From the Psalter:
The Lord has set his throne in heaven,
and his kingship has dominion over all.
Bless the Lord, you angels of his,
you mighty ones who do his bidding,
and hearken to the voice of his word.
Bless the Lord, all you his hosts,
you ministers of his who do his will.
Bless the Lord, all you works of his,
in all places of his dominion;
bless the Lord, O my soul.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 103:19-22 (BCP 1979 version) – January 7, 2013.)
Last week the senior seminarians of the Episcopal Church, those who will graduate in the spring and shortly thereafter be ordained to the transitional diaconate, sat for the General Ordination Examination. This mutli-day test is something like a Bar exam for the clergy of our denomination. Each day, after the testing was concluded, one or more bloggers were posting and commenting up on the questions.
A test question in the area of cross-cultural ministry asked about the theological, pastoral, and practical issues a parish minister might face when asked to permit the use of his or her church facility by a yoga group, a Muslim congregation, or a group of Zen Buddhists. In a Facebook discussion, I suggested that it was an unrealistic question, that it might be of interest as a hypothetical to academics, and might possibly describe a situation a priest in a cosmopolitan urban parish might face, but that it was not going to be a problem for the great majority of our clergy who will minister in smaller cities, small towns, and exurban and rural areas, places where there are few Muslims or Zen Buddhists. As the discussion went on, I realized (once again) that there is a great divide in the Episcopal Church between our leadership, drawn mainly from and headquartered in the coastal urban centers and our academic seminaries, and those of us on the ground and “in the trenches” in the small parishes of the midwest, the plains, the Rockies, the deserts, and the rural South. I later posted this comment as my Facebook status: “The academic and urban elites that run the Episcopal Church should stop flying over the middle of the country. They should drive through it and spend time in the small communities in the midwest and the great plains.”
Since doing so, I’ve received plenty of affirmative responses from colleagues ministering in Wisconsin, Nebraska, elsewere in Ohio, Kansas, and other midwestern, southern, and southwestern communities. From colleagues in large urban areas on both coasts, however, I’ve received sarcastic comments about midwesterners being persecuted by New Yorkers and apparently earnest comments describing midwesterners as “ignorant” and isolated but not responsible for “the way they are.” Point illustrated, perhaps?
I bring this up again here today because the psalm reminded me of the discussion: “Bless the Lord, all you works of his, in all places of his dominion.” In all places of his dominion . . . . It truly does seem to me sometimes that leadership of the mainstream denominations, my own Episcopal Church among them, get focused on the urban centers and bound up in the problems that urban life presents. It often seems to me that leaders focus on the ministries of large parishes and tailor church programs to their needs. But, important as those centers and those parishes are, they are not the only places of God’s dominion, nor are they the norm.
We hear over and over again in the church press about the “average Episcopal church” . . . which has about 80 people in attendance on a Sunday, which has a budget of only slightly more than $100,000 per year, which is unable to sustain full-time ordained ministry, and which has fewer than ten children in Sunday school and not enough teens to field a youth group. We have this average because many (probably most) of our parishes are in smaller communities in the midwest, the plains states, the Rocky mountain states, the rural south, and the desert southwest. We have members and congregations in all places of God’s dominion, not just in the urban centers of the coasts.
If we are to bless the Lord in all the places of his dominion, the church (in all its denominational varieties) needs to begin paying attention to all the places of his dominion!
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
As I read the lesson from Exodus today, there is a bush in my dining room. It’s a four-foot tall evergreen and it’s sort of burning. There are little electrical lights all ablaze all over it. It’s our Christmas tree. (We have a short Christmas tree set on a table because we have three cats. We tried for a couple of years to have a normal size seven-foot tree with these guys, but it was impossible. So, small tree on table.)
On the third day of Christmas the church calendar directs our attention to St. John the Evangelist and, again, the Daily Office lectionary falls in line. John is the gospeller whose wonderful prologue serves as the Gospel lesson at the Eucharist on Christmas Day (1:1-14) and on the first Sunday after Christmas (1:1-18). It is for me a much more meaningful Gospel of the Incarnation than Luke’s sweet story of innkeepers, shepherds, angels, and the virgin birth: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (v. 1)
On the second day of Christmas the church remembers a murder, the martyrdom of Stephen, and our Daily Office lectionary won’t let us forget it. Often the readings of the Daily Office seem to have nothing to do with the season and they seldom are tied to a saint’s commemoration, but today the morning and evening readings tell the whole story in gruesome detail.
Sort of buried in Jude’s moralizing about false teachers and those who follow them is an Advent message: “Look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.” As I’ve been saying pretty consistently throughout the season, here and in my sermons, Advent is not so much about celebrating the birth of Jesus, wherever it was and whenever it was about 2,000 years ago, as it is about getting ready for his return, the parousia as seminary-educated folks like to say.
The world was supposed to end today. I slept in in hopes it would be gone before I got out of bed . . . but alas, it is still here and there are still laundry to be done and a dog who needs a bath and Christmas meals to be shopped for and sermons to be written.
The first word of this bit of Isaiah in Hebrew is often translated “Woe” but here in the New Revised Standard Version, it has been rendered “Ah”. The Hebrew is hôy ; it is a negative exclamation pronounced “oy!” Perhaps the “woe” translation is better. However, the construction “woe to you . . . . ” has taken on an oracular connotation to modern ears and that is not what the prophet is saying here. He will later make prediction about these oppressors, but for now he is simply making an indictment. 
Recently, following the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, a bunch of Christian “leaders” (Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, Bryan Fisher, to name a few) have basically said, “God has been taken out of the schools,” or “God has been taken out of our society,” or some variation on this theme. This, they say is, the reason the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place. Because of God’s supposed absence (voluntary on God’s part, it would seem) the horror took place. They seek to blame those who have “put God out,” but the way they make this argument really places the responsibility on God who apparently made the decision to stay away; either that or they are describing a God who is powerless in the face of some alleged official refusal to “allow God in” because our Constitution prohibits state-prescribed sectarian prayer in the schools.
