That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Isaiah (Page 11 of 14)

One of Those Weeks (Salvation Belongs to Our God) – Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter – April 21, 2013

April 21, 2013 / / 3 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Fourth Sunday of Easter: Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; and John 10:22-30. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Etching of the Heavenly Throne RoomIt’s Good Shepherd Sunday . . . the Fourth Sunday of the Easter Season is always Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year, regardless of which of the three years of the Lectionary cycle we are in, we hear some lessons which mention shepherds or lambs, and we recite the 23rd Psalm as the Gradual, and we sing every “Shepherd hymn” in the hymnal. I’ve been preaching Good Shepherd sermons for 25 years, so I pretty much thought this was going to be one of those Sundays when I could just “wing it” and preach extemporaneously.

But it’s not. The events of the past week have made this a Good Shepherd Sunday unlike any that has come before. This Good Shepherd Sunday, as I read the words of the 23rd Psalm, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” (Ps. 23:4) I cannot help but be aware of all those who, unknowingly, were in that very place on Monday afternoon; I cannot help but think of Boylston Street, Boston, as “the valley of the shadow of death.”

Today’s Gospel lesson is John the Evangelist’s story of an event that happened before Jesus’ crucifixion, something that happened as he was teaching in the Jerusalem Temple. “The Jews,” which is John’s way of naming the temple authorities (the priests and scribes) gathered around Jesus and put him on the spot. “Are you the Messiah?” they ask, “Tell us plainly.”

Jesus’ answer is to say that he has said as much and that it is plain to those who are his sheep, because his sheep understand what he says: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) They hear what I say; they understand my words; and they do what I tell them.

Well, maybe . . . .

Let’s be honest. Understanding Jesus and doing what he says aren’t always very easy. For example, St. Luke tells us that Jesus said, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6:36-37) And St. Matthew tells us that he commanded, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt. 5:44) I know what those words mean, but when it comes to the events of this week, they are not easy to obey.

But . . . OK . . . let’s give it a try. Our prayer book heritage gives us words to pray when we cannot think of the words ourselves, so let’s give this praying for those who hurt us a try using some of those prayers:

O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth: deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 816)

Into your hands, O Lord, we commend Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Savior, praying that he may be redeemed in your sight. Wash him, we pray, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb who was slain to take away the sins of the world; that, whatever defilements he may have contracted in the midst of this earthly life being purged and done away, he may be presented before you pure and without spot; through the merits of Jesus Christ your only Son our Lord. Amen. (Adapted from the BCP 1979, page 488)

O God, whose mercy is everlasting and whose power is infinite; Look down with pity and compassion upon Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and whether you visit him to test his fortitude or to punish his offences, enable him with your grace to submit himself willingly to your holy will and to your judgment. O Lord, go not far from him or any person whom you have laid in a place of darkness; and seeing that you have not cut him off suddenly, chasten him as a father and grant that he, duly considering your great mercies, may genuinely turn to you with true repentance and sincerity of heart; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Adapted from the Book of Common Prayer of 1789, A Form of Prayer for the Visitation of Prisoners.)

This is what our Shepherd requires of us, that we pray for the repose of the soul of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and for the salvation Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, even though we find it very difficult to do.

When I was still practicing law, I had occasion to defend a dentist whose hobby was sculpting. One of the pieces he showed me was a very nicely done, and in most respects very traditional, Crucifix. What was nontraditional about it was the expression on Jesus’ face; it was contorted in obvious and quite extreme rage.

I asked him about that saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Christ depicted in that way, and I can’t say that I’ve ever conceived of this reading any of the Gospels’ crucifixion stories.” He answered by asking me, “You know in the Gospel according to Luke when Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them . . . . ?’ I’ve always heard that as angry, as Jesus saying to God the Father, ‘You forgive them because, right now, I can’t.'”

If you, like me, are having some difficulty in praying for those two boys, let these prayers be offered in that same spirit. We pray for God to take them, for God to forgive them, because right now, we can’t. We know exactly what Jesus meant but right now, we can’t do it. So we ask our Shepherd to do it for us. Because, as the multitude witnessed by St. John of Patmos cried so clearly, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:10)

That’s one of the Good News lessons for today, for this week, I think. Jesus asks us to pray for and forgive those who do us wrong, but if we can’t, he can do it for us. We don’t need the fancy words of prayers out of the prayer book tradition. We just need Jesus’ own words, his words on the cross, “Father, forgive them.” That’s really all we need to say, “Father, forgive them.” Because even if we can’t, he can.

I think the other Good News lesson for this week is in something else Jesus says in today’s Gospel lesson: “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

Yesterday, I was at a diocesan leadership conference and, as you might expect, during the break times, our conversations centered around the events of the week.

A colleague commented at a diocesan meeting this morning, “It’s been one of those weeks.” My first thought was, “One of what weeks? There aren’t very many weeks like this!” The more I thought about it, however, I think maybe every week is like this. Every week people die. It’s an uncomfortable reality, but it’s true. Every week people die. It’s nothing to fear, however. I remember hearing a bishop (it may have been Desmond Tutu) say that being a Christian means (among other things) accepting the fact that you have already died. Certainly that is the witness of scripture: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Rom. 6:3-4) And, again, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:2-3) And, again, “The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” (2 Tim. 2:11) The very meaning of the Easter Season which we continue to celebrate is that death has been conquered, and that to God’s faithful people “life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.” (BCP 1979, page 382)

And every week people do awful things to other people. Sometimes those things are hugely catastrophic for many people, like the bombs at the marathon finish line. Sometimes those things go unseen by nearly everyone except the one injured, like the bullying that has led so many teens to commit suicide. Such things, awful things happen all the time. But . . . “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” (Isaiah 40:28-29) And, again, “The Lord upholds all who are falling, and raises up all who are bowed down.” (Psalm 145:14) And, again, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philip. 4:13) The very meaning of the Easter Season which we continue to celebrate is that the power of God overcomes anything, any-awful-thing, the evildoers of this world can throw at us.

Not very long after the bombs exploded in Boston, comedian Patton Oswalt posted a reflection on his Facebook page in which he said:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem — one human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evildoers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

I think that is the reality to which Scripture testifies; I think that is the triumph of Easter — that the good will always outnumber the evil. “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

So I guess my colleague was right. It’s been one of those weeks . . . a week when life was changed for some, a week in which the Presence of God helped people get through some really awful stuff, a week when the good outnumbered the bad. It’s been one of those weeks. Every week is. Thanks be to 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.

Monstrous Relief – Sermon for Resurrection Sunday – March 31, 2013

March 31, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Resurrection Sunday, March 31, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, First Sunday of Easter: Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; and John 20:1-18 . These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Christ Appearing to His Disciples after the Resurrection by Wm Blake

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

So writes novelist and poet John Updike in the first of his Seven Stanzas at Easter from the collection Telephone Poles and Other Poems. Here is the rest of the poem:

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

“Let us not seek to make it less monstrous!” I love that line!

Only a poet like John Updike could use the word monstrous to describe the Resurrection of Christ and, in spite of its shock value, or perhaps because of it, it is the perfect word, an ambiguous word that captures the essence of the entire Palm Sunday – Maundy Thursday – Good Friday – Resurrection Day event. Monstrous can, and usually does, mean something like “frightful or hideous; extremely ugly; shocking or revolting; awful or horrible,” and those are certainly good words to describe the way the people of Jerusalem turned on Jesus, the way his disciple Judas betrayed him, the way his other followers denied and abandoned him, the way the authorities both Jewish and Roman abused and killed him. It was all monstrous; there’s no doubt about that!

Monstrous, however, can also mean “extraordinarily great; huge; immense; outrageous; overwhelming.” And those are superlative ways to describe the fact of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead! It is a huge thing! It is immense, outrageous, overwhelming! Yes, the Resurrection is monstrous!

I have been thinking a lot recently about two people who are hardly ever thought of in all the drama and majesty of Holy Week and Easter: one of them is mentioned briefly only by John in his story of Jesus’ Crucifixion; the other isn’t named at all. I refer to Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ mother and foster father.

Of course, we know nothing of Joseph during Jesus’ adult ministry; after that event in the Jerusalem Temple when Jesus was about 13, Joseph is never again mentioned in the Gospels. Some suppose this is because he had passed away, but I like to think that he was just back home in Nazareth working the family carpentry business, making tables and chairs, supervising construction of homes, building hope chests, keeping the family provided for so that Jesus could go about his ministry and Mary could accompany him.

Mary is mentioned in John’s story of the Crucifixion as standing at the foot of the cross and being entrusted by Jesus to the disciple whom he loved. And the legend from which we get the 14th Station of the Stations of the Cross, and which Michelangelo’s exquisitely beautiful Pieta depicts, is that when his body was removed from the cross she held him, dead, in her arms. But there is no mention of her or of Joseph at Jesus’ burial, nor are they mentioned in any of the accounts of Christ’s post-resurrection appearances.

That omission, for I am sure that is what it is, an omission, disturbs me. Yesterday, was the 55th anniversary of my father’s accidental death at the age of 39. His mother and father, my grandparents, were in their sixties when he died. One of my clearest memories of childhood is his funeral. I remember how, as we were leaving the graveside, my grandparents hung back, how they could not step away from nor turn their backs on the grave that held their child’s lifeless body. When, at last, they accepted my Uncle Scott’s physical encouragement to do so, my grandmother said to my mother, “A mother should not outlive her child.” She would know that feeling again just a few years later when my Uncle Scott died of cancer.

And my mother would know it, as well, when in 1993 my only sibling, my older brother Rick, died of brain cancer. I vividly remember doing exactly what my uncle had done, physically moving my mother and stepfather away from the grave, the grave they could not leave on their own. Later that day, my mother said to me, “You’re grandmother was right. A parent should not outlive her child.”

Having seen my grandparents and my parents at the graves of their children, I cannot believe that Mary and Joseph were not there when the stone was rolled into place, when Jesus was buried in that borrowed tomb.

Updike’s description of the Resurrection and his admonition to us, “Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,” so aptly describes the entire event of Holy Week and Easter, because we cannot appreciate the overwhelming wonder of the Resurrection, without taking into account the horror and ugliness of the whole thing, Judas’ betrayal, the other disciples abandonment, Peter’s denial, the trial before Pilate, Christ’s scourging and humiliation, his bitter agony on the Cross, his final self-emptying in death, and his burial at which I cannot but believe his mother and foster father were present. It is all monstrous; painful and ugly and awful in the first sense of that wonderfully ambiguous adjective.

I thought that I had some sense of that because I had witnessed my grandparents’ and my parents’ anguish at the deaths of their children; I thought I understood what old Simeon had said to Mary when Jesus was dedicated in the Temple as an infant, his disturbing prophecy, “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.” (Luke 2:35) I thought that I had understood all that until a couple of weeks ago.

As some of you know, two weeks ago Good Friday, sixteen days ago, our daughter disappeared. She stopped posting things to Facebook, which she had been in the habit of doing almost hourly from her cell phone. She stopped answering her cell phone; calls would go directly to voicemail. Her friends checked her home and found her car gone and no one there. She wasn’t at her place of work; she wasn’t at her school; she wasn’t at any of her usual hangouts. My wife, our son, our daughter-in-law, and several of our daughter’s friends looked everywhere they could think of in the area of St. Louis, Missouri, where her apartment is. I played the role of information central, receiving their reports and letting everyone know what everyone knew, which was nothing. We went to bed that night knowing nothing.

Family systems therapists have discovered that patterns of events run in families. Not just habits or ways of handling things, not just customs or traditions, but actual life events repeat from generation to generation. I went to bed convinced that the pattern of a child predeceasing his or her parents was playing out again. I knew in the very depths of my being that my daughter was dead.

Let me tell you, old Simeon in that Temple proved himself a master of understatement. That sword of grief does not simply pierce a parent’s soul; it rips the soul to shreds. That, I now know, is why my grandparents and my parents could not leave those graves, and that is why I cannot believe that Mary and Joseph were not there in that garden when Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus buried their child.

Now, lest you believe that this is a funeral oration rather than an Easter homily, let me assure you that our daughter is not dead! As it turned out (Thanks be to God!), she had gone to Kansas City on a personal errand and, while there, had become acutely ill and been admitted to a local hospital on an emergency basis. She had lost her cell phone and because she hadn’t memorized our telephone numbers, she couldn’t call us. (One of the dangers of cell phones, it turns out, is relying on its memory of stored numbers instead of one’s own memory!) On Saturday morning, through a friend, she got word to her mother about where she was, and then her mother called me. Our daughter is now out of the hospital, is back in St. Louis, and is back to her usual occupations. But I cannot tell you how relieved her mother and I were on that Saturday morning! All of the anguish and fear and sorrow and grief of the night before drained away. I cannot say that we were joyful or happy, but we were profoundly, overwhelmingly, monstrously relieved.

Which brings me back to Mary and Joseph and the first Easter morning . . . . I have an entirely new understanding of the Resurrection story. Preachers and theologians toss around a funny word to describe the way we view and interpret Holy Scripture. The word is hermeneutic. It means, basically, the method or principle through which we understand the text; it is the filter through which we appreciate its meaning. There are shared, intellectual hermeneutics, but there are also highly personal hermeneutics. I share my grandparents’ and my parents’ and my family’s recent experiences with you so that I can also share with you, and you can enter into, my new personal hermeneutic for grasping the impact of the Day of Christ’s Resurrection.

Just as I am puzzled by the absence of almost any mention of Mary and Joseph in the narrative of Christ’s death and burial, and I am astounded that there is no allusion to them in the Gospel accounts of that first Easter morning or any time after his Resurrection! The only word about either of them is in the first chapter of the Book of Acts and, again, it’s only Mary who gets mentioned. Luke, the author of Acts, says that following Christ’s Ascension forty days after his Resurrection the apostles “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.” (Acts 1:14) That’s it, that one mention! I find that astonishing! Apparently so have many Christians throughout the ages, because there is an extra-biblical tradition that the Virgin Mary was the first person to witness our Lord’s Resurrection.

The Golden Legend, which is a medieval collection of stories about the saints, says that the first appearance of the resurrected Christ on Easter Day was to the Virgin Mary:

It is believed to have taken place before all the others, although the evangelists say nothing about it.. . . . [I]f this is not to be believed, on the ground that no evangelist testifies to it . . . perish the thought that such a son would fail to honor such a mother by being so negligent! . . . Christ must first of all have made his mother happy over his resurrection, since she certainly grieved over his death more than the others. He would not have neglected his mother while he hastened to console others.

St. Ignatius of Antioch (1st C.) claimed it was so, as did St. Ambrose of Milan (4th C.), St. Paulinus of Nola (4th C.), the poet Sedulius (5th C.), St. Anselm of Canterbury (11th C.), St. Albertus Magnus (13th C.), St. Bernardino da Siena (15th C.), and the bible scholar Juan Maldonado (16th C.)

Most recently, the late Bishop of Rome, his Holiness John Paul II, in a general audience in 1997 expressed this opinion:

The Gospels mention various appearances of the risen Christ, but not a meeting between Jesus and his Mother. This silence must not lead to the conclusion that after the Resurrection Christ did not appear to Mary . . . . Indeed, it is legitimate to think that [his] Mother was probably the first person to whom the risen Jesus appeared. Could not Mary’s absence from the group of women who went to the tomb at dawn indicate that she had already met Jesus? This inference would also be confirmed by the fact that the first witnesses of the Resurrection, by Jesus’ will, were the women who had remained faithful at the foot of the Cross and therefore were more steadfast in faith. (Gen. Aud., Wednesday, 21 May 1997)

I cannot but believe that the Risen Christ appeared to Mary and Joseph (if he was present as I prefer to think he was), and that they would have been at least as profoundly, overwhelmingly, monstrously relieved as my wife and I were two weeks ago yesterday, if not more so!

So here’s my new thought, my new hermeneutic of Easter Day. I think that the overwhelming initial response, especially of Mary and Joseph, but also of Mary Magdalene, of Peter, of the disciple whom Jesus loved, of all the others, to the fact of Jesus’ Resurrection was not, as we are usually told at Easter Services, joyfulness! I think it was relief. The dictionary defines relief as “alleviation of pain, as the easing of anxiety, as deliverance from distress.” This is the appropriate experience and emotion of Easter Day, profound relief, not immediate joy or gladness; I think that comes later in the Easter Season and that it comes later in life as we live out our Easter faith. But in the immediate aftermath of the monstrous-ness of Holy Week, in the wake of the horrible ugliness of death, Christ’s or anyone else’s, one is simply not ready to be jubilant and happy. In the face of our own sinfulness and spiritual dysfunction, we are not ready for joy and gladness. But the fact of Christ’s Resurrection relieves us of grief and sorrow; it relieves us of sin and death. The experience and impact of Easter Day is one of profound, overwhelming, (one might even say) monstrous relief.

Perhaps that is why Jesus stuck around for forty days, to continually reassure and sustain the disciples in their relief from fear and sorrow and grief, so that they could move into joy and gladness as time went on. Perhaps that is why Easter is not a single day, but a season of fifty days, so that as it progresses we can . . . like Mary and Joseph, like the Magdalen and Peter, like the disciple whom Jesus loved and all the apostles . . . move from relief into Resurrection joy, so that it provides a pattern with which we can handle the inevitable losses in our lives. As life goes on and as the victory of life over death sinks in, Easter relief grows into Easter joy, something that propels us toward action and compels us to invite others into the Resurrected life of our Risen Lord.

As Christians, we have access through the relief of Christ’s Resurrection into a joy that is unshakable. We must remember, however, that joy is really not an emotion — it is a virtue. Easter joy does not mean being happy all the time or being fine when times are difficult; Easter joy means being sustained by the power of the Resurrection. What Easter joy means is that in the depths of our being, despite the circumstances we may face, despite any fears we may have, despite whatever may be tearing up our souls, despite whatever sin or spiritual malaise we may be in, we are able to get through them, to let go of them, and to find relief and eternal life in the Resurrected Christ, a life into which we invite others.

John tells us that on that first Easter morning, when Jesus called the Magdalen by name, “she turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).” I do not hear joy and happiness in the voice of this woman who had just been weeping in grief and confusion at his grave; I do hear relief. She was so comforted that she grabbed on to him, but he said to her, “Do not hold on to me . . . . .” It has been said that joy comes from letting go — letting go of our attachments, letting go of any thoughts that the present moment should or even could be different than it is, letting go of our expectations. Joy is the virtue of celebrating present, of living in the moment, something to which we come through a process of detachment and release. Resurrection Day is not the end of the process; it is the beginning. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus said to Mary Magdalen, “But go to my brothers . . . .” Go and invite them into the outrageous reality of which you are now a part.

Easter Day brings relief, overwhelming relief! Through that relief we are able to let go, to release our fears, our griefs, our worries, and our sorrows with absolute abandon, to be completely freed of our sinfulness! In letting go as the Easter Season and as our Easter faith progress, we ultimately find joy, unutterably ecstatic joy, huge, overwhelming, outrageous joy into which we are compelled to invite others!

“Let us not seek to make it less monstrous!”

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

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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.

Wells of Spirituality – From the Daily Office – March 5, 2013

March 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

From the Gospel according to John:

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.'”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 7:37-38 (NRSV) – March 5, 2013.)

St Mary's Well Cefn Meiriadog WalesScholars and commentators seem to agree (and a computer search of various translations confirms) that there is no single verse of the Hebrew scriptures saying what John says Jesus quoted. It seems to be an amalgam or summary of several different bits of the prophets. When I read this story of John’s, however, it isn’t a prophet that comes immediately to mind. Instead, I think of a portrayal of Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs:

Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, “You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” (Proverbs 9:1-6 NRSV)

John’s picture of Jesus standing in the streets of Jerusalem calling out an invitation to all comers is very reminiscent of Proverbs’ picture of Wisdom calling “from the highest places in the town.” They may be using different metaphors for spiritual nourishment, but the offer is the same. And, since John has clearly dipped into the Wisdom tradition in Jewish thought in his Prologue (John 1:1-18), the parallel imagery is understandable.

Of course, a prophet, Isaiah, also comes to mind especially when this Gospel is read in the context of Morning Prayer. The canticle called The First Song of Isaiah (Isaiah 12:2-6) includes these words:

Surely, it is God who saves me; *
I will trust in him and not be afraid.
For the Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense, *
and he will be my Savior.
Therefore you shall draw water with rejoicing *
from the springs of salvation. (BCP translation)

When I consider the words of this Gospel together with Isaiah’s song, I come to the conclusion that the springs of salvation are in the believer’s heart, that we draw living waters from deep inside ourselves. I must confess that I am predisposed to that conclusion. Several years ago I was introduced to the observation of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Everyone has to drink from his own well,” by the writing of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez. In his book We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gutierrez wrote, “Spirituality is like living water that springs up in the very depths of the experience of faith.” From that deep experience we “live, and walk in the way of insight.”

Frank Griswold, a former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, once said that Anglican spirituality emphasizes the progressive nature of grace, carefully considering our human experience of the divine. “Christ happens to us over time,” he wrote. “The One who makes use of water, bread and wine to mediate his presence can make use of the stuff of our lives and relationships to address us and draw us more deeply into his life, death, and resurrection.” From being drawn deeply into the on-going life of Christ we drink from that well, we develop insight, and “the stuff of our lives” becomes the spring from which the living waters of grace flow out to others.

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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.

Reason and Consensus: Biblical Political Values – From the Daily Office – February 26, 2013

February 26, 2013 / / 2 Comments

From the Psalms:

How long will you assail a person,
will you batter your victim, all of you,
as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence?
Their only plan is to bring down a person of prominence.
They take pleasure in falsehood;
they bless with their mouths,
but inwardly they curse.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 62:3-4 (NRSV) – February 26, 2013.)

U.S. CapitolAs I read the lessons and Psalms of the Daily Office lectionary for today, this was the passage that spoke loudest to me, but I did not want to write about it. I tried to reflect upon and author a meditation about some other bits of the Scriptures appointed for today, but my thoughts kept returning to this one.

I’m fairly confident that my comments about it will not be readily accepted by, will indeed by rejected by some of my readers, including not a few of my parishioners. But I have to be honest in my understanding and exegesis of the Bible, and its application to our modern world.

I usually use the version of the Psalms from The Book of Common Prayer in these meditations, but today I’ve chosen to use the New Revised Standard Version because the translation is more accurate. The Prayer Book puts these words in the first person, “How long will you assail me . . . ?” The NRSV is closer to the Hebrew which is in the third person, “How long will you assail a man . . . ? The Hebrew is ‘iysh which can mean a male human being, but can also be translated as gender neutral, so the NRSV is not wrong to do so.

The theologian Karl Barth, in an interview with Time Magazine in 1963 advised theologians “to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” Three years later, in another interview, he said, “The Pastor and the Faithful should not deceive themselves into thinking that they are a religious society, which has to do with certain themes; they live in the world. We still need – according to my old formulation – the Bible and the Newspaper.”

When I read these words from the Bible, I cannot help but remember these words from the news: “I hope he fails. . . . . I hope Obama fails.” (Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, January 16, 2009)

I cannot help but remember these words from the news: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, National Journal interview, October 23, 2010)

I cannot help but remember these words from the news: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” (Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Oh, Politico, concerning President Obama’s first-term agenda, October 28, 2010)

I cannot do anything but what Professor Barth admonished and interpret these newspaper reports from my Bible, especially when my Bible decries and condemns those whose “only plan is to bring down a person of prominence.”

I make no bones of that fact that I am politically a progressive. I’ve never hidden that from anyone and in today’s current American political climate, especially since I live in a “swing state”, that means that I voted for President Obama, twice. My congregation knows that. In the first election, I put no political bumper stickers on my car, but my wife had an Obama/Biden sticker on hers. In the second election, we both did. If I’d had my druthers, I’d rather have voted for the Green Party but, as I said, I live in a swing state and a vote for the Greens would have been, effectively, a vote for the Republican candidates. I voted for President Obama.

So there they are; my political cards are on the table. In politics, economics, and social values, I’m on the “left” of the spectrum. No secrets.

But this isn’t about left or right, Democrat or Republican. It isn’t really about politics, at all. It’s about consensus building and governing with with reason; it’s about values that are not only political but Biblical.

I take the Bible seriously; I’m fairly conservative when it comes to exegeting Holy Scripture. When a Psalm negatively portrays the sorts of politics we see in modern America, I take it seriously.

I can remember a time, not so long ago, when this wasn’t the way our leaders conducted the country’s business. For example, although I was not (and never will be) a member of his party, I remember with affection and respect Senator Everett Dirksen, R-Ill. His was a voice of reason and compromise; his skillful working with Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-Mn) and Mike Mansfield (D-Mt) led to the end of a Republican filibuster and passage of the Civil Rights Act 1964.

It was a Republican who spoke of “the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.” That Republican was President Dwight D. Eisenhower giving his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961.

President Eisenhower worked well with a Democratic Senate leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Tx. They both had a fondness for government by consensus and reached across party lines to form a close working relationship. One of Johnson’s favorite sayings was “Come, let us reason together;” he spoke it often after he became president himself. It is a quotation from Scripture:

“Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool. If you consent and obey, you will eat the best of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” Truly, the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 1:18-20, NAS)

Our political parties do not have to play the sort of political games currently being played. They have worked together in the past; they can do so again. Planning only to bring down one’s opponent, refusing to work toward consensus, failing to reason together . . . these are not only bad politics, they are unfaithful.

Scripture is filled with admonitions to work together:

Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when brethren live together in unity! (Ps 133:1, BCP version)

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. (1 Cor. 1:10, NRSV)

Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph. 4:1-3, NRSV)

Make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. (Philip. 2:2, NRSV)

Our political leaders who claim the Christian faith should not be governing (in truth, failing to govern) on the basis of “bringing down a person of prominence.” Any who do should be taken to task, but not on the basis of their politics, because on politics people of faith can disagree. No, they should be taken to task because such behavior is unfaithful; it betrays the Biblical witness and the admonitions of Scripture to reason together. Reason and consensus are not only political values; they are Biblical values.

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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!

====================

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

The Ash Wednesday Exhortation – Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent – February 17, 2013

February 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, February 17, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Lent 1, Year C: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2,9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; and Luke 4:1-13. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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LentIn The Book of Common Prayer on page 264 you’ll find the beginning of the liturgy for Ash Wednesday. If you were here on that day which marks the beginning of this season we call Lent, or in another church to be marked on your forehead with the cross of ashes, to be reminded of your mortality with the familiar words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return,” you will also have heard the Lenten admonition which the presiding priest reads at each Ash Wednesday service. It begins at the bottom of that page and comes in the service after the reading of the lessons of the day and the preaching of the sermon.

It seems to me that many of us hear those words, perhaps even read along with them (as is our wont as Episcopalians), but I wonder to what extent we actually think about them, consider them, and internalize them. So this morning, as we enter into the Sundays which are in Lent but not of Lent, I’d like to return to Ash Wednesday and look more closely at, and perhaps offer a few cogent comments about, the Ash Wednesday admonition.

Dear People of God, . . . .

. . . . it starts and let’s just stop there and consider what that means. We hear those words, “the People of God,” often in Scripture, and when we do we usually understand it to mean those people long ago, those folks who lived way back then 2,000 or 3,000 or more years ago and way over there in the deserts of the Middle East in Palestine or Judea or Israel or Syria. “The People of God,” we think, are the Hebrews, those folks who Moses helped get their freedom from Pharaoh in Egypt, the ones to whom Moses is talking in the reading from Deuteronomy this morning. Or, perhaps, we believe “the People of God” are the descendants of Abraham, that “wandering Aramean” whom Moses’ audience was to claim as their ancestor. Or, again, maybe we think of the modern Jews as “the People of God,” the Chosen people with whom God has that special covenant.

But here we are addressed in the liturgy of Ash Wednesday as if we are the People of God! Do we think of ourselves that way? And more specifically, does each of us think of him- or herself individually as a “person of God”?

Did you know that that one of my titles, one of the names of the office of ministry in which I work, actually comes from that term? The word “parson,” which describes a parish priest or village clergyman comes from the old or middle English version of the word “person”. The medieval parish priest was the “person of God,” the “parson,” whose job it was to be in the church praying the liturgical hours, offering the sacrifice of the Mass, looking after the spiritual business of the community so the rest of the people wouldn’t have to! They could get on with the planting of crops, the tilling of fields, the harvesting of produce, the care and feeding of livestock. They could do all the other things of daily life and then go to the pub and have a beer because the “parson,” the “person of God” would have have taken care of the religious stuff, the spiritual stuff for them.

That is not, however, the way it’s supposed to be because no one person is the “person of God” — we are all “people of God;” we are all “persons of God.”

The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection . . .

Now pay close attention to that! The focus of Lent is not Lent! The focus of Lent is “our Lord’s passion and resurrection.” The focus of Lent is Maundy Thursday and Jesus’ agonizing night of prayer in the garden at Gethsemane. The focus of Lent is Good Friday and his terrible, tortured death on the cross of Calvary. The focus of Lent is Holy Saturday and his burial in the borrowed tomb, his descent into hell, his freeing the souls of the dead. The focus of Lent is the empty tomb of Easter morning, his resurrection, his fifty days on earth appearing to, teaching, and sending forth his apostles. The focus of Lent is his Ascension into heaven to be always alive and always with us, our great high priest eternally pleading our case before the Father, elevating our humanity into divinity. Lent is never about Lent! Lent is always looking forward. Lent is always about Easter and beyond.

. . . . and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting. This season of Lent . . . .

As many of you know, I was not reared in the Episcopal Church . . . I wasn’t really brought up in any religious tradition. On one side, my mother’s, the family were part of the Campbellite tradition, out of which the Disciples of Christ is the largest current denominational body; they didn’t know from Adam about the church year, about Lent or any other season. On my father’s side they were Methodists in the old Methodist Episcopal (South) mold; no liturgical seasons for them! So we didn’t do this Lent thing. I had Catholic classmates in grade school, of course. I knew they were Catholic because they would show up at school on Ash Wednesday morning having come from Mass with a smudge of ash on their foreheads; they were doing Lent.

But the only thing I knew about “Lent” was that in the sort of English my grandmother spoke it was the past tense of the verb “to lend”. I thought the Roman Catholics were maybe paying back to God something they had borrowed from God. And, you know what? That’s not far from being a good description of what Lent is, in fact, all about. In our lesson from Deuteronomy today that is exactly what Moses instructs the people who are about to enter into the Promised Land, these Hebrews which he has led from captivity in Egypt. They are to remember that everything they have or ever will have has been given to them by God, through no merit of their own; they are to return to God at least some portion, the “first fruits”, of that which God has lent to them.

This season of Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism.

Did you know that back in the beginning, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity first legal and then the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was a big deal to become a Christian? It was a dangerous thing because it was illegal, and Christians were often blamed for the Empire’s problems and made scapegoats, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. One could not simply walk into a congregation and ask to become a member. You had to be instructed and tested, and often it took as long as three years to complete all the catechesis needed to be accepted into the assembly, to be permitted to undergo the rite of Holy Baptism, which was commonly done only at Easter. And during these forty days of Lent modeled on the forty days of Christ’s tempting in the desert about which we heard in the Gospel lesson, the catechumens underwent their most rigorous training and testing, with mortification of the flesh, denial of even the simplest pleasures, a severely restricted diet (a “fast” in the dietary sense). Only then could they be baptized.

This was a big deal because baptism was considered a sort of death. St. Paul puts it this way in the Letter to Romans (not in the portion we heard today, but in the Sixth Chapter in a passage we read on Easter morning): “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3) The symbolism of Holy Baptism, especially when done in the traditional way by full immersion, is that the water represents the soil of the grave; we are “buried” as we go under the surface and as we come up out of it, we are resurrected: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. . . . If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” (6:6,8)

So Lent was a time for this baptismal preparation, and it was a time that reminded every member of the church of their own baptismal promises, of their own “death” to the world and their new, resurrected life in Christ, of the seriousness of what it meant (and means) to be a Christian.

It was also a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church.

There was no rite of private confession in the early church; that was created by the Irish monks in the 6th Century and eventually spread to the whole church after the 9th Century. Nor was there a general confession in the early liturgies such as we now have in the Anglican form of worship that we enjoy. No, in the early church when a member was guilty of some grave sin they had to confess it before the whole assembly, after which they would be excluded from communion and they would be given some penance, some way to make amends before they would be permitted to return to worship with the congregation.

Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.

Of course, the congregation would, as the admonition suggests, realize that not only was the repentant sinner in need of forgiveness; they all were — and we all are. You’ll remember the story of Jesus encountering the rabbis and villagers planning to stone the woman taken in adultery. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,” he said. (John 8:7) And not one of them did so because they realized, as Lent calls us to realize, that we are all sinners and all stand in need of forgiveness.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.

So this closing invitation to “a holy Lent” just asks us to do a lot of things we hear about every Lent, doesn’t it? Every year someone like me gets up in front of the congregation in every parish and prattles on about things we should do for the next six weeks, which are really things we ought to do year-round, but this time of year we sort of focus on them. We know we’re supposed to “fast” – that means give something up, right?

When people ask me what I’m going to give up for Lent, I always answer, “Chocolate.” It’s easy for me to give that up – I don’t eat chocolate. I should give up . . . I don’t know . . . my Irish whiskey? Good wines? I know! I’ll give up Downton Abbey right after tonight’s episode (the Season 3 finale).

But really, the point of fasting and self-denial is not the “mortification of the flesh.” It isn’t making oneself miserable because we think we ought to join Jesus in his desert misery, his famished hunger as described in today’s gospel lesson. The point of giving something up is to make room in our lives for something else, or to pay over or pay forward that which we give up to the benefit of someone else, or to concentrate on something of spiritual benefit to ourselves.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, God questions God’s people about fasting. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” writes the Prophet. Delivering God’s word, Isaiah tells us that God asks, “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” (58:4-5) The answer to these questions is clearly, “No.” The Prophet continues:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (58:6-7)

If I give up whiskey for Lent, the money I save not buying it should be given to World Vision International or to Episcopal Relief and Development or to our own Free Farmers’ Market food pantry. If I do give up Downton Abbey, the time I save should be given to study of Scripture, another of the admonitions of this Ash Wednesday exhortation.

The forty days of Lent are, symbolically, our time with Jesus in the desert, our time to emulate our Lord in his preparation for ministry, our time to face our temptations as he faced his. Note how he did so. Each time the devil would set something wonderful before him – food, or world power, or spiritual superiority – Jesus responded by quoting Scripture. Jesus was sustained, strengthened, and empowered by the words of the Law and the Prophets. How many of us could do that?

The truth is that I couldn’t! I’ve never been able to memorize chapter and verse. If you ask me, “Doesn’t the Bible say something about . . . . ?” my response will be to shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t know. I’ll look that up.” Don’t get me wrong! I read Scripture all the time, every day in fact. I just don’t have the head to remember it all. That’s what concordances and computer search programs are for! I know what’s in there, I just don’t always know where it is. But just because someone may not have the knack to remember chapter-and-verse is no excuse not to study God’s Word. So I do, and I commend the practice to you, so that, as Paul wrote to the Romans, “The word [will be] near you, on your lips and in your heart.” We are all, as the collect for today confesses, assaulted by many temptations; through study and contemplation of the Bible, we can each find God mighty to save; we can each, like Jesus, be sustained and strengthened and empowered by Scripture.

And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer.

And then there is a rubric, a word of instruction, saying, “Silence is then kept for a time.” The rubric is not part of the Ash Wednesday exhortation, but those may be the most important words on the page.

When the exhortation and our tradition ask us to “give something up for Lent,” the purpose is to turn our attention from the distractions of the world around us. At the vestry’s retreat the past couple of days, our facilitator asked us to consider the difference between “doing” and “being”, to consider whether the job of the vestry is to “do things” or rather to “be something”. As part of a clergy study group, I’m currently reading a book entitled Beyond Busyness: Time Wisdom in Ministry. The author’s premise is that being “busy” is a bad thing, that when we are “busy” we are allowing a lot of small distractions take us away from the bigger, more important things one which we should use our time. “Busyness” results from concentrating too much on “doing” and too little on “being”.

Keeping silence for a time helps us turn our attention away from busy doing and toward productive being.

There is a lovely verse from the Psalms. (Don’t ask me which verse in which psalm! Remember, I just can’t recall that stuff.) The verse reads, “Be still, and know that I am God!” (46:10) In those catalogs like National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting send out from time to time, I’ve seen a carved stone plaque of that verse which repeats the verse several times, but in each reiteration leaves off a word or two:

Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.

So I leave you with the rubric as, perhaps, the most important admonition of Lent: “Silence is kept for a time.” Be still and know that God is God. . . . . Be still and know that God is. . . . . Be still and know. . . . . Be still. . . . . Be.

Amen.

Enduring Enlightenment – From the Daily Office: Ash Wednesday – February 13, 2013

February 13, 2013 / / 0 Comments

From the Letter to the Hebrews:

Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Hebrews 12:12-4 (NRSV) – February 13, 2013.)

Running the RaceThe author of the Letter to the Hebrews is using an athletic metaphor, and borrowing from the Hebrew Scriptures, to make a point about endurance.

Taking up his own earlier metaphor of “running with perseverance the race that is set before us” (12:1), he echoes the Prophet Isaiah, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.'” (Isa. 35:3-4a) He draws from the Proverbs, “Keep straight the path of your feet . . . .” (Prov. 4:26)

Endurance, also known as “fortitude,” is one of Christianity’s four cardinal virtues. In Freemasonry (yes, I’m a Freemason), this Christian virtue is defined as “that noble and steady purpose of mind, whereby we are enabled to undergo any pain, peril, or danger, when prudentially deemed expedient.” As a subject of preaching, I’m afraid, this virtue gets rather short shrift in today’s church. I suppose that may be because the church reflects the popular culture which, with its emphasis on self-expression and instant gratification, emphasizes a sense of entitlement to ephemeral happiness and comfort.

As we begin Lent, it is well to reflect on this virtue. This period of forty days is meant to be our spiritual union with Jesus in his time of desert testing. If ever there was an example of endurance or fortitude, it has to be those days of temptation in the arid land beyond the Jordan. Endurance is a part of our Christian heritage, going back to Jesus and beyond him into the centuries-long story of the endurance of Israel, God’s chosen people.

Endurance is also one of the four Buddhist virtues, although in that religious tradition it is called “eternity”. It is regarded as a quality of inner being which allows the practitioner to remain unswayed by the ever-changing circumstances of life while confidently challenging him- or herself toward enlightenment. It leads, it is said, to another of the Buddhist virtues, happiness, a kind of contentment that can withstand the ups and downs of human existence including death. This is quite different from the vacuous “happiness” of the modern age, that insipid self-indulgence buoyed by unprecedented affluence and rampant consumerism.

This Lent let us eschew the world’s “happiness” and strive for that eternal happiness common to the Christian and Buddhist faith traditions, that noble and steady purpose of mind, that quality of inner being, that eternal endurance that leads to enlightenment, that leads to 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.

The Tongue of a Teacher – From the Daily Office – February 1, 2013

February 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Isaiah:

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens —
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Isaiah 50:4 (NRSV) – February 1, 2013.)

I Love My Teacher“The tongue of a teacher” is a such a ripe and fruitful image — it calls to mind all those wonderful people who are so formative in our lives. I remember particular teachers from throughout my life who have been and still are forces that formed and form who I am.

I’ve spent the past few days laid up by a case of viral enteritis with all of its unpleasant symptoms and so the first teacher to come to mind is my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Hancock. My most vivid memory of her is from a day when I was similarly ill and my father had to come to school to pick me up; I have other memories of Mrs. Hancock, but I especially remember how gentle and solicitous she was to a sick five-year-old.

In the Sixth Grade my teacher was Miss Upton. I was in love with Miss Upton, but she married during spring break and broke my heart! I think I fell in love with her because of how she dealt with the class the day President Kennedy was assassinated. I’m sure she appreciated the tragedy of the day much more than her group of 11- and 12-year-old students and was probably more upset than we were, yet she was a solid rock of calm and reassurance.

There were many others – Mrs. Weckle and Mr. Sallee in high school – Dr. Dykstra and Dr. Marcuse in college – professors in graduate school, law school, and seminary – and, of course, the many, many informal teachers we all encounter throughout life. All those people who have been given “the tongue of a teacher.” It is not the subjects they teach that makes them memorable; it is the way they taught, the way they lived their lives that infused their teaching.

Yes, teachers teach “subjects” – the nuts-and-bolts of mathematics or literature or property law or koine Greek. But more importantly a good teacher teaches how to learn and how to live. Good teachers foster critical thinking skills so that, given a concept, a student may go beyond the facts of the day and deal with any matter he or she may encounter. Great teachers foster critical living skills so that a student may go deeper than the mere facts and encounter the truth.

I thank God for Mrs. Hancock, Miss Upton, and all those to whom God has given “the tongue of a teacher” in my life.

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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.

Even More God Is Our Mother – From the Daily Office – January 26, 2013

January 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Isaiah:

Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
even when you turn grey I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Isaiah 46:3-4 (NRSV) – January 26, 2013.)

Stone Sculpture, Motherhood, Artist UnknownAs anyone who knows me will testify, I am no Calvinist! But hats off to John Calvin who wrote about these verses, “God has manifested himself to be both Father and Mother so that we might be more aware of God’s constant presence and willingness to assist us.” (Commentaries, Vol. 8, Baker Books:2005) Isaiah’s words on behalf of God are among the strongest maternal images of God in Holy Scripture. Just three chapters later, speaking through the prophet, God will ask and declare, “Can a woman forget her nursing child And have no compassion on the son of her womb ? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.” (49:14-15) And, again, Calvin wrote, “God did not satisfy himself with proposing the example of a father, but in order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls His people not merely children, but the fruit of the womb, towards which there is usually a warmer affection.”

So forgive Calvin his use of the masculine pronoun and laud him for his forward thinking and astute observation of God’s Motherhood. Would that modern American Christians would follow his lead! I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen something from the conservative wing of the Church (from Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant writers) decrying maternal metaphors as “Gnostic” or “pagan”. How sad that a theological tradition rooted in Scripture (and developed by preachers as early as Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom) should be ignored, devalued, debased, and rejected by so many. By doing so, they accomplish two things: they run the risk of alienating women (and, in fact, have done so), and they fail to communicate with those for whom the “fatherhood” metaphor is problematic. How much better might the church address the modern world if it remembered the words of Pope John Paul I that “we are the objects of undying love on the part of God. . . God is our father; even more God is our mother.” (Spoken at the time of the Camp David peace accords.)

My own biological father, of whom I have only vague memories, was an alcoholic whose most influential action contributing to the formation of his sons’ lives (at least my own, if not my late brother’s) was killing himself in a single-vehicle roll-over accident while driving drunk when I was 5-1/2 years old. When my mother remarried five years later, it was to a man to whom I could not relate at all for several years (though we became quite close once I’d been an adult for while); because of that strained relationship, at age 14 I chose to move away from home. Thus, I am one of those for whom the “fatherhood” metaphor is not all that significant. My best parental memories are of a strong and resourceful single mother; God described as “our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come” (Dame Julian of Norwich) makes a whole lot of sense to me.

This Isaiah passage resonates for me, and I am grateful to Calvin and Julian of Norwich, to Augustine and Chrysostom, and to John Paul I for developing the maternal metaphor. “Even more God is our mother.”

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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.

Choose a Party over Purity – Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany – January 20, 2013

January 20, 2013 / / 2 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 20, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Epiphany 2, Year C: Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 96:1-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Icon of the Wedding Feast of CanaIn our gospel lesson today, Jesus turns water into wine. He does so, somewhat unwillingly it seems, because he and his mother are at a wedding banquet and the couple is about to run out of wine for their guests. Mary brings this to Jesus’ attention because she apparently believes he can do something to save the hosts from embarrassment. At first, however, he seems disinclined to do anything about it. Not the least bit phased by her son’s reluctance, Mary tells the servants to do whatever he tells them, and she goes back to the party. I have always imagined that as she turned away Mary gave Jesus the same sort of look my mother would give me when I tried to not do as she wanted, the same sort of look I’ve seen my wife give our children. So . . . Jesus turns water into wine, and (as you will see) not just any water into not just any wine, but really good wine! Now, one supposes that Jesus could have done something else to assist the wedding couple, but he chooses to do this, to turn water into wine.

Wine is a very special sort of drink, especially in the Jewish tradition and, thus, in our own Christian faith. Wine gets a special mention in Psalm 104, which is a long song of praise to God for all the things God has created, especially those things that are good for human beings. Along about the middle of the psalm, the singer gives praise to the Almighty that among the “plants to serve mankind” are those from which we get “wine to gladden our hearts.” (Ps 104:15-16) In Jewish tradition, grape wine is considered such a gift to humankind that it alone of all alcoholic beverages has a special prayer of thanksgiving: Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, bo’re p’ri ha’gafen (“Blessed are you, O Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine”).

I would like you to keep that in mind. I’ll return to the subject of wine and glad hearts in a short while, but first I want to share with you a news story that crossed my desk a couple of days after Christmas. It is from the Jewish publication, The Tablet:

Climate change has been blamed for a host of devastating events, from Hurricane Sandy to the evaporation of Greenland’s glaciers. But earlier this year, a dramatic weather event had a small but important impact on the Jewish community: In July, as a drought brought the effects of global warming to the Midwest, the only mikveh in Omaha, Neb., went dry.

The mikveh, a ritual bath, is an essential part of any Orthodox Jewish community, so when one goes dry, it’s a serious issue — especially in Omaha, where the next nearest mikveh is a state away. “The mikveh is one of the most basic institutions of any Jewish community,” explained Jonathan Gross, the rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue, Omaha’s Orthodox congregation. “How are you supposed to have young families if you don’t have a mikveh?”

Refilling a mikveh isn’t a simple matter of turning on a faucet; there are rules about what kind of water can and cannot be used. The community in Omaha prayed for rain – one of the approved methods for replenishing the water in a mikveh – and their prayers were eventually answered. But by the time those rains came, another solution was already in place, a solution that involved one ton of ice.

Mikvehs typically serve multiple purposes. The first and most important is as a place for women to purify themselves after completing their menstrual cycles; immersion in a mikveh is a critical part of the laws of Taharot HaMishpacha, family purity, and without immersion a woman is forbidden to have sex with her husband. New vessels, like pots and pans, must be immersed before they can be considered kosher and thus usable. And converts need to immerse to conclude their conversions. Customarily, men also dunk, before holidays and before their wedding day, although this isn’t mandated by modern Jewish law.

Like many mikvehs, the Omaha Community Mikvah is composed of two below-ground pools. The first pool fills with rainwater through a hole in the roof, and the second, larger pool is used for the actual bathing. To be considered halachically valid, a mikveh is required to have at least 40 se’ah of natural water. A se’ah, a unit of halachic measurement, corresponds to roughly five gallons of water, according to one stringent opinion – meaning that 200 gallons of natural water are required for a kosher mikveh. The water must fill the mikveh through naturally occurring sources, either by rain or through a connection to a spring or river. Water that is transported to the mikveh through direct human means – in buckets, for instance – is called she’uvim, drawn water, and cannot be used to fill a mikveh. Tap water is also forbidden, though this wasn’t always the case—and tap water can be added to the mikveh once the required 200 gallons of natural water are present.

[Preacher’s Note: The author is being generous in equating 40 se’ah to 200 gallons. A se’ah is 12.128 litres. Doing the math yields a more accurate conversion of 40 se’ah to just under 130 gallons. This is the approximate volume of water changed to wine in today’s gospel lesson. See The Jewish Encyclopedia.]

In July, Omaha’s mikveh was accidentally emptied when a maintenance crew member thought that cleaning the mikveh meant emptying it completely. In most circumstances, a mikveh can be refilled relatively easily through rain or snow, but this summer’s drought made that impossible. “Had this happened in January with all the snow we would have been filled up in a week!” Gross lamented on his blog.

The mikveh was out of service for almost two months. Women traveled to the next closest mikveh in Des Moines, Iowa, or Kansas City, Kan., each more than two hours away. Dishes went unpurified. The receptionist at the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home, where Omaha’s mikveh is located, received calls every time it rained an inch, asking if the pool had somehow miraculously filled. As the weeks passed, different ideas were thrown around: The supervising rabbi of the mikveh suggested the community pray for rain. They did. Another rabbi tried to open up a larger hole in the roof to allow more water, but that didn’t work. Some scientific-minded congregants suggested lighting giant Bunsen burners, evaporating water and then allowing it to condense over the mikveh; this was deemed impractical and was never tried.

The town finally turned to Rabbi Yaakov Weiss, 34, the pastoral service coordinator of the Blumkin Home and one of the supervisors of the mikveh. Another rabbi brought up the idea of using ice to fill the mikveh, and Weiss began looking into it. Using ice was a sort of loophole or leniency: Since the ice was solid and not liquid, if it was moved into the mikveh while still in its frozen state, when it melted it would be considered non-she’uvim water, and the mikveh would be kosher. This procedure, while not common, is almost universally accepted.

“I know it had been done in Nova Scotia once, but I had never heard much about it prior or since,” Weiss said.

Weiss called Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Zvi Sobolofsky, two important legal minds at Yeshiva University in New York. They referred him to a mikveh expert, Rabbi Yirmiya Katz, who went through the exact requirements of filling the mikveh with ice.

Weiss’ first thoughts were to use the large ice machines in the Blumkin Home, but that plan was quickly vetoed since the ice would have melted too much by the time they put it in the mikveh. Weiss, with Katz’s help, figured out that he’d need a lot of very frozen ice put in the mikveh very fast.

Weiss called every ice company in Omaha (“Did you know that while there are many ice companies – Arctic Ice, Omaha Ice, Glacier Ice – they are all actually the very same place?” he wrote on Gross’ blog) and finally found one that could deliver the required amount: 250 10 pound blocks of ice. The ice was paid for by the Jewish Federation of Omaha, on whose campus the Blumkin Home is located.

On Friday, Aug. 24, Weiss and a group of volunteers wearing special gloves that wouldn’t melt the ice amassed outside the mikveh at 8:15 in the morning. But the truck showed up an hour late, and by the time Weiss opened the first package, the ice melted in his hands.

“Apparently this was their version of solid blocks of ice: It was a block of crushed ice pushed together in a brick,” explained Weiss. “It doesn’t stay as cold as a real block of ice.”

Weiss went back to the drawing board where he found Muzzy Ice, an ice company that makes blocks of ice for ice sculptures. He had found them earlier but decided against using them given the large size of their ice blocks. “I didn’t want to risk damaging our mikveh,” Weiss said, but he relented once he realized that was the only option.
Three weeks later, on Sept. 11, a Muzzy Ice truck pulled up to the mikveh. Inside the truck were seven 300-pound blocks of ice. An extra 100 pounds of dry ice was shoved inside the truck to ensure that nothing melted.

In less than an hour, staff members of the Jewish Federation moved the ice into the mikveh. Along the way, little pieces of ice would chip off and fall on the stairs; Weiss and a colleague would rush to pick them up to make sure that the chips wouldn’t liquefy and contaminate the mikveh water. “It was very intense and very stressful,” recalled Weiss. “[But] it was quite an experience. I’ve never dealt with a ton of ice in a small contained area.”

Once all seven 300 pound blocks were moved, the question became how long the ice would take to melt. Estimates ranged from two days to a week.

They never got to find out.

The next evening a huge torrential storm hit the Midwest. In several hours, the bor z’reih, the place where the rainwater collected, was filled to capacity and the first pool was filled. “I went in the next day and said, ‘Wow.’ ” Weiss told me. “Now our only problem was our mikveh was filled with ice.”

Both Weiss and Gross said that the whole effort pulled Omaha’s roughly 6,000 Jews together and led to a newfound curiosity about the mikveh, even among those who don’t really use it.

“Was it a waste of energy and time? Or conversation and money?” Weiss considered. “We often say that our efforts and actions have repercussions for good and bad and perhaps this was a repercussion. It’s a community mikveh and it’s integral to us. Perhaps by showing how much it means to us, I think . . . we saw a response or sign from God. For our action, we have God’s reaction: ‘I’ll give you the rainfall you were looking for.’ ” (The Day the Mikveh Went Dry, The Tablet, December 27, 2012)

I wanted to read that article to you because it gives you a picture of how seriously the Orthodox Jews of our time treat what John in today’s gospel lesson calls “the Jewish rites of purification.” Modern Orthodox Judaism is the direct descendent of, and the closest thing we have in our world to, the village religion of Jesus’ time and place. The seriousness with which the Orthodox Jews of Omaha, Nebraska, dealt with the filling of their mikvah gives us clue to how gravely the Jews of Cana, and Jesus himself, would have regarded the 130 or so gallons of water that Jesus just sort of willy-nilly turns into wine for the wedding banquet.

OK. Yes, I’m being facetious. There is nothing willy-nilly about this. Jesus isn’t just turning water into wine. Jesus is doing something called an “enacted parable”. An “enacted parable” is one told through actions rather than words. The prophet Hosea, for example, married a prostitute to illustrate the unfaithfulness of Israel; the prophet Jeremiah wore a yoke to symbolize the oppression of the Babylonians. An “enacted parable” has been described as “an extravagant action which upsets the conventions of life” (A. Richardson, Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Westminster:1983, p. 426). This is precisely what Jesus is doing when he changes the water of ritual purification into wine to celebrate newlywed love; he is upsetting the religious conventions of Jewish life.

Jesus is enacting the distinction that St. Paul will later explicate into a theological contrast between Law and Grace. Now don’t get me wrong, Jesus is not overthrowing the Jewish religion! Jesus was, himself, a good and faithful Jew, and the Law’s insistence upon ritual purity is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. But the point Jesus seems to be making here is that given a choice between Law and love . . . choose love! Given a choice between worrying about water for purification on the one hand or enjoying wine to gladden the heart on the other . . . choose gladness. By changing the water intended for the mikvah into wine for the party, Jesus is saying that joy ranks higher in the scheme of things than purity. Given a choice between celebration and seriousness, says this action . . . choose celebration.

Judaism, of course, is not a religion entirely of Law, ritual purity, and seriousness. As anyone who has been to a Passover supper or a Chanukah party or a Jewish wedding feast knows, there are occasions of great merriment and fun, of joy and celebration. Here, at the beginning of his public ministry, the Son of God makes it plain, that these are the higher ranking values of the reign of God. He will do so again at the end of his earthly life when, in the joyful context of the Passover banquet, he will take bread and wine, wine which gladdens the human heart, and tell his friends to do the same again and again, “whenever you do it,” in his memory.

One of my very favorite motion pictures is Auntie Mame starring Rosalind Russell; I just love that movie. There is a scene in it in which Mame is speaking to her stenographer Miss Agnes Gooch (played by Peggy Cass):

Mame — Oh, Agnes! Here you’ve been taking my dictations for weeks and you haven’t gotten the message of my book: live!
Agnes — Live?
Mame — Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!

I want to suggest to you today that Mame was preaching the gospel, that that is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with miracle at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee, that it is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with Lord’s Passover supper in the Upper Room, that it is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with our weekly gathering for the Lord’s Supper in Holy Communion.

Choose wine over water, choose love over Law, choose gladness over worry, choose joy over gravity, choose celebration over seriousness, choose a party over purity! Life’s a banquet! Enjoy it! Amen.

The One Who IS – From the Daily Office – January 11, 2013

January 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

From the Gospel of John:

When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, got into a boat, and started across the lake to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The lake became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the lake and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land towards which they were going.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 6:16-21 (NRSV) – January 11, 2013.)

Gustav Dore, Jesus Walking on the Water (1866)Jesus walking on the water has always struck me as a very funny story. “Funny” in the sense of “oddly out of place”, although it also has a certain Monty-Python-esque quality to it as well. The fact that it is reported in three of the Gospels – in the synoptic Gospels of Mark and Matthew and here in John – attests to its importance for the early church. John’s version of the story is the simplest, but it contains all the elements – a storm, rough seas, disciples’ fear. Like Mark, John leaves out Matthew’s addition of Peter trying to join Jesus on the surface of the lake.

I say the story seems out of place because it is (other than Jesus’ fit of pique at the poor fruitless fig tree, which has a parabolic quality to it, the fig being a rabbinic metaphor for the Torah; Mark 11:12-14, and Matthew 21:18-22) the single demonstration of divine power by Jesus which does not benefit another person or group of people. Other manifestations of power result in the provision of food (the wine at the wedding in Cana, the feeding of crowds of 5,000 and 4, 000) or in the healing of the supplicant or some other person. Jesus here seems to be simply about his own business. In fact, Mark makes it clear that “He intended to pass them by.” (Mark 6:48b) However, the disciples see him so he must respond.

It is Jesus’ response that underscores why this story is here, I think, and the NRSV translation does not do it justice. The Greek is “Ego eimi, me phobeithe.” The words “ego eimi” are the same words used in the Septuagint (the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) when God’s identity is revealed as “I AM” (for this is what the Greek emphatically states). In Exodus, God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush and, when Moses asks God’s name, he is told, “I AM who I AM;” the Greek is “ego eimi”. (Exodus 3:14) In a similar way, Isaiah the prophet reports God saying several times, “I, even I AM He;” the Greek is “ego eimi.” Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus will use this same construction in his famous “I am” statements. Here as there, Jesus’ identity with God is what is stressed.

And this is also the import of the story of Jesus’ walking on the water, this miracle with no other purpose, no parabolic meaning as in the blasting of the fig tree, no benefit to another as in the feeding or healing miracles. This miracle simply demonstrates the power of Jesus over nature, and simply over nature, but over the forces of death and chaos represented by water and the storm. It is, purely and simply, a manifestation of divine power.

I try always to keep before my mind’s eye the Jesus who is human, to remember that he was “one who in every respect has been tested as we are” (Heb. 4:15) But every so often it is important to remember that Jesus is also divine, fully divine, God incarnate. It is necessary every so often simply to stand in awe of the One who walked on the water, the One WHO IS, and yet who humbled himself to become as we are.

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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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