That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: First Corinthians (Page 7 of 11)

March Forth – From the Daily Office – June 6, 2014

June 6, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Jeremiah:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord”, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Jeremiah 31:33b-34 (NRSV) – June 6, 2014)

Troops marching at Omaha BeachCan the finite ever truly know the infinite? Can the human mind ever fully grasp the knowledge of God? We have the assurance of Jeremiah’s prophecy, the consolation of God spoken through “the weeping prophet” that it can. And Jeremiah is not alone.

Whenever I read a verse of scripture that speaks of the knowledge of God, I remember a favorite hymn of the rector under whom I served as curate, God Is Working His Purpose Out, sung to the tune Purpose. A repeating text in the hymn, not quite a chorus, is “the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” It is based on a verse from the prophet Habakkuk: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (Hab 2:14)

Like Jeremiah, Habakkuk assures us that the time will come when finite human beings will know the infinite Lord. Habakkuk focuses on the overwhelming universality of this knowledge, “as the waters cover the sea,” while Jeremiah focuses on its intimacy, “I will write it on their hearts.” It is Jeremiah’s intimacy that is echoed by Paul in his famous essay on love in the thirteenth chapter of the first letter to the Church in Corinth where we find yet another assurance that despite our limitations we will come to full knowledge of God:

For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:9-13)

Paul links knowledge of God to love using the Greek word agape, that word so poorly translated by our English word “love.” Agape is unconditional, non-judging love which places demands not on the beloved, but on the lover; it requires the lover (as Nazarene theologian Thomas Oord has noted) to act intentionally to promote well-being even, or perhaps especially, when responding to that which creates ill-being. Linking universal but intimate knowledge of God to agape, Paul places a burden on every follower of Christ.

The prophets’ assurance that all will know God, that the universal but intimate knowledge of the Almighty will cover the earth and also be written on individual hearts begs the question of how. Paul’s linkage answers that question: through the ministry of the members of the church. As the Episcopal Catechism says, “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” through the ministry of God’s people. My old boss’s favorite hymn says it more poetically:

What can we do to work God’s work,
to prosper and increase
the brotherhood of all mankind —
the reign of the Prince of Peace?
What can we do to hasten the time —
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled
with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.

March we forth in the strength of God,
with the banner of Christ unfurled,
that the light of the glorious gospel of truth
may shine throughout the world:
fight we the fight with sorrow and sin
to set their captives free,
that earth may filled
with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.

On this 70th anniversary of D-Day, marching forth under the banner of Christ fighting sorrow and sin and setting captives free seems an appropriate metaphor for our ministry. God’s instrument for flooding the world with knowledge, for writing it on the hearts of human beings, is the Church, whose members are called “to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” (BCP 1979, page 855) March forth, Church, march forth!

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

I Don’t Know – From the Daily Office – May 13, 2014

May 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Book of Exodus:

Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?” And Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are bent on evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off ‘; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Exodus 32:21-24 (NRSV) – May 13, 2014)

Golden Calf“I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

I chuckle every time I read this story and get to this point. In fact, when the story of the golden calf has been read in church and the reader gets to Aaron’s disclamation of responsibility, I’ve been known to laugh out loud.

Once, years ago, in a bible study group reading Exodus, I asked, “How old was Aaron?” No one knew, but we were all pretty certain that Moses and his brother were not young children at the time of this story. Nonetheless, a young child is exactly what Aaron sounds like: “I threw the gold in the fire, and out came this calf!” No mention of his forming the mold, pouring the molten the gold, breaking the mold, polishing the casting, and all the rest that goes into the making of a metal statue. The calf just “came out.”

There was a phantom in our house when my children were very young. We’d find that someone had opened the orange juice and not only taken some, but also spilled a good deal on the kitchen counter and floor. “Who did this?” we would ask. “I don’t know,” would be the answer. The contents of my wife’s purse were spilled there was lipstick smeared on things. “Who did this?” we demanded of the little girl with red all over her face. “I don’t know,” she told us. Someone once tried to make sand castles in the cat box. “Who did this?” we asked the little boy with sand fingers. With a straight face he replied, “I don’t know.”

We never caught I Don’t Know doing any of these things (or many others), but there was plenty of evidence of his (or was it “her”?) existence. I Don’t Know was a very active sprite! Apparently, I Don’t Know was much older than we thought. He or she appears to have been with the Hebrews in the desert. — “Who made this golden calf?” — “I don’t know. I threw the gold in the fire and out came this calf!”

In the modern adult world, I Don’t Know has gotten more adapt at hiding his or her identity. “Who made that decision?” we ask. The answer is often one of I Don’t Know‘s alter egos: a committee, the vestry, the (unnamed) higher-ups, the council, management, the administration. Could it be that I Don’t Know is being scapegoated?

Imaginary friends are a healthy part of maturing. Research shows that children with imaginary companions tend to be less fearful, laugh more, smile more, engage more with peers, and are better able to imagine how someone else might think. An imaginary friend can aid a child to handle fear, explore ideas, or gain a sense of competence, but children with imaginary friends will sometimes blame them for misbehavior in an attempt to dodge the displeasure of adult authority. I Don’t Know is not exactly an imaginary friend, but disclaiming responsibility and deflecting blame is certainly child-like (if not childish) behavior.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child,” wrote St. Paul, “I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” (1 Cor 13:11) Jesus once told a story about someone who decided to stop blaming I Don’t Know. The man in the story “put an end to childish ways” and said to himself, “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.'” (Lk 15:18)

We human beings of all ages when challenged still seem invoke I Don’t Know to avoid personal responsibility on a pretty regular basis. Christian maturity, coming (as Paul said) “to the measure of the full stature of Christ,” (Eph 4:13) no longer laying things at the feet of I Don’t Know is something for which we all need to strive. We need to give up being like Aaron; we need to put an end to childish ways.

Is that going to happen on a general basis any time soon?

I could answer, “I don’t know.” But the truth is, I think I do.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Flesh and Blood – From the Daily Office – April 24, 2014

April 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 15:50 (NRSV) – April 24, 2014.)

Human BodyI think I know what Paul is trying to say here, but I don’t like the way he’s saying it. I mean, I really have a theological issue with the assertion that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” I think the statement is just plain wrong. It states a dualism that relegates the material, specifically the human body, to realm of the damned, the unclean, the unworthy. In light of a creation story in which the Creator “saw everything that he had made [including that human flesh and blood], and indeed, it was very good,” I cannot accept the condemnation of our material being.

We have in our scriptural tradition an understanding that there have been human beings bodily “ascended” into the spiritual realms. “Elijah, because of great zeal for the law, was taken up into heaven,” says the First Book of Maccabees (1 Mac 2:58), and that is what Second Book of Kings describes: “Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.” Elisha watched it happen and kept staring up until he could no longer see his master. (2 Kg 2:11-12) And then there is Enoch who “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him,” (Gen 5:24) a statement which has always been understood to mean that he was taken, flesh and blood, into God’s eternal Presence.

Of even greater significance is the Ascension of Christ! As the Apostles stood “watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,” and then a couple of angels assured them that he had “been taken up from you into heaven.” (Acts 1:9,11) This was Jesus in the same body that had been executed! That body still bore the wounds of crucifixion; he had invited Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” (Jn 20:27) That flesh-and-blood body which ascended had sat at table with his friends; after his Resurrection, that same flesh-and-blood body had eaten a piece of honey and shared some grilled fish. Paul goes on and on about earthly bodies and heavenly bodies, physical bodies and spiritual bodies, perishable bodies and imperishable bodies . . . but Jesus lived, died, rose, and ascended in one and same body!

I’m rather fond of the body I’ve lived in. It’s fat and out of shape and, truth be told, I wish it were better looking! But I’ve done a lot of stuff with this body and, like Henry Higgins with regard to Eliza Dolittle’s face, I’ve grown accustomed to it. It has been useful — it’s climbed holy mountains and visited sacred places; it’s lifted babies from their cribs and cuddled them; it’s hugged my wife and children; it’s helped old people into and out of bed; it’s held the hands of dying parents; it’s fed the hungry and built shelters for the homeless; it’s stood at the altar of God and ministered the Flesh and Blood of Christ. This flesh and blood has done some holy things. If I’m going to be gifted with life eternal, I’ll be happy to do so in this flesh and blood that has served me well, and with which I have done my best to serve God and God’s people.

I think I know what Paul was trying to say, but I wish he’d found a different way to say it because I think what he said is just wrong. Flesh and blood can inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, I believe that flesh and blood have already inherited the kingdom of God. Here and now.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Death Rattle of Death – From the Daily Office – April 22, 2014

April 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 15:26 (NRSV) – April 22, 2014.)

Lungs and FacesTwo weeks before Easter I came down with the flu. I spent three days in bed with a high fever, a racking cough, and a good deal of body aches and pains. A friend who suffered the same illness (it’s gone around our town and several people have suffered through it) described the muscle pain as feeling as if one had been beaten up, thrown the ground, and kicked several times. It felt to me as if every square centimeter of connective tissue in my body was inflamed at the same time. (This is the first time in a couple of weeks or more that I’ve had enough morning energy to write anything after reading the daily lessons.)

It all made getting ready for Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter rather difficult, and even when Resurrection Sunday got here, I didn’t really feel much like celebrating. I always end a respiratory illness like that with two lingering symptoms: a nagging cough and laryngitis – both were in full force on Easter Eve. Gargling with warm salt water and several doses of codeine-laced cough suppressant got me through the Festival Eucharist on Easter morning.

So here we are at Tuesday in Easter week and the lingering cough is still tagging along. I’m feeling like it, not death, is the “last enemy to be destroyed.” Death is already conquered; the cough is not! In my Easter homily, I preached about that sense many (if not all) people have had from time to time of “dying a little” because of life’s many small disappointments, of how that sense is a result of disordered (sinful) creation disrupting the proper relationships of life, and of how all that sinfulness crashed down through time and eternity, through space and the cosmos, hitting one moment, one place:

Think about the weight of all that sin, all that dying, experienced in little ways every day by all the people who have ever lived . . . think of that weight crashing down
through the centuries,
through the millennia,
through all of time and all of space,
crashing down to a single hour,
a single moment,
a single instant,
on a hill outside of Jerusalem,
on a single man,
a man hanging on a cross
who cried out
“It is finished!”

Death, the last enemy, has been conquered. But there seems to be this lingering, nagging cough still sounding through the universe, still tickling at the throat of creation, still hacking away. It’s the death rattle of death. Pay it no mind. Eventually it and even its echoes will fade away.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

“You Have Died (a Little)” – A Sermon for Easter Morning – April 20, 2014

April 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day were: Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; and John 20:1-18. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Shrouded CorpseSeveral days ago, as I was reading again the Easter story and the sections of the Holy Scriptures appointed for this year, I had the radio on and tuned to my favorite oldies station.

I was prayerfully considering and trying to figure out what Paul was saying to the Colossians when he wrote these words that we heard in the Epistle lesson for today: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) I was trying to figure out what Paul meant by “hidden with Christ.” The Greek word is krypto and in addition to “hidden” it can also mean “secret” or “not noticed.” It is the origin of words like cryptogram and cryptography and also of crypt, a synonym for tomb. What does Paul mean? Is he saying our life is buried with Christ? Or that, somehow, the Christian life is a “secret” or that it goes “unnoticed”?

So I was pondering all of that and my oldies station played a very old and familiar song:

It hurts to be in love when the only one you love
Turns out to be someone who’s not in love with you
It hurts to love her so when deep down inside you know
She will never want you, no matter what you do

And so you cry a little bit
Oh, you die a little bit
Day and night, night and day
It hurts to be in love this way

Some of you are old enough to recognize the lyrics of It Hurts To Be In Love by Gene Pitney, a Top Ten hit from 1964.

And then, right after that song, the radio station played the one which has this as the refrain:

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

That was a Number One hit for Roberta Flack in 1973.

Those songs played just as I was prayerfully considering and trying to figure out what Paul was saying to the Colossians when he wrote: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) Now I don’t really think that God speaks to me through the radio or in the lyrics of popular songs, although it’s possible that God does. However, that coincidence of lyrics and Biblical text did take me down a path of revelation that I’d like to share with you this morning.

Those songs and songs like them – you can probably name several popular melodies going back to Cole Porter’s 1944 tune Every Time We Say Goodbye (“Every time we say goodbye, I die little”) or before – songs that mention this sense we have all had of “dying a little” because of a broken heart, because of the loss of a loved one, because of a disappointment in life. I think that’s why these songs become popular. We’ve all had that sense of “dying a little inside” for these and for many other reasons. And so Paul writes to the Colossians and to us:

“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

In his historical play Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare has his title character observe that “a coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.” (Act 2, Sc. 2) Ernest Hemingway took Shakespeare to task about that. In A Farewell to Arms he wrote:

‘The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one’…. (The man who first said that) was probably a coward…. He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.

I think the truth is that everybody, valiant or cowardly, everybody dies many little deaths throughout our existence on this earth. Each and every one of us is “killed softly” in myriad ways by the circumstances of life. We have, as Paul wrote to the Colossians, died . . . many times over.

Sometimes those little deaths are the result of our own actions; sometimes they are the result of other’s actions; sometimes they happen because that’s just the way the world is. The world, though created by God to be good, is out of kilter; it is, we say theologically, fallen. The world and everything in it, including you and me, are not in the proper relationship with our Creator. We are not in proper relationship with one another. We call that “sin.” And sin, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, has weight, a weight that clings to us like dirt, and each time we experience one of those little deaths a little more weight, a little more dirt is tossed on until, as Paul wrote in this simple verse in the letter to the Colossians, we are buried.

“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Think about the weight of all that sin, all that dying, experienced in little ways every day by all the people who have ever lived . . . think of that weight crashing down
through the centuries,
through the millennia,
through all of time and all of space,
crashing down to a single hour,
a single moment,
a single instant,
on a hill outside of Jerusalem,
on a single man,
a man hanging on a cross
who cried out
“It is finished!”

“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

They took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb and on the day after the Sabbath the women came and found the tomb empty. We know that story so well. It is the foundational story of our faith. We know it so well and yet we have to be reminded of it again and again because those little deaths seem to keep happening and hiding it from us. “Our life is hidden;” it gets buried under that weight; it goes unnoticed.

Anastasis IconIn the Eastern Orthodox tradition, icons of the Resurrection depict Christ rising from the tomb with a whole crowd of people. To one side of him crowned and haloed are King David and King Solomon; on the other, we see Abel the first martyr of creation carrying a shepherd’s crook and Moses the first prophet of the Old Covenant. Also present is John the Baptist, who is both the first prophet and the first martyr of the New Covenant. Beneath Christ’s feet, the gates of hell lie broken, often forming a cross. And from two tombs, Adam and Eve are rising, but not of their own accord; Jesus holds them by the wrists and is pulling them from their graves.

The mythological proto-parents of our race, the ancient kings, the prophets and martyrs . . . this little crowd represents all of humankind . . . you and me and all the people who have ever lived, all the people who have ever died any kind of death, whether physical death or the little daily kinds of dying we all have experienced . . .
we are all there,
all being pulled from death,
pulled from out of hiding,
pulled from where we are buried,
pulled from where the life God wants for us is unnoticed,
all rising with Christ to new life.

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, . . . ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’” (1 Cor. 52,54-55) “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

We celebrate Easter, the historical fact of the Resurrection of Christ, not because it is something that happened 2,000 or so years ago, although it is certainly that. We celebrate the Resurrection because it is something that happens every day. “You have died . . .” Every day in myriad little ways, as those popular songs and our own experience reminds us, we die a little. Every day our life is obscured and hidden; every day our life is made secret even from us and the life God wants for us goes unnoticed.

But . . .
“It is finished!”
That seemingly endless round of sinful little deaths is over;
it crashed down through time and space
to that one instant
on that one cross
and it was done with,
conquered!
“It is finished!”

Every day Jesus, rising from the tomb, grabs us by the wrist and pulls us from the grave. “I came,” said Jesus, “that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) Every day, he pulls us up out of the little deaths of sin into the resurrection of that abundant life. “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “It is finished!”

“When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory,” wrote Paul. (Col. 3:4)
Christ has been revealed; we are revealed with him in glory.
Christ is risen.
We are risen!
Death is conquered!
“It is finished!”
We are free!
Alleluia!

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Given First by God – From the Daily Office – April 5, 2014

April 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NRSV) – April 5, 2014.)

Agape in Greek LetteringThere are six Greek words translated “love” in English: eros (sexual passion), philia (deep friendship), ludus (playful love), pragma (longstanding or mature love), philautia (self love), and agape (unconditional or selfless love). It is the sixth which Paul uses here and which is used extensively throughout the New Testament and in early Christian texts.

It is perhaps perhaps the most radical. This is the love that one extends to all people, whether friends, family members, or strangers. Agape was translated into Latin as caritas, which is the origin of our word “charity.” C.S. Lewis referred to it as “gift love,” the highest form of Christian love. It is similar in nature to concepts appearing in other religious traditions. For example, it has been suggested that the idea of metta or “universal loving kindness” in Theravada Buddhism is the same thing.

Agape is used in the Gospels to describe the love that God has for humanity in general: “For God so loved the world, he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).

It is also used to name the human response to God’s love and to describe the love that Jesus commands be shared and expressed between human beings. In Matthew 5:43-44, agape is used to describe both one’s love of neighbor and the love we are extend to our enemy.

It is not, despite the popularity of this passage as a reading at weddings, about marital love. This is Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians (and through them to all Christians) about “the more excellent way” mentioned at the end of Chapter 12, the manner in which they are to exercise their spiritual gifts.

Chapter 13 does not stand alone. It continues Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts that begins in the previous chapter and continues through the next. Agape here is to be the guiding principal Christians employ in deciding when, where, and how to use the gifts God has given them. They are to be offered to the community with the same sort of self-sacrificing love exhibited by God to all of humankind: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

Agape has nothing to do, as romantic love — eros — does, with attractiveness or attraction; it has nothing to do, as marital love — pragma — does, with compromise; it has nothing to do with any prior relationship, as familial or brotherly love — philia — does. It is to be bestowed on the unloved and the unlovely; it is to be given without regard to whether it is deserved or merited; it is to be given without thought of reciprocity or payback. It is, in a word, to be given as God gives it. It is something human beings are incapable of giving but for the fact that it is first given them by God.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Bodies, Bees, Ants, Trees – From the Daily Office – April 3, 2014

April 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

The body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear were to say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? * * * If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 12:14-17,28 (NRSV) – April 3, 2014.)

Leaf Cutter AntsThe “body analogy” is so deeply engrained in Christian theology through Paul’s use of it in his epistle to the Corinthians and elsewhere that it may be heresy to suggest that its usefulness in the modern world may have come to an end. It was, perhaps, an apt description of the church in a time when church communities were small and close-knit, but does it work in the modern age of the mega-church, or in an age of decentralization?

I ask the question because I truly don’t know . . . .

At a conference I attended recently, a speaker talked about the church as “hive” and described the way in which communities of bees and ants are similar and different, and how that model might be used to understand the modern church. I didn’t buy that argument. Churches are not colonies or hives.

For example, ants are simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information; no ant sees the big picture. No leadership is required; no ant tells any other ant what to do. Even complex behaviors of the colony may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

In many ways, today’s church can seem like this. No single member sees the big picture; when the church community functions smoothly, no leadership is needed. Unfortunately for the analogy, however, human beings are not ants; they are possessed of individual identities and free will, so collections of humans, including churches, seldom run “smoothly.” Furthermore, the thing about ants is that they are pretty much interchangeable; an ant might be a nest worker one day, a trash collector the next, a forager the following day. And one ant can easily say to another, “I have no need of you” because there are plenty of replacements.

Beehives are a bit different from ant colonies, and the insects’ means of communication and “hive-mind” decision making differ, but as an analogy for the church, I think the beehive is as problematic as the ant colony.

More recently, another writer suggested the diffused process of creating computer code by several programmers all connected by a “tree” of files and directories, each working a peace of the bigger project, as an analogy for the church. This overcomes some of the objections to ant colony or beehive metaphors in that one programmer cannot easily take the place of another on the project. I’m not sufficiently familiar with the way teams of code writers work to engage the metaphor, however, so I don’t know how well it works.

Does the body analogy still work? Maybe . . . perhaps to a much less effective degree than when Paul first used it, however. Does the insect community work? Maybe . . . but not sufficiently to provide a true model. Does the programmer tree work? Maybe . . . it may speak to a new generation in ways analogies from nature do not.

What I do know is that each of these metaphors is limited (as any analogy is) and while any one of them may help us understand who we are as a community, they can also mislead us. What is common to them all, however, is that each points toward some form of organization, some type of communication, and a common purpose. Those are the hallmarks of entities — bodies, colonies, hives, communities, churches — that flourish.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Compartmentalization – From the Daily Office – April 2, 2014

April 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 (NRSV) – April 2, 2014.)

Compartmented BoxThe genius of Paul is his holistic approach to understanding the gifts of the Spirit, the talents and skills of human beings. Yes, he says, there are all sorts of talents and skills, but they all come from the same source – God the Spirit – and they are all to be used for the same purpose – building up the community. It is a genius that is lost in the modern world, I’m sorry to say.

I spend some time on social media sites such as Facebook and I see people posting the silliest of comments (including some surprisingly stupid quotations from some otherwise intelligent people) which lay down hard-and-fast, black-and-white assertions about things that are clearly false. For example, on Facebook recently the philosophy Bertrand Russell, famously an atheist, was quoted as saying, “So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” I don’t know the accuracy or source of the quotation, but there it is. It’s a ridiculous statement on several levels, not the first of which is that it is clearly inaccurate.

Although Jesus or the gospel writers may never have specifically said or written, “Intelligence of good” or something of that nature, Jesus often praises those who understand his parables, or expresses frustration with those who don’t, which is a way of praising intelligence. Further, to limit the Christian message to the Gospels alone leaves out the greater part of the New Testament, including Paul who (as here) praises wisdom and knowledge as gifts of God.

In any event, the posting of that quotation led to a discussion in which one person asserted that “faith and reason are two entirely different things and have nothing to do with one another.” If the writer had been an atheist, I’d have chalked that up to polemic . . . . but the writer claimed to be a Christian! As a Christian, I would debate that proposition fully; faith and reason are neither different nor separate! I would not be alone, either. The late Pope John Paul II began one of his many encyclicals with these words:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. (Fides et Ratio, 14 Sept. 1998)

Another participant who self-identified as an American citizen asserted in the conversation that “religion has no place in public politics.” Coming from someone whose country’s foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, asserts “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” a clearly religious sentiment in a public political document, the participant’s argument was not only ridiculous, it could be considered hypocritical! Religion may have no place in government (the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment is based on that premise), but that is a different thing from saying it has no place in politics.

I tried to suggest that these black-and-white generalizations were inaccurate and did not help to further rational consideration of Bertrand Russell’s assertion, the quotation which had started the conversation. Unfortunately, the discussion became so heated and counterproductive (what at one time back in the days of email list-serves would have been called a “flame war”) that I discontinued participation. Eventually, the original poster closed the discussion and deleted the entire thread.

Finally, this morning, I read a news report in which the first paragraph asserted: “Religion has never fully accepted the LGBT community. It goes against their doctrine, which in and of itself is an issue.” That’s so broad a generalization as to be laughable. “Religion” encompasses every faith system ever adopted by human beings and there is no common “doctrine” amongst them! Furthermore, as an Episcopalian whose church has elected and ordained gay and lesbian bishops, who works regularly with LGBT colleagues both lay and ordained, and whose denomination has come down squarely in favor of marriage equality, I can point to at least one religion about which this generalization is false.

Would that people who write for publication, who produce “content” for the internet, and who take part in the “flame wars” that erupt in social media could adopt St. Paul’s more holistic approach! Instead, we see the tendency to compartmentalize and separate, to insist on a division of public from private, politics from religion, faith from reason, gay from straight, black from white, this from that, whatever from something else, and on and on and on.

The world, however, isn’t black and white; it’s all sorts of grays and other colors. The world isn’t compartmentalized and neither are human beings. The world and the people in it are a fascinating mix of talents, skills, gifts, abilities, positions, attitudes, beliefs, and opinions that cross our arbitrary lines and divisions, that spill from one compartment to the next. We Christians believe all of this flows from one source and all of it has one purpose, to build up community. When we try to compartmentalize and separate, community suffers.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

No Words – From the Daily Office – March 29, 2014

March 29, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to the Corinthians:

No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Corinthians 10:13 (NRSV) – March 29, 2014.)

Tear on CheekA couple of months ago, a friend mine published a list of the ten things Christians can’t say while following Jesus. One of those things was “God never gives us more than we can handle.” My friend explained, “Ever tried saying this to a person contemplating suicide? No? Well, of course not. Why? Because it is just wrong. It’s wrong for the reason that #10 (Everything happens for a reason) is wrong and it’s wrong because factual circumstances of living prove that sometimes this life does bring with it more than we can handle.”

And here is Paul, in Paul’s own verbose inimitable way, saying exactly that, or is he? I’ll admit that I first read Paul as saying what my friend says Christians can’t say, but on reflection I think Paul is rather more nuanced than that. “God will not let you be tested beyond your strength” does not (as the thing we can’t say does) suggest that it is God doing the testing; further, Paul adds that God provides us additional strength (“the way out”) that should allow us to endure the testing.

The issue for us is whether we are able to recognize and take advantage of that “way out.”

I’ve known too many people who couldn’t, family members and friends who when faced with the trials and tribulations of life couldn’t handle them and simply cracked, became broken people. My father, who killed himself in a single-car motor vehicle accident while driving drunk, was probably one of them. My mother, who weathered that event and pulled herself and her children up out poverty into relative economic comfort, was not, although in retrospect I believe she waged a life-long battle with depression. How is one person able to contend with what life throws at us and one not?

Paul assures us that “no testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.” In other words, we all face the same trials; they are part of life, part of being human. They are not something “God gives us” to test us; God doesn’t give them to us at all. Some might not buy Paul’s assurances, but I think what he is saying is that the differences are of degree not kind, or perhaps that the differences have to do with our differing abilities and willingnesses to tap into “the way out” provided all of us by God.

Something I learned early in my ministry is that “the way out” has nothing to do with words, teaching, talking, writing, reading, or any of that. It has nothing to do with anyone hearing or anyone else saying “the right words.” Sometimes there are no right words. “The way out” has to do with human companionship, presence, and community.

When I was first ordained a deacon, a family in my congregation lost a teenage daughter to sudden and tragic death in a car accident. I couldn’t reach them by telephone when I first heard the news so I went to the family home thinking I could at least leave a note on the door. I found the parents just arriving home from the hospital. I had no idea what to say so I said virtually nothing; we simply sat together an wept. I felt like a complete pastoral failure; I had offered nothing that would “make it all make sense.” But several weeks later the girl’s mother sent me a short note thanking me for being there; specifically, she thanked me for not saying anything, for just being there to share their grief.

When Paul says that “no testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone,” he is reminding us of the centrality of human community. When he says that God “will provide the way out,” that is what he is again referring to. God doesn’t send the test, the trial, or the tribulation. God, indeed, does not give us more than we can handle; he doesn’t give us these things at all! They are not from God. But the people around us, who weep with us when there are no words, who support us through the troubles, they are.

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Father Funston, a retired Episcopal priest, was last the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Really? What? No! – From the Daily Office – March 20, 2014

March 20, 2014 / / 2 Comments

From the First Letter to the Church in Corinth:

Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – I Corinthians 6:16 (NRSV) – March 20, 2014.)

Wedding rings and moneyThis is one of those times (there are, I admit, quite a few) when Paul loses me! I step back from his words and say, “Really? What?” Is Paul seriously equating sex with a prostitute with marriage? I know that Paul didn’t have too high an opinion of marriage. In the next chapter he will say that he thinks staying single is a much better idea: “I wish that all men were even as I myself am. . . . I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I.” (1 Cor. 7:7,8) But does he really hold it in such low regard so as to equate it with prostitution?

Paul’s quotation is from the second chapter of Genesis, from the story of the creation of Eve at the conclusion of which the biblical author writes, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. ” (Gen. 2:24) The story of the creation of Eve is about God fashioning for Adam a helper, someone with whom he would spend his life tending, caring for, and protecting the Garden of Eden — it’s not the story of a “one night stand.”

The two are not the same, but in the midst of his argument about preserving the purity of the church Paul has let his guard down, blurted out an honest (if inappropriate) appraisal of marriage, and let us see what he really thinks of it. To my mind, this makes suspect everything else he writes about marriage (or that someone else has written in his name). If, for example, he believes that marriage is nothing more than a cheap sexual liaison, that stuff about wives being “subject” to their husbands (Eph. 5:22, Col. 3:18) takes on a different color! I don’t know, it might be reasonable to expect a paid call girl to be “subject” to the man who’s paying her (prostitution seems to be inherently a relationship of power and domination) . . . but that’s not what I understand the relationship between spouses to be.

I rather like what the introduction to the Episcopal Church’s rite of Holy Matrimony says about the mutuality of marriage:

The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God. (BCP 1979, page 423)

And I don’t think marriage was instituted by God to be equivalent to prostitution despite what the Apostle Paul may have thought. So when I read this verse, I step back and ask, “Really? What?” . . . and I answer, “No!”

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

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