From John’s Gospel:
John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 1:32-34 – August 8, 2012)
The word appears twice in these three verses: testify. According to the dictionary it means to make a public declaration of belief, a statement of faith, an affirmation of fact. I wonder how many church members ever “testify” during the normal course of their daily lives. Not many, would be my guess. In fact, my initial response to my own question is “Damn few!” Members of the Episcopal Church are admittedly reticent to talk about religion, theirs or anyone elses.
We do not have a time during our worship when personal testimony is encouraged or invited. Since the earliest days of its existence, the Christian church has ritualized testifying by incorporating a corporate statement of faith, the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed, into the its liturgy. While this has had the salutary effect of unifying the church around a single set of understandings of God, it has also gotten Christians out of the habit of talking about God and faith in their own words; in other words, it has encouraged us to not testify.
The great re-awakenings of faith seem always to have started when someone started doing just that – talking about God. Giving up on the ritual, they simply gave utterance to the important questions in their lives and how God had helped or was helping or ought to help answer them. Martin Luther nailed his questions to a chapel door; John Wesley preached about his questions and answers in country fields; Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield held emotional revivals encouraging others to talk about faith. Talking about God, that’s all they were doing.
There’s another word for that, by the way – theology – from two Greek words, theos and logos, god and word – words about God, theology, testifying; it’s all the same thing. People who testify, who talk about God in their lives, are simply doing theology.
I’ve a friend who thinks we need to change our worship to add a time for personal testimony, but I’m not convinced. If talking about God in church worked, it would already have worked because we talk about God a lot in church. Adding or taking away from what we do in church isn’t the answer. There are already plenty of churches doing that; it’s not our tradition and not our style and if we tried to do it, it wouldn’t be authentic. We should do what we do, but do it with greater integrity and better quality.
In The Church Creative: How To Be a Creative Gathering in the 21st Century, John C. O’Keefe makes the point that the answer to the question of increasing religious activity is not adding glitz to worship, the answer is reimagining God’s role in our lives – the answer is talking about God outside of church in everyday life.
When we think in terms of creativity and productive solutions we need to go beyond just hanging cool pictures, listening to different music, showing movie clips, developing a catchy sermon series, or using flood lights and fog machines in worship. It means we see things in a different way; we view life and issues we face from multiple directions and learn to re-imagine, rethink. (The Church Creative, page 186.)
We need to hear more people in more situations saying, “I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” We need more God-talk by whatever name we call it.
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Father Funston in the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio. (Fr. Funston has no commercial interest in or connection to Zazzle or the I-Heart-Theology T-shirt; the link is provided simply to acknowledge the origin of the graphic.)
Just a few days ago the Public Religion Research Institute issued a new report entitled A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials. A “millennial” is somone currently 18 to 24 years of age, the youngest cohort of adults. (From my point of view at nearly 60 years of age these are children; my son and daughter are both older than this group!) According to the report, these young adults are more likely then the general population to be religiously unaffiliated; one-quarter of them so identify themselves. Interestingly, most of those who do so were reared in religiously affiliated households. The greatest movement away from religious affiliation was seen among those raised in Catholic and white mainline Protestant families. It would appear that we have not been doing a very good job of teaching our children “that they in their turn might tell it to their children”!
Reading these oh-so-familiar words in the introduction to John’s Gospel, I remember other words I read on another blog yesterday:
It is intriguing how often in stories of Holy Scripture food plays a role. From the “apple” in the Garden, to Abraham offering a meal of cakes and meat to the three men (who turn out to God) at the Oaks of Mamre, to this story of Gideon, to David and his men eating the Bread of the Presence, to all the food items listed as items of sacrifice in Leviticus, the Old Testament (indeed, the whole Bible) is food focused. The People of God define themselves through the annual reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the Passover; the new People of God define themselves (in my tradition and others) by the weekly reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the death and Resurrection of Christ and anticipating his return. It’s intriguing but not surprising. The Jewish and Christian faiths are not, in the long run, about following rules of ritual or moral conduct; they are about being in an intimate relationship with that which is the source of being, that which we call “God” and address as “Father” or brother or redeemer. And, other than sex, there is probably no more intimate activity two or more people can share than eating together.
“Most blessed” be a murderess? What is this? Yesterday, a friend and colleague who was only a little older than I am passed away after several months of pancreatic cancer, so I’m a little sensitive on the subject of death this morning. So, really! What is this? 
These are the words spoken by the great crowd of Jews and others who thronged the streets of Jerusalem for the Festival of Shavu’ot when the Twelve, empowered by the Holy Spirit, begin to tell the story of Jesus in languages they had never before spoken. Shavu’ot is a celebration with both agricultural and historical significance in Judaism. It is known as the “festival of the first fruits,” a harvest feast when the first fruits were brought as offerings to the Temple; it is also known as the “festival of the giving of the Law,” a celebration of the handing down of Torah on Mt. Sinai. It was called Pentecost, a Greek word meaning “fiftieth”, because it always falls on the fiftieth day after the Passover. That year it fell on the fiftieth day after the Resurrection and, thus, the Christian feast of the Holy Spirit carries that name, as well.
This past Sunday, the Episcopal Church marked the 28th anniversary of the women known as “the Philadelphia Eleven” who were ordained on July 29, 1974. Four retired bishops (Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, Edward Welles and George Barrett) chose to defy the General Convention of the Episcopal Church which, at its regular triennial meeting in 1973, had voted against opening the priesthood to women; women were already eligible for ordination as deacons. Joined by male presbyters who supported them and the candidates, they ordained eleven women deacons to the priesthood: Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield Fleisher, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Martha Swanson, and Nancy Hatch Wittig. Shortly thereafter, four additional women were also “irregularly” ordained: Eleanor Lee McGee, Alison Palmer, Betty Powell, and Diane Tickell. A firestorm of controversy erupted in the church: charges were filed against these dissident bishops (Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, Edward Welles and George Barrett) and an emergency meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops was convened on August 15, 1974.
These women were not the first to be ordained to the Anglican priesthood, however. During the Second World War, Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained to the presbyterate on January 25, 1944, by the Rt. Rev. Ronald Hall, Bishop of Hong Kong, in response to the crisis among Anglican Christians in China caused by the Japanese invasion. No male clergy could be found who were willing to take on the onerous ministry, but Ms. Li was, so she was ordained and served with distinction. After the war, the Archbishop of Canterbury sought to make the bishop and the priest rescind the ordination, but neither did. Ms. Li voluntarily ceased serving as a priest until more than 30 years later when she immigrated to Canada where the Anglican Church, following the Episcopal Church’s lead, had begun to ordain women. Her priesthood was recognized and she served as an honorary canon in Toronto, ministering among the immigrant Chinese population.
Have you ever done that thing on a public street corner where a couple of people stand there looking up and pretty soon some passing pedestrian, wondering what they are gazing at, will stop and look up, and then another and then another and so on until a lot of people are looking up into the sky at nothing for no reason? I have an image of that in my mind when I read the this passage, although in this case the “men of Galilee” are not looking at nothing for no reason. They are looking at something they can no longer see, except in their minds’ eye, and it is certainly not “for no reason” that they are doing so. Something phenomenal has happened to them; someone they thought had been killed by the authorities had returned from the dead, had eaten with them, talked with them, appeared to them over the course of over seven weeks, and now he had “ascended into heaven.” They had plenty of reason to stand there staring into the sky into which he had apparently gone.
As the letter to the Romans draws to a close, Paul sends greetings to several persons by name: Phoebe (named here), Prisca, Aquila, Epaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junia, and many others. As I read through there names, I cannot help but wonder who these otherwise forgotten church members were. What were their roles in the church? What did they do outside the church?
