Realiter Loquendo

Consolations

2012-03-01T13:52:00.005-05:00

Well, I'm not gonna lie, it's been a rough week around these here parts. Just a lot to do, and not a lot of time in which to do it, plus a sleep cycle disrupted by various causes. However, I received a minor consolation today. A large, unexpected and weighty package arrived at my door today as I was rushing late to class. It was, I discovered, a whole stack of the current edition of the Intercession Papers of the Guild of All Souls, of which I am now a member. Thus, I have made a further small step in my slow, and highly eccentric quest to join every single Anglo-Catholic devotional society out there. The mission of the Guild is described on the website as follows.

Founded in England in 1873, the GOAS is a Prayer Guild within the worldwide

Anglican Communion which seeks to promote the Church's teaching in regard to the Faithful Departed:
• Intercessory prayer for the Dying and for the Repose of the Souls of the Departed.
• To encourage Christian customs at burials, especially the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
• To promote the two great doctrines of the Christian Creed: "The Communion of Saints" and "The Resurrection from the Dead."

Basically, we do that by praying for the dead, as listed in the intercession papers. I actually think that the Guild has one of the more important and worthwhile ministries of all the AC devotional societies out there, because it is a genuine ministry of charity, praying for the souls of the faithful departed. Besides which, the Resurrection of the Dead is a doctrine that tends to be neglected in contemporary American Christianity, so good on the Guild for promoting it.

Also, the Guild maintains a ministry of providing requiem mass vestments to poor parishes. Since I expect to be in a poor parish one day, I am particularly grateful for this ministry.
And, since I received a whole stack of these intercession papers, I have plenty to share with friends, should you happen to be interested - also membership is free for Seminarians o{]:-)

The Lutheran Aquinas.

2012-02-27T17:58:00.002-05:00

I recently ran across this quote from Saint Thomas on justifying grace. I think it sums up really well the catholic understanding of grace, which does not overwhelm or destroy our nature, but raises and perfects it.

God does not justify us without ourselves, because while we are being justified we consent to God’s justification by a movement of our free will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace. (Summa,I-II, q. 111, a.2, ad.2)

Catholic Christianity rejects both the Pelagian idea of an autonomous will, and determinism. For Aquinas, just as much as for Luther, salvation is grace through and through, but while Luther seems (at least at times) to have believed that any human cooperation meant a diminishment of grace, Aquinas believed that the human will moved by God, could genuinely cooperate. Not to use Luther's words against him, but I think in this case "his thoughts of God were too human," and he seems to have placed God's causality on the same level as ours. I think St. Thomas helps us out of many of the knottier problems of Protestant theology on this point.

Recent Aesthetic Encounters

2012-02-26T10:03:00.004-05:00

Two artistic projects have recently caught my attention, and I feel like sharing them with all y'all here at the blog. The first of these, is Dappled Things.
Dappled Things is a relatively new journal of Catholic art and writing including essays, poetry and short fiction. I am saving up my meager student income for a subscription, but for now much of the content is available on the website. I highly recommend it, if you have any interest in the intersection between faith and art, whether you are Catholic or not. Roman Catholics, I find, are particularly good at creating art that deals with religious themes without being "religious fiction" in the sense of thumping a heavy hand on a bible every few sentences. For an example, see any piece of fiction by Miss Flannery O'Connor; judging by the content of Dappled Things, she seems to be their unofficial patron saint, which is a good sign. I also note that their definition of what makes a piece of art "Catholic" is not at all narrow, although they ask that it engage in some way with the Catholic tradition, even if only in a very subtle way.

The second glorious artistic discovery for me has been Spark.
Spark is a collaborative effort between artists working in different media. The 15th round just finished, and the art is going up on the online gallery over the next week. Two artists, say a writer and a photographer, are randomly paired. Each sends the the other an "Inspiration piece," some work in their medium, and each takes about 10 days to come up with a response inspired by what they were sent. The idea is to stretch yourself by both the time constraint and by trying to get inspiration from a new sort of subject.

I was introduced to Spark by the Wonderful Author of Without a Map, who has been participating for a few years. Despite my intense reserve about sharing my creative work others I decided to go ahead and participate in this round and you can read my short story, inspired by a lovely photograph from Mr. Brian MacDonald, here. At some point, my inspiration piece (a poem) should also be up, with Mr. MacDonald's response. While I am not terribly happy with my story, I think it had good elements, and it was worth writing just to know I could write a piece given the constraints.
I highly encourage those creative types who happen to read the blog to think about participating in the next round of Spark!

Ash Wednesday

2012-02-22T22:30:00.000-05:00

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The collect for Ash Wednesday is one of my favorites for the whole year. I long to have that secound clause written on my heart: God who hatest nothing that thou hast made...
Lent is really one of my favorite times of year, because it is, above all, a time to reflect on the mercy of God.
While it is hardly traditional, here is a little musical reflection on that theme, from one of my all time favorites, Mr. Tom Waits.

Society of the Holy Cross, take 2

2012-02-17T09:32:00.001-05:00

Well, I am happy to say that our little chapter of the Pusey Guild has hit its second year (roughly). We had two new inductees this year. Fr. Ralph Walker, Master of the SSC in the Americas celebrated low mass this past Wednesday, and gave us many words of encouragement. My hope is that the guild will continue to grow and thrive at Trinity. It continues to be a great blessing to me.

Is the Ordinariate Anglican?

2012-02-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

That's a question I have had on my mind ever since the Apostolic constitution appeared. I have been thinking about it again in the last couple months with the appointment of Msgr. Steenson as Ordinary in this country. Back a couple year ago I would have answered the question in the fashion of Herr Professor Barth: "NEIN!"

Having had a little time to cool down and watch the progress of my brothers and sisters in the Ordinariate, I have moderated my position significantly. I am not, and have never been, an Anglo-Papalist. I am a classical Anglo-Catholic, a Tractarian and an unapologetic Ritualist, but I believe in Episcopal and conciliar government of the Church. I do think the Pope has a special role of authority in the Church, but I do not accept the doctrines of infallibility or (even less) universal jurisdiction. Hence, my total lack of interest in the Ordinarite when it was first announced. I still have no plans to move in that direction, for the same reasons.

I have been to one Ordinariate mass so far, at St. Luke's in Bladensburg, MD, and what was amazing to me was how much I felt at home. The worst part of the service was not receiving the Eucharist, because I felt very much that these were my people, these were Anglicans and Catholics in the senses that mattered. I sensed no bitterness or anger from the congregation, or the preacher, Msgr. Keith Newton; only joy and gratitude.

Now there are a lot of reasons why you could claim that the Ordinariate is not really Anglican, but most of the criticisms I have heard come down to this: You can't be an Anglican and be in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. But if a Church defines itself by being not in communion with another church, I have to say I think it has crossed the line into being a sect. Christ's call is for unity, and a Church that has ceased pursuing unity is in grave sin and needs to repent.

There are more sophisticated theological critiques of the Ordinariate. Obviously, I don't agree with all of their theology. But I have equally strong or stronger disagreements with Anglicans in, oh, say Sydney Australia, who are officially part of the Anglican Communion. So until some one comes up with a really clear definition of Anglicanism, I think the Ordinariate is Anglican.

Sorry, readers, if this is a debate you are not part of and find boring. It's the sort of thing that comes up in my world though, so I figured I would throw my hat in the ring in defense of the Ordinariate.

(almost) Turkish Coffee

2012-02-13T20:11:00.000-05:00

I am afraid the blog is getting a little random as I find myself occupied elsewhere. I suppose I will have to accept that for the time being, and tell my perfectionist side to take a hike. But anyway, Coffee is one of my little obsessions. I am working on getting to the point where I can roast my own coffee beans.
So here is a little recipe for Pseudo-Turkish Coffee.
Ideally, you should obtain the Special Turkish grinder, and an ibrik, the lovely little copper pot for making Turkish and Greek Coffee. If you can afford to buy these things, so much the better. I can't.
So My recipe is simple. When you grind your coffee, add one pod of Cardamom. Cardamom can be expensive, so I recommend buying it from an Indian grocery, or possibly from Penzey's Spices. I also recommend black Cardamom, which has a smoky sweet flavor that I think goes better with the coffee. Again, the only place I know to obtain Black Cardamom is Penzy's. Seriously, Penzy's is awesome.

Put the grounds in your French press, with water that is just below boiling. Then let it all steep for about four minutes. If you don't have a french press, I really, really recommend one. They make coffee that is so much better than anything you will get from an auto drip brewer.
Pour into a small cup, and add sugar and milk to taste. Extra sugar, of course, is good for "Turkish" style coffee.

A mild protest

2012-01-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

My Libertarian tendencies are brought out by SOPA and PIPA, so I am going ahead and noting my solidarity with Wikipedia and other sites protesting yet another abuse of power by the Federal Government.
http://sopastrike.com/

I am a political conservative, so for some thoughts on why conservatives should opposes both these acts, have a look over at National Review here and here.

A Late but Merry Christmas

2011-12-30T11:53:00.000-05:00

Although it is already long past Christmas day, I don't plan to let the season go by without comment. It has been a good time for me, and a great ending to the secular year. I am spending the time with my family and preparing to take canonical exams for ordination next week. It has also been an exhausting time, and so I am not going to write a long post. Instead, I am just going to post two unrelated quotes that have been on my mind this Christmas season.

It surpasses all thought, it amazes, it confounds, to think of God becoming man; the Infinite enshrined within the finite, the Lord of all blended with His servant, the Creator with His creature! It is a depth of mystery unsearchable. We must shrink with awe when we pronounce it. Of old they fell down and worshipped, when, in our Creed, they uttered it― “God was made Man.” It was an unimaginable condescension for God to create. From Eternity, in Eternity, (since it had no beginning), He was Ever-blessed, Love loving Love in the Holy Spirit, Who is the Bond of Love and Unity. He was, in Himself, All-perfect. He needed nothing, changed not. And yet, in that He created, He did a new thing, and formed those who needed Him, as though He needed them. He formed them to serve Him Who needed them not, and He accepted their service. It was much, as Scripture saith, to “humble Himself to behold the things which are in Heaven and earth.” But that He, Who was Perfect in Himself, should take into Himself something without Him; that He, Who is All in all, should add something to Himself; that He Who is a Spirit, should take into Himself that which was material; in a word, that God (if we realize to ourselves what that word God is) should take into Himself what is not God; one must stand speechless with awe at so amazing a mystery. How must we be amazed and scarce believe for joy, to think that that which He so took was man, ourselves, our fallen, sinful, in Him Alone unsinful, unsinning nature. - E.B. Pusey, From a Christmas sermon on Philippians 2:5-7 entitled "THE INCARNATION, A LESSON OF HUMILITY."

And then there is this little Gem from Karl Barth. It is not particularly about Christmas, but about the cross, and Christmas, too, points us towards the cross.

Now certainly something needs to be said about human sins and errors. Yet it ought to be said from the standpoint of sin forgiven and error removed. Sin undoubtedly has to be taken seriously, but forgiveness even more seriously. For either forgiveness is the first word, or it is not true at all. Sin must be spoken about only as the Sin which is taken away by the Lamb of God. - Homiletics, 52.

And that, I think, is a pretty good explanation of the meaning of Christmas, after all, that is why Jesus was born.

The Horror, the horror...

2011-12-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

I can't even tell you how happy this makes me...

if you don't get it, go read more Calvin and Hobbes.

All Things Upside Down, or Men, Women and The Magnificat

2011-12-12T14:33:00.000-05:00

At the moment, I should really be writing something more directly connected with the overwhelming number of final papers I need to hand in next week - but a man can only spend so much time checking the formatting of his footnotes before he needs a break.

I continue on my Auden kick, and I am reading through For the Time Being his extended poem written in the form of a Christmas oratorio. I figure it's good preparation for Christmas.
Reading that poem, together with this excellent post over at Without A Map, and some personal conversations with the wonderful author of that blog, has got me thinking again about the really extraordinary role of Mary in the history of Salvation.
One of the most striking passages so far is the "Temptation of St. Joseph."
The words of the 'Narrator' are a really amazing meditation on the relationship between Mary and Joseph, and the relationship between Men and Women generally.

The temptation of St. Joseph was the temptation to doubt Mary's fidelity when he discovered that she was pregnant, and to divorce her. In Eastern icons of the nativity, there is often an image of St. Joseph in the corner, conversing with an old man who represents the devil. Somehow, Joseph overcame his doubts, and did not send Mary away. I'm sure that God sending Gabriel (who probably got more work in this one six month period around 4 BC than he had since the book of Daniel) to drop him a line helped with this. Anyway, all of that is just by way of background. Here's what Mr. Auden has to say.

For the perpetual excuse
Of Adam for his fall - "My little Eve,
God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,"
For his insistence on a nurse,
All service breast and lap, for giving Fate
Feminine gender to make Girls believe
That they can save him, you must now atone,
Joseph in silence and alone
While she who loves you makes you shake with fright,
Your love for her must tuck you up and kiss goodnight.

For likening Love to war, for all
The pay-off lines of limericks in which
The weak resentful bar-fly shows his sting,
For talking of their spiritual
Beauty to chorus girls, for flattering
The features of old gorgons who are rich,
For the impudent grin and Irish charm
That hides a cold will to do harm,
Today the roles are altered; you must be The Weaker Sex whose passion is passivity.

Auden focuses in on something that is present in the gospel narratives, but which is, at least in my experience, rarely commented on. Mary is often presented as a meek and passive figure, the essence of some kind of idealized femininity. But this, it seems to me, is hardly biblical. Mary is passive in a certain sense - the incarnation was God's initiative, obviously, but Mary's willingness to participate in the whole plan was not a passive decision in the sense that she just sat there and watched things happen. She took it upon herself to endure outrageous difficulty, to be the bearer of the eternal word of God - to risk being the object of mockery and outcast. She even risked her life - Joseph could have had her stoned. Mary became the protagonist and hero of this small story within the wider gospel narrative.
And Mary seems to have known that God was working in her, and turning all things upside down. I say she seems to have known it, because the Magnificat, her own hymn, is full of this imagery.

My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
For he hath regarded
the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold from henceforth
all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me,
and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him
throughout all generations.
He hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel,
as he promised to our forefathers,
Abraham and his seed for ever.

The Magnificat is not the hymn of passive femininity - it is a battle hymn. The whole theme of it is that God has chosen the weak, the poor, the foolish things of this world as the instruments of his salvation. Ultimately, of course, we see this reversal in the cross, where the death of Christ, becomes his victory. In God's plan it is the weak and the poor who will be exalted, the slaves who will save the masters, and the woman who will save the man.
Mary herself is a remarkable instance of this kind of reversal. She describes her self as "a handmaiden" - a female slave. And in that society, there really wasn't a lower rank than a female slave. Mary was poor, obscure, and a woman, and after God made her the mother of his Son, a woman who was regarded as an adulteress.
She was the lowest of the low, but God made her, after her son, the most important player in the whole drama of salvation. Mary, the obscure Jewish girl, is in the words of the Eastern hymn, the "Champion Leader" of the Church. Joseph has a part to play in all this, of course, but it is not the role of leader. He is the passive one, the man who must stand by and be the servant to his wife and the child she carried.

So what does that mean? I don't know exactly. The gospel turns everything upside down - especially human power structures, and that includes gender roles. I don't think that men and women are interchangeable, and I think there are real differences between the sexes which go beyond the obvious and merely physical. For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that I am even ambivalent about Women's ordination. Still, no anthropology can claim to be Christian if it privileges men over women, or ignores the fact that in the gospel there is an inherent critique of gender roles.

I am not going to attempt here to come up with an anthropology that does justice to the biblical picture of men and women. Plainly, it is a big topic, and it raises all sorts of issues in the life of the Church (Women's ordination being the most obvious), so for now, I am just going to be content to raise the issue, and welcome thoughts and comments.

The Incompleteness of Anglicanism

2011-12-06T10:49:00.000-05:00

Archbishop Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, is certainly one of the patron saints around here, even if his picture isn't up on the side bar.
His book, The Christian Priest Today, has been an important book for me in considering my own sense of calling. He was also another "Barthian Catholic," which is one of the descriptors I would use for myself these days.
This year, I have had several opportunities to dip into his classic book, The Gospel and The Catholic Church. I was really prepared for it by reading Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology - thinkers like Zizioulas, Dumitru Stăniloae and Thomas Hopko - and have discovered that Ramsey speaks especially to many of my own concerns, with his dual commitment to Ecumenism and to the Catholic order of the Church.
Here is what Lord Ramsey had to say about the place of Anglicanism in the broader Church.

While the Anglican church is vindicated by its place in history, with a strikingly balanced witness to the Gospel and the Church, its greater vindication lies in its pointing through its own history, to something of which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness.

Anglicanism is a mess, and it always has been. It is broken, but its brokenness also points to its vocation. What Anglicanism has to offer the wider Church is not just a slightly more liberal Catholicism, or a slightly more liturgical Evangelicalism. Rather, Anglicanism's gift is its peculiar witness to both the unity and the brokenness of the Church, and to the final hope that all who confess Christ may one day be one. And Anglicanism has the potential to stand as an authentic via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, not as a compromise, but as a bridge, calling the whole Church into a greater realization of the unity we have in Christ.

Advent Poetry

2011-12-03T17:05:00.000-05:00

I am on a W. H. Auden kick after having seen Allan Bennett's The Habit of Art, about Auden and Benjamin Britten, performed recently. So to celebrate Advent, here is an excerpt from the Advent section of his poem, "For the Time Being."

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

The Internet is for Platonists

2011-12-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

*WARNING: This post is really just a series of random thoughts. Do not attempt to extract a thesis from it*
I do not have the nerve to even hazard a guess at how many hours I spend online each week. It is doubtless vastly accelerating the progress of myopia, and for some reason it really bothers me to think about how much of my time is spent in the company of my decrepit iBook G4 (This little trooper has lasted since before Mac started using Intel).
Now, don't get me wrong, I love the internet and technology and all that, and if Facebook, Blogger, Gmail, and the archives over at First things disappeared tomorrow, I would be in a very bad mood. On the other hand, I might get more actual work done.
I have just been thinking recently, how the internet, and electronic media have transformed the idea of place. Not so long ago, your life and interests were confined to a relatively small geographical area. Now, much of my social interaction, on a daily basis, is with people on the other side of the country. If I were a teeny bit more cosmopolitan, it would include people on the other side of the globe. There is something bizarrely disincarnate about the internet. It takes flesh and blood people and turns them into pixels and information. I wonder, how will this effect our theology in the next few generations? It seems to me like it might exert a pressure in a generally idealist direction. What will it do to our whole notion of place? I tend to be sympathetic to the Eucharistic ecclesiology of Eastern thinkers like Zizioulas, but place plays an essential role in that ecclesiological scheme, with the bishop understood as the head of the Church in a given place. What does place even mean anymore for most of us? If the most important parts of our life are not lived within the limits of a physical place, does it make sense that the Church's structure should be determined by those limits? Why not have dioceses determined by affinity, as the ACNA seems to be doing for the most part? But then, does the concept of a diocese become evacuated of its real meaning? These are not, I think, merely academic questions. They seem to me to be highly relevant to a number of churches, most notably the emerging ACNA, but also the Orthodox churches in this country, as they continue their task of trying to achieve a unified Orthodox church.
All this just because I spend too flippin' much time on Facebook.
Maybe I'm crazy, I don't know, but the medium is the message and all that...

Memento Mori

2011-12-01T15:58:00.001-05:00

I am really pleased, generally speaking, that we wear white for requiems these days, what with Christ having trampled down death by death... still, I have to admit, old black requiem vestments are among the coolest looking pieces of religious garb. I just can't resist posting a link to these images of a high mass set from Daniel Mitsui's blog. The set is from Chimay, the abbey much beloved of beer drinkers everywhere (mmmm... Chimay).
As a note, Mr. Mitsui is doing a delightfully bleak series of posts (perhaps for the penitential season of Advent) on Christian art dealing with death, which I highly recommend. It appeals to my inner goth.
h/t: Eve Tushnet

The Hidden Reign of God and the Long Defeat

2011-10-31T18:02:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I posted, and I sincerely wish I had more time to post on the blog. I am afraid this semester has been a bit overwhelming, though, so I can't promise that posts will become more frequent until winter break rolls around. I do have some substantive posts in the works, which I hope to be able to work on in the next month, but we will just have to see. In the mean time, here is a sermon I preached yesterday at the church plant where I am blessed to be doing my field work. It is not my best work, stylistically speaking, but I am relatively happy with the content.
This sermon focuses on Revelation 5:1-11, and while there is a lot there, I chose to focus simply and directly on the message of the cross. It wasn't an 'evangelistic sermon,' but the more I think about preaching, and the more I try to live the Christian life, also the more convinced I become that it is vital to keep preaching the gospel to Christians. We never stop needing the word of the cross.

The book of Revelation is an amazingly popular book of the Bible. There are an amazing number of movies made based on the book of Revelation, or using images from the book of Revelation. Everybody knows that 666 is the number of the beast, or has heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, even outside the Christian church. Inside the Church, everybody has an opinion on how to interpret revelation, and the timeline for the end of the world.
There are some denominations where they spend a lot of time reading Revelation, so a lot of you are probably pretty familiar with the book if you are from one of those denominations. I, however, grew up an Anglican, and the truth is, Anglicans are kind of nervous about Revelation. We read it, but we don’t talk about it much. Which means, I can’t claim to really understand the book of Revelation. I’m even a little intimidated by it, as a preacher. It’s confusing, its filled with monsters that sound like something out of a Godzilla Movie, and it’s tempting to get bogged down in explaining what each head on each monster, or each jewel on God’s throne signifies. For example: Just who are these twenty four elders? What are the four living creatures with eyes “within and without,” and what does that even look like? Or what does any of this have to do with the Left Behind series, the Soviet Union or who ever it is we’ve decided is the Anti-Christ this week?
Now I have my own theories about the end times, and I could tell you about them, but I’m not going to do that. I think with Revelation, the best course is to begin with the big picture, with the obvious things that God is saying. So I am going to set aside all the detailed questions, and try to preach a very simple sermon on Revelation 5. So what is going on in this part of Revelation? In the first three chapters, John records a series of letters to series of letters to seven Churches, recording messages to them from the risen Christ, when he is caught up into heaven.
And it is there that he sees the vision of the Lamb who was slain. And this vision needs to be set in some context. John is called up into heaven, through an open door, and the scene that he meets in heaven is the throne of God, surrounded by all the host of heaven - most notably the twenty four elders with golden crowns, four living creatures with eyes all over, and uncountable Angels as well. There are a lot of interpretations of what these figures mean, but what I find most convincing is the view that the elders represent all the redeemed people of God, and the living creatures represent his rule over all of creation.
The image of God surrounded by these twenty four elders would have suggested the typical images of Caesar surrounded by kings, which is part of why this scene in God’s throne room is central to John’s vision. One of the overarching questions of the book of Revelation, maybe the overarching question, is who is really in charge? who reigns and is worthy of worship and honor? is it God or the forces of the world, like the dragon? The Beast? Or more concretely, Caesar and the Roman Empire?
We aren’t left in suspense. From the beginning the answer is clear: it is God who reigns, and God who rules over time and history and the whole world. It is God who sits enthroned, and who is worthy to receive honor and glory, because it is God who “Created all things and by his will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11). That’s the context we need to have before we can understand chapter 5. God reigns, and God is in control. This isn’t a statement about what will be, but a statement about how things are already. God already reigns, and already governs all things, despite all contrary evidence.
And their is abundant contrary evidence. An honest assessment of the world demands that we admit: it doesn’t look like God is in control. And St. John seems to have been completely aware of this. When we come to chapter 5, St. John sees that God, seated on his throne, is holding a scroll. The first thing we see in chapter 5 is a desperate search of the entire universe for someone who can open this scroll. When St. John realizes there is no one, no human being, animal or angel, who can open this scroll he starts to weep. Which, frankly, seems like kind of an over reaction. Why is this scroll so important?
Well,The scroll is another symbol that is disputed, but again, its basic meaning is pretty clear. Most of the book of Revelation is about what happens as each seal on the scroll is opened, and God’s rule and God’s judgments are enacted in history. What St. John, understood, somehow, was that if there was no one to open this scroll, then God doesn’t really rule in the world after all.
He talks about this search of heaven and earth in one sentence, but I think it must have taken a good deal of time; he probably doesn’t tell us what he saw, because we all know basically what there was to see. If we go looking for signs of God’s reign in the world, our search will be mostly disappointing. In this world There’s violence, wars and rumors of wars, injustice and corruption. We’ve already mentioned Caesar, who would have been an obvious enemy of God in John’s time, but there are still world leaders who have divine pretensions, who feel entitled to treat other people like they own them.
Even the natural world seems to be out of control. Think of all the people killed by disease, or those killed, randomly to all appearances, by natural disasters just this past year or so. The Tsunami in Japan, the earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand, tornadoes and devastating heat in the Midwest.
Just to make it a little worse, it’s not as if being a Christian makes life much easier. And we all know that persecution continues to be a reality for Christians around the world. All of us at Trinity go to school with a number of student from Africa, who could tell you first hand about being persecuted for their faith.
Even if we don’t experience outright persecution, we all face pressure to turn away from Christ, and we can find plenty of other things to worship. We could worship the State; we could worship America, or some ideology, or we can just worship our appetites, and most of the media attempts to get us to do. When the last election happened, there were a lot of people who seemed to be worshiping one of the candidates. Or if we’re the pious sort, we could do something really dangerous like worshipping the Church, or even the liturgy.
But speaking for myself, and maybe for others as well, what I think I struggle with more than anything, isn’t any of these things. All of them are external. What really worries me is that Even when I look at myself, it is not always clear that God is in control. Our hearts are “deceitful... and desperately sick” as Jeremiah says, and even when we desire to do good we do evil, even after we come to faith in Christ. We all have the experience that St. Paul describes when he says “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom 7:19). When St. John went searching for someone who could open the scroll, and bring God’s rule in the world, he found no one. Not even the holiest of Saints, who could do it. So, whether we look at the world outside, or at the depths of our own hearts, God does not seem to rule.
Like St. John, If we look for God’s reign, we wont find it anywhere, unless we look to the cross. We only understand God’s rule and judgment when we realize that that they are exercised in the Lamb that was slain.
When the scroll in God’s hand is opened, both divine judgement and salvation are accomplished. In all the world, there is only one person who can open the scroll and exercise that divine authority: The Lion of Judah, who has conquered, and when we actually see the Lion of Judah, he is not what we expect - not a mighty conqueror, but a lamb, and a slaughtered lamb at that.
And it is precisely because of his sacrifice, his death, that Christ Jesus, the Lamb of God is qualified to open the scroll and to rule. Echoing their hymn to God seated on the throne the elders and the living creatures praise the lamb and say “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God” (5:4).
God’s ultimate act of authority in the world isn’t a show of force, as we might expect and hope, but instead it appears as a show of weakness. Because in the Cross, God actually judges all the evil that there is in the world. The judgement is that when the one really righteous person, when God himself comes into the world, our response as human beings was to kill him. St. John in his gospel says “This is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light...” (John 3:19). God has judged all of us in the cross of Christ. He has done more than that, though. He’s taken the judgment on himself. It was Jesus who bore the brunt of our punishment and our sin. And through faith, we have been let in the secret though, and we know that the cross leads to the Resurrection. The Lamb has been slain, but he has also been raised. God has judged Jesus, but he has also vindicated him, by raising him from the dead. And if we know that we have been Judged in Jesus, we also know that we have been vindicated and forgiven in him. “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Rom 8:6).
What does this mean for God’s people in the world then? First, it means that God really is in control, despite all the evidence, because God has already overcome sin and death in the cross. God does reign in the world, but he reigns from the cross. His reign is mostly hidden because that is the nature of the cross. God’s reign isn’t by force, but but by grace.
Secondly, it means that we have victory with God in Christ, but following our Lord, our victory is generally hidden. One of my favorite authors, J. R. R. Tolkien, once said “I am a Christian... so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains... some samples or glimpses of final victory.” This isn’t pessimism, but simply recognizing that most of our experience in this life is the experience of the cross, and that doesn’t mean that we are failing or that God has abandoned us. It may mean just the opposite, that we are being given the chance to witness to God’s victory in the Cross, and that God is very near to us.
And this is true even when we look at the state of our own souls. In fact, the closer we come to Christ, the more we will become aware of how inadequate we are, how little God seems to rule in our hearts and in our lives when we examine ourselves. The most sanctified people probably think the least of themselves, but then again, they also spend the least amount of time thinking of themselves. Because God calls us to repentance, which means to turn away from ourselves, and turn our eyes towards the cross. That’s precisely what our sanctification consists of; it’s not so much a matter of trying to sin a little less each day, or of trying to make ourselves a little better, but of constant repentance, turning away from ourselves and towards Christ.
even if we practice spiritual disciplines like fasting, or rules of prayer, they aren’t useful primarily because they make us better people, but because they make us realize how much we need God. They make us look away from ourselves and towards what Christ has done on the cross, and that is how we come to love God more. We don’t love God in the abstract, by just thinking about how good he is; we love the God who sent his only Son to die for you and for me. When we believe that, when we know it with all our hearts, our lives can’t help but be transformed.
Because when we look towards Christ, we see that God truly does reign, that he truly is worthy of glory and honor and praise. And like the Elders in John’s vision, we can only fall down in worship, offering our crowns back to the one who gave them to us in the first place.
In the Name of the + Father...

Trinitarian Reflections After a Zen Encounter (Part 2).

2011-09-03T13:24:00.000-04:00

Well, here is my follow up to the post I wrote 2 months ago, entitled: "Trinitarian Reflections after a Zen Encounter (Part 1)," from about two months ago..This piece is very incomplete, and I still need to develop my thoughts on these issues more clearly, but I also thought I owed any one who is taking the time to read this blog a follow up my previous post. In the previous post, I focused on the incarnation, and discussed the sacraments, worship and the difference between the sacred and secular. The context for these discussions was a set of critical remarks I heard about Christianity, during an interfaith discussion group hosted by a Zen Temple. In this post, I try to focus more on the Trinity and outline some ways in which I think that a strongly Trinitarian spirituality can help us to approach Zen. I am not really saying much that is original here (at least I don't mean to),
In the previous post I mentioned two critiques of Christianity, and responded to the first. The second was as follows:

Christianity begins with the individual, and is primarily concerned with individual salvation. The starting point for Christians is: how can I as an individual escape the wrath to come? Asian religions generally, and Confucianism in particular, are far more oriented towards the group; family, city, nation, world, etc. The individual’s identity is derived from those around him. Christianity, therefore, is basically individualistic.

My basic response is that the Trinity, which together with the Incarnation, is one of the central mysteries of Christianity, totally excludes individualism. It may be that there are individualistic Christians, but the Christian God is not a monad. Unlike Buddhism, Christianity teaches that God is personal, but God is not a single person, because such a being is finally unthinkable. To be a person is always to be in communion with other persons.

The practical meaning of this is that "individual salvation" is something of an oxymoron. As human beings we are made in the image of the Trinity, and so we can only be saved - in fact we can only really be human - by being in communion with others and with God. To be a human being fully alive we must pour out our lives in obedience and love to God, and service to our neighbors.

Fr. Thomas Hopko expresses this remarkably well in an article commenting on the command to "Love your neighbor as yourself."

So, “love your neighbor as yourself.” However, in certain modern editions of the Bible, I have seen this translated as, “You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” But that’s not what it says. The best English translation of that passage from Leviticus is, “You shall love your neighbor as being your own self.” Your neighbor is your true self. You have no self in yourself.
An “individual” is a person who refuses to love. When a person refuses to identify in being and value with “the least,” even with “the enemy,” then the person becomes an individual, a self-enclosed being trying to have proper relationships — usually on his or her own terms. But again, we would say that the person only comes into existence by going out of oneself into communion with the other. So my task is not to decide whether or not I will be in relationship with you but to realize that I am in communion with you: my life is yours, and your life is mine. (From Living in Communion, available here. Emphasis mine)

The Christian life consists in emptying ourselves, in taking up our crosses daily and denying ourselves out of love for our neighbors. This is what we see in Christ's life, his offering up of himself to the Father, for the sake of humanity, and the foundation of the Christian life is the Trinity, in which the persons give themselves totally in love to the others. If this were not God's nature, then he would not be truly a God of love, and certainly he would not be the sort of God who went to the cross for the sake of his creatures.

What is surprising though is that this distinctly Christian understanding of reality resonates deeply with the Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata or Emptiness. There have been several excellent articles and books written on precisely this comparison. To my knowledge the best of these books is The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Dialogue with Masao Abe on God, Kenosis and Sunyata, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives.

Buddha taught that "All beings are without a self." Everything which exists is "empty" or insubstantial. Buddha's teaching was specifically directed against the Hindu teaching of his day, which said that one could eventually reach the realization that the Atman, or self, is actually identical to Brahman, the ultimate reality (i.e., God). Buddha, in contrast, denied that there is any such thing as Atman which could be identified with ultimate reality.

Instead of having some core element of their being which is their "self" all beings exist only as part of a web of relations. So I am, because I am a son, a brother, a person living in a particular place (relationship to other objects in space) and time (relation to other objects as they change). As Raimundo Panikkar explains it

[A] person is a citizen with respect to the civitas a creature with respect to the Creator, and so on, but the very character, complexion, intelligence, will, and so on - any accidents that would seem to belong to this individual as "substance" - are actually nothing but relationships distinguishing this person from other similar groupings of attributes. (The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. 136-137)

The Buddhist assertion is that there is nothing underlying these relationships, that is, there is no substance which has relationships to other substances, rather relationships constitute substances. Panikkar terms this "radical relativity." At the heart of all beings there is no stable foundation, no substance upon which accidents rest, but only Sunyata or emptiness. The Buddhist Heart Sutra succintly says "That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness form." Some interpreters take this to be a kind of Nihilism

But this is incorrect, because Sunyata does not indicate that everything is illusory or meaningless, but that all beings are interdependent, rather than self-sufficient and isolated. Further, Sunyata is not a mere nothingness or void. "In the realization of true Sunyata, form is ceaselessly emptied, turning into formless emptiness, and formless emptiness is ceaselessly emptied and forever freely taking form. This total dyamic movement of emptying, not a static state of emptiness, is the true meaning of Suyata" (Masao Abe. "Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata" in The Emptying God. 28). At least in theory, this understanding of Sunyata should not result in nihilism, but in compassion and openness to others, because part of what emptiness means is precisely self-negation for the sake of the other. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva even forgoes Nirvana for the sake of others.

Sunyata understood in this sense is not so far from the quote above from Fr. Hopko: "Your neighbor is your true self. You have no self in yourself." The true self is found only in communion, in giving our lives and ourselves for the sake of others. We are called to lay down our lives, which could certainly sound rather depressing and Nihilistic, but paradoxically Jesus says: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life" (John 12:24-25 ESV).

In other words, it is only through "emptying" ourselves that we can really come to live. Dying to ourselves, for Christians, does not entail a process of depersonalization, as in so many pagan mystical systems. Instead, by dying to ourselves, we actually become more ourselves. Christians learns this not from an experience of Sunyata, but through the Cross of Christ, and in the revelation of the Trinity.

In God, being is communion (apologies for stealing from John Zizioulas), and so our lives, too, are communion, and we only live in relation to others. Panikkar, in the work already cited, goes so far as to say "the Trinity is radical relativity par excellence" (The Silence of God. 141). Realizing of course, that Panikkar was not totally orthodox as a Christian thinker, I still think this point is rather helpful, because it shows clearly how much Christians can sympathize with the Buddhist understanding of Emptiness.

I will venture to say, therefore, that Christianity is able to embrace the insights of Buddhism on this point, because these same insights are also found in Christian tradition. I am not advocating syncretism, or coming up with some kind of Zen Christianity. Rather I am suggesting that the truths experienced by Buddhists are already present in Christian faith, that the Trinity both includes and surpasses the truth of Sunyata.
That is all I have to say for now, but I expect I will return to some of these ideas in later posts.

On the Road Again

2011-08-09T18:21:00.001-04:00

Okay, I feel this is obligatory.

Well, now that's out of the way.
In any case, it has been a little bit since I posted up a substantial post, and I think it will be a few days before I write anything really solid for the blog; still, I wanted to give my good readers an update on my present whereabouts and activities. I am done with my internship, having preached one last time at St. James Church, Las Cruces this past Sunday.
The last two or three weeks of my internship were quite intense with lots to do, and some of it still to be done. I had to write a sermon, visit a church in El Paso, and get my apartment deep cleaned before leaving. Also, I had to finish putting my various projects in order, including finishing up the Altar Guild Manual, Customary and Pastoral Care Manual for St. James (I was revising the first two, and composing the last. Next year's intern will pick up where I left off).
I am still processing all the things that happened during the internship, but it was a really great experience, and I think it is one of the best things I have done for my formation as a seminarian so far.
I made new friends, and I learned a lot just from talking to different rectors, and even a couple of bishops, including Bishop Lamb, the retired Bishop of Northern California, who was serving as interim rector of one of the parishes I visited.
I was reminded numerous times during the internship of my weakness and God's strength, and I am very grateful for that.
It has also given me a lot to think about as I process what is going on in the Episcopal Church. I don't write about that much on this blog, mainly because I think there are plenty of Blogs that deal with TEC/ACNA politics already, and do a better job than I possibly could. I am, however, painfully aware of the storms raging within the Anglican Communion right now, and all of us within TEC have to deal with the present troubles as best we can.
I will say that the Diocese of the Rio Grande is much more liberal leaning than my home diocese of Albany, although I was in an evangelical parish. I have spent my whole life in conservative dioceses, so it was eye opening to talk with more liberal leaders. Amongst other things, it convinced me that most of the "two gospels" rhetoric which comes from conservative Anglicans, and which I have even employed from time to time, is overblown.
I will probably have more to say about that at length.
For now though, I am a bit to tired to right about such deep subjects. I set out from Las Cruces yesterday, and stayed in Albuquerque for the night. Right now, I am sitting in a Starbucks in Amarillo, TX. I am probably going to stay here (in Amarillo, not Starbucks) for the night , even though I would like to get further, but I am afraid I am just so tired that pushing myself would not be a good idea. Besides, there are not a lot of big cities between here and Oklahoma City, and I am not sure how long I would have to drive before I found a good motel. Anyway - more updates to follow.
Pax Tibi

St. John Marie Vianney, pray for us

2011-08-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

Today is the feast of St. John Marie Vianney, the Cure de Ars

Quiet Adventures in a Border Town

2011-07-25T18:33:00.000-04:00

I am winding down from a very good, but very draining week. I spent said week in Columbus, NM at a ministry called Our Lady of Las Palomas (OLLP). Included is a picture of where I was staying at Compassion House, the retreat center of OLLP. Columbus is a very small village, with a population under a thousand, right on the US/Mexican border. Poncho Villa raided the village in 1916, and but as far as I can tell, things have been relatively quiet in Columbus since then. This last year a number of town officials were arrested for selling guns to various Mexican drug cartels, and most have plead guilty. Columbus is also very poor. They have no police force as of a few months ago, instead relying on the county sheriff's department for law enforcement, the public library is open three afternoons a week and paved roads are the exception. I was sent there by the priest in Demming, the nearest good sized town, to see the ministry at OLLP, which St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Demming supports, and to assess "how we can build Christian community in Columbus." I felt a bit like an ecclesiastical scout, and despite the fact that I had no idea how I was supposed to approach this assignment, I had a very rewarding experience. Let me try to explain what OLLP is, and what I was trying to accomplish there.
OLLP has this mission statement on their website:

"Our Lady of Las Palomas is a multi-faith multi-cultural community of contemplation, prayer and action committed to the life of simplicity, presence, and service in right relationship with God. We are a beyond borders interfaith community with people of the United States and Mexico participating in a cooperative community of justice and sustainability"

In fact, OLLP functions as a sort of umbrella organization which encompasses a number of ministries, mostly in Palomas, Mexico rather than in the village of Columbus. Palomas is directly across the border from Columbus, and there is a lot of traffic back and forth. I was discouraged from going across the border during my time there, and followed that advice, and so did not see the ministry there first hand. Palomas is not a safe place right now, for reasons which are obvious if you have been following the progress (or lack thereof) of the Mexican drug wars.
OLLP supports, through classes and donations, the work of The Border Cooperative/ La Cooperativa. The Cooperative works to train women, mostly in Palomas in skills like weaving and jewelry making so that they are able to start their own businesses and attain a degree of independence.
They also support the Hunger Project, a feeding ministry in Palomas.
OLLP itself was also founded to be an interfaith retreat center. I must confess I had some difficulty with this aspect of the ministry, but I am not going to go into it now.
At this point OLLP has relatively little outreach in Columbus itself, although there is sometimes a midweek service, when local Episcopal/Anglican clergy are available for it.
They are at a point of transition in their ministry, because the Rev. Deacon Kris Lethin and his wife, the Rev. Judith Lethin, the real visionaries behind the ministry, are not able to devote all their time to it right now, but divide the year between ministry here in New Mexico, and in their native Alaska.
I was asked to see what was needed in Columbus, to go around talking to people, to see what the needs are in Columbus, and come up with some ideas for how OLLP could accomplish this. I was also asked to consider whether it would be worth the time and resources to try planting
I was initially horrified by this task. First of all, I had only about four and a half days to do this, had little idea what to expect going in, and I am terrible at just starting up conversations with strangers.

What surprised me most about my time there was that I found that God really did send me the people I needed to talk to. I enjoyed the whole process of getting to know the town, and thinking of ways to build community. By the time I left I felt a real affection for the place, and wished I could spend more time there and actually put some of my ideas for building community into action. Columbus is the sort of town that is so small that everybody really does know everybody else, and you can sit at the patio of the one hotel in town and quickly get a good sense of the state of local politics.
Columbus does have spiritual needs, including getting some kind of clergy association established.
It will need to do a lot of healing, I imagine, given the recent arrest of so many officials. Among those arrested were the Chief of the now dissolved police force, and the mayor, so yes, times are tough in Columbus.
I wont go into detail just now about my thoughts on how OLLP should get involved in Columbus, because I have been asked to prepare a report for the Deanery and for the board of OLLP. I have not submitted that yet, and I don't think it would be appropriate to state all my thoughts publicly here, before sharing them with the kind people who sent me to Columbus in the first place.

What I will say is that God gave me a lot to think about in my time there. I found that I was really drawn to idea of ministering in a poor town like Columbus. In addition, I saw proof that if God puts me in a place to do ministry, he will also give me the means to accomplish that ministry. He will send me the people I need to talk to, and give me words to say. I knew this already, but it was deeply encouraging to see it in action. It was, as I said, a draining experience, because it was so new and different, but it was a real blessing to see God's faithfulness in action.

I will also add, that I think that the most effective thing that OLLP could do for Columbus is simply to be a presence there. I think that if OLLP was able to establish some sort of intentional, semi-monastic, community in Columbus, which would just be a model of prayerful, gospel centered community, it would do a great deal of good for the place. More active ministries would, of course, develop from this, but prayer and presence are the place to start.

Further Reflections after Summer Camp

2011-07-18T22:58:00.000-04:00

I got back to Las Cruces yesterday, from a long week at Camp Stoney. As I have observed before, I am not a natural summer camper. If you have ever seen the film "Adams Family Values" the camp sequence summarizes my own basic feelings about camp very well.
However, for this week, I tried to put my own grumpy, introverted prejudice against all things Summer camp aside, and judge the camp on its own merits.
Overall, I think the camp is doing a good ministry.
There were certainly things I would do differently if I were setting up the structure of the camp, but I want to share one deeply moving thing that happened at the end of camp.
We were not expecting to be able to have a final Eucharist, but a priest was able to come at the last minute. Before the Eucharist there was an Agape meal. The agape meal was simple, with the kids sitting around tables arranged in the shape of a cross, and a lot of candles scattered about.
The kids were asked to read a lot of verses about love, and one of the counselors explained the meaning of agape love.
We sang some worship songs (I am not a big fan of worship music, but these were all reverent and well known songs) and as the evening went on, it got darker, and finally the only light in the room was the candles.
It was already pretty dark when the kids were asked if they would give any testimonies they might have. It was at this point, that things became heart breaking. One of the first kids to speak up was a little boy, maybe twelve years old who talked about how he had heard God's voice holding him back during a suicide attempt. And many of the kids had similar stories. These were young kids, from difficult backgrounds, and almost all of them had gone through far more suffering in their lives than I have ever had to face. I confess, I was crying by the end of the night.
I was grieved and outraged by the pain these children were going through. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I thought of the Brother's Karamazov and Ivan's anguished discussion with Alyosha, about suffering, and with Ivan I wondered how anything could ever possibly justify or rectify the suffering that these children have in their lives.
And the only response I have is to cling to the cross and to the Eucharist, where the Lord's death is proclaimed until he comes again, where God is with us in the most small and hidden of forms.
And when it came time for the Eucharist, which was very simple, just following the so called "Rite III" in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the priest celebrating for us paused to explain that as Episcopalians we believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, feeding us. At the fraction, he pauses again to explain that the fraction signifies Christ's broken body, but also our brokenness which is made whole by Christ's. It was the best thing I think he could have said to those kids.
I had the honor of helping distribute communion, and I am deeply grateful for it.

"If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” John 6:51

Liturgy and Anglican Catholicism.

2011-07-15T00:47:00.001-04:00

I dislike the use of the terms "Catholic" and "Evangelical" to designate parties or forms of Churchmanship. To the extent that one is Christian one is both Evangelical and Catholic. However, I don't have a better set of terms so I will use the accepted terms "Catholic" and "Evangelical" to designate two of the major forms of Churchmanship within Anglicanism.
I had an enlightening conversation with a more Low Church friend recently.
We are classmates, both preparing for ordained ministry in the Anglican Communion, and both of us expect to be Church planters. My friend was asking how it could be possible to incorporate all three streams of Anglicanism (Catholic, Evangelical and Charismatic) into a Church plant - especially if such a plant was based on small groups.
Catholic worship generally requires more resources than Evangelical or Charismatic, and so, my friend reasoned, the Anglo-Catholic tradition is less feasible in a small parish or church plant. From some conversations I have had, I think a lot of people also believe that Anglo-Catholic parishes are not accessible to the poor or less educated. I think that the history of the Ritualist movement shows that this is false. After all, the SSC began in the London Docks, where Charles Lowder would preach on the streets and break up drunken brawls. It was as bad as any urban slum today. But I digress.

It dawned on me during this conversation that most Anglicans think that Anglo -Catholicism is fundamentally a matter of Liturgical preference or worship style. But Anglo - Catholicism is not fundamentally about liturgy. It is a theological position not a liturgical preference. My friend was surprised by this, and I realized that I had not articulated the point so clearly before.

A knowledge of the the Oxford Movement makes this obvious though. It is a well known fact (among those who care about such things) that E. B. Pusey celebrated the Eucharist in cassock, surplice and hood to his dying day. Pusey even distanced himself from the SSC because he was not completely sanguine about the ritualism of the Society.
Some of the theological distinctives of the catholic movement as I understand them are:

The Church is understood to have a historical continuity which is manifested visibly in the ordered life of the Church (Bishops, Priests, Deacons and Laity).
A belief in the efficacy and importance of the sacraments.
The Church is primarily a worshiping and Eucharistic community. That is, the Eucharist is the central act of worship, and from this act of worship flows the whole life of the Church. The Eucharist is "source and summit" of the Christian life, to quote Trent (something I don't usually do). This is a somewhat different emphasis from the Evangelical view, which tends to see the Church primarily as entrusted with the task of evangelism. Of course, worship and evangelism are not mutually exclusive.
The Scripture must be read in the context of the Eucharistic Community of the Church. This is another way of saying that Anglo - Catholics recognize the authority of Tradition.
Anglicanism is understood as an expression of the one Church. In other words, Anglo - Catholics do believe that we must be catholic first and Anglican second. Anglicanism is a valid expression of the catholic Church to the extent that it is possible to be faithful to the tradition of the universal Church within Anglicanism. Many of us, myself included, think that it is actually easier in some ways to be faithful to true catholic tradition within the Anglican tradition than within the Roman Church.
Anglo-Catholicism does not necessarily entail a wholesale rejection of the reformation. I for one, think Cranmer's highly Reformed homily on "lively faith" gives excellent expression to the Biblical doctrine of justification.

It is in fact possible to hold to all these distinctives while practicing any number of liturgical styles. One of the most formative times in my spiritual life was spent worshiping in a little Anglican Church with very simple low church worship, but catholic theology, which was manifested in the teaching, and various other ways.

Now I think that most Anglo-Catholics would agree that some liturgical styles give better expression to catholic theology than do others. I don't know what theology is expressed by clown Eucharists, for example, but it's certainly nothing catholic in any meaningful sense. There is a reason that ritualism grew from the Oxford Movement, but my point is simply that Anglo-Catholicism, if it is anything worth while, is more than a merely aesthetic movement. Rather, it is a theological and pastoral movement, with aesthetic and liturgical implications. I think this is important to remember, especially for those of us like myself, who have some interest in planting churches, or those who are in poorer parishes. We will necessarily have simpler liturgy, but there is no reason why our churches cannot be fully catholic in doctrine.

We have everything we need for catholic worship contained in the historic Anglican liturgies.
Significantly, one of the principles of the Oxford movement was strict loyalty to the BCP. If it comes right down to it, we don't need smells and bells to have fully catholic worship; all we need is the church gathered together in a place, faithfully maintaining apostolic teaching and fellowship, and celebrating the sacraments.

On Mary and the Church

2011-07-14T23:16:00.000-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about Mariology of late - at least since May, when I read a bit by Henri deLubac on Mary and the Church. Until fairly recently I tended to think of Marian devotion as a relatively unimportant part of the Church's life. It has always been important to my personal, private devotional life, but I thought that it really was only a private matter. I am beginning to change my mind.

Even Karl Barth observed that Mariology and Ecclesiology are directly correlated. It is part of catholic tradition to identify Mary with the Church. This is more than just a metaphor. It is true that Mary is only a member of the Church, but a member who stands for the whole in an irreducibly unique way. In some sense, every member of the Church has a unique role, but that is especially apparent in the person of Mary, because only one member is the Mother of God. When Jesus Christ took human flesh, he did not take on human flesh in general, he took flesh "of the virgin Mary his mother," a Jewish woman with a specific address somewhere in Nazareth of Galilee.

Mary's uniqueness is especially important. Marian doctrines are really doctrines about the incarnation. This is well known, and has been repeated many many times by Catholic apologists, but it bears repeating here. For example, Mary is called Mother of God, because otherwise Jesus is not God, and we are not saved.

Now granted, Mary had a unique function, but we may ask: So what? Isn't it the function, or office "Mother of God" which is really important, rather than the individual person Mary? Once Mary's gives birth to Jesus, there is really nothing more to say about her.

This, so far as I can tell, is the attitude of many who reject devotion to the Mary.
But I can think of no attitude more contrary to the meaning of the incarnation. To think that way about the economy of salvation, is to reduce persons to merely functional, interchangeable individuals of a set. Part of what the incarnation proves is that the particular and the individual matters to God. Persons are not ciphers, they cannot be reduced to their functions, and God does not deal in mere generalities -he most certainly does not save generalities - he deals with persons.

If Mary is reducible to a function, then so perhaps is her son. It is not just Jesus' function as atoning sacrifice which is important, it is his identity as the unique Son of God. Or perhaps the best way to put this is that function and person are inseparable. Jesus is an irreducibly unique person, and so is his Mother.

And the unique person Mary of Nazareth stands at the place of continuity between the old and new covenants. She is both Israel, and the Church. She is the first person to accept the coming of the Messiah, responding in faith to the word of God. There was a time when it could be said, quite literally, that Mary was the Church. Before anyone else, Mary accepted God's Word, and was saved by faith in Jesus Christ. She was the faithful remnant of Israel. She had the prophetic work of presenting the Word of God to the world, and she did it more perfectly than any prophet before her. She proclaimed God's word in the Magnificat, but she brought forth the only begotten Son who is the true Word of God.
She walked in faith beside her Son, and though she seems at time to have misunderstood him, she was among those who stayed with him to the last. She shared in his sufferings (I should note I do not mean to imply that Mary's sufferings added something to Christ's, nor do I accept the Roman Catholic doctrine that Mary is Coredemptrix. She shared her son's sufferings in the same way we all must if we also hope to share in his resurrection). In Mary's fruitful virginity we also see the greatest expression of God's work of bringing life from barrenness, a pattern seen in women like Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth, but most perfectly in Mary. Mary's life, in short, recapitulates the whole life of the Church.

This only makes sense, of course, if you have a sacramental view of reality, in which individual objects become the places where greater spiritual realities are embodied and revealed. Mary stands for the Church in a way which is more than merely metaphorical or symbolic, but which is almost sacramental.

Mary's role as Mother of God places her in a unique relation to the Body of Christ, in every sense of that term. She is the one from whom he takes his humanity - the same humanity which saves us and to which we are united by baptism and Eucharist. If the Church is truly the Body of Christ, then Mary is also mother of the Church.

Of course, in a basic and utterly central way, all Christians are equal in Christ. But the equality we have in Christ does not mean that we do not have distinct roles. I think this is clear from the metaphor of the body which St. Paul uses to such great effect, and I think it is also part of what is going on in John's gospel when Jesus gives his Mother over to the care of the beloved disciple. In the shadow of the cross, Jesus is establishing his Church, and the church takes the form of a new families. And in families, people have different roles. Mary's role is that of mother, and by virtue of our membership in the Church, Mary is our mother, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Marian devotion shapes the way we think of the Church then, because we can look to Mary to understand how the Church should look. First of course, there is Mary's title of Virgin. Mary's virginity, as I already mentioned, seems to me to be the climax of a long drawn out theme in scripture. Sarah, Rachel, Hannah and Elizabeth gave birth from barrenness - God can create life where hope seems lost. But in Mary God's power is shown even more strikingly. In the case of the other women, childbirth was unlikely, but not quite impossible, but in the case of Mary God leaves no doubt that it is his power which brings life from barrenness.

If Mary is the exemplar of the Church, then it is this sort of fruitful virginity which is to characterize the Church's life. This of course, is the same truth which is also revealed in the cross. It is God's power to bring life from death.

If we really believe that Mary has a unique role in the Church, then so do other members of the body. The Church isn't just a democratic society in which every member is identical and interchangeable functionary, it is a family in which each member is unique and irreplaceable. I think this will also incline us towards a catholic view of Church order, in which there are necessarily orders in the Church.

In addition (and I will have to see if I can find precisely where Barth said this) as Barth pointed out, where there is Marian devotion, synergism follows. Mary is the symbol, and the instance of humanity cooperating with God for salvation. Her choice of obedience undoes Eve's choice of disobedience. Meditating on Mary's life, we are likely to come to a synergistic view of salvation.

There is a great deal more to say about Mary and the Church, but I am not going to try and list all of it now. For one thing, we could go through the whole Magnificat, looking at exactly how Mary describes herself; her humility and lowliness are major themes. Also, there is what seems to be her characteristic activity of contemplation, of keeping all the things she sees in the life of her son, and pondering them in her heart. We can ask what it means for the Church to "treasure up all these things and keep them in her heart?" (Luke 2:19, paraphrased).

And of course, it is still worth asking, what form devotion to Mary should take. It is one thing to meditate on the lives of the saints, and another to invoke the saints, asking for their intercession. Perhaps we could restrict our Marian devotion to simply thinking about Mary - not actually speaking to Mary. I doubt this approach is plausible though. If we believe that Mary is our mother, then it would be a very strange family in which the children only thought fondly of their mother, but never spoke to her. This would be odd, because to know another person means more than just knowing about them; it means having a living relationship with them, communicating with them, empathizing with them, and having an interest in them precisely as another person, as a "thou" to be addressed.
If, as I have suggested in this post, it is important for the life of the Church that we be conscious of the Blessed Virgin as a person, that awareness must somehow grounded in a living relationship with her.

Summer Camp

2011-07-12T19:01:00.000-04:00

Well, this is shaping up to be a somewhat difficult week. I am at Camp Stoney, where the diocese of Rio Grande holds its summer camps. The camp is a good ministry, but I am reminded once again that I don't really do well with Summer camps. I have never enjoyed silly activities, and while I know that they shouldn't, it just makes me uncomfortable to do goofy songs with hand motions (e.g. a blessing, complete with shark fin hand motions, to the Jaws theme music).
Again, I know that everyone is doing it, and it's just for fun, but I still get embarrassed. It's an introvert thing. Camp was not designed for introverts.
Besides which my ritualist tendencies just make me cringe at worship music like "Drop Kick me Jesus." I might enjoy camping if we were doing actual wilderness activities, but that is not really how summer camp works.

One of the serious challenges is that I am not sure exactly what my position here is - I am not a counselor, but I am about the same age as the counselors and I am not clergy. I think my main job is to observe the ministry being done, and learn what I can from it. I know there will be a lot of times in ministry when I don't know exactly what is expected of me, so this too, is a learning experience.

This week they are doing "Grace Camp."
The ministry of Grace Camp is a good one, and I am glad to get to see it. The kids are almost all from difficult backgrounds, many of them with one or both parents currently incarcerated. They are good kids, and I am glad that they have a place where they can come, and just be told about how much Jesus really does love them. To my surprise, I rather like working with the kids.

I am also trying to keep up with my other work, researching Churches, writing the pastoral care manual for St. James and calling people I need to call.
This Thursday, if all goes well, I shall be meeting with the bishop. I am looking forward to getting to talk with Bishop Michael, and I think it will be a good conversation.

My reading list continues to go well and to grow. I have numerous people telling me about books I should be reading, which makes it difficult to keep up. I have finished The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse 5 and The Celebrant, a novel about the Martyrs of Memphis. The Martyrs were Anglican Nuns and priests who stayed in Memphis in the late 19th century to treat the sick and dying during one of the cities periodic yellow fever outbreaks. This last novel was particularly moving because the Sisters of St. Mary, now reside in my home diocese of Albany.
I am now reading Philip K. Dick's book Valis. PKD was a fascinating writer, but you can tell that he was beyond mere eccentricity and into insanity by the time he wrote Valis. The book is mostly auto-biographical, and what is fascinating is how self aware he seems to have been about his mental illness. He seems to have know that whatever the nature of his religious experiences (which are at the center of the novel), they were mixed with a heavy dose of mental illness, but he does not seem to have been able to sort out what was insanity and what was something more.
For those of you who don't know much about PKD, here is a link to R. Crumb's comic book bio of him. I am not a big fan of Crumb, but this is an entertaining way to get the background on PKD's stories.

I will be writing some more theologically oriented reflections, occasioned by interesting conversations I have had. But those reflections will take a bit more time to formulate, and for now, my time is limited.
Pax Tibi

Trinitarian Reflections after a Zen Encounter (Part 1).

2011-07-06T15:58:00.000-04:00

Not too far from my apartment in Las Cruces there is a small Zen temple. It is almost a store front place, but it is well arranged. The abbot is a friendly and pleasant fellow, an American who was taught by a Japanese priest. I have an ongoing interest in Zen, and Buddhism generally, so whenever I find out there is a Zen center near by I go and visit it.

This particular Zen center has a couple of weekly groups that meet for discussion, including an Inter-faith discussion group that meets on Monday nights. The abbot invited me to come to this group, and since I am thoroughly open to interfaith discussions, I accepted. This was about a week ago now. The topic for the evening was Confucianism, and I found that overall the tone of discussion was respectful, the comments intelligent and the conversation productive.

Christianity came up only in passing, but often enough that I could get a sense that everyone there had certain fixed notions about Christianity. Two ideas in particular came up repeatedly. Christianity was contrasted with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, which, it was asserted, do not divide the world into the sacred and the profane. Christianity by contrast divides the world into the sacred and profane, or secular. What is done in Church is sacred and important. God is more present to us at certain times and places, such as in Church at the Eucharist. There is sacred and secular time (for example, the daily office).

Also, Christianity begins with the individual, and is primarily concerned with individual salvation. The starting point for Christians is: how can I as an individual escape the wrath to come? Asian religions generally, and Confucianism in particular, are far more oriented towards the group; family, city, nation, world, etc. The individual’s identity is derived from those around him.

To both of these ideas I want to say, “in a way yes, and in a way no”.
In simplified form, my responses to these critiques of Christianity are as follows.
Christians cannot divide the world simply into sacred and secular. The incarnation means that God is with us, dwelling among us. God becomes present in the everyday realities of human life, in the person of Jesus Christ. This means that there is no aspect of human life so trivial that God does not care about it, and so we as Christians must seek and acknowledge God in every aspect and moment of our lives.

Secondly, Christianity is the only religion I know of in which God is a community. God is Trinity and not a monad. Part of what that means is that individualism is totally excluded. A person alone is no person; if that is true for God how much more so for his creatures.

Now, here is my answer in a more complicated, and possibly less helpful form.

I think that in orthodox Christian theology, there is a dialectal relationship between the sacred and secular, the material and spiritual, the transcendent and immanent.

John Henry Cardinal Newman said that if he had to name the central idea of Christianity, he would say it was the Incarnation, and I think he was correct. The incarnation is an inexhaustibly rich idea, with many implications. Part of what the incarnation means, is that there can be no clear dividing line between the sacred and the secular. God in his transcendence becomes present to us in our finitude. Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man, and God who dwells in light inaccessible, also dwells among us in the everyday circumstances of human existence.

The same God seated between the Cherubim, who was hidden from access in the Holy of Holies was also held, as a helpless child in the arms of his mother, grew up in a backwater of the Roman Empire, worked in the carpenter’s shop, got tired, hungry, sweaty and had to perform even the most apparently meaningless of necessary tasks like eating, drinking and relieving himself. I am not trying to be crass, but to make the point that even the unpleasant and trivial aspects of human life are sanctified by the incarnation.

If our lives are suffused with a deep awareness of the reality of the incarnation, then we cannot relegate God’s presence to particular times and places. God is present in everything and all circumstances, and we are called to "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances" (ESV 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). Our whole life must become a witness to the presence of God.

Anything less is frankly Gnostic, not Christian. In Gnosticism, there is not only a division but an opposition between the material and spiritual, the sacred and secular. The God of the Gnostics is blissfully unconcerned with the unpleasant realities of material existence. Not so the God of the Bible. I do grant that there are many Christians who are poorly catechized on these maters, and who don't really live in a way that fits the implications of the incarnation. That is a matter of insufficient instruction though, and not a matter of a basic flaw in Christian thought.

Why then do we have "sacred times" and "sacred places"? In Catholic and Orthodox tradition, certain objects (relics) are even understood to bring us closer to the presence of God or the saints. If God is everywhere present and filling all things, how can God be more present at some times and places? I don't have a complete answer, and as I recall St. Augustine addresses this question to some extent in the first book of the Confessions and more or less concludes that it is a mystery, and I doubt I can do better. Still, two thoughts do occur to me. They may be contradictory, or at least in tension. Judge for yourself.

First, designations of sacred time, like the practice of saying Morning and Evening Prayer, or keeping the Sabbath holy, are not intended to limit the presence of God to particular times and places. Quite the opposite. By setting aside certain times to focus on God, I become more aware of God the rest of the time. "Sacred time" is really a way of constantly returning and remembering God's presence. We have special times for doing that, partly as a concession to our weakness as human beings. Unless we have periodic reminders we tend to forget God's presence. So having sacred times does not mean that other times are less sacred, but rather all of time is sanctified by means of constantly returning and remembering God's presence. The same can be said of Sacred places.
Even Buddhists, Confucians and Taoists implicitly concede the need for this sort of constant return and reminder. After all, Buddhists have temples and sacred places, and devote a certain amount of time to meditation each day.

At the same time, while it may seem to contradict what I have just said, I think there is some sense in which God is truly closer to us at certain times and in certain places. For one thing, being material beings means that we live in time and in place. For material beings to be is to be in a given place and time. If God is going to communicate himself to his creation without violating its very nature (i.e. destroying it) he must do so in a particular place and time. Jesus Christ, the ultimate revelation of God, was a particular individual human being, born of a particular woman on a particular day.

Sometimes, people try to make the incarnation into merely an idea. I think Hegel started this trend. On this interpretation, the incarnation merely signifies the unity of the immanent and transcendent. It is not necessary, according to this interpretation, to believe that Jesus Christ, the particular individual, was the unique instance of this union. That, it seems to me is to miss the point. If the Transcendent is to be united to the immanent, the material and the particular, without simply absorbing the material and particular, it must be united at a particular time and place. Otherwise, we are back at Gnosticism and saying that the material does not matter.

And it seems to me that the only way to hold together the particular and the universal, the immanent and transcendent, is through a robustly sacramental theology and spirituality. In the sacraments God is revealed to us in material elements of Bread, wine, water and oil, precisely in their materiality. The bread and wine of the Eucharist are a sign, but they are not merely a sign. God is particularly present to us in these ordinary things, because God was really present in the particular man Jesus Christ, and because God wishes to be present to us as particular persons who are living in a particular place and time.

Now I don't think that means God is absent at other times, but it certainly means that somehow, mysteriously, his presence is first there in the sacraments. Jesus Christ is present everywhere, because he was first present in Nazareth of Galilee. Similarly, all times and places can become sacred, because certain times and places are sacred first. All our meals can become sacred and sacramental acts, but only because of the sacred meal of the Eucharist. Again, this means, that in some way there are truly sacred times and places, which are really more sacred than others, but it does not mean that the rest of time is somehow unimportant. Its importance is derivative and dependent, but not non-existent.

So far, as you may have noticed, my reflections have been more incarnational than the Trinitarian. That is why this post is only part one. Of course, the incarnation and Trinity are closely connected, with the Incarnation leading us into the Trinity. I will try to share some more explicitly Trinitarian reflections in part 2.

Reflections after a week (plus a sermon!)

2011-06-26T17:37:00.000-04:00

After a week in Las Cruces, I think I can say that I like it here. I am situated comfortably in an apartment just across the street from the NMSU campus, with a Starbucks on one corner and an Indian restaurant on the other - joy! I have acquired a library card and a bank account. Since books are slightly more important to me than food, I am quite happy with the library card. And the library is excellent. They have an extraordinarily good collection of videos too, which is nice. Nerd Moment: They have massive amounts of Anime! I am finally working my way through the whole Cowboy Bebop series. As convenient as Starbucks is, I prefer the cafe I am sitting in now, which is about half a mile from my apartment - it would be walking distance if it were under 100 degrees Farenheit. It is called Milagro, they roast their own beans, and the place has the perfect coffeehouse atmosphere. The barista is suitably tattooed and pierced, and I am watching a gentleman sitting out on the patio, painting in mixed media. I must also confess that I am eavesdropping on a conversation about Anarchist political theory (or lack thereof?). I plan on making this comfortable little corner of Bohemia into my second home for the duration of my stay in Las Cruces.

The internship itself is also going well. So far I enjoy working with Fr. Nick and the other staff here. I have been researching the history of the Parish and the area. A major task for me during the internship is learning to assess different parishes. This is going to be of enormous help to me in the course of my career, I am certain. I will be traveling to different parishes, as I have already mentioned, and preparing a sort of report on each. The idea is to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses are at each parish, what areas it needs to grow in, etc. This isn't the sort of thing that gets taught in Seminary, but it is important. I have known a lot of clergy, and not one is without a story of some occasion when they were simply blindsided by some unexpected conflict in a parish. Inevitably, looking back, they describe these disasters as the sort of things which could have been avoided fairly easily if they had just know what signs to look for.

I also had the chance to meet Bishop Michael Vono, the relatively new diocesan. There was a pleasant get together for the deanery clergy, and I was invited - I was also put on the spot and asked to say grace for the dinner. I am told that Bishop Vono is a moderate liberal. He had some comments about the current divisions in the Anglican world, and I found his remarks very gracious. I also found him to be very personable, and he seems to be interested in church planting. I will have the chance to talk with him at greater length later during my internship.

I also preached this morning. I always enjoy preaching, and I think it went well today, although the readings were rather difficult. I have very cranky theological objections to having more than one Eucharist a day in a parish, but two services does give the preacher the chance to improve a bit on the sermon the second time around. I got some very helpful tips from Fr. Nick afterward, and I expect that my preaching will improve greatly by the end of the Summer.

In any case, here is the sermon I preached today.
The readings were Proper 8, year A. (N. B. St. James still uses the BCP lectionary, not the RCL)
Isaiah 2: 10-17, Romans 6: 3-11, Matthew 10: 34-42 and Psalm 89: 1-4, 15-18.

The Peaceful Sword of Christ.

Last week, I had the adventure of driving across the country from New York to Las Cruces. Most of you have probably been on at least one long road trip in your life and you know that on road trips you see lot of interesting billboards. I saw billboards for the Jesse James wax museum, billboards for Churches, and at least one that just said Jesus in really big capital letters.
But the most interesting billboards I saw were in Missouri along the I-44. There must have been at least twenty billboards for the Precious Moments Chapel. You all know the precious moments figures? they’re the little figurines with the big eyes, sort of child like, designed to make you feel warm and comfortable and sentimental. There’s a whole industry around them. Figurines, greeting cards, posters, you name it. And, apparently, somewhere just east of Joplin Missouri, there’s a whole chapel with Precious Moments figurines portraying scenes from the Old and New Testament.

I found myself wondering, as I saw billboard after billboard advertising the precious moments chapel, how they would portray some of the biblical stories. Because, as I’m sure you have noticed, there are some of the stories of the Bible that are anything but cosy or comforting. For example, I doubt that any of the readings for this Sunday made it into the Precious Moments Chapel. In the Gospel reading, Jesus goes out of his way to avoid being comforting or cosy.
It is as if Jesus knew perfectly well that people were expecting him to be comforting, easy going - a cuddly messiah - and he wanted as quickly and decisively as possible to disabuse them of that notion. “Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth” he tells his disciples “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” If Jesus had a press secretary - which fortunately he didn’t - he would have pulled Jesus aside at this point and asked him “What are you thinking, Lord? you’re supposed to be the prince of peace! People want nice pastel pictures of you looking meek, and mild, and comforting, maybe holding a lamb - and definitely not holding a sword.”
Now Jesus’ disciples had every reason to expect that Jesus had come precisely to bring peace. When he was born the Angels declared peace on Earth good will towards men; The prophet Isaiah had said that Jesus would be called “Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6), and St. Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians, refers to the message of Christ as the gospel of peace. It seems like Peace, is very much something Jesus came to bring.
How can the gospel of Peace bring division that “sets a man against his father” and “a daughter against her mother”? Jesus did come to bring peace, but it was not the kind of peace that his disciples, or anyone else expected. There are at least two kinds of peace to be had. The World’s peace, and God’s peace.

The world makes us a lot of offers of peace. It offers us the false peace of not being challenged, or pushed beyond where we are comfortable. Some people wanted Jesus to bring that kind of peace - they wanted Jesus to just be just the meek and mild saviour, who didn’t really ask much of them, who made them feel warm and comfortable all the time. They wanted the peace of not being bothered. Or some people wanted a more expansive peace, a political peace. Jesus and his disciples lived under the rule of the Roman empire, and Rome prided itself keeping the peace. Rome could keep peace in its empire, but it was a peace that was always backed up by violence. Rome had the biggest military force in the world and no qualms about using it. People would behave themselves for Rome because they knew that if they got out of line Rome would destroy them.

Rome stands as a good example of this World’s kind of peace; a peace maintained by violence and by fear. Many many people in Israel wanted Jesus to bring this kind of peace. They expected the Messiah to establish Israel as the center of an earthly empire where God would reign. They imagined the same kind of peace which Rome offered, just with Israel holding all the power.
That is the kind of peace which Jesus most emphatically did not come to bring. He brought a different kind of peace from anything that the world knew or expected. Rome ruled by the sword, and Jesus said he came to bring a sword, but his sword was very different from Rome’s.

If you look on the cover of your bulletins there’s an icon (See above). I don’t know how much you may know about icons, but they usually show some event from the life of Christ or the lives of the saints. I love Icons, because they don’t just show how an event would have looked if you saw it in person; instead they use symbols to show something about what that event means. I think this Icon shows what kind of sword Jesus came to bring.

This Icon is the Resurrection. Jesus is bursting from the tomb, victorious, and powerful, and in his hand he’s holding his cross like a weapon - like a sword, in fact. Obviously, Jesus didn’t really come out of the tomb carrying his cross. The point the icon makes is that the Cross was the weapon that Christ used to overcome the world, the flesh and the devil. The cross was the sword by which Christ brought God’s peace.

This gives us a clue as to how different God’s peace is from the World’s. Rome also used the cross as a weapon to keep peace, by putting those people who disturbed the peace onto a cross. Jesus used the cross as weapon by being the crucified one. Unlike the World, Jesus doesn’t keep the peace by overpowering his opponents, but by suffering at their hands and for their sakes.
Jesus’ victory and his peace don’t come through violence - but the sword of the cross still divides people. St. Paul asks us “Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death.” And this is the most fundamental division that there can be between people. We’ve either died with Christ or we havn’t.

St. Paul continues by telling us to consider ourselves “dead to sin, but alive to God in Jesus Christ.” To be dead to sin means we aren’t defined by any of the things of the World. Not by our age, race, intelligence, wealth, family or any of things the World normally uses to say who a person is. Maybe most importantly, we are no longer defined by our sins and our failures. Those things are as meaningless to a baptized person as they are to a dead person. To live to God means that we are defined only by our relationship to the Father through Jesus Christ. In Jesus we have peace with God. And it isn’t like the World’s peace, because God’s peace is not a peace kept by force or threats of violence, but by the selfless love of Christ on the cross.

If we live our lives as if we really believed this, trying to take up our crosses daily and lead Christ like lives, we will find that we encounter conflict. Because living in light of Christ’s death and Resurrection is a threat to the World’s kind of peace. Effectively, we say that the world has no hold on us. The world will try to convince us that we are wrong, that it still has some claim on us. One tactic the world uses is to tell us there is something called an “ordinary person.”
The world tells us we are just ordinary people. The people sitting next to us in Church are just ordinary people. All of us still have to go to work, still get tired, sick and old. We aren’t special to God, and we are still just caught up in the same hectic mess of the world that we knew before we ever met Jesus. Really, the world says, nothing has changed. And this is a very convincing lie. Because we do still look like ordinary people, even to ourselves.

Even though we have new life in Christ, that life is hidden until Christ’s return when we will be changed in a way that the whole world can see. It takes faith to see as defined by our relationship to God, who we can’t see, and not by the daily pressures of the world. It takes faith to realize that in God’s eyes there is no such thing as an ordinary person. C. S. Lewis said once “the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . you have never met a mere mortal.” The only way to look at things this way is by constantly reminding ourselves of how God sees us, through prayer, worship and reading the bible.

When we look at ourselves and others in this way, with the eyes of faith, we have the real peace that Jesus came to bring. And when we look at other people in faith, trying to see them the way God does, that peace we have from God spills over into our relationships with other people - even people who look impossible to get along with by worldly standards.

This kind of peace is very different from the world’s peace. It is a peace based on love, not force; it is a peace that we can have even when the whole world is falling apart around us and is anything but peaceful, because it doesn’t come from the world. It is a peace so different from the worlds, that in the blessing at the end of our Sunday services it is called the peace that passes all understanding. The world can’t understand this kind of peace, but faith can grasp it. When those around us see a kind of peace in us that they can’t explain, it is one the most powerful witnesses we can give to the truth of the Gospel, because it shows that there is something God can give that the world can’t give or take away.

When we leave Church today, may we walk out into the world, armed with the sword of the cross, and may the peace of God become visible in all our lives as our proof that Christ has overcome the world.
Amen.

Now in New Mexico

2011-06-19T18:54:00.000-04:00

Well, I made it to New Mexico in one piece. I got to Amarillo, TX on Friday and stopped for lunch. My goal for Friday was to make it to Albuquerque, and since Amarillo was only three hours from Albuquerque, I decided to dawdle a little bit. I wandered into a store that claimed to be "Texas' Catholic Superstore!" where the proprietor evangelized me.
He also asked me if I had ever read Thomas Aquinas. I have to admit, I found this a bit funny. I was even wearing my Aquinas medal at the time. I just said yes, I have read a little Aquinas, and he is one of my favorites.
I found a number of things I wanted in the store - mostly statues and pictures, and a couple of books - but I resisted the temptation to buy anything, and pressed on to Albuquerque, where I spent the night.

I arrived in Las Cruces yesterday (I can't believe it was only yesterday!) around one in the afternoon, and I was greeted by Fr. Nick and his wife from the church. We had lunch at a Boba shop located a couple of blocks away from my new apartment, which is also next door to a Starbucks, where I am sitting right now, giving you an update.
I had time for a quick nap before I went off to the Juvenal detention facility with a team from the Church. They go once a month and just hang out with the guys in one dorm area, and spend a little time in prayer. One member of our team gave a brief talk on the presence of God in our lives, and how we can experience that presence. I was impressed, as I have been in the past when I participated in prison ministry, by the amount of faith which some of these guys have, and I am looking forward to going back.

This morning I attended both services at St. James, and met the congregation. They were all very welcoming, and I am looking forward to getting to know the parish better. In the mean time I am taking a break, and trying to catch up on email and various other tasks. Tomorrow I have the day off, so I will be taking the day to explore Las Cruces. It looks like a beautiful town, and I think I will enjoy my summer here.
Pax Tibi, Per Crucem.

On the Road.

2011-06-17T13:55:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in a Starbucks in Amarillo, TX taking advantage of their free internet and reliably tasty coffee. This is the fourth day of my long road trip to New Mexico.
It has been a long exhausting drive hopping from one westbound highway to another, staring at billboards that advertise by turns Baptist Churches, "Adult" superstores, Long defunct tourist attractions, or simply read JESUS. I wonder: how many people really respond to evangelistic billboards like that?
I also saw many, many signs for the Precious Moments Chapel, which can be found somewhere outside of Joplin, MO. According to the signs, there are many scenes from the Old and New Testaments there, enacted by the neotenic Precious Moments characters. I almost wanted to stop just to see how they would handle the story of the Levite's concubine.

I have never done a trip like this on my own before and it has been a long time since I really did anything comparable with my family. The truth is though, I enjoy driving and I enjoy watching the landscape of the country change. Somewhere in western MO was the most dramatic change - the soil abruptly changed to a reddish color, which became deeper as I went through OK. Oklahoma had the distinction of having the friendliest toll road workers I have ever run into - they were positively chatty compared with the typically depressed, dreary workers I am accustomed to meeting in such jobs. Personally, I think any job in which I was stuck in a small box where I got to inhale car fumes for eight hours a day while wearing a painfully orange vest would make me a bit cranky, so I am impressed with the Oklahomins.
The weather has been mostly good. The most distressing thing was the winds in OK, which were pretty strong, but the sky was clear with no sign of tornadoes, which was my major concern.

I did pass through Joplin Missouri though, and saw the very edge of the devastation there. I was plainly far from the worst of it, and passing by at 7o mph, but I could see the ruins of a few houses through the broken line of trees. Bits of the destroyed homes were hung in the branches of the trees that were still standing. I said a number of prayers as I drove through that area.

Now I am in Texas, as I mentioned. I lived here a number of years ago, although I was in the Dallas area. I don't think I have set foot in Texas for a good fifteen years, and it is kind of nice to see it for a bit. I did not enjoy living here as I recall, but it is not a bad state to drive in. The roads in this area are not bad, and there is not nearly as much construction as there was in some other states.

I expect to be in New Mexico this evening and at my summer apartment in Las Cruces by early afternoon tomorrow. On the road, I am listening to Eugene Peterson's book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places and enjoying it enormously (Technically, this violates my no theology rule, but I it was the only audio book I had on my iPod). Peterson is an excellent spiritual writer, and actually quite good on the Eucharist. Despite advice I have received to listen to music on long trips, rather than audio books, I find that spoken words keep me awake a little better. In the evenings, when I stop for the night, I am reading The Great Gatsby. I have never read it before, which I realize is a big gap in my claims to literacy, so I am filling it in now. I have finished the Moviegoer, by Walker Percy, as well as Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick. I found Eye in the Sky entertaining, but I was not really grabbed by it. I think it was one of Dick's earlier novels before he went completely insane, but also before he really started dealing with some of the themes of identity and perception that his books are best known for.

As sad thing happened yesterday, and I heard from my parents that they had to put one of the family cats, Boots, to sleep. He was about fourteen years old - older than my youngest sibling. He had kidney failure, and was not able to eat or even drink anymore. I was fond of him, and miss him but it was especially hard on my siblings, most of whom have never gone through having a pet die. He was really my younger sister's cat, and it was especially hard for her. It was also the first time that a family pet has needed to be put to sleep, which I know was a hard decision for the family to make; they are all in my prayers. Personally, I am a big pet person, and I hope to see them in heaven.

Well, its about time to get back on the road. Next time I post, it will probably be from Las Cruces, God willing.

Summer Plans; Reading and Other Things

2011-05-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

Academically speaking, my summer has now begun in earnest. I am back in my New York home, with no homework, and I have finished grading papers for the class I co-taught this last semester.
I am enjoying catching up with my family and being back in upstate New York.
Next month I will drive to New Mexico for an internship in the Diocese of Rio Grande, which I am very excited about. I will have the chance to hone my preaching skills and my abilities as a pastor, as well as getting to spend time in the South West, a region of the country I really love.
I would ask your prayers that I can somehow find and be able to buy a new car in the next few weeks. I have been getting by without a car of my own for some years now, and it is rather daunting to try and purchase one right now. But God has graciously provided me with two job opportunities (This internship and another job in the fall) which both require cars, so I suppose he will be gracious enough to provide me with the needed vehicle.

I have undertaken a sort of spiritual discipline this Summer.
I am a bit of a theology addict, as my friends know, and while that is good given my ambitions, I tend to read theology to the exclusion of other material. I don't actually think that a good theologian can afford to read only theology. Theology is, as St. Thomas teaches, the highest science and embraces all areas of human life, obliging a theologian to take some interest in everything - which entails thinking about things which are not overtly theological from time to time.
Judging purely by my own experience, I also think it is necessary to take a break from theological or philosophical reflection on occasion, to give the ideas that one has been absorbing time to settle, and be integrated with other ideas. These brakes are times for giving ideas a 'test drive,' seeing how well they really fit with experience. Otherwise I find I am constantly rehashing ideas and remaining unsettled.
So my spiritual discipline this summer is reading fiction. Without a good diet of fiction my imagination tends to atrophy due to lack of use, and again that is not good for a theologian. The analytical way of thinking which comes naturally to me needs the complement of more narrative and metaphorical ways of thinking.
I am permitting myself to finish one book of metaphysics that I started earlier this year, and a book of essays that I am hoping to review for the Trinity academic journal.
So far, I have finished The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, several short stories by Gene Wolf and I am a good way in to The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. I plan to read some Kerouac and Philip K. Dick later in the summer.
Science Fiction and fantasy are my favorite things to read so there will probably be more of that to follow.
I will continue to update the blog periodically with news from my internship, theological reflections, and musings on my current reading material.

May is Mary's Month.

2011-05-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

For reasons not totally clear to me, May is particularly associated with the Mother of God. To celebrate a little, here is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (one of my favorite poets), in honor of our Lady during the month of may.

18. The May Magnificat


MAY is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;	5
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?	10
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—	15
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested	20

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing	25
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind	30
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say	35
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry	40

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth	45
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Good Friday Sermon

2011-04-28T23:13:00.000-04:00

I had the privilege to preach on Good Friday at my sponsoring parish. Here it is.

I’m never really sure how to greet people on Good Friday. You can’t really wish people a happy Good Friday. I have one friend who always wishes me a gloomy Good Friday, but somehow I don’t think most people would appreciate that sentiment.
Which only goes to show what a strange day Good Friday is. A few years back I was at an Easter service, with a friend who is not a Christian, but who had decided to come to Church with me and some other friends on Easter Sunday. As we were waiting for the Service to start we were having a conversation, and she was asking a lot of questions about what exactly Christians believe about Jesus.
At some point my friend asked “so you believe that Jesus is coming back?” of course I said yes, we expect that Jesus will return. “So” she asked “Will he get it right when he comes back?” I was a little confused by this question, so I asked what she meant. And she explained, “Well, obviously he failed the first time he came. I mean, he got crucified. So when he comes back, will he do better the second time.” My friend had the most natural possible response to the events of good Friday. Good Friday looks like a failure. It looks like something we should be a little embarrassed about, not something we should celebrate. Good Friday does not look Good at all.
But I had to explain to my friend, what I am sure you all already know. The cross was not a failure or an accident. From the beginning everything was leading up to this day and this hour, to this hill of Calvary. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus foretold his death and prayed “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (John 12:27 ESV).
Jesus prays that God will glorify his name, and God does just that, but he does it in the Cross. Crucifixion was a painful and humiliating way to die; and according to the book of Deuteronomy, everyone who died hanging on a tree was cursed by God (Deut 21:23). The great irony of the gospel is that in this shameful death God’s own glory shows forth most clearly.
Jesus told his disciples “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). When we look at Jesus we see what God the Father is like. And Jesus himself was never more visible than when he was on the cross. He was literally exalted, lifted up, for the whole world to see. And what most people saw in the cross was failure. What Mary and John standing at the foot of the cross saw, and what everyone who understood saw, was justice and love.
The cross was God’s judgment on the world, and the proof of his justice. The judgment of the world is that when the world saw God in the flesh, we rejected him. Those who crucified Jesus took it on themselves to condemn the judge of the universe. In rejecting Jesus they proved that they were not of God, but of the world. Even the priests of God, who should have been ready to receive Jesus as king, turn away from him, and say “we have no king but Caesar!” They cast in their lot with the kingdom of the world, rather than the kingdom of God.
The cross is the place where God judged the world, but at one and the same time it is the place where God forgave the world. On Good Friday, God made our sin his problem. God could have judged and rejected the world, just like the world had rejected him. Instead, God endures judgment himself for our sake. Jesus does not climb down from the cross and call a legion of Angels to destroy Pilate and the high priests. He endures the judgment of the world, and the judge is judged in our place.
There is a story that I heard some years ago, that is probably made up, but which shows very well what Jesus is doing on the Cross. In the story, two boys grow up as childhood friends. As they get older, they go their separate ways. One becomes a lawyer and the other drifts off into a life of petty crime. The lawyer eventually becomes a judge, and years later he and his childhood friend are reunited, unfortunately they are reunited in court when the friend has been brought in on charges of some crime. If the judge was going to be just, he had to follow the law and fine his friend - even though his friend, who has not been a successful crook, cannot possibly afford to pay the fine.
The judge handed down the judgment. He didn’t let his friend off the hook. What he did instead, once the hearing was over, was to come to his friend and say I know you can’t pay this fine, but I will give you the money, I will take the penalty for you, so that you can go free. That’s just what Jesus does on the cross.
God’s forgiveness does not mean ignoring evil - that would be unjust - instead, it means that God recognizes the evil that has been done and judges it, but he does not leave it there. That would be how the world deals with evil. God’s way of dealing with evil is not like the world’s way though. Instead, God takes our problem and makes it his problem.
St John in one of his letters says “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us...” (1 John 3:16). When we see Jesus lifted up on the cross, we see that we have a God who loves us enough to go even to the point of going to the cross in order to save his people from sin and death. This was a shocking idea in the Ancient world, and it should be just as shocking to us. We have a God whose whole heart is love for those who rejected him.
And even though the world rejected Christ, Christ does not reject the world. Instead, in the shadow of the cross, he begins to form a new community. When he looks at his mother and at John the Beloved disciple, he says “Woman behold you son” and to John, “behold your mother.” Partly, Jesus is just being a good son, and providing for his mother. But he is doing more. He is changing the relationship between these two people, and he is forming a new community. This community is a family, the family of God, and it is the community that each of us joined when we were baptized.
If we’re God’s family, there ought to be a family resemblance between God and his children. St. John says that we know God loves us, because he laid down his life for us, and he goes on to say “And we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16). What God has done for us, we are called to do for others. We are called to follow Christ’s example of the cross, and give our lives for others. We do that, I think, not so much by literal death - although that is sometimes what God calls for - but by being people who show God’s forgivness to the world.
When we forgive, we do something which looks impossible to the world. It looks like we are ignoring evil when we forgive. But we are not ignoring evil or letting people get away with it; instead, we are dealing with evil by way of the cross. This will always involve some sacrifice on our part, just as it did on God’s part. It will mean taking up our cross, and following Jesus to Calvary, where God judged and forgave us.
This will look like foolishness when we do it, just like it looked foolish when God did it. God’s way of dealing with evil is not the world’s way of dealing with evil. But God’s way, as it turns out, is the only way that works at all; it’s the only way that can lead from death to life, and Good Friday turns out to be good after all, because it leads to Easter.
+In the name. . .

Beautiful Words from Dom Gregory Dix

2011-04-19T10:01:00.000-04:00

This is a well know passage from Dom Gregory Dix's classic, but now somewhat outdated book, The Shape of the Liturgy. It is a reflection on Christ's words, "Do this in remembrance of me."

Was ever a command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of human greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner-of-war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc — one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei — the holy common people of God.

h/t: The Anglo-Catholic

Ritualism is good for your health.

2011-03-26T13:05:00.000-04:00

Apparently recent studies have shown that Frankincense contains a chemical with a mild psychoactive effect that counteracts depression and makes you happy. I have always said we needed more incense in our church services.
Read all about it here.

The Angel of the Lord Announced Unto Mary . . .

2011-03-25T18:46:00.000-04:00

A sermon on Romans 2:25-3:18, Jeremiah 5:1-9 and John 5:30-47 March 25, 2011,
Feast of the Annunciation. Preached at the Trinity Chapel.

Today we are exactly 9 months away from Christmas. it’s the feast of the annunciation, when “the Angel announced unto Mary and she conceived by the Holy Ghost.” It seems ironic that the Angel’s announcement of the one “who will save his people from their sins” should come in the middle of Lent, and that this feast should be marked by readings that speak of God’s judgment. Especially incongruous is the reading from Romans where Paul specifically speaks of God’s judgment against Israel, the same people Jesus came to save.
This reading is a key part of Paul’s argument in Romans. In the first chapter he established that God’s wrath and judgment rest on all the gentiles. This wouldn’t have surprised any Jewish readers: Gentiles were, by definition, idolaters, outside God’s covenant and the sphere of his grace. A pious Jewish reader might have come to the end of C. 1 and been excused a sigh of relief, and a prayer of thanks for the good fortune to have been born into the covenant people.
The Apostle doesn’t let his audience enjoy that relief for long though. The Jewish people, the covenant people, also stand condemned before God. “Circumcision,” Paul says “is indeed of value if you obey the Law, but if you break the Law, your circumcision becomes uncircumscision” (ESV, 3:25). Now Paul’s claim that the Jews had failed to keep the Law must have sounded strange. Paul himself says in Philippians that he was blameless at to righteousness under the Law (Phil. 3:6). And I don’t doubt that there were many Jewish men and women who could have said the same. They had kept the Law; They had sinned, fair enough, but the Law made provision for forgiveness through sacrifice. So for what fault could God possibly condemn them?
What Paul saw when his attempt to stamp out Jesus’ followers was interrupted by conversion, was that even though he was blameless with respect to the Law, he had completely missed the point of the Law. The Law is, as Paul said, “the embodiment of knowledge and truth” (2:20), and the Truth which the Law spoke of was the Truth of Jesus Christ. Jesus himself says “if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:46 ESV).
It’s not so ironic after all that we read this on the feast of the Annunciation, because the judgment against God’s people was precisely what the Angel announced to Mary. God had come to dwell with us, to save his people from their sins - this was the truth to which the Law bore witness. The world rejected this truth. St. John says “this is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the Light” (John 3:19). It is the Gospel, as much as the Law, which judges us.
The Prophet Jeremiah searched among the wealthy and the wise, looking for a righteous man, and was disappointed. Israel had the spiritual wealth and wisdom of the Law, they were “entrusted with the oracles of God,” but they became no better than the Gentiles when they rejected the only one who perfectly embodied the Law God had given them. That’s why Paul can say that the Jews had every advantage (3:1-2), and yet were no better off for it (3:9). All of humanity, Gentile or Jew, is under God’s righteous judgment.
Now at this point I picture Paul’s hypothetical Jewish reader throwing up his hands in frustration and saying “Well what are we supposed to do then? We did all the right things! But we’re guilty anyway, judged anyway. What more can we possibly do?” But that’s exactly it: we can’t do anything!
Our whole problem is that we try so hard to do something; we want to establish our own righteousness apart from God. We’ve been doing it since the Garden of Eden, when we wanted to be like God, when we tried to deny our dependence on him. And anything we do, whether circumcision, or Baptism, or even the Holy Eucharist, just becomes a more subtle form of idolatry when we attempt to use it as a way to prove our righteousness, rather than a sign of our total dependence on God.
So again, what can we do? In Christ we have heard God’s judgment that “None is righteous.” And the only thing we can do is respond to God’s judgment with our “Amen.” We can admit that God is righteous, that we deserve the sentence of Death which was carried out on the Cross, that we’re helpless before God. This isn’t despair: it is faith and it is repentance.
It’s not despair, because we have not just been judged, we have been judged in Jesus Christ. The Cross is our judgment, and to believe that we have been judged in Christ and his cross is at the same time to believe that we have been raised with Christ. As soon as we accept that we are unjust and have been judged in Christ, we will also hear that we are justified in him.
So as we go through Lent, and we fast and pray and practice Christian disciplines, may those things not become distractions from God, but reminders of our need for God, so that when Good Friday comes we can really say Amen to the Cross and passion, and rejoice in the Glory of Easter.

National Apostasy anybody?

2011-03-05T22:41:00.000-05:00

This is not a political blog, not even an ecclesiastically political blog, but I feel like I have to post about this.
Perhaps you have all heard the recent news from the UK.
Owen and Eunice Johns, who have been foster parents for a number of years now, have been told by a judge in England that their conservative Christian views on homosexuality exclude them from being suitable foster parents, because their views might be harmful to children.
Now first, I think this is an outrageous and totalitarian decision, but what really gets me is that the judge says there is no place for Christianity in the laws of England. . .
Really? Last I checked there is still a body called the CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Maybe it is because I am an American, but I cannot grasp the sheer madness of a judge in an avowedly CHRISTIAN NATION WITH A STATE CHURCH saying that Christianity has no place in the laws of the nation. That makes some sense in an nation like the United States of America, but how can it possibly even be uttered in anything but jest in an English law court?
And if John Keble thought things were bad when the state abolished a few Irish dioceses, what would he have to say about this?

The Society of the Holy Cross

2011-03-03T20:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon six seminarians from Trinity School for Ministry, including myself, joined the Pusey Guild, which is the portion of the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) reserved for Seminarians. The SSC was founded by Charles Lowder and several other Anglo-Catholic priests to support the spiritual life of the clergy, by providing a rule life and a community to support each other in observing that rule. It is now the largest and oldest priestly society in the Anglican Communion.
We had a beautiful High Mass; Fr. Ralph Walker, SSC, Master of the Province of the Americas Celebrated, and Fr. Tom Hightower, SSC who is in charge of the Pusey Guild, preached a wonderful homily on the importance of keeping the Cross of Christ at the center of our lives as Christians and future priests, so that we can bring the good news of Jesus Christ to a disconnected and religiously indifferent culture. Fr. Walker also gave us a very moving exhortation to stay true to the vision of the Society's six founders. He pointed out that the SSC was founded by six priests, 156 years ago as of February 28, and that there are six of us who form this newest chapter of the Guild, and he called on us to follow the example of those six priests who dedicated their lives to preaching the gospel of Christ, and undertook to live truly cross shaped lives.
He also noted that the four great distinctives of the SSC are 1) its orthodox doctrine, 2) dignified and beautiful worship, 3) emphasis on pastoral care and 4) involvement in social concerns, especially ministry to the poor.
It is a great blessing to me to be part of the Pusey Guild at Trinity, and I pray that we will be a blessing to all our brothers and sisters at Trinity during our time here, and a blessing to those parishes, church plants or communities of whatever sort which will be under our care when we are ordained as presbyters in Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
+ In Hoc Signo Vinces!

Comfort for Bad Evangelists

2011-02-22T17:13:00.000-05:00

A Sermon On Ruth 1:15-22, delivered this morning, 2/22/11

And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.
So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. And when they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them. And the women said, “Is this Naomi?” She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi, when the LORD has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”
So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabite her daughter-in-law with her, who returned from the country of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest. (Ruth 1:15-22 ESV)

The book of Ruth is a story about two people with the odds completely stacked against them. In our reading for today, from the end of the first chapter of the book, Naomi does not appear as a very sympathetic figure. She is, by her own description, a bitter and hopeless person; moreover, In her own mind she was clear about who was to blame for her bitterness. The Lord has done this to her, and while she does not curse God, or even accuse God of injustice, it would be hard to say that she had any great hopes that God will come to her rescue.
On the other hand, it’s hard to blame her. In human terms her assessment of the situation was hardly inaccurate. She was an old woman, living in a patriarchal society, and all the men to whom she could have looked for help had died. She was an alien in Moab, the land of Israel’s enemies. She certainly had to return back to her own homeland, but even back in the land of Israel, she was living in the time of the Judges, and “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25 ESV). And Naomi had done nothing to deserve or cause the disasters she had endured.
In light of all this, Naomi’s advice to her two Moabite daughters in law was quite reasonable, and they would have done well to follow it. She told them to go home, and find new husbands. They could not expect any security or comfort if they went with Naomi, neither could they offer her any help. Orpah, Ruth’s sister in law, does a perfectly honest and sensible thing by going home.
But it never seems to have crossed Ruth’s mind to leave her mother in law. She was determined, despite Naomi’s repeated advice, to leave behind everything and go with her. And for Ruth, this did mean leaving behind everything: Her home land, her people, her family, and - Most importantly - her God. She tells Naomi “where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16 ESV)
Which is an extraordinary thing. Ruth was a Moabitess, as the author of the Ruth reminds us repeatedly, who grew up worshiping the God Chemosh, and what can she have known of Israel’s God besides what she heard from Naomi and Naomi’s family? And as we’ve seen, Naomi was hardly the world’s most convincing evangelist. She was angry, and bitter, and as for her family – they had all died childless in a foreign land. But Ruth abandoned Chemosh and the religion of Moab, and she decided to cast in her lot with Yaweh and his people Israel, when there was really no good reason she should have.
So what made Ruth decide that she should follow a strange God? I don’t know, but it’s fairly easy to say what didn’t make her chose Yahweh over Chemosh. It was not because she had any promise that things would go better for her in Israel, and it was not because Naomi painted an appealing picture of life as a member of God’s covenant people.
Which in a way is good. I don’t exactly want to commend Naomi’s evangelistic strategy - because she does come dangerously close to accusing God of injustice. On the other hand, Naomi is honest with Ruth. I may just be preaching to myself here, so forgive me if you don’t have this problem, but I find that when I am telling people about Jesus, I always want to tell them all the ways that their lives will become better if they have a personal relationship with Christ.
The problem with that is that, like Naomi, I am not a very convincing evangelist. Not only do I have plenty of moral failures, but my life is really not all that much happier than the lives of many unbelievers. In terms of happiness and success, my unbelieving friends would probably be better off staying in their own land of Moab, with Chemosh or some other deity of their choice.
Fortunately, Jesus did not really try to sell people on his message by promising them success or happiness. He called them to take up their crosses daily; He promised them temptation and persecutions and as all the martyrs from St. Stephen down to the martyrs of our own day could testify, he spoke truly. Jesus does not promise a happy life - but he does promise life. And it is only through faith in God’s promises that true life is to be found.
People do not really come to God because they think they will be “happier” or more prosperous, but because somehow God shows them that he is real, and he is good and he is worthy of our trust, even in the moments when it looks most foolish to trust. In the end, nothing we can say to anyone can prove that or convince them of it, unless God brings them to faith. Which is encouraging if, like Naomi, you are not a terribly good evangelist - because ultimately it does not depend on you. God is good, and he will make that known, as he did for Ruth, when she realized that against all good counsel and sense, she must abandon her people to become part of God’s people.
And her faith, as it turns out was not misplaced. God would prove to be trustworthy and not only would Ruth prosper, she would be the ancestor of David and, of course, of Jesus himself. But she did not believe because God had promised that, she simply believed and trusted God. And that, as it turns out, is one of what G. K. Chesterton would have called the paradoxes of Christianity: when we come to God hoping for any easy or a happy life, we will be disappointed. When we come to God seeking only God, leaving behind everything that would make us happy, we will be surprised to find happiness and blessings as well.
Amen.

Very sad . . .

2011-02-21T10:37:00.001-05:00

I only heard today that Dr. Robert Crouse, a great classical Anglican scholar has recently passed away.
River Thames Beach Party has a brief obituary here.

Living as Forgiven People; A Sermon

2011-02-19T15:00:00.000-05:00

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
(Luke 19:1-10 ESV)

This morning’s Gospel is a pretty familiar story. It’s a memorable one, and it was always one of my favorites as a kid in Sunday school. I think it’s so memorable, because its actually kind of funny. Honestly, the first part of it is a not very subtle short joke. Zacchaeus is too short to see over the heads of the crowd around him, so after hopping up and down hoping to see over all the tall people, he finally gets frustrated and climbs a tree, just so he can get a glimpse of Jesus.
Zacchaeus probably hoped no one would spot him. He expected Jesus would walk on past, and he would get a chance to see what was so special about this Rabbi, and then Zacchaeus would go on with his life. But when Jesus got to the tree where Zacchaeus was hiding, he looked straight up at him, and called his name. We don’t know how Jesus recognized Zacchaeus, maybe someone pointed to the tree and said, “Hey look, there’s Zacchaeus.” It must have taken Zacchaeus by surprise. And any chance of going unnoticed was completely shot. The whole crowd was staring.
But Any embarrassment that Zacchaeus felt must have disappeared pretty quickly when he realized what Jesus was saying. Jesus tells him “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”
(Luke 19:5 ESV) Zacchaeus doesn’t hesitate - in fact, he’s overjoyed that Jesus has invited himself for dinner. He climbs down as quickly as he had climbed up.
The crowd wasn’t so thrilled though. “When they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” (Luke 19:7 ESV) Zacchaeus, after all, was a tax collector, and in the first century Jewish world that meant a sinner. Tax collectors were on about the same social level as thieves and prostitutes.
There were good reasons why tax collectors were disliked. Most of the local tax collectors were Jewish, but their job was to collect the taxes levied by Rome. Effectively they were collaborators with an occupying government. And the work that tax collectors did required them to associate with Gentiles, making them ritually unclean, and unable to participate in temple worship. Devout Jews would avoid tax collectors as much as possible to avoid being “contaminated” themselves Also, one of the main ways tax collectors made their money was through extortion. They would charge more than the actual required taxes, and pocket the difference. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was rich, which means he was a successful extortionist; He was also chief tax collector, in charge of a whole gang of crooks just like him.
I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that Zacchaeus would have been viewed almost like a mob boss. He was rich a rich, successful crook, with political protection from the Roman authorities, and not the sort of man any respectable person would associate with. Certainly no Rabbi would honor a tax collector with a visit to his home.
But Jesus did.
The crowd was shocked - and we should be too. Zacchaeus was a terrible person.
And Jesus doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t even wait for Zacchaeus to repent, before treating Zacchaeus as a friend. It’s as if Jesus is letting him off the hook.
Jesus disciples must have been confused, too. They remembered that not long before Jesus had met another rich man and treated him very differently.
If you’ll put up with a slight digression, I want to look at that story, because I think it’s important for understanding what Jesus was doing when he met Zacchaeus.
If you have a Bible in your pew, take it out, and open it to Luke 18:18, the chapter right before this morning’s reading, to the story of the rich ruler. If you don’t have a Bible in front of you, that’s okay too, because we’re not going to read the whole thing, I just want to hit some highlights.
It’s no accident that this story comes right before the story of Zacchaeus. The two stories are like mirror images. In the story of the rich ruler, a rich man, probably a young one, comes to Jesus and asks him “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus is surprisingly short with him. He tells him “You know the commandments, Do not commit adultery, do not murder, etc.”
And without hesitation, the rich man tells Jesus that he’s done all these things. He is sure he is righteous; he has kept all the commandments. Jesus does not argue with him, but he tells him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me.”
The rich man becomes, as the ESV puts it, “Very Sad.” Then, Jesus tells the disciples how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. In other words, it’s impossible.
So one rich man comes to Jesus, addresses him as teacher, asks his advice, is told to sell everything, and hears that it is impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom. When Zacchaeus is just curious to see the new Rabbi in town, Jesus makes no demand on him at all - Jesus even does him the honor of staying at his house.
So what’s the difference between these two rich men? The Rich Ruler probably was a good person, and he probably did keep the commandments. But he had missed the point. He thought that there was something he could do that would be enough to let him inherit eternal life. He trusted in his own ability, and not in God. As it turned out, he did not trust God enough to let go of the safety net that was his wealth.
Zacchaeus did not have the luxury of trusting in himself. He knew he was had no hope of getting eternal life by his good deeds, because he didn’t have that many good deeds. So when God came to him in the person of Jesus, when Jesus offered him forgiveness and showed him love, he could only respond with gratitude.
And the amazing thing is that because Zacchaeus had the experience of forgiveness and of grace, he was actually able to do what the other rich man couldn’t. He says to Jesus “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” (Luke 19:8 ESV). The experience of Grace and forgiveness transforms Zacchaeus.
I think most people come to Jesus the way the rich ruler did: We come hoping Jesus will tell us something that we can do for ourselves, sure that if Jesus will just tell us the three easy steps to salvation we can do it. And so, like the rich ruler, when we discover that we can’t do it, we go away very sad.
When we come like Zacchaeus in our brokenness, knowing that we really can’t do it, we discover that Jesus is ready to forgive us anyway. Like Zacchaeus, we discover that we are able to do what seemed impossible. Zacchaeus life became a witness to God’s grace, because he became a gracious person himself.
[I think another great example of what it means to live as a forgiven person can be found in the life of Thomas Cranmer. Most of you probably know a bit about Thomas Cranmer. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the English Reformation, and he is responsible for putting together most of the Book of Common Prayer, including the service we are using today.
Cranmer was a politically powerful man, but he was also known as a very kind man. His enemies would have said he was a pushover. There was even a joke that went around that if you wanted to make Archbishop Cranmer your friend for life, just do him some injury, and he would rush to forgive you. But if you read Cranmer’s writings, his letters and journals, you’ll discover that he was not just a nice man who wasn’t particularly suited to politics.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Cranmer was a man who knew that he was one of the lost, like Zacchaeus, whom Christ “came to seek and to save.” He knew that he had been forgiven, and that if God had forgiven him he also had to forgive those around him. He hoped to show them a glimpse of God’s grace and forgiveness in the way he treated them, and to point them back to the source of that grace. That is what it means to live as forgiven person: to live in a way that displays God’s love.
So like Zacchaeus, and like Cranmer, may we remember, that we are among the lost whom Jesus Christ came to “seek and to save,” and may we be people whose lives point to the power of God to redeem. As we have received grace, let us show grace, and as we have received forgiveness, let us offer forgiveness.

A sermon on Luke 20: 27 - 40.

2011-02-18T17:56:00.000-05:00

There came to him some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, having a wife but no children, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died without children. And the second and the third took her, and likewise all seven left no children and died. Afterward the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife.”
And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.” Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For they no longer dared to ask him any question.
(Luke 20:27-40 ESV)

I am sure that the Saducees thought they were very clever when they asked Jesus their question about the resurrection. And they probably spent a long time coming up with the story in this gospel reading, which they were sure would silence all of Jesus’ talk about the resurrection. Jesus however, does not seem to have been especially impressed.
On one level the Saducees meant their question to be ridiculous. The story they tell Jesus is wildly unlikely, and even comical. For one thing, marrying this woman seems to be certain death. If this story had ever really happened, by the time the woman got to the third husband or so, someone would have gotten suspicious. . .
But the Saducees meant the story to be ridiculous.
They meant it to be ridicuolous, because they were not really asking a question, they were laying a trap. In the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the Saducees did not believe in the resurrection. They did not want to ask Jesus about the resurrection, they wanted to prove that the whole idea of resurrection is nonsense.
They wanted to make Jesus look as ridiculous as their story of these seven hapless brothers. To put this dialouge in context, Jesus has just cleansed the temple, and now he stands in the temple teaching. By cleansing the temple, he effectively declared himself the messiah, and so declared himself a higher authority than those whose business it was to look after the temple, people like the pharisees, saducees and scribes. So they wanted to discredit him. When they asked Jesus about the resurrection, they expected him to stand there blankly, exposed as a fraud in front of the whole crowd when he was unable to answer. The crowd would laugh, and Jesus would look like a fool.
But Jesus did answer, and it was the Saducees who walked away looking like fools.
Jesus answers the question in such a way that he not only refutes their argument, but gets at the very heart of their error. The real problem with the Saducees, is that they have too small a view of God. They think of God as a God who is only concerned with this life. We can see that from the question they ask. They create a scenario that is based totally on the values and necessities of the present age.
The practice of one brother marrying another’s widow to carry on the brother’s family name, was a custom that only applies in a world where death reigns and the best we can hope for is children to carry on the family name. The Saducees thought that the only immortality to be had was to be remembered by others. They only thought in human terms.
And they believed that God is only really concerned with this world, just like they were. The Saducees were so caught up in living to this world, and to other people, that they don’t see that “all live to God.”
They had a view of the world in which death was the end of everything, even of God’s care for his people. Which means that this life is all there is. If you have a bad life - or if, like the brothers in their story, you die childless - then that’s the end. There is no hope, no redemption. Maybe that’s why they were so protective of their own authority and position, and so offended when Jesus challenged it. It was all they could hope for.
They were so caught up in this way of thinking that they couldn’t see the resurrection when it was right in front of them. They couldn’t see it in the Scriptures, in God’s dialogue with Moses, which Jesus points to as evidence of God’s continued care for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even though they were long dead. And for the same reason, they could not recognize Jesus as the “resurrection and the life.” Of all people then, the Saducees were perhaps the least prepared to recognize Jesus.
In their eyes, Jesus would not have looked like a messiah, but like a failure. He was not a messiah who came offering worldly success or prosperity. He preached that the poor, the afflicted and the persecuted were blessed. Finally, like the brothers in the Sadducee’s story, he would die childless, and even abandoned by his friends. And that, the Saducees would have seen as the end of Jesus’ story.
The saducees were so fascinated by the things of this world and this age, that they could not see beyond it to the possibility of an age when the successes and failures of this world will not matter any more. Jesus’ response to their challenge exposes the worldliness at the heart of their question. We don’t know quite how they responded, except that they did not ask Jesus any more questions. Probably, they were angry, and probably most of them didn’t change their views and suddenly start believing in the resurrection.
But Jesus had given them the opportunity to do just that. By showing just how distorted their view of God and of his creation were, Jesus gave his opponents the opportunity to look at things from God’s view, and not from a human view.
It is tempting, when we read this passage, to try and use it to construct some theories about what the afterlife will look like, or about the nature of marriage, and its place in heaven. There is certainly material here for that, but I don’t think that is really why Luke recorded the story. I think he included it so that we, like the saducees, can have opportunity to consider whether our view of God is too small.
The Saducees thought that with Death, God’s concern for his people ended. We can fall into thinking that God’s care for us is limited, perhaps not by death, but by other circumstances. Especially when times are difficult, and we are in the midst of failure, we can forget even to call on God, we can think that God has forgotten or neglected us.
When you come to a point in ministry when you are not sure if you are reaching anyone at all; when your church plants are not growing, no matter how good the sermons are; when you find yourself trying to minister in a church where the leadership actually seems to be doing its best to oppose the gospel, and you feel very alone and defeated, those are the times when it is easy to forget that God still cares. Those are the times when we are tempted to fix things our own way and not wait for God.
This gospel reading is a reading for those times. Jesus is calling us to remember that God’s care is not limited to this world, and that the succeses and failures of this age are not ultimate. He is calling us to remember that we are not a children of this age, but of the resurrection. And Jesus himself, and his resurrection are our guarantee that God can overcome all things, even death.

Creation, Mystery and Intelligibility.

2011-02-02T21:38:00.000-05:00

I am deeply drawn to mystery in my own spiritual life. I have frequently become frustrated with theologians who seemed to think that they had everything figured out and fitted into a system. Aquinas has been accused of being just such a systematician, a person who always has an answer to every question asked, and who leaves no place for wonder in the world. Fortunately, Josef Pieper corrected my misunderstanding of the Angelic Doctor. While Thomas Aquinas was incredibly methodical in his thought, he did not set out to create a system of theology which would answer every question and resolve every doubt. In his marvelous little book The Silence of St. Thomas, Pieper argues that mystery properly understood is vital to Aquinas's thought.
For St. Thomas, all real beings are potentially knowable by the human mind, because they are created things. That is, all things come from the mind of God - they are knowable because they are known by God.
On the other hand, Pieper argues that it is equally true to say that “the very element which makes [things] capable of being known, must necessarily be at the same time the reason why things are unfathomable” (Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 66) There remains in all things, even the simplest, something unknown to us, which prevents us from ever claiming a totally exhaustive knowledge of the world. The cause of this is the same as the cause of the knowability of the things.
To know a thing completely requires that we know a thing in its relation to the mind of the creator, a knowledge which is inaccessible to us in this life. Because things are created they are knowable, but because they are created there is in them a depth which the human mind cannot fathom. “Because things come forth from God... they partake wholly of the nature of the Logos, that is , they are lucid and limpid to their very depths... Because of their origin in the Logos they mirror an infinite light, and therefore cannot be comprehended” (99). Even in the world to come, in the very vision of God, God will not be fully comprehended, because God is infinite, and our minds are finite. Perhaps, as Gregory of Nyssa speculated in his Life of Moses, we can progress continually to a deeper and deeper vision of God, but we can never reach a point where we exhaust what there is to be known about God.
The doctrine of creation excludes the extremes of skepticism and of a rationalism which claims to have grasped everything. St. Thomas never finished the Summa Theologiae, and this is perhaps not so surprising. “Its fragmentary character belongs to the total implication of the Summa Theologica” (92) Aquinas did not fail in never completing the Summa; the Summa could not be finished, because there will always be more to know, and Aquinas knew that.
All this amounts to saying that for Thomas Aquinas, God and creation are profoundly mysterious.
I value this sense of mystery in Aquinas; what I love most about it is that it is a mystery that is not anti - rational. For Aquinas, things are mysterious not because they are unknowable and illogical, but because there is simply more to know about things than we could ever exhaust. We could never say all there is to say about a single mote of dust because that would finally be to say everything about the creator of that dust mote. Mystery lies in the fullness of reality, not in its emptiness or incoherence. Mystery never excuses us from trying to understand the world or from understanding God - rather mystery always calls us to seek for a deeper understanding.
Mystery does not just stop us in our tracks, but it draws us on in wonder, ever further in and closer to the very mind and heart of the creator.
To him be glory, for ever and ever
Amen.

Why Thomist Children Should Watch "The Incredibles"

2011-01-12T11:05:00.000-05:00

I really enjoy cartoons, I have to admit. I even like Anime.
It doesn't matter if the animations are hand drawn or CGI, as long as they are done artfully, and with some aesthetic sense. That's why I love Pixar. I think Pixar has probably been the best thing to happen to American animation since Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse. In terms of the sheer artistry and technical skill displayed in their animations, and in terms of character development, dialogue, pacing and plot, Pixar films far excel the attempts of their less creative competitor Dreamworks.
Dreamworks, of course, was the studio that brought you the interminable Shrek series, in all its tedious, strained, pop-culture humor.
Don't get me wrong, I really liked the first Shrek. It was clever, and funny and I really appreciated the ending of the movie. Shrek 2 even had its points. If you don't find Antonio Banderas's send up of himself as Puss in Boots funny, you probably don't actually have a sense of humor, and should seek medical attention from a specialist. In any case, I will have more to say about Shrek later.

Why then, should Thomist Children watch The Incredibles in particular? Leaving aside for the moment whether there are such beings as Thomist Children, there are several reasons. First of all, this is one of the few "family" films of recent years that actually centers around the much scorned nuclear family. Seriously, so many children's films actually set out to undermine the whole notion of family and its importance. Usually, they do this with good intentions, but there is a famous road paved with such intentions.
The Incredibles, however, celebrates the family and a major theme of the film is the importance of being a responsible member of the family. Which leads to the real reason why Thomist Children should watch this movie: The Incredibles is a movie about Virtue. That may sound odd, but it's true. Here is the key scene (in my opinion):

Dash, the son of two super heroes, sums up the basic conflict of the film here: When everyone is special, no one is.
In case you don't know about the plot of The Incredibles, I will explain (spoiler alert). It's a story about the daily lives of a couple of married super -heroes, who have retired from the business of saving the world. They have not retired by choice, but because Super - Heroism has been outlawed. In the opening sequence of the movie we learn that what defeated Super - Heroes was not super villains, but bureaucrats and lawyers. Mr. Incredible made the mistake of saving a man who was trying to kill himself by jumping off a ledge. The suicidal man survives, but proceeds to bring a lawsuit against Mr. Incredible for emotional distress. His lawyer tells the assembled press, "My Client didn't ask to be saved. Mr. Incredible's actions were irresponsible."
A chain of lawsuits follows and eventually it becomes impossible for Super Heroes to operate at all.

So Mr. Incredible, with his superpowered wife, ElastiGirl, retires and gets a soul killing office Job at an insurance company. Meanwhile he and his wife have three superpowered kids, who are forbidden to use their powers, for fear that their carefully constructed cover could be blown. The family has been strained to the breaking point by their unfortunately successful attempt to remain mediocre.

Eventually, this becomes too much for Mr. Incredible, who secretly resumes super - heroics without the knowledge of his wife or family. Eventually, his dishonesty leads to disaster, and his whole family is put in danger when they are discovered by an ambitious young super - villain.

Despite the dangerous situation they are placed in by Mr. Incredible's recklessness, the family is actually saved by finally having the chance to use their powers. When they are forced to defend themselves and employ their powers, they actually become much better individuals and a stronger family.
Mr. Incredible makes a terrible mistake by lying to his family, and that is portrayed as a mistake, but he is not mistaken in trying to be, well. . . incredible.

This movie is all about using everything you have been given to be an excellent person. I have heard some people remark that this film must have been influenced by Ayn Rand, but I see more of Aristotle in it. For one thing, Ayn Rand had no time for family or children. Her stories, it's true, emphasize the goodness of personal excellence and fulfillment, but from what I can tell, she recognized no external constraints upon the individual. For example, Rourke, the hero of The Fountainhead, has no qualms about stealing his best friend's wife (Rand provides some pseudo-rational justification for this). In The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible fails to be a hero when he neglects his responsibilities to his family. He becomes a Hero at the same time he becomes a responsible husband and father. The personal fulfillment of the characters comes not as individuals, but as a family. They take responsibility for each other and help each other.

Their happiness is not a happiness of individual fulfillment at the expense of others, but a happiness which consists in self sacrifice and responsibility. In the world of The Incredibles it is precisely in the context of the family, with all of its inconveniences and irritations, that personal excellence is achieved. In Aristotle's thought, virtue is precisely human excellence of this sort. Aristotle, like most of the Greeks, would also have encouraged a little healthy competition amongst men of virtue. Virtue should be recognized and rewarded, and attempts to say "everyone is special" even when they have achieved nothing in particular, undervalue the achievements of really virtuous men and women. The virtuous are right to demand the chance to exercise their virtue, and right to demand that their virtues be recognized for what they are.

A key point in Aristotle's thought, though, which separates him from thinkers like Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Ayn Rand, is that he does not understand Human excellence to consist either in the arbitrary exercise of the will, or to be something which an individual can attain alone. Virtue is reasonable, not arbitrary, and it is social, not individual. For Aristotle, a virtuous person must also be a man who lives and interacts with other men and women in society.

And society, of course, starts with the family. Catholic Christian thought has developed this insight quite deeply, but it is present in the better part of Aristotle's thought as well (See Book 1, c. 2 of The Politics) . At his best, Aristotle acknowledges the importance of the family, against his teacher Plato, who would have given over the care of children to the state.

So in its emphasis upon virtue, I would say The Incredibles is an Aristotelian movie, and in its emphasis upon family, responsibility and self sacrifice, it is a Christian movie. Of course, the movie is not perfect, and in a certain sense it is not Christian or even religious. There is no mention of God at all. I doubt the director thought about catholic Christian understandings of the family and Aristotelian ideas of virtue at all when he made this movie. But in its basic way of seeing the world, it fits more with a Christian (specifically a Thomistic) world view than with any other view.

Now, it might rightly be asked, are children's films not trivial things, unsuitable as a topic for a blog which claims to be about Christian theology? In a way yes, and in a way no. Any given Children's movie probably is trivial, but children's movies as a whole are extremely important. Children and adults are both formed by the stories we read and watch. The stories we tell our children shape their imaginations in incredibly important ways. Stories, I am convinced, are the basic ways that we make sense of the world. They give us the unstated assumptions upon which most of our actions are based. If children are brought up watching movies where family doesn't matter, and "everyone is special" and happiness is nothing but a contented mediocrity, then they will believe these lies without even realizing what they believe. Children need stories that put them in a position to understand the truth when they actually hear it articulated.
By itself, The Incredibles is not very important, and it is not sufficient (for one thing, there is the aforementioned absence of God). But it is basically the right kind of story.

In this it is different from most of the children's movies that dominate the market; movies like Shrek and its endless sequels. The Shrek films are funny, but they are pervaded with a winking cynicism that, to me at least, seems unwholesome. They are parodies, and parodies are finally uncreative and derivative by their nature, no matter how funny they may be. They also thrive on reversals and irony. The Ogre becomes the knight, the handsome prince turns out to be the villain, and of course, the beautiful princess becomes an ugly ogress - but that's good, because physical beauty is really only superficial and deceptive.
Or take for example, Dreamworks' most recent offering Despicable Me, about a super villain with a heart of gold. Again, it is parody and reversal: the Super villain becomes the super hero.
As far as all this goes, there is nothing wrong with it. Beauty can be deceptive, the supposed good guys can turn out to be bad guys.

Every now and then, we need a good parody to remind us not to take ourselves to seriously, or to point out the hypocritical or the trite, but when parody becomes the mainstay, it is a sign of decadence. Human imaginations can't survive on irony alone. When every film stars a villain as the hero, it shows that we have lost faith in heroes. And if children constantly see heroic persons portrayed as ridiculous, and ridiculous persons portrayed as heroic, what will that do to their view of the world? Who will they want to grow up to be, the knight or the ogre?
The starting point needs to be stories where goodness and beauty are simply good and beautiful, where heroes are really heroic.
The Incredible's manages to portray genuine heroism without irony, and equally without tedious sermonizing. I wish there were more kids movies like that.

G. K. Chesterton on Thomas Aquinas.

2010-12-08T18:19:00.000-05:00

The philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.
- From Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by G. K. Chesterton.
Chesterton, as always, says it well.

A sermon on Luke 9:18-27

2010-11-30T18:16:00.000-05:00

A Sermon on Luke 9:18 ff.
Preached 14 October, 2010
Feast of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereshewsky, Bishop and missionary.

Today’s gospel reading is a climactic moment in Luke’s narrative. Within Luke, Chapter 4 verse 14 to chapter 9 verse 51 forms what might be described as one “act” of the Gospel narrative. In this act, we follow Jesus from the beginning of his public ministry in Galilee to the time when he “sets his face to go to Jerusalem.” And througout this act, the question on everyone’s mind is, who is Jesus?
From the beginning of his ministry on, someone is always asking about Jesus’ identity. In the five chapters that recount Jesus’ Galilean minisity, I count six times when people ask about Jesus “Who is this man?” By Chapter 9 even Herod has heard about Jesus, and is wondering who he is. Luke 9:9 “. . . it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead, by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the prophets of old had risen. Herod Said ‘John I beheded, but who is this about whom I hear such things?’” .
So everyone wants to know: Who is Jesus? There’s a lot of dramatic tension built up around this question, and just as the tension has become almost unbearable, Jesus himself asks the disciples “Who do the crowds say that I am?” (9:18). They give the same answers that Herod had been hearing: John the Baptist, Elijah, or a Prophet.
Then, Jesus does just what the disciples were probably hoping he would not do: he asks them “Who do you say that I am?” (9:20). It is taking a liberty with the text, but I imagine there followed an awkward silence. Jesus has asked the big question, and nobody wanted to get it wrong. It was Peter, true to character, who had the nerve to answer, and he even gets it right. Jesus is “the Christ of God.”
We don’t know exactly what Peter thought it meant for Jesus to be the Christ, but we can be sure that Peter and the other disciples were not expecting what Jesus said next. “And he strictly charged and commanded them to tell this to no one, saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (9:21-22).
They had figured out that Jesus was not just another prophet but the one who would usher in the kingdom of God (Acts 1:6). What they didn’t know yet what that the Cross was the instrument by which God would show forth his glory in the world, and establish his reign. They did not expect a Messiah who would have to be cursed, killed and and raised on the third day. Even as blunt as Jesus is here, it is clear that they do not understand quite what he means by predicting his suffering. That is probably why Jesus tells them to keep his identity secret for the time being: because they don’t really understand it yet, and neither will anyone else; The cross only makes sense in light of the resurrection, and the disciples will have to wait to see that.
Now, the Question of Jesus’ identity was not an academic matter for the disciples, because their own identity’s depended on the answer to this question. In Matthew 10:24 Jesus says that the point of being a disciple is to be like your teacher. So if anyone wants to be Jesus’ disciple, they are also going to have to suffer, and be rejected, just as Jesus did. The twelve, and anyone else who wants to follow Jesus, including those of us here today, are called to take up our cross daily.
So what does it mean to take up our cross daily? We should remember that Crucifixion was a form of punishment. Taking up our cross does not mean just suffering - pagans and atheists suffer. Suffering is just being human. To take up the cross is to accept the suffering, loss and rejection which come as a result of really living the Christian life. Our cross is the suffering that comes from being willing always to put our lives at God’s disposal, and always to speak up for the Gospel, even though that means coming into conflict with the powers of this world that still fight against God. This inevitably results in suffering, and sometimes even in more literal martyrdom.
But we are able to give our lives over to God in this way, because we know that that “Whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will save it,” Jesus is our proof of that, because we know that Son of Man not only suffered many things and was rejected and killed, but that he was raised on the third day. With St. Paul we can say “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to come” (Rom.8:18). We can die daily to the world, because we have the hope and the assurance of something better than the world can offer. By taking up our cross daily, we witness to that hope, and we witness not only to Christ’s death, but to his resurrection.
Let us pray:
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have grace to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.