation at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Overbrook, Philadelphia, Pa, April 3, 1966 William M. Horn, Pastor.” The passage from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians follows; it was my confirmation verse. The same verse shows up in its more modern form in this Sunday’s lessons.
My father was a very perceptive man. I do not know what my siblings’ confirmation verses were, but he chose mine wisely. Already as a young teenager I must have been showing signs that I would be questioning, wondering, forming the analytical mind of a scientist. Dad did not worry about those doubts; he knew himself and his own growing up well enough to realize that at some point children need to question what they have been given, so that they can take it back as their own. It was his prayer for me that in testing everything I would learn to discern the good, and hold to it tightly.
The small book with his inscription was a great aid in learning to discern the good. As I look at it now, with its tattered cover and well-thumbed pages, I realize how extraordinary a book it is. It is indeed a Lutheran prayer book, with a daily office for morning and evening, a year-long lectionary geared to the liturgical seasons that takes one through the breadth of the Bible, and a collection of prayers for various occasions. It prepared me for the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer even though I did not know it at the time. It led me into a world where prayer and Bible reading are daily rituals, a world where I still dwell. Its daily selections from Luther’s Small Catechism created a deeply-rooted theology that continues to nourish my faith. In short, it prepared me for what I do now: teach and preach the Word of God.
Did my dad know all that when he gave me the book? Perhaps. Once, when I was in botany graduate school, I remarked that I might someday be a pastor. He thought that I would be a good one. I didn’t ask him why; the comment itself was precious enough without details.
I use a different prayer book now, one that is Anglican rather than Lutheran. Yet I still hold fast that which is good, good enough for Paul, good enough for my father, good enough for anyone who wants to walk toward light, toward truth, toward God.
[Advent 3: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24.]
That appears in my father’s handwriting at the end of an inscription in A Lutheran Prayer Book edited by John W. Doberstein. The rest of the inscription says, “Presented to John Charles Horn on his Confirmation at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Overbrook, Philadelphia, Pa, April 3, 1966 William M. Horn, Pastor.” The passage from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians follows; it was my confirmation verse. The same verse shows up in its more modern form in this Sunday’s lessons.
My father was a very perceptive man. I do not know what my siblings’ confirmation verses were, but he chose mine wisely. Already as a young teenager I must have been showing signs that I would be questioning, wondering, forming the analytical mind of a scientist. Dad did not worry about those doubts; he knew himself and his own growing up well enough to realize that at some point children need to question what they have been given, so that they can take it back as their own. It was his prayer for me that in testing everything I would learn to discern the good, and hold to it tightly.
The small book with his inscription was a great aid in learning to discern the good. As I look at it now, with its tattered cover and well-thumbed pages, I realize how extraordinary a book it is. It is indeed a Lutheran prayer book, with a daily office for morning and evening, a year-long lectionary geared to the liturgical seasons that takes one through the breadth of the Bible, and a collection of prayers for various occasions. It prepared me for the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer even though I did not know it at the time. It led me into a world where prayer and Bible reading are daily rituals, a world where I still dwell. Its daily selections from Luther’s Small Catechism created a deeply-rooted theology that continues to nourish my faith. In short, it prepared me for what I do now: teach and preach the Word of God.
Did my dad know all that when he gave me the book? Perhaps. Once, when I was in botany graduate school, I remarked that I might someday be a pastor. He thought that I would be a good one. I didn’t ask him why; the comment itself was precious enough without details.
I use a different prayer book now, one that is Anglican rather than Lutheran. Yet I still hold fast that which is good, good enough for Paul, good enough for my father, good enough for anyone who wants to walk toward light, toward truth, toward God.
[Advent 3: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24.]
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Beginning of the Good News
Mark is in a hurry. No sooner does he slap a title on his Gospel than he’s off and running. Yet even that title makes one stop and think. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” Beginning? Good news? Is he resetting the clock? Making a fresh start? Will this good news be a second chance, an enduring new hope?
As soon as Mark teases us with his title, he points to Jesus as the fulfillment, not the repudiation, of what was written in the past. The words of Israel’s prophets are coming to pass. John the Baptizer is the predicted voice in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord. In his enthusiasm, Mark says that everyone comes out to see John, but when one is talking about the beginning of a new world, some hyperbole is understandable.
John’s a queer character indeed, and it is easy for us to get caught up in his dress and diet, missing his message. He points forward, toward the more powerful one coming after him who will baptize not with water but with a mysterious Holy Spirit. That one, of course, is the Christ, already named in the first verse. The new era is here.
Biblical time is a curious thing. It can be very long or very short. “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day,” wrote the author of the second letter of Peter. When God is waiting for us, time stretches out. “The Lord…is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” Our waiting for God can also seem to take forever. “We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is home.” Clearly righteousness is not very much at home on the earth we now inhabit.
How do we reconcile God’s time and our time? How do we reconcile Mark’s conviction that a new world has begun in Jesus Christ when everything seems just the same as it always has been? That’s the paradox of the Christian life. It is the central characteristic of the kingdom of God, already here yet still to come. It confronts us every Advent.
Peter’s letter gives us a remarkable clue to our place in this paradox. “What sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness,” he wrote, “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” Waiting for and hastening the day of God! We are not passive observers of God’s time. We are active participants. In this new creation, what we do has an effect on time.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that what we do changes our perception of time. If we work for the coming of the Kingdom, that place where righteousness is home, then years may seem like days. If we turn away from God, days may feel like years. Yet the patience of God lasts even longer, as God waits for us to repent and turn back.
Advent, the time of paradox, is also a time to be mindful of how we live. “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by God at peace, without spot or blemish.” Like Lent, Advent is inwardly focused, though not so penitential. Advent is God’s time, conflating a birth two thousand years ago with the present age and a future yet to come. It is indeed a new beginning, predicted in the past, still unfolding. Let it be for us a time of joyful waiting.
[Advent 2: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8.]
As soon as Mark teases us with his title, he points to Jesus as the fulfillment, not the repudiation, of what was written in the past. The words of Israel’s prophets are coming to pass. John the Baptizer is the predicted voice in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord. In his enthusiasm, Mark says that everyone comes out to see John, but when one is talking about the beginning of a new world, some hyperbole is understandable.
John’s a queer character indeed, and it is easy for us to get caught up in his dress and diet, missing his message. He points forward, toward the more powerful one coming after him who will baptize not with water but with a mysterious Holy Spirit. That one, of course, is the Christ, already named in the first verse. The new era is here.
Biblical time is a curious thing. It can be very long or very short. “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day,” wrote the author of the second letter of Peter. When God is waiting for us, time stretches out. “The Lord…is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” Our waiting for God can also seem to take forever. “We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is home.” Clearly righteousness is not very much at home on the earth we now inhabit.
How do we reconcile God’s time and our time? How do we reconcile Mark’s conviction that a new world has begun in Jesus Christ when everything seems just the same as it always has been? That’s the paradox of the Christian life. It is the central characteristic of the kingdom of God, already here yet still to come. It confronts us every Advent.
Peter’s letter gives us a remarkable clue to our place in this paradox. “What sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness,” he wrote, “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” Waiting for and hastening the day of God! We are not passive observers of God’s time. We are active participants. In this new creation, what we do has an effect on time.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that what we do changes our perception of time. If we work for the coming of the Kingdom, that place where righteousness is home, then years may seem like days. If we turn away from God, days may feel like years. Yet the patience of God lasts even longer, as God waits for us to repent and turn back.
Advent, the time of paradox, is also a time to be mindful of how we live. “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by God at peace, without spot or blemish.” Like Lent, Advent is inwardly focused, though not so penitential. Advent is God’s time, conflating a birth two thousand years ago with the present age and a future yet to come. It is indeed a new beginning, predicted in the past, still unfolding. Let it be for us a time of joyful waiting.
[Advent 2: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8.]
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Keep Awake
My grandfather had a remarkable ability to fall asleep anywhere at any time. No doubt his age helped. He was already in his late sixties when I was born. By the time I was old enough to remember him, he seemed ancient.
When I was in my teens, I went to my first church convention. My grandfather was there, too, for he never missed one. He sat in the row in front of us, and routinely fell asleep at the beginning of every speech. When the applause at the end startled him awake, he would sit up straight and say, “Marvelous speaker. Just marvelous!” I still think of him with envy when I attend conventions.
For those whose worries keep them awake at night, sleep is a great gift. But there are those who choose not to sleep. The ancient monks of Egypt were famous for their all-night prayer vigils. They chose sleeplessness because they took literally the admonition of Jesus to “keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” They didn’t want to be caught napping when Jesus returned in his glory.
This Sunday begins a new church year, and paradoxically we begin the year by contemplating the end of all time. In church logic that makes sense. Soon we will move toward the coming of Christ at Christmas, but first we reflect on the Second Coming of Christ, the time when the resurrected Jesus will return to make all things new. The renewal part sounds great, but we are also told that Christ comes as judge, to show us where we have fallen short.
Some rightly look forward to the day of judgment – those who have been wronged, or cheated, or oppressed. The prophet writing in Isaiah’s name was one. He knew the “awesome deeds” God had done in the past. He wanted God to do them again, so that the adversaries of Israel might tremble. He wanted things to be put right. At the same time, he knew how much Israel itself had sinned, and so prayed for God’s mercy. He realized that God’s judgment falls on everyone, not just those on whom we would like to see it fall.
That’s the part we tend to forget. We want God to step in and make things right by changing someone else. Maybe God could start with Congress, so that there is no longer gridlock in Washington. After that God could move on to our enemies. We forget our own complicity in saying “no new taxes” and “don’t touch Social Security.” We want God to defeat our enemies without considering what we might have done to make them hate us in the first place. We dream about what will happen when God comes, overlooking the fact that we are asleep when we dream.
That’s why Jesus says “Keep awake.” He did not mean that we should be sleepless, in Seattle or anywhere else. In a sense, he meant that the Christian is never off duty. We go about the ordinary business of living, but always with the awareness that at any time we may be called to account by God for what we have done.
Yes, I do envy my grandfather’s ability to fall asleep anywhere. Maybe that will come as I age. Yet if I live as Jesus commands, mindful of how he desires me to live and leaving the rest to God – well, I just might sleep a lot better at the end of the day.
[Advent 1: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37. With a new year and a different Gospel, I’m using a different volume in The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Mark by R.T. France.]
When I was in my teens, I went to my first church convention. My grandfather was there, too, for he never missed one. He sat in the row in front of us, and routinely fell asleep at the beginning of every speech. When the applause at the end startled him awake, he would sit up straight and say, “Marvelous speaker. Just marvelous!” I still think of him with envy when I attend conventions.
For those whose worries keep them awake at night, sleep is a great gift. But there are those who choose not to sleep. The ancient monks of Egypt were famous for their all-night prayer vigils. They chose sleeplessness because they took literally the admonition of Jesus to “keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” They didn’t want to be caught napping when Jesus returned in his glory.
This Sunday begins a new church year, and paradoxically we begin the year by contemplating the end of all time. In church logic that makes sense. Soon we will move toward the coming of Christ at Christmas, but first we reflect on the Second Coming of Christ, the time when the resurrected Jesus will return to make all things new. The renewal part sounds great, but we are also told that Christ comes as judge, to show us where we have fallen short.
Some rightly look forward to the day of judgment – those who have been wronged, or cheated, or oppressed. The prophet writing in Isaiah’s name was one. He knew the “awesome deeds” God had done in the past. He wanted God to do them again, so that the adversaries of Israel might tremble. He wanted things to be put right. At the same time, he knew how much Israel itself had sinned, and so prayed for God’s mercy. He realized that God’s judgment falls on everyone, not just those on whom we would like to see it fall.
That’s the part we tend to forget. We want God to step in and make things right by changing someone else. Maybe God could start with Congress, so that there is no longer gridlock in Washington. After that God could move on to our enemies. We forget our own complicity in saying “no new taxes” and “don’t touch Social Security.” We want God to defeat our enemies without considering what we might have done to make them hate us in the first place. We dream about what will happen when God comes, overlooking the fact that we are asleep when we dream.
That’s why Jesus says “Keep awake.” He did not mean that we should be sleepless, in Seattle or anywhere else. In a sense, he meant that the Christian is never off duty. We go about the ordinary business of living, but always with the awareness that at any time we may be called to account by God for what we have done.
Yes, I do envy my grandfather’s ability to fall asleep anywhere. Maybe that will come as I age. Yet if I live as Jesus commands, mindful of how he desires me to live and leaving the rest to God – well, I just might sleep a lot better at the end of the day.
[Advent 1: Isaiah 64:1-9; Mark 13:24-37. With a new year and a different Gospel, I’m using a different volume in The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The Gospel of Mark by R.T. France.]
Monday, November 14, 2011
Healing Service
This coming Sunday we will have a healing service at our church. There will be a special litany in place of the Prayers of the People, and all will be invited to come to the side altar after receiving communion for prayers and the laying on of hands. When we did this last spring, our retired priest was at the healing station. Afterwards he told me that I need to be there next time. So this Sunday he will preside and preach, and I will be at the side altar. No doubt it will be a trial for me to have someone else in charge, but at least that’s a good trial, one that I should experience from time to time.
The side altar is the church’s original one of ancient wood, replaced many years ago by an elegant marble-faced high altar. In front of it is a four-foot-wide kneeler that I found in storage. It is where I pray Noonday Prayer with a thurible of incense smoking on a nearby windowsill. As I kneel I pray for all whom I have encountered that day, and think of the generations of people and priests who have worshipped there before me. It is little wonder that the retired priest felt so much power at that healing station last spring.
Prayers for healing I’m familiar with from childhood. It’s the physicality of the healing service, the typically Anglican embodiment of our words in laying on hands, that is new to me. We sure didn’t lay on hands in the Lutheran church of my youth! Faith was more cerebral, with well-ordered arguments and well-crafted words, than anything so personal as placing hands on someone else’s head. Only at confirmation did that happen, which undoubtedly made the rite more powerful. (There was power enough that it was my father who confirmed me, a man whose chief form of personal contact was a welcoming handshake backed by a beaming face.)
I haven’t decided whether I will anoint with healing oil on Sunday. Those raised in the Roman Catholic Church might worry that I am giving them last rites, and the staunch Protestants will have no idea what the oil is about. I used to be in the latter category. I suspect that the Reformation threw out anointing as a reaction to all things Romish, in this case not returning to Scripture to recover the original healing use of oil. Or perhaps it disappeared because it was recommended in the letter of James, an epistle that Luther despised. For whatever reason, I had to get used to having a little container of bishop-blessed healing oil as one of my priestly possessions.
In praying for others I will also experience healing myself. God’s power can’t help but affect the channel through which it flows. That will be good. This has been a hard series of weeks, with diocesan work taking me away from home and funerals of beloved people in the parish. For someone as cognitively oriented as I am, sorrow flows underground, unseen, where it is reached only by the penetrating love of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, I think this will be a good Sunday to have a healing service at our church.
The side altar is the church’s original one of ancient wood, replaced many years ago by an elegant marble-faced high altar. In front of it is a four-foot-wide kneeler that I found in storage. It is where I pray Noonday Prayer with a thurible of incense smoking on a nearby windowsill. As I kneel I pray for all whom I have encountered that day, and think of the generations of people and priests who have worshipped there before me. It is little wonder that the retired priest felt so much power at that healing station last spring.
Prayers for healing I’m familiar with from childhood. It’s the physicality of the healing service, the typically Anglican embodiment of our words in laying on hands, that is new to me. We sure didn’t lay on hands in the Lutheran church of my youth! Faith was more cerebral, with well-ordered arguments and well-crafted words, than anything so personal as placing hands on someone else’s head. Only at confirmation did that happen, which undoubtedly made the rite more powerful. (There was power enough that it was my father who confirmed me, a man whose chief form of personal contact was a welcoming handshake backed by a beaming face.)
I haven’t decided whether I will anoint with healing oil on Sunday. Those raised in the Roman Catholic Church might worry that I am giving them last rites, and the staunch Protestants will have no idea what the oil is about. I used to be in the latter category. I suspect that the Reformation threw out anointing as a reaction to all things Romish, in this case not returning to Scripture to recover the original healing use of oil. Or perhaps it disappeared because it was recommended in the letter of James, an epistle that Luther despised. For whatever reason, I had to get used to having a little container of bishop-blessed healing oil as one of my priestly possessions.
In praying for others I will also experience healing myself. God’s power can’t help but affect the channel through which it flows. That will be good. This has been a hard series of weeks, with diocesan work taking me away from home and funerals of beloved people in the parish. For someone as cognitively oriented as I am, sorrow flows underground, unseen, where it is reached only by the penetrating love of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, I think this will be a good Sunday to have a healing service at our church.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Guidance for the Journey
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This is one of my favorite collects. It is classically Anglican, written for the original 1549 Book of Common Prayer. “All” holy Scriptures is an echo of that book’s preface, which lamented how the medieval accretion of liturgical rules and saints’ days had chopped up the readings so much “that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread…There was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.” By contrast, that first prayer book provided an orderly reading of nearly the entire Bible each year at Morning and Evening Prayer.
It is quite a challenge to understand all Scripture as written for our instruction. Some passages are just plain boring (especially in Leviticus). Others are guaranteed to create an upset stomach as they are “inwardly digested.” Take Sunday’s reading from Zephaniah, for instance. It proclaims the day of the Lord, “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” This does not sound like good news – at least not to those who are well off. But what about those who suffer under tyrannical government, or the many who can’t afford food while the few are fabulously wealthy? For them, this is a promise that God will right the wrongs. It is a warning to those who rely on silver and gold more than God, those who buy yet another Lexus when their neighbors are in want, those who pass by the Occupy protesters in the street, en route to their multimillion dollar jobs.
Paul takes up the warning against complacency in his first letter to the Thessalonians. Christ will return unexpectedly like a thief in the night, he says. Christ will come as inescapably as a child is born to a woman in labor. Yet Paul provides hope where Zephaniah does not. “God has not destined us for wrath,” he writes, “but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is not God’s will that anyone should perish; it is we who we bring disaster on ourselves by our own actions, by the choices we freely make.
Jesus says as much in his parable of the talents. Like the master in the story who goes on a journey, God has given us talents, gifts, for us to use in his service. When we use them as God intends, they multiply. Not only are we able to return to God more than we have been given, God gives us even more. But if we hoard what we have been given, keeping it only for ourselves and not others, we both forfeit the blessing and lose what we already have. The most remarkable part of this passage is that God come to us just as we expect him to be. If we believe that God is generous, we see God’s generosity. If we believe that God is harsh and judgmental, we experience God’s judgment. Would that more Christians would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest that passage!
And so Scripture provides just what the collect says: learning, instruction, guidance for the journey, a journey made in the blessed hope of everlasting life. Whether it is the wrath of Zephaniah, the warning of Paul, or the use of our talents in Jesus’ parable, we can find wisdom in the lessons that are read day by day, week after week, if only we search for it.
[Pentecost 22: Zephaniah1:7, 12-18; Psalm 90; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 5:14-30. The information about the collect is from Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the American Prayer Book. The wonderful preface to the 1549 prayer book can be found in the current 1979 book on p. 866.]
This is one of my favorite collects. It is classically Anglican, written for the original 1549 Book of Common Prayer. “All” holy Scriptures is an echo of that book’s preface, which lamented how the medieval accretion of liturgical rules and saints’ days had chopped up the readings so much “that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread…There was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.” By contrast, that first prayer book provided an orderly reading of nearly the entire Bible each year at Morning and Evening Prayer.
It is quite a challenge to understand all Scripture as written for our instruction. Some passages are just plain boring (especially in Leviticus). Others are guaranteed to create an upset stomach as they are “inwardly digested.” Take Sunday’s reading from Zephaniah, for instance. It proclaims the day of the Lord, “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” This does not sound like good news – at least not to those who are well off. But what about those who suffer under tyrannical government, or the many who can’t afford food while the few are fabulously wealthy? For them, this is a promise that God will right the wrongs. It is a warning to those who rely on silver and gold more than God, those who buy yet another Lexus when their neighbors are in want, those who pass by the Occupy protesters in the street, en route to their multimillion dollar jobs.
Paul takes up the warning against complacency in his first letter to the Thessalonians. Christ will return unexpectedly like a thief in the night, he says. Christ will come as inescapably as a child is born to a woman in labor. Yet Paul provides hope where Zephaniah does not. “God has not destined us for wrath,” he writes, “but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is not God’s will that anyone should perish; it is we who we bring disaster on ourselves by our own actions, by the choices we freely make.
Jesus says as much in his parable of the talents. Like the master in the story who goes on a journey, God has given us talents, gifts, for us to use in his service. When we use them as God intends, they multiply. Not only are we able to return to God more than we have been given, God gives us even more. But if we hoard what we have been given, keeping it only for ourselves and not others, we both forfeit the blessing and lose what we already have. The most remarkable part of this passage is that God come to us just as we expect him to be. If we believe that God is generous, we see God’s generosity. If we believe that God is harsh and judgmental, we experience God’s judgment. Would that more Christians would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest that passage!
And so Scripture provides just what the collect says: learning, instruction, guidance for the journey, a journey made in the blessed hope of everlasting life. Whether it is the wrath of Zephaniah, the warning of Paul, or the use of our talents in Jesus’ parable, we can find wisdom in the lessons that are read day by day, week after week, if only we search for it.
[Pentecost 22: Zephaniah1:7, 12-18; Psalm 90; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 5:14-30. The information about the collect is from Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the American Prayer Book. The wonderful preface to the 1549 prayer book can be found in the current 1979 book on p. 866.]
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
For All the Saints
Recently the local paper had a couple of articles on life after death. Sort of. One, headlined “What happens when you die,” featured the work of a funeral home and cemetery. The other article was about Iowa ghosts, a not unexpected topic around Halloween. The only mention of belief in either article was a discussion of what different faiths do with their dead. I should not have expected anything about the afterlife in a newspaper, given that cultural relativism tells us that all religions are valid, if not fundamentally the same.
Last week R and I watched "The Bishop’s Wife," perhaps in anticipation of the upcoming diocesan convention. Loretta Young is smashing in the title role, and David Niven is the perplexed bishop trying to raise money for a cathedral. His prayers are answered when an angel played by Cary Grant arrives to give him guidance. Of many memorable moments, there’s one where Grant sits down at a harp and starts playing. Of course! He’s an angel, and all angels play the harp, right? This is 1947 culture: Christianity is assumed, but bowdlerized, inoffensive. Angels are good-looking, perform minor miracles, play harps, and have to leave when they start getting too attached to humans. God and Jesus hover in the background but are never mentioned (unless you count the Christmas setting, but that’s mostly for making us feel good and providing a memorable skating scene.)
The reality of Christian faith in the Bible is quite different. For one thing, death is looked squarely in the face. That is possible because Jesus passed through death to rise again on the third day. We still celebrate the day of resurrection every Sunday, the day when death lost its final power over us. I say “final” power, because we do still die, of course. Yet as the prayer book burial service says, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” There lies the great hope, the great belief of Christian faith. Like Christ, we will die. And like Christ, we shall one day rise again.
That’s why we have All Saints’ Sunday. We remember all who have gone before us in Christian hope, waiting for the resurrection of the dead. At our church there will be pictures and other remembrances of the saints in our own lives. Those saints are truly blessed. They hunger no more and thirst no more. God has wiped away every tear from their eyes.
But what about us who are left here without them? For us there are tears and mourning. There is hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. We will bring pictures because we truly miss those faces and those voices. Yet we still have this incredible promise from God, a promise about which the Apostle John wrote: “Beloved, we are God’s children now. What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
And that’s it: we are promised the vision of Jesus. When we see him, we will be transformed. We will be like him: no longer dead, but alive; no longer in this body that hungers and aches, but in a resurrected body more solid and fresh and imperishable that anything we have experienced on earth. That’s a promise that Christ himself gave us. As for whether or not such a body comes with a built-in ability to play the harp – I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
[All Saints’ Sunday: Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12. I discovered via Google that Gail Laughton actually played the harp in "The Bishop’s Wife"; it is his arms and hands we see in the close-ups. He also dubbed the harp segments in Harpo Marx’s movie appearances, in spite of the fact that Harpo was an accomplished, if unique, harpist.]
Last week R and I watched "The Bishop’s Wife," perhaps in anticipation of the upcoming diocesan convention. Loretta Young is smashing in the title role, and David Niven is the perplexed bishop trying to raise money for a cathedral. His prayers are answered when an angel played by Cary Grant arrives to give him guidance. Of many memorable moments, there’s one where Grant sits down at a harp and starts playing. Of course! He’s an angel, and all angels play the harp, right? This is 1947 culture: Christianity is assumed, but bowdlerized, inoffensive. Angels are good-looking, perform minor miracles, play harps, and have to leave when they start getting too attached to humans. God and Jesus hover in the background but are never mentioned (unless you count the Christmas setting, but that’s mostly for making us feel good and providing a memorable skating scene.)
The reality of Christian faith in the Bible is quite different. For one thing, death is looked squarely in the face. That is possible because Jesus passed through death to rise again on the third day. We still celebrate the day of resurrection every Sunday, the day when death lost its final power over us. I say “final” power, because we do still die, of course. Yet as the prayer book burial service says, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” There lies the great hope, the great belief of Christian faith. Like Christ, we will die. And like Christ, we shall one day rise again.
That’s why we have All Saints’ Sunday. We remember all who have gone before us in Christian hope, waiting for the resurrection of the dead. At our church there will be pictures and other remembrances of the saints in our own lives. Those saints are truly blessed. They hunger no more and thirst no more. God has wiped away every tear from their eyes.
But what about us who are left here without them? For us there are tears and mourning. There is hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. We will bring pictures because we truly miss those faces and those voices. Yet we still have this incredible promise from God, a promise about which the Apostle John wrote: “Beloved, we are God’s children now. What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
And that’s it: we are promised the vision of Jesus. When we see him, we will be transformed. We will be like him: no longer dead, but alive; no longer in this body that hungers and aches, but in a resurrected body more solid and fresh and imperishable that anything we have experienced on earth. That’s a promise that Christ himself gave us. As for whether or not such a body comes with a built-in ability to play the harp – I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
[All Saints’ Sunday: Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12. I discovered via Google that Gail Laughton actually played the harp in "The Bishop’s Wife"; it is his arms and hands we see in the close-ups. He also dubbed the harp segments in Harpo Marx’s movie appearances, in spite of the fact that Harpo was an accomplished, if unique, harpist.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
