The Canon Rector’s Retirement

For all those who have followed this space, much has taken place in my life since my last post. As of January 1, 2019, I have retired. The last parish I served was Saint Paul’s, Wellsboro, PA, where I had served as the Rector for nearly the last 25 years. I am no longer the Rector of that parish, and contrary to what it says on the banner of this page, my articles no longer appear in their parish newsletter.

As the dust settles and as I adjust to being a retired person after a long and fruitful active parochial ministry that has spanned 39 years, I undoubtedly will continue to blog, because before I was a priest, I was a writer. But for now, I am on a bit of a sabbatical.

On a personal note, thank you to those who have been faithful readers and followers of this column. I hope it has been a source of information and encouragement over these years.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

To Make America Great

Remember back in grade school on that day that you did not do your homework? When asked for it, you knew you quickly had to come up with a creative excuse. So you blurted out the most credible excuse you could imagine at the moment. “I did it, but the dog ate my homework.”

Now if you were the teacher’s pet, a sycophant, you might have been believed just once. But unless it was the teacher’s first year, most of us would have been caught in the obvious lie. For, were the truth told, we didn’t do the homework, we were busy playing sand lot baseball with the neighborhood crew instead. The teacher might have pointed out that whatever happened to the homework was of no consequence. Whether the dishwasher, your kid sister, or the dog ate it was of no consequence. What mattered was the objective reality that the homework was due and you did not have it. On that day we might have learned that excuses, no matter how carefully crafted, really don’t let us off the hook for what we have done, or for what we have left undone.

Some years later, I had the occasion of visiting a mental health facility. Prominently placed over the reception/intake desk was a sign: blaming behavior is not an indicator of good mental health.

As we approach this 4^th of July celebration, I am suddenly aware of how much blaming behavior there is in our contemporary culture. Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans. The President blames Congress. Congress blames the President. Everybody blames somebody else and uses those poor choices of others as an excuse for the poor choices of their own. More than disgusting, it is morally outrageous.

For years our country has demonstrated the record of taking the moral high-ground as an aspect of our leadership in the world. The Revolutionary War was about the inalienable right of the freedom of humans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Civil War claimed the moral high ground to end slavery. WWI was supposed to be the war to end all wars; and WWII was as response of humanity to genocide and totalitarianism. In all these instances, the United States exercised leadership as a champion of high ideals and high moral values. In the wake of the recent news, day by day it is becoming more difficult for us to claim that high ground.

I am sure that we would all like to make America great. I guess the question is what is your definition of greatness? My definition of greatness includes not wasting time on blaming behavior. Mine includes stepping up to the plate to deal with issues pro-actively and cooperatively. Mine includes striving for workable compromise rather than polarization.  Mine includes asking what is the right thing and doing the right thing. Mine includes morality.

Pray for our country.

Faithfully,

 

Canon Greg+

Moral Courage in Acts

Wait! Stop! Hold the presses!

That first reading for Sunday (Acts 10: 44f.) from the Acts of the Apostles was a groundbreaking moment in God’s plan of salvation in the world. It was a pivotal moment in the early Church and it is a pivotal moment in the Bible. It was not so simple and so innocuous that the Holy Spirit fell on some people while Peter was speaking. Something far more dynamic was taking place. Something that had big implications for the future of the Church and your place in it.

Humans are discerning beings. And one of the things that they discern the most are the things that separate one from another. If you were to read the Bible from a certain point of view, it is the history of racism. That racism that plagues our modern-day history, plagued them back then also. Biblically, racism is a problem much larger than the racism of African American and Caucasian relationships that are the bane of our cities. It was expected that Samaritans and Jews had ample cause to hate one another; Joshua is given a mandate to destroy the Hittites, Amalekites, the Perizzites; the establishment of the Davidic line features ongoing warfare with the Philistines. Jews and Gentiles did not get along, especially when it was that the Gentiles were of the sort that were the conquerors.

At prayer one day, Peter was inspired to be obedient to the request of the people who were knocking at the door. Those people were representatives of a fellow named Cornelius. Cornelius was a Roman Centurion. While it was true that he was in the category of “God fearer” which was a name given to one who respected the God of the Jews and practiced their religion insofar as he was able, he was a Gentile, nonetheless. He was a person of authority. It would have been intimidating for Peter to answer the door and to find Roman soldiers knocking and insisting that he come with them. And come with them voluntarily. It is roughly analogous to the State Troopers knocking at your door and asking you to come along for a conversation. Except, of course, as a citizen of this Commonwealth and of these United States, you have far more rights and privileges than Peter did. Since Peter had been already arrested several times for proclaiming the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, it would have taken a great deal of courage for him to go along with the soldiers at his door.

It would also have taken a great deal of moral courage for Cornelius to send for Peter. Not the kind of courage that it takes on the battlefield, but the kind of courage that opens one up to ridicule among one’s peers. The snickering and the back-biting and the gossip and mudslinging in which humans are so skilled. And no matter how grace-filled the moment when the Holy Spirit fell upon these Gentiles, the grace of God apparently created problems. How would the Gentiles be received into this new Church? How would Peter be able to justify his actions?

No, this reading that seems so wonderfully bucolic is hugely dynamic. And as it held implications and consequences for the early Church, it does so for us. How willing are we to step out of our comfort zone for the sake of the kingdom of God? How willing are we to risk actions that will break down the barriers that divide and separate us? How willing are we, in the face of the rise in modern day racism, to stand up for what is right and what is moral? How willing are we in this era when lies and half truths abound, to have the moral courage to stand up for the Truth?

These are all questions for which there are no easy answers. And, I guess, like for Peter and for Cornelius, the question is, how obedient are we to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit within us.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

Connect the Dots: Palm Sunday and Easter

Strange though it may be, this message spans both Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. The one is a solemn recollection of our Lord’s betrayal, crucifixion and ignominious death. The other is a solemn celebration of the ultimate victory of God over death and the power of God shown forth in the face of the hostility of the world.

Can we connect the dots? Like the back of placemats found at some of our fine area restaurants, can we draw a line between point A and point B? Indeed we can.  In this instance, Holy Week is the linkage that connects the dots. Holy Week is the passage by which we are brought from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to Easter.  Holy Week is our invitation to walk with our Savior through the way of the Cross. We walk in the way of the Cross, so that we might be strengthened to bear our Crosses. By walking in the way of the Cross with Jesus, we are taught how to bear our crosses that we may find them, to borrow a phrase from the collect, “none other than the way of life and peace.”

I have great sorrow in my heart when I encounter those brave souls who occasionally admit, “I didn’t get much out of Easter this year.” I have great sorrow because they have missed a tremendous opportunity. What you are likely to get out of Easter is in direct proportion to the way in which you have prayed your way through Holy Week. Please note the Holy Week Schedule that’s featured in this newsletter.

Evidence of humans bearing crosses is abundant. If you doubt it, all you have to do is turn on the news any time of the day for about ten minutes. The reality of the Cross becomes abundantly clear. What Jesus shows us and gives us is hope. Because He bore His Cross, I dare to hope. Because the way of the Cross leads to the Resurrection, I dare to hope. and daring to hope, I am delivered from the chains of cynicism and despair.

Blessed Holy Week, Blessed Easter.

Fr. G+

Of Ashes and Parkland

Earlier this past week, I suppose– like most of you– I was fixated on pancakes and Ash Wednesday. I found it jarring and distressing to come home Wednesday evening to learn that there had been another school shooting. This time Parkland Florida.

One reaction was, “Thank God it wasn’t here.” But then again, it very nearly happened here a few years ago, and it is only a matter of time before it happens again. Why should we be different than anywhere else? After all, Wellsboro has troubled youth just the same as anywhere else.

But the other reaction I had was even more troubling. It is another school shooting. They say Parkland, Florida was the 18^th thus far this year in a year that is some 45 or 50 days old. It’s just another one. That disturbed me even more.

How long before we become entirely desensitized to such events? “It didn’t affect me.” Been there, seen it, done it. Heard it already. How long before we as a culture become totally indifferent to it?

I know that there are no simple answers, and that people seemingly have a great deal of difficulty listening to long-winded, complicated explanations for which we have no patience. And so we line up on sides of the issue: those for Second Amendment rights, and those who opine that those Second Amendment rights need to be curtailed. There are those who suggest that there be more stringent background checks.

But as they say in the investment business, “past performance is not an indicator of future performance.” The complicated answer would have to include our culture’s endemic fascination with violence, and it would also have to include indices of good mental health. Because individuals and societies who solve their problems (and persist in solving their problems) with violence or with drugs are not exhibiting indices of good mental health.

A component of good mental health is spiritual health. Here again we have a Gospel that seems familiar. We’ve heard about the Baptism of our Lord in Advent, and in Epiphany, and again this week for the 1^st Sunday of Lent. It is a lesson that we’ve heard, except that this week we’ve the added detail that as a consequence of his baptism, Jesus was driven into the wilderness to wrestle with demons.

Does that resonate? For our very culture is in the wilderness, and wrestles with demons at this present hour.

Jesus overcame temptation by confronting the devil. Will we be able to do the same? Will we find the grace of God in the midst of all the brokenness that surrounds us on every side?

In the last analysis, Ash Wednesday is not about the personal dynamic of sin. We, of course, have made it very self-centered as though it is strictly about us and how we fall short as individuals. But there is a corporate dimension to Ash Wednesday and to the general confession of sin. There is a corporate dimension to the penitence of Lent. When you and I enter into it, we shed tears for the whole human condition. We shed tears that ours is a culture in which today there is a youth in our community who will try to find happiness by sticking a needle in his arm, her arm. We shed tears that there a youth out there somewhere whose mental estate is such that he takes a gun in his hand and dreams of settling a score. We shed streams of tears that as a culture we have not done well modeling the good, and showing the compelling nature of grace.

Benjamin Bedomme was a well-known minister of the Gospel who lived in the 1700’s. He was renowned for his preaching and for his hymn-writing. One of his hymns was popularized by the late folk-singer, Doc Watson. We sometimes sing that hymn on Saturday nights.

“Did Christ o’er sinners weep?
And shall our cheeks be dry?
Let floods of penitential grief
Burst forth from every eye.”

Weep therefore with Christ; are there not plentiful reasons that we should raise a flood of tears with Him in divine sorrow?

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

The Joy of Lent

If you have a living, dynamic relationship with the Lord Jesus, then Lent is an exciting time. What’s exciting is that it is the yearly invitation to focus on ways in which you can grow closer to Jesus through the practice of intentional, Christian discipline. Now, I am not writing about hair shirts, or flagellii, (whips and scourges), but I am writing about the intentioned practice of prayer, the use of time, and self-control.

The style of life for most of humans demonstrates about as much intentionality as a catfish rising to the dough bait on an August afternoon. We see something we want, and we go for it.

Lent offers a great gift. That gift is to slow down, to be intentional with the time we spend with the Lord Jesus, and to be intentional with the time that we spend with one another.

I have noticed that there tends to be a consistency to how a person treats others, that is reflected in how a person treats and interacts with the Lord Jesus. Learning to spend time with the Lord also teaches us how to spend time with others. Learning to listen to God teaches how to listen to others.

Ironically, if you want to become a better person, one way to do that is to pray more, not less. If you cannot find time for God, it is dubious that you can really find time for another person. The practice of prayer, a practice that seems so unnecessary to some, doesn’t make us only more “otherworldly,” it makes us more fully human.

All this is the invitation of Lent. It is also the gift that Lent gives us. I hope yours is a glorious one. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, which is February 14–generally known as Valentine’s Day.

In addition to our regular services, there also is the opportunity for meditation on Sundays around 9 AM in the Chapel, and the Stations of the Cross will be offered on Tuesdays at Noon.

Faithfully,

Fr. Greg+

Christmas Joy is Hope

We come again to the most wonderful season of Christmas. W e may celebrate the day with many cherished, familial customs and traditions. For some our celebration may be with  family and friends. For others it might be or alone, or with the memories of loved ones we remember. However we celebrate, by far the greater celebration is the gift, the coming of infant Jesus into the world. He, a king, for our sakes came into this world as a pauper. He through whom all things were created, came as a baby. He who is all powerful came as the one who is vulnerable to all things human. He who came as the expression of God’s love came into an environment which is largely indifferent, if not outright hostile to the mystery of His holy birth. He came as a human, υποτάσσω, which is the Greek word meaning subject, as in under the rules, limits and conditions of humanity. As we say in a familiar Eucharistic prayer: He lived and died as one of us.

But something there is that does not love grace and love in this world. The people in the inn were indifferent to the grace of God just a few yards beyond the back door. Herod wasn’t indifferent. He was outright hostile. And in this year, 2017, some two thousand years after Jesus’ birth, he still persists in coming into a world that is indifferent, if not outright hostile still. Yet, deny it though we might, people still need the Lord. We still need grace. Compassion, forgiveness and charity are lost commodities in our time and place. If we look at the crèche and see the love of God, then we most also an indictment of our ignorance and indifference to the greatest treasure of all time.

May it be that your hearts are curiously moved during this holy season. May that love of God still touch your hearts and souls and be that lever that pries away the sin of indifference.

Blessed Christmas to one and all!

 

Fr. G+

A new look at John the Baptist

The humility of John the Baptist is striking. In an era when most are compelled to blow their own horns and where self-aggrandizement is the order of the day, John’s response might be a paradigm to us all. “Who are you?” ask the priests and Levites. It is a question about authority. “Who do you think you are? How dare you behave in this manner? Who gave you the authority to proclaim a message of repentance? Are you a prophet? Are you Elijah? Elijah was expected to return before the end of the age based on the prophecy of Malachi in Malachi 4.5-6, where it is written, ‘I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.’”

Those are the last words of the Old Testament. Those priests and Levites want to know by what right, by what commission, by what authority, is it that John does what he does. “Who are you? Give us an answer.”

And John’s answer is not very satisfactory to them. “I am not a prophet. I am not the Messiah. I am not Elijah. I am just one single, solitary voice crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. To get ready for His coming. To make his ways straight. I am here to get you ready to receive the one who will baptize you, not with mere water, but with Holy Spirit.”

We, of course, have been baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. While most of us are not holy rollers, wave our hands in the air and speak in tongues sorts of people, being infused with the Holy Spirit compels us to a certain world view:

For starters that includes:

The ability to rejoice always. We may not always be in circumstances that are happy circumstances. We may not always be able to be filled with cheer. Yet, as we know that we are in the fullness of God in Jesus Christ, we are in on a secret—that’s how the sufferings of the present time are not worthy of comparison to the glory that shall be revealed. The grounding of our rejoicing is that God has a plan for us and that God will carry us through all things, even when we do not see how it shall be possible for us.

Secondly, we are called to live a life of prayer. Living a life of prayer includes regular worship on the Lord’s Day, but it transcends filling a Sunday obligation. If you have a relationship with a significant other, but you only see them once a week, that relationship is not going to flourish. Chances are that relationship would deteriorate from your lack of attention. If your life is truly hidden with Christ in God, then you will find yourself resorting to pray frequently, such that it would be essentially praying with out ceasing.

Thirdly, in a life that is filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit eventually we learn not to quench the spirit. Have you ever the experience someone coming into a group with such negativity that they manage to poison any positivity that might have been?

If the spirit of the Lord is truly upon us, we will be preoccupied with building community and building relationships. We will focus on those things that unite, not divide us. We will come to recognize that we all bear a responsibility to encourage and to lift up not only ourselves but the culture in which we live. Because that’s what it is to be transformative in the name of our Lord Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

 

 

Render unto Caesar . . .

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are God’s.” Most of us have little trouble rendering onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Every year, quite a while before the deadline of April 15, we sit down and struggle with form 1040. In my instance, it usually winds up being a packet about 3 inches thick. Through the variety of computations and attached schedules we generally come to an understanding of exactly how many dollars and cents we need, under penalty of law, to render unto Caesar. Whether we feel cheerful or resentful doesn’t matter. We still need to send it. Some of us have been rendered enough and might be getting a refund; others of us are invited to send along a check to complete our being rendered. In some happier instances we look forward to a refund. That means of course that we’ve overpaid during the course of the year.

 When it comes to the matter of stewardship, it’s all different. There is no schedule 1040. There is no one demanding particularly that we give. There’s no schedule to be filed to tell us how we are to give, or under what circumstances we give. It’s a matter between what’s in our heart and what we know is right in proportion to what we know about our relationship with God. Far from being a compulsory burden, stewardship is supposed to be an occasion of joy. It is not an act based on compulsion, but an act that is based upon our loving response to the tender mercies which we have encountered from Almighty God.  The heart of stewardship stems from an awareness of the blessings that we have received during the year and during years past throughout our lifetimes.

 The very heart of stewardship rests on the notion that we are aware that we have received blessings from Almighty God, and that we are thankful and filled with gratitude for the blessings which we have received. We are asked to count our blessings and to approach the altar with hearts that are filled with thankfulness.

 Now, being human, it is our tendency often to base our system response of stewardship on what we see as the needs of the church. We all know costs go up in terms of price. Most of us know that from running our homes each year.  We also know how things go up in the life of our parish. Utilities, insurances of various sorts, Cost of living, (2% this year) necessary but routine repairs. We all know none of it goes down. We know that if our stewardship is strictly parish-needs based that for Saint Paul’s to

But ultimately the grounding of stewardship rests on the ways that we are aware that we have been and how we are blessed. That’s the thing that our theme for the year is supposed to remind us. It is not me and it is not you that have gotten for ourselves all that we have and all that we enjoy. Rather it is that all that we are and all that we have comes from God. The real challenge of those words of Deuteronomy “Be careful lest you may say to yourself, “my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember to give your thank offering to the Lord your God.” The real challenge is don’t forget to be thankful, don’t forget to be grateful. Remember to show your gratitude to the Lord your God and offer your gift with thanksgiving.  

Faithfully,

Fr. Greg+

 

“The Thing I do, I hate. . .”

Here’s a meditation on Romans 7:15-25

Before we decide that St. Paul has gone around the bend, before we analyze him from the view of modern psychiatry, before we dismiss that second reading from the Epistle to the Romans as the ravings of one gone mad, perhaps we might pause for a moment of gratitude. We might be thankful for his candor and self-disclosure. We might rejoice for his fundamental honesty. Because what we could learn from the 2^nd reading this morning is that life in the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit entails hard work. It is an invitation to a life of self-discovery in the light of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. To embark on the life is essentially to engage in journey, no; more than a journey, an adventure of growth in the life of the spirit.

Of course, God loves us just the way we are. But that’s not to say that he has the expectation that we will engage in the that journey towards the fullness of life in the Holy Spirit. And eventually, in that life of the spirit, if we are faithful to the promptings and the calling of the grace of God, we will come to a realization. And that realization is twofold.

-One, that you are being called to become something other than what you are today, because God is not finished with you yet.

-And Two, that as we become more attuned to life in the power of the Holy Spirit, that there is a gulf fixed between where we are and the high ideal that we are called to in the completeness of life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

That’s because it is, as we all know, impossible for us as human beings to live fully and completely every minute in the life of the Spirit. Even if we were to live in a place where the distractions were minimized, it would be impossible for us to with that much energy and intentionality. Eventually we come to the recognition that there is a distance from the high ideal to which we are called and the reality of where we are in human terms. Curiously, the more aware we become of the potential which is ours in the of life in the spirit, the more we are also aware of just how short we fall from the ideal. While we might delight in the law of God, like Paul, the more we are aware of what life might be like in the Holy Spirit, the more aware we become of how our mortal nature weighs us down.

Sometimes it is alleged of Christians that we seem to be people who are preoccupied with sin. In some popular perceptions, Christians are characterized as the sort of people who are no fun to be around, who can’t lighten up and enjoy life, who have an overwhelming sense of rigidity in making sure that they don’t transgress the commandments. I would tell you with tears in my eyes that I have known well-meaning people who present Christianity in this fashion. But that is not the essence of Christianity. Christians are called to be preoccupied, not with sin but with life in the grace and the power of the Holy Spirit. We would be doing a greater service to the mission of the Church if we could figure a way to articulate this better and more accurately.

Canon Greg+

 

 

 

 

Ascension–why’s it important?

Most of us can relate to many of the aspects of our Lord’s life. For example, most of us can relate to the idea that it’s good news that someone has conceived and is about to bring a child into the world. So we can find a way of understanding the doctrine of the incarnation. Many of us, if we do not have the experience ourselves, have known people that have had the joy in bringing a child home from the hospital. So we can relate to what a tremendous joy birth is. We don’t really have a hard time conceptualizing or struggling with the meaning of Christmas and the touching story of the birth of Jesus.  While I’m reasonably sure that none of us have had the direct experience of resurrection, I’m quite sure that all of us here have had the experience of laying a person to rest. Someone whom we have loved and cared for. Someone for whom our heart aches as we come to that moment “where even at the grave we make our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” So in a real way we can relate to the disciples and Mary Magdalene and the others. We can imagine the tremendous joy that they must’ve experienced when they encountered the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

But things are different with the Ascension. That’s an experience with which throws most of us. It is hard for us to relate to it.

For starters, no one I have ever met ever had any direct experience of anybody else’s Ascension.   We have never had the experience of someone that we know and love being suddenly picked up and drawn up into heaven and disappearing before our very eyes. Oh, we can understand the likes of Ralph Kramden making a fist and hollering “to  the moon to the moon, Alice, to the moon. But Ascension? That’s something entirely different. If we were to experience something like that, I’m sure that our reaction would not have been so different from the early disciples. “Men of Galilee why stand you gazing up into heaven?”  Why indeed? Wouldn’t we all?  For most of us  the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ stands fairly abstract and obtuse, something inaccessible and incomprehensible.

Well, we can reflect theologically the Ascension, and in so doing, we could make the statement that the Ascension of our Lord is important because it reminds us that Jesus is not only an itinerant preacher from Galilee but he is also the cosmic Lord and King of all creation. We can reflect, as Saint John did, that there is a certain necessity of the Ascension because our Lord goes to prepare a place for us in his permanent heavenly kingdom. We might notice, as did Saint John that there is a necessity to the Ascension:  he goes that we might be filled with power from on high. The Ascension is a precursor signaling that the Messianic era is over as we look forward to something new which is the era of the Holy Spirit  shared upon all humankind.  We celebrate that in the feast of Pentecost,  next Sunday. The fulfillment of the promise of the prophet Joel, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

But the second thing about the Ascension is that it is a marvelous moment in which the followers of Jesus are reminded that they are commissioned to go forth into the world to preach, to proclaim the gospel to all nations, and bring all peoples into the fold. In the words of the Great Commission we are sent to baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The angelic beings chastise those men of Galilee for standing around too long saying goodbye. “You have work to do. Get on with it.  Get out into the world and start proclaiming the love of Jesus and quit standing around staring up into the sky.”

Graduations are popular at this time of year. So I suppose we could think of this disciple graduation day. Usually the other name for graduation is commencement. It’s not the end of the journey but it’s the new beginning. So Ascension Day is tremendously about this living into the vocation of proclamation. Proclamation is a thing that we are all called to do. To proclaim Christ by word and example to seek and to serve him in others. Unfortunately, it’s a whole lot more comfortable for all of us as it was for Peter, Andrew, James, and John, and the rest to stand in to gaze. Far more comfortable to stand and gaze than to go out into the world and to represent the love of God in Jesus Christ. Yet the mission of the church is the proclamation and representation of Jesus in the community in which we live. Yours is fundamentally the same as the apostolic commission and so is mine.

Last thing that comes to my mind with the assumption of our Lord Jesus Christ is this: it’s a very touching moment and it’s a hard moment because most of us find it incredibly difficult to say goodbye. In representations of art often times the disciples are shown reaching up in the air as if to grasp the feet of Jesus to hold him back stay with us stay with us a little longer. Reassuring as our Lord’s last words to his disciples may be about how he’s going to be present with them always, that does not soften the blow as they reach up while he ascends. Yet ascend he must so that they must be filled finally and wonderfully and completely in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

How to be human

Moral Theologians instruct us that there are three main virtues, known as theological virtues. They are Faith, Hope and Caritas. Caritas is one of those specialized Latin words. Sometimes it is translated as Love; at other times Charity. In English, of course, there is a vast difference between Love and Charity, though presumably any act of Charity springs from an intrinsic attitude of love which finds its expression towards meeting the need of an individual or group.

In 1 Corinthians 13, Saint Paul articulates that the greatest of these virtues is love, and that is doubtlessly inspired by the words of Saint John’s Gospel such as we have heard this morning. But we might notice just how inter related these are.   Faith, in the way in which Saint Paul expresses it, is not a dogmatic system of belief—as we sometimes refer to the Christian Faith—as an expression of systematic theology. No, in Saint Paul, it is different. Faith is a thing that springs from our response to the love of God which we have encountered in Jesus Christ. As a virtue, Faith entails the development of a dynamic relationship of trust towards God. It also entails a dynamic relationship of trust towards other people in our lives. So we place our faith in those of whom we have the experience that they have earned our trust.

But without faith, hope is not possible. One of the great things that springs from our capacity to grow in faith is the capacity to have hope. Absent faith, eventually the human spirit becomes hopeless, downtrodden, browbeaten into the dust of the earth. Absent hope, the only response that makes sense is radical alienation.

Carried to its logical extension that means separation from God, from one’s fellow human beings, and ultimately from life itself. One finds that sense of radical alienation in the existential philosophy of the last century; one finds it also expressed certain hate groups that seem to be gaining ascendency today. Because if I have no hope and no influence of positivity, something essentially has to come in to fill that void. Those might include: fellowship with others who express their radical alienation in the same manner as do I; it might have to do with turning to drugs, or alcohol to numb the innate human drive to find meaning to life.

If it is true that without faith, there is no hope, it is also true that without hope, humans have a diminished capacity for love. If I have no ideal, nothing in which to believe, then why should I be concerned about anything other than myself. Absent faith, hope and love we all too quickly find ourselves down a path to sociopathy.

And that is why religious experience is fundamentally a part of what makes us human. It serves as a critical reminder that

-life has meaning and has a purpose

-that life is based on a series of relationships with G od and with our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, and the family of humankind,

-Faith, hope and love channel our attention from negative, self-destructive thinking to positivity and potential rather than failure and self-loathing. Without these, the world devolves into a vicious, hostile environment.

In 1971, a somewhat obscure Country singer/songwriter published a cut “Angels from Montgomery.” That song had a bit of popularity when it was performed by Bonnie Raitt. The Chorus is:

Make me an angel that flies from Montgom’ry
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

So it is for good reason that we are reminded of these virtues: Faith, Hope, and love do more than abide forever. They are the minimum required building blocks that make us human.  Want to be human? Abide in the love of Jesus, strive to live a life filled with faith and hope.

The Lord is Risen Indeed Alleluia!

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.

The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia.

This has always intrigued me. In scripture, God always speaks the language of positivity and the language of hope.

Even at those moments such as one encounters with the prophets, where there is that dark and angry tone of excoriating judgment, there is always a note of hope. Even when it is not likely that his people will either hear or heed his voice, there is always that subcontext of God who created all things in love. While God may be angry or frustrated with his people, it does not seem to be in his character to hate them.  So even those prophets whose message was so strident, there is that note of compassion: “if only my people would listen to me.” “if only they would turn with new hearts.” “if only they would follow and obey my commandments.” “if only they would be my people and if only they would let me by their God.”

Over the years it has been the task of preachers on this happy Easter morning to try to persuade people that the resurrection of Jesus is real. And of course there are a number of resurrection appearances of our Risen Lord recorded in the New Testament; most of them are not private audiences but involve two or more witnesses. Those appearances have a weight of authenticy about them. They are credible, if for no other reason, no one makes up a tale about someone being raised from the dead—and if they had concocted such a tale, who among them would endure the suffering and painful deaths that all the apostles endured (except John). They would have folded—changed their story—as part of a plea deal. But they didn’t. And that in itself testifies to the truth. It makes no sense from human experience; Easter, this day of Resurrection,  while incomprehensible from from the human point of view, teaches us

·         that God is greater than the human point of view,

·         that the power of God is greater than all things in heaven and earth

·         that in the face of all things broken in the world, God was in Christ, reconciling all things to himself.

·         That the love of God is greater than the hatred of the world.

That our Lord’s message to the disciples, “be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world,” is just as applicable today as it was then.

When we live fully in the power and the promise of Jesus’ resurrection, things change.

·         We are no longer held prisoner by the fear that is in the world,

·         We are no longer, chained by the negativity that grips people’s lives, and institutions and systems,

·         We can give up what I call the little liturgy of the wringing of the hands over the dismal prospects of a bleak future, because we can come to trust in Him who promises, “Behold, I make all things, New.

·         We are no longer consumed by the pettiness that is the hallmark of the press and grind of daily life, because we know that we dwell in the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

·         We can fully live in the vision of this morning’s epistle, for if we have truly set our minds on the things that are above, and not the things on earth, we will be continually renewed by the way in which our life is hidden—that’s to say covered, protected and enfolded, with Christ in God.

Here’s the mistake that most people make: the resurrection of Jesus is not an intellectual proposition. It is not a time worn, outdated dogma of the Church. And we need to quit acting as though it were those things. The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection is a proclamation about a dynamic relationship with the living Lord Jesus Christ that transforms life wondrously.

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.

The Lord is Risen indeed.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

Palm Sunday: the Passion of Jesus

He died. Just as any of us do. For some of the people standing there, it was a huge disappointment. No new era of reign of God appeared. Just one more human life snuffed out. Call him an itinerant preacher, or a prophet, he was just a part of the surplus population who came to an end. Granted, more tragically than most, but then most of the prophets did not come to cheerful ends either.

Of course, not everyone turning from the scene of the crucifixion had that reaction. There were those who had hindsight—which they say is always 20/20. Even the centurion, hardened by his years of service to Rome, a man who had seen much in the way of human suffering and tragedy, and who had dished out more than his share of it upon people—even he was able to see something different. It was not just his sense that a mistake had been made, or that there was a miscarriage of justice. Hardened though he may be, as he turned away from the horrific scene at Calvary, these words escaped his lips: surely he was the Son of God.

And of us, what thoughts press upon us as we turn away from Calvary this morning?

Do we think as some do that Jesus died in vain? After all hatred still seems to go on in the world. The message of love as agape has never really taken hold. The kingdom that Jesus preached does not appear to have reached its perfection. And if that is your reaction, then you must ask yourselves, “Have I grown indifferent to the message of the Gospel that I am not moved by our Lord’s sacrifice?”   “Does it no longer move my heart, because it is just lost in the vast sea of instances of human beings’ inhumanity to one another.”

Or maybe it is that we ourselves are overwhelmed by a sense of horror that is conjoined with guilt and remorse. For, if you were raised with a certain understanding of the atonement, then you would understand that Jesus died for your sins and that is but a polite way of trying to work around the painful awareness that I caused this. I was the causative agent of his suffering and his death. I was the responsible one.  It may have been a Roman soldier who did it in historical time, but I might just as well have been the one who plaited the crown of thorns and pressed it upon his head; I might just as well have been the one who took the nails and drove them into his hands and feet and plunged the spear into his side.

That is, of course the traditional way in which our Lord’s Passion is proclaimed. But when a person remains stuck with that sense of guilt and remorse, then ultimately, what is supposed to be redemptive, the sacrifice of Jesus, becomes instead itself an occasion of destructive sin. Because ultimately Calvary is not about what I did. It is about what God has done.

The classic teaching of the Church about the Passion of Jesus is that it is to be used to move us to a sense of thanksgiving. We are called to be thankful because of the many things that Jesus endured for us and for our sakes. It is hoped that our gratitude is the lever that helps us to change our lives and our attitudes towards one another. Having a profound sense of thanksgiving is the basis of spiritual renewal in Jesus Christ.

But lest we think too narcissistically about it, the Passion of Jesus is not solely about me. It is about the redemption of all that is broken in the world. It is the message that God’s grace can overcome all things in a world gone wrong and how it is that even in the midst of all that has gone wrong and descended into madness, that there is hope where there is the grace of God.  

Faithfully,

Canon G+

Jesus Wept

When I read the raising of Lazarus, it strikes me how I have come to appreciate it differently over time. I have always been deeply touched by what my grandmother taught me was the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” For years I had presumed that Jesus was weeping over the loss of a friend, weeping as many of us have wept over the loss of those who have been near and dear to us. Regarding that scene, the divine sorrow of Jesus at the loss of Lazarus commingles with the sorrows of our shared humanity.

He who is soon to be victorious over death can conquer it, but he does not short circuit it. We may celebrate the resurrection and we may be people of the resurrection, but that does not insulate us from those very human emotions of grief—stages and emotions that Dr. Kuebler-Ross described so well in her important book, Death and Dying.

I have come to appreciate the courageous faith that comes out like an allegation from Martha and Mary, that oftentimes has been the allegation of the times in which we live, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Coming from them, it is a statement of faith in the healing power of the Lord Jesus. He, who gave sight to the blind man could have prevented Lazarus’ mortality had he been there to heal Lazarus. In our time, of course, that statement comes out more as an allegation—an existential cry of agony reflective of what we think of as the absence of God in the midst of crisis.

“If you had been here, there would have been no Kosovo. If you had been here, there would have been no Sandy Hook. If you had been here, there would have been no humanitarian crisis of starvation in the South Sudan, no refugee resettlement crisis of Syrians. If you had been here there would have been no Zika virus. If you had been here there would be no Isis, no Boku Haram. Dylan Roof would not have entered Emanuel A.M.E.  in Charleston, and killed all those people.” And so on.

This is the allegation of suffering humanity that on the one hand searches desperately for God, while on the other hand it denies that God exists. This is the allegation of a suffering humanity that would prefer Merlin the magician to Jesus the redeemer. Merlin has a magic wand; Jesus shows us the way of the cross. Merlin waves a magic wand and makes everything instantly better. Jesus, on the other hand, teaches that redemption is possible and that walking in the way of the cross is none other than the way of life and peace. As the human race we might prefer Merlin; but God gives us Jesus. In the long run, Merlin’s results are temporary; Jesus’ results are the well-spring of eternal life.

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept. But the cosmic Lord through whom all things were made and have their being weeps for his friend, but not his friend only. There is the cosmic dimension to His divine tears. He weeps for the human condition. He weeps in compassion for all that we suffer.

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

Blindness that cannot be healed

When you read Saint John’s portrayal of the Lord Jesus in his Gospel, suddenly it will come to you that the beloved disciple’s portrayal of the Lord Jesus is complex. For although John portrays Jesus as a totally transfigured being, he also portrays the human side of Jesus in the way that the other Gospel writers do not.  This can sometimes be jarring. As John presents him, the Lord is not always shown as Jesus meek and mild. In the Gospel of John, Jesus has some very human moments. Among these are moments when he’s dealing with frustration, or when he’s sick and tired of trying to explain the same thing over and over again to those who fundamentally don’t get it. And, there are a few moments when his divine patience wears thin when he is dealing with those who do not see him for who he was and what he was about in his earthly life.

The picture of the Lord Jesus in John’s Gospel shows us one  who can be somewhat abrasive on occasion, who is sometimes obtuse, and who can resort to the use of sarcasm and irony to get a point across.

I don’t know about you, but what I appreciate about John’s portrayal of the Lord Jesus is that it gives an element of hope to the likes of me and you, who also struggle with lack of patience, who sometimes become angry and deal with that anger through sarcasm and who possess just enough cynicism that we, too, appreciate the element of irony in life.

So the great irony in the healing of Bartimaeus is this: it is a simple matter for the cosmic Lord of all creation, the divine Word incarnate to bend down, to spit on the ground and make mud with his saliva, and in an act reminiscent of creation to spread the paste/mud over Bartimaeus’ eyes. It is a small matter for Jesus to tell him to go wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam. Reconstructive eye surgery is apparently simple for Jesus. But helping people to see the light of God in front of them is a different matter. It may be a simple matter to heal Bartimaeus. But the same cosmic Lord of all creation, the same divine Word incarnate cannot restore sight to the spiritually blind scribes and Pharisees.

Spiritual blindness, of course, can have its origins in ignorance. When it comes to the topic of ignorance, moral theologians make a distinction between vincible and invincible ignorance. Since invincible ignorance implies an ignorance that is so profound that it cannot be overcome. Invincible ignorance implies that there is a circumstance which exists in which the primary actor cannot know the consequences of an action and therefore is not culpable.

This week, in the news, a case was reported in which a mother, Wendy Lavarnia of Phoenix allegedly left a loaded gun within the reach of a two-year-old child. That child was able to reach the gun and when he did, he pointed, fired the gun and shot and killed his brother. It would be presumed that the two-year-old acted in a state of invincible ignorance. You could not say the same for the mother. Vincible ignorance is of a sort that can be or might have been or ought to have been overcome. Probably the mother did not know when she set the gun down, that the two-year-old could reach the weapon and did not know that the child would point and fire the weapon and she might say that she was ignorant of those things. But hers is vincible ignorance; she reasonably ought to have thought that placing the gun within reach of the two-year-old could have the potential for tragic consequences.

But Jesus makes it clear that in the instance of the Pharisees that theirs is neither vincible nor invincible ignorance. It is a willful rejection of the grace of grace of God—a refusal to see the light in front of their very eyes. And, sadly, though he may be the cosmic Lord of all creation, the warning for them, and by extension for us is that there is a sort of blindness that even He cannot heal.

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

A new look at an old story: Nicodemus

Nicodemus was not a bumbling fool. Neither was he a coward because he came at night, nor was he an ignorant person who came to ask a question whose answer he did not understand. Although he is often portrayed as these by what passes in some venues as Biblical scholarship, Nicodemus was a complex person.  

As a complex person, Nicodemus deserves a much kinder treatment than he frequently receives at the hand of those who preach and teach the Christian faith. For starters, he comes across as an independent thinker.  Rather than falling into line with whatever everyone else was saying about Jesus, Nicodemus demonstrated the courage to think and to act beyond the herd mentality.  Rather than to listen to prevalent opinion, he chose to go to what is called the primary source. That’s to say he went to Jesus himself that he might make up his own mind, through his own encounter with Jesus.  He was that sort of person who was not impetuous, but he was inquisitive, probing, and non-reactive. He was one who wanted to gather the facts from all facets. And since we have been exploring the topics of morality, ethics and the role of conscience these last several weeks, might I point out that in Nicodemus we have an example of the positive use of conscience. So often these days, it is presumed that conscience serves only an accusatory function; in this instance, conscience serves to compel Nicodemus not so much as to avoid the negative but to pro-actively seek the Good.

I would surmise that Nicodemus also was wrestling with a spiritual problem. How can we conclude that?  Well, it is the track record of scripture that when people came to Jesus, he always addressed the spiritual condition of the person. When people came with a physical ailment, our Lord Jesus always addressed the spiritual component before he addressed the physical condition. That is consistently the case in the New Testament. The paralytic is told that his sins are forgiven. The leper is told that not only is he healed, he is made clean. And so on.  So we can infer that Nicodemus has arrived at a moment in his spiritual life, in which those things that had been life giving were no longer life-giving. Perhaps it was, no, I would say it was probably that he had reached that moment of what the French call ennui, what the spiritual masters call spiritual boredom, or accidie, ( pronounced a see’dya) what the psalmist calls the “sickness that lays waste at mid-day. He’d lived a life steeped in the scriptures, been to the temple, done the requirements of the law, fulfilled all the obligations thereof, and what once had given him life and been compelling was not longer life-giving, no longer was compelling. But now there was an element of enthusiasm missing from those things. Like so many of us, Nicodemus had been there, seen it, done it and was bored with it.  Seen in that fashion, not only is Nicodemus a fairly complex person, but he becomes a fairly contemporary personality,  a symbol for our times.

And so, when Nicodemus comes before the Lord, Jesus tells him bluntly and plainly, “you have to be born again, you have to be renewed, you have to be born from above.”

And when Nicodemus ask how can that be, although it is masked, there is a quiet desperation in his question, a quiet desperation which eventually confronts all of us in the spiritual life because accidie is a thing that must be worked through, not a thing to which we ought to self-indulgently cater.

Faithfully,

Canon G+

To be Changed into His Likeness

Some years ago when I was preaching at a Lenten Series supper and Evensong at Saint Andrew’s, Tioga, I preached a sermon about moral and ethical theology. After the service, the late George Williams came up to me and said these words: “I almost understood what you said. I almost was able to follow it.”

In honor of George, I offer this reflection:

Law and order! That’s what we need! More of it! What’s wrong with this world is that they don’t teach the ten commandments any longer! They don’t teach them in schools, as if they ever did, and as if it were the schools’ responsibility to teach them. Well, parents don’t teach them, as if they ever did, because isn’t it the school’s responsibility after all? Passing the buck as to whose is the onus for moral development and formation has certainly contributed to the muddled moralscape in which we live.

So, culturally, we tell ourselves, “maybe these values are supposed to be learned by osmosis.” Somewhere along the line, a child is supposed to learn something about right and wrong, good and evil, the difference between telling a lie and telling the truth, Right? And there’s where the argument for synteresis breaks down. Synteresis is what moral and ethical theologians call the innate sense that is to be found in all human beings that is the tutor as to what is right or wrong, just or unjust, what is the seeking after the Common Good, or what is to the detriment of the Common Good.

But synteresis appears to be a thing that is articulated, given voice by enculturation. It may be inherently a part being human, at least in most of us, to seek The Good, but what we understand as The Good is shaped not only by synteresis, but by the culture in which we live. Of course there are certain psychopathic and sociopathic personalities in whom the function of conscience is absent. But, for the most of us the function of conscience serves as a warning when we have transgressed.  In the Disney movie, Pinocchio, conscience was personified as Jiminy Cricket, an apt personification as anyone knows who has been kept awake with a cricket’s chirping after midnight. But in terms of moral theology the conscience is more often appreciated as the still, small voice of God to the soul.

The allegation made by Karl Marx was that religion was the opiate of the people.  And, I suppose if the point of religion and having faith were merely crowd control, we would have to agree with his analysis.

But the point of Christian Faith is not crowd control. The point of Christian Faith is held up for us in a snapshot in this morning’s Gospel. The point of our practice of faith is transfiguration. The ethics of Jesus are on a higher, more complex plane that do’s and don’ts and crowd control. The ethics of Jesus are about how we learn to put the dynamic of love—his love—into our daily lives and into practice in the world in which we live.

We are called to proclaim Christ as the one who transforms, and more than transforms, but transfigures culture.

We celebrate what it is to:

To be made into the likeness of Christ, to radiate his love, his presence, his grace in the world in which we live. As we prayed in the Collect this morning: that we may be changed into his likeness from glory to glory. It is not enough for Peter and Andrew, James and John to be passive participants. Their lives were forever also transfigured on the mountain. There’s a saying sometimes applied to items on Facebook: having seen a thing, you cannot unsee it.

Peter, Andrew, James and John cannot unsee the transfiguration of the Lord Jesus. And as we come to the vision glorious week by week, we cannot unsee it either. We should be profoundly affected by what we have come here to behold. Having witnessed His transfiguration, let us become challenged the signs of his transfiguring love in the world.

Faithfully,

Fr. G+

 

The Minimum

When I was in seminary, I’d a friend who had spent a significant time in the Army before he discovered a vocation to the priesthood and came to seminary. Because of his years in the Army, he’d picked up on a saying, which seemed applicable for many situations, and he used to joke about it. Here’s the saying: “The minimum is good enough; otherwise it wouldn’t be the minimum.”

Unfortunately, there is a tendency, a very human tendency to apply that maxim to a wide variety of human endeavors. Especially it seems to be in vogue when it comes to dealing with what should be questions concerning moral and ethical theology.  If “the minimum is good enough, otherwise it wouldn’t be the minimum,” then discourse about right and wrong become a conversation about “what can a person get away with” and still preserve the appearance of moral decency. 

 Because human beings have a marvelous capacity to rationalize almost anything, it is easy to lose track of synteresis. Synteresis is what ethicists call the fundamental human sense of what is right and wrong. Synteresis is not particular to either revealed or applied theology. It is more the innate sense within that has to do with right and wrong and a human desire to seek that which is good and that which is positive. In the imagery Saint John’s Gospel, it is to be drawn towards the light not the darkness. Because of the human tendency towards rationalization, when synteresis is clouded, discussions about right and wrong devolve into what’s called ethical relativism, or what the ethicist Daniel Maguire called the muddle on the moralscape.

“The minimum is good enough, otherwise it wouldn’t be the minimum.”

Jesus’ ethics transcend this. He pointed out in Matthew 5:20 that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And while this is one of those difficult sayings of Jesus, for we are left to wonder how we might accomplish such a thing in contemporary life, those scribes and Pharisees had, in fact reduced the requirements of the Torah to the minimalistic standards. So although they lived out the minimum requirements of the Law from a legalistic view, they were far, far indeed from the Spirit of the Law.

One way in which they had done that was to separate the notion of holiness from righteousness. They saw holiness as being set apart, cutting themselves off from the wickedness of the world, and they reduced righteousness to being a complex system of legal requirements to be met, rather than being a living relationship between God and man.

Yet, even in the Torah, the Law, the religion of the Old Testament, there were ways in which holiness and righteousness were knit together: that is demonstrated in the first lesson today. “You shall be holy,” says the Lord. But the way to holiness is to love justice and to do acts of mercy to provide for the downtrodden and those in need. “You shall not reap to the edge of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip the vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard: you shall leave them for the poor and the alien.

The ethics of Jesus are based on a foundation of love. That is reflected in today’s gospel. Today’s Gospel is particularly a warning about not catering to the desire for revenge. As an aside, I am reminded of the old proverb: “If you go for revenge, dig two graves one for your adversary and one for you.”

The collect also reminds us about the importance of love by reminding us in no uncertain terms that all our deeds, without love, are meaningless and worthless.

If the minimum is good enough, then I suppose we have to identify that in Jesus’ terms the minimum is the ethic of love: love that goes the extra mile, love that turns the other cheek; love that looks down from the cross and prays, “Father forgive them.”

Faithfully,

Canon G+

The Least in the Kingdom

No mere reed shaken with the sultry wind of the desert; No mere reed shaped by the prevailing winds of popularity and fashion, John the Baptist is an uncompromisingly harsh figure which arose from an uncompromisingly harsh desert wilderness. You do not seek out John the Baptist to see someone mollycoddled in the lap of luxury and affluence.

No mincer of words, nor one who spares the feelings of the hearer is John the Baptist, proclaimer of something that is not very much in vogue these days: no proclaimer of opinion, but the herald of unvarnished truth. Nothing about your encounter with John is a feel-good moment. Here comes the bulldozer. There is nowhere to hide. Repent while you can because soon and very soon it is going to be too late to escape the consequences of the choices you have made and the fate you so roundly deserve.

“What shall I, frail man be pleading, who for me be interceding, when the just are mercy needing?”

And yet, Jesus says that while John is the last and the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, and that there is none born of woman who has arisen that is greater than John, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

How can that be? How can it be that one who so galvanizes to repentance is relegated to so low a place in Jesus’ vision of the kingdom?

For all his vision, for all his gumption, for all his stirring proclamation, how was it that John missed it? What did John fail to see?

He failed to see this: the positivity of conversion, the joy of transformation. John’s ministry and that of all the prophets is a sad commentary that the via negativa, the negative way, is a more powerful motivating factor in human life than that which is positive, hopeful and life-giving.

It is a whole lot easier to be against something that it is to be for something. It is a whole lot easier to be against sin than it is to be for transforming grace. It is a whole lot easier to reduce the dynamic ethic of Christianity to dogma and doctrine (“do’s and don’ts,” things done and left undone) than it is to be for the dignity of every human being. It is a whole lot easier to shut people out than it is to welcome the stranger. It is easier to say of the other, “you don’t belong here,” than it is to say “I can see the face of God in you.”

But the ethic of the kingdom as Jesus taught it was based on a positive dynamic. And John didn’t get it. And most of us have a hard time getting it too. It may be that love triumphs over fear, but there’s nothing quite like the cold icicle of fear in the very marrow of one’s bones to get our attention.  Why is it that the still small whispering in your ear the middle of the night generally does not have the message, “you are loved, and all is right with the world?” It is because we, like John, have the propensity of listen to the negative and to give it more credence than the voice of hope.

As much as we might need the voice of John the Baptist, we also need to be redeemed from it. And we will not be redeemed from hearing that voice of the via negativita until we learn another discipline: and that is the gift of Advent. That is to learn to wait with eager longing for the voice of God. But to do that we have to learn a new skill, one that is hard to cultivate: to learn to wait with patient expectation.

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

John the Baptist

The enigmatic figure, John the Baptist looms over Advent. His stern voice of deep approbation pierces across centuries even to this day.  Curiously clad, and yet more wondrously subsisting on crunchy honey, John is the last formidable voice from that bygone era of the prophets: Jeremiah and Isaiah; Amos and Hosea; Joel and Micah and others whose uncompromising message was not tailored to please anyone who heard it.

Yet, stridently uncompromising as his message is, there is an element of hopefulness in it. In a world that is unforgiving it is a hopeful message that repentance is possible. That one can change the direction of life before it is too late. That there is, as Psalm 130 would have it, the promise in that Psalm that with God “There is forgiveness with thee, therefore thou art to be feared.” The real, compelling message of John the Baptist and the real, compelling message of the Gospel is that new beginnings, so rare a thing in this life, are actually possible with God.

As you may have noticed from reading the Advent Booklets, the ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos, and Kairos. Human beings most usually live with a preoccupation of Chronos: the passage of time that is the never ending of seconds that pass into minutes, from months to years and from years to lifetimes. A thing is put in motion, and like a great and tragic machine it must run its course. That is what we call chronology. From the point of view of Chronos, there are only consequences. You chose to do thing A and thing B follows. The consequence is that you get what you deserve.

That is becoming ever more true in this computer era. This is the age of the death of privacy. Websites abound that invite you to google yourself. Credit scores and everything else instantaneously available.

As a culture, we have become essentially like characters trapped in a William Faulkner novel, who cannot escape the past because they are prisoners of it. Due to the miracle of Google and Facebook, you cannot escape the past. If you have Google Maps on your phone, it will track “your places” that is to say everywhere you went on any particular day. It can be turned off, but how many of us know that? Most of us don’t. So most of us participate in monitoring and tracking without even knowing it.

Only in Kairos, God’s time, is repentance possible. In Chronos, you can change direction, but you cannot escape the consequences of what you have chosen or what you deserve. If they were aware of that so keenly in the time of John the Baptist, how much more keenly ought we to be aware of it these days. The good news that is given by John is not that you need to repent; the good news is that you can repent. From the standpoint of Chronos, it is already too late. Only in the love of God has the dimension of Kairos entered into the world.

Faithfully,

Cn. Greg+

 

Zombie Apocalypse Part 2

Transitions are always difficult. We’ve seen some evidence of that in the events of the past week surrounding the election; but we also see it in the apocalyptic language of this Luke 21:5-19, the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday Morning. But at some point you have to ask yourself a question about this imagery of violence in the gospel: is it a solemn warning of the zombie apocalypse to come, or is it encouragement?  Was it the intention of our Lord to scare his disciples or to strengthen them? Or maybe both?

The first reading of that Gospel passage would suggest the theme of fear in the midst of the uncertainty of life. Look at the temple, the sign of God’s abiding presence in the midst of Israel, the symbol of God’s protective providence. “Don’t take it for granted that it will always be there. Someday you will look and it will be gone.”

What is suggested in Jesus’ comment is not too popular with the hearers. Because what seems to come across in the wider context of his comment is this: take your faith for granted and you will be complicit in its destruction. That’s not a real feel-good statement.

But the rest of the statements of our Lord  contain an element of comfort:

-you don’t need to go chasing after every new thing that comes down the pike, (what’s implicit) is that you already know all that you need to know

-take care that you are not led astray and sidetracked (what’s implicit is) stay focused

-you’re going to endure hardships (but what’s implicit is) you will be given the grace of God to face all those things that you fear, even those things that you fear the most. Even including: arrest, being imprisoned, having charges brought against you, betrayal by your family members. But what is implicit is you will not face these things alone because the grace of God will be there.

While we may not be focused on these positive aspects of today’s Gospel, they all seem to distill down to one particular focus: “By your endurance, you will save your souls.”

While we might appreciate endurance when it is demonstrated by professional athletes, we do not necessarily appreciate endurance in other areas of life. For while we don’t live in the first century, we share with that century that familiar trait of all human beings: we still have the tendency towards self-indulgence, not self-discipline, opting for the easy way out, not the path of courage. We want our faith to be there to bail us out of the difficult moments, we may want to be spiritual so long as we’re not talking about “spiritual discipline.”

And yet Jesus reminds us that it is by our endurance that we will gain our souls. Endurance essentially means being faithful and being disciplined in our practice of faith. When you think about it the athlete who has not faithfully practiced and disciplined himself (or herself) in training has no gas in the tank when it comes to that endurance moment for the extra effort, the extra burst of speed, the ability to go the extra mile.

By your endurance you will gain your souls.

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

 

The Zombie Apocalypse has not yet come

While on travel to Williamsport the day before the general election, my eye caught sight of one rather distinct yard. Amidst the collection of election posters in yards all up and down the street, there was this one yard. What was peculiar about it?  Where there might have been election posters to proclaim preferred candidates of the occupants of the house; there were only Christmas lights.  While my first thought was to think how the homeowners were rushing the season, when I thought about it longer, I found a hopeful message. In the midst of what has been one of the more acrimonious campaigns on record, here was a different message. The light shines in the darkness; there was that beacon of hope even in the midst of all the ugliness of the campaigning. It seemed to be saying, “here is respite. Christ can come, even to this.”

I suppose I should have stopped to thank the owners. For here was a hopeful message: the zombie apocalypse is not coming. Christ the redeemer is coming.

My impression of this past election season has been to hear voices from many that have articulated a great deal of concern, anxiety and outright fear of the unknown that might be coming. That fear will not magically diminish with the result of the election. For, as in the case of all elections, some will get what they want, and others will not. The challenge for the winner is this: campaigns highlight differences but the post-election challenge is to heal the brokenness that the campaigning has fueled. Can that be done in the highly polarized climate in which we are living at the moment? That is the major issue that only time will be able to tell.

So I found myself thinking about how most of us can become fairly worked up over the fear of the unknown, and I also found myself thinking about the passage of the Gospel that is often appointed for Thanksgiving Day. It is that passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus keeps assuring his disciples “to be not anxious.” A thing that I freely acknowledge is far more easily said than done, especially in the world in which we live—a world in which a New York minute is considered to be the luxury of time.

We humans put a lot of anxiety into life; Jesus instead invites us to invest a sense of calm trustfulness in the grace of God, pointing out that while we cannot lengthen the span of our lives through worry and anxiety, we most certainly can shorten them by overindulgence in worry.

The first step in addressing the anxiety problem is to develop a sense of thanksgiving. A thankful heart always brings with it the invitation to spend time in the here and now in gratitude, rather than to dwell in the nightmarish land of what horror there might be.

So I pray that as we prepare for the coming holiday season that we do so by allowing time for thanksgiving and rejoicing, counting our blessings and remembering that it is always a right and joyful thing to give thanks.

Those ‘be not anxious verses’ are in Matthew, Chapter 6.

Faithfully

 

Canon Greg+

Election Day and Beatitudes with a Twist

 

If you have turned on the TV for even 5 minutes this past week, it would be almost impossible to overlook that Tuesday is election day. Regardless of which is your favored candidate, and regardless of which is elected to be the next president of these United States, that day will signal the end of one of the most acrimonious election cycles within recent memory. To be sure, it will mark an end to this present acrimonious election cycle; without a doubt it will not put an end to the widespread and painful divisions of our nation.

 

Regardless of who is elected, those divisions will still exist; for while the outcome of this election will settle who will be in the White House for the next four years; while it might settle who will control Congress; it is not a magic wand that will cause the major issues of our day to be settled.

 

Poverty, racial injustice, issues about access to health care, the issues of jobs and what to do with immigrants will all still be before us.

These will not go away simply because we have voted.

What have elections, All Saints’ and Stewardship have in common? Probably most of us would say, “not much.”

Maybe there are those among us who just don’t settle for such an answer, because we have found it singularly unsettling to compartmentalize areas of our lives. We look instead for that which integrates those separate strands and threads of life.

What seems to be the unifying theme is vision.

We vote for whom we do based on vision, selecting that candidate whose vision best articulates our own.

 

The great Saints (those with a capital S) were those who had vision also. Their vision was transcendent, based not so much on things of earth but on the hope and expectation of the coming of the kingdom of God.

Stewardship as a theme also invites us to a vision, in which the secular and the sacred meet. It is where the practical vision and the transcendent vision meet. We provide for God’s house as a means of providing for the time and place for the proclamation of God’s vision, which is one of hope.

I like to call the version of the Beatitudes that we have heard in this morning’s Gospel, “Beatitudes with a twist.” They are not the bucolic, pastorally benign sayings that we usually associate as the Beatitudes. More familiar is the version is found in Saint Matthew.

But there is an edge to those in Saint Luke, where the beatitudes contain a series of warnings. These are generally called The Woes:

6:24 “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

6:25 “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

6:26 “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets”

The effect to these Beatitudes with a twist is that they jar us where we have become complacent.

Falling into complacency is always a danger in the spiritual life. It is good that we hear them from time to time; that they call us into a renewed sense of our vision. They help to keep us from becoming too smug, too self-contented, and too complacent.

This week reminds us of many things. But chiefly it reminds us about the importance of vision in human life, both corporately and individually.

“For without vision,” as Proverbs would remind us, “the people perish.”

Where we become complacent about democracy, it perishes; where we become complacent about faith, it dies; where stewardship languishes, so does the mission of God and the kingdom.

What is your vison?

Where is your gaze fixed?

 

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+

 

But I Need that Mercedes!

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this: “The hardest substance known to humankind is water.”

At first glance, water does not seem to have the appearance of being a hard substance, especially if it is examined only one drop at a time. But beneficial and necessary as water is, too much of it is not necessarily a good thing. Just ask the people of Haiti and the Southern United States about the power of Hurricane Matthew. Some of us remember the effects of other storms such as Agnes, that impacted our region some number of years ago. Water can erode mountains, carve canyons. If you’ve ever had a leak in the plumbing in your house, you know first-hand there is nothing like a little leak. A little leak can do damage of a serious magnitude. There’s the repair of the pipe, the repainting and the other renovations that can reach epic proportions before the damage is repaired.

So apparently the Gospel for this coming Sunday (Luke 18:1-8) seems to liken prayer to  the dripping faucet torture. The corrupt judge who expects to be bought and who sells out to the highest bid of special interest groups for his reelection campaign becomes wearied by the persistent nagging old woman. The only advantage to him in hearing her case is that it will make her finally go away.

As was the case in the story of the ten lepers, today’s gospel lesson is unique to Saint Luke. It is not found in any of the other Gospels. You may suppose that it was not included because the parable evoked in them the same reaction that it evokes in us. We’re left wondering why our Lord would have used this parable in the first place.

Well, what we have here is an image about prayer and vindication. People in our Lord’s time were quite used to the concept of an absolutely corrupt judiciary. So the point of the parable is: God is not like that. He hears your prayers; God hears your concerns. God knows your struggles. Prayer is not an exercise in nagging the Almighty; applying dripping water torture. To use another metaphor, the idea behind prayer is not how squeaky wheel gets the grease.

One of the popular songs performed by the singer, the late Janis Joplin, had these words: “Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz” which only serves to highlight the idea that prayer is about asking for things. In reality, although it is clear in scripture that God wants us to ask about things, there it is more abundantly clear that the purpose of prayer is to foster a relationship with the Divine.  As in the sacrament of communion, the purpose is literally ‘to be made one with the Divine.’ Prayer is about relationality. It is about intimacy with the Divine. It is about who and what we become through the act of worship and prayer. When you come to understand prayer in that way, you also become aware that there are types of prayer that are of a higher order. Meditation (yes, it exists in the Christian Tradition); contemplative prayer; Lectio Divina are all ways that one comes to be with the Lord.

In the theme of our lessons, we may want things, but God wants you. He wants to write his law in your heart. He wants you to be among his people, walking in a new covenant with him–a covenant of love.

Faithfully,

Canon Greg+