Reflections after a week (plus a sermon!)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 . . .

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.

A Orthodox Quote on Chrisitan Mysticism from a Heterodox Source

"In Giving us his love, God has given us his Holy Ghost so that we can love him with tthe love wherewith he loves himself. We love God with his own love . . ." Meister Eckhart, quoted by Thomas Merton in Zen and the Birds of Appetite.