That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Politics (Page 22 of 23)

Preaching Like Stephen, Making People Angry – From the Daily Office – August 20, 2012

August 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From the Acts of the Apostles:

When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died. And Saul approved of their killing him.

(From the Daily Office Lecionary – Acts 7:54-8:1 – August 20, 2012)

Martyrdom of Saint StephenSaint Stephen, one of the first deacons of the church, has just preached a sermon in which he has reminded his hearers, Jewish authorities in Jerusalem, that the Jews had a history of mistreatment of prophets, Their ancestors, he has said, “killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now [his listeners] have become his betrayers and murderers.” No wonder they were angry with him.

I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that Christian preaching ought to anger those who hear it. If it doesn’t make them angry at the preacher, it should make them angry at someone or something else, angry enough to do something . . . though maybe not a fatal stoning.

We who preach the gospel of Jesus Christ should have the courage and conviction of Stephen, if not that of Jesus himself. There is a lot in our society that needs to be “called out” – the obvious racism of the way Ohio’s voting hours are being limited, for example, or the obvious sexism of a senate candidate in another state who can conceive of something he labels “legitimate rape” or the callous disregard for the needs of poor children deprived of nutrition be the defunding of school meal programs. These are not merely political issues; these are moral, ethical, and spiritual issues about which the church – and the church’s preaches – need to speak out. There are no “merely political” issues; every issue has moral, ethical, and spiritual dimensions, and of those the gospel has much to say. It will not say it to our world, however, unless preachers address the issues. And if that makes someone angry, so much the better.

A 19th Century Chicago journalist named Finley Peter Dunne wrote under the pseudonym of an Irish bartender named Mr. Dooley. One of Mr. Dooley’s observations concerned the role of the press:

Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us.
It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks,
commands th’ militry,
controls th’ ligislachure,
baptizes th’ young,
marries th’ foolish,
comforts th’ afflicted,
afflicts th’ comfortable,
buries th’ dead,
an’ roasts thim aftherward.

In the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, Gene Kelly played an H.L. Mencken-like newspaper editor saying, “It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Clare Booth Luce used a variation of this sentiment in her eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt and numerous churchmen, including Reinhold Niebuhr, have applied similar words to the Christian faith, arguing that the preacher’s job, indeed the very nature of the gospel, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Our job as ministers of the gospel is to offer hope and consolation to those who are hurting, while standing strong against the evils of injustice and oppression and selfish pursuit. And if that makes someone angry, so much the better.

The first deacon, Stephen, should be the patron saint of this kind of preaching, of which there should be much, much more.

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

Citizenship and Prayer – From the Daily Office – August 11, 2012

August 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From the Acts of the Apostles:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Acts 4:32-35 – August 10, 2012)

This short passage from the Book of Acts describes the sort of world Jesus intended. Not just the sort of church . . . . the sort of world, the sort of human society, a complete community in which no one claims private ownership (it’s all God’s remember) and where there are no needy persons because what is needed is distributed equitably.

Dream world, right? Never gonna happen, you say? Then what do we mean when we say (some of us everyday, but a lot of at least once a week), “Our Father in heaven . . . your kingdom come”? If we don’t mean it, if we don’t want God’s kingdom to come, why do we keep asking for it? (Jesus taught this petition to his disciples when they asked him to teach them to pray. See Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4.)

I got into a beef in an on-line recently because another person attributed Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s criticism of his state’s Department of Transitional Assistance to his Christianity. Brown was upset because the department had mailed voter registration materials to some 400,000 welfare recipients; he interpreted this as a pro-Democratic-Party action by the department. (In fact, it was in compliance with a court order regarding the state’s failure to comply with “motor voter” regulations.) Nowhere in the article to which my correspondent referred was there any mention of Brown’s Christian faith (he is reportedly a member of the conservative Christian Reformed Church) by either Brown or the reporter. I objected to this person’s statement as a gratuitous and groundless comment, and a lengthy conversation ensued. (It was eventually and abruptly terminated by my correspondent.)

It got me thinking, though, about how we characterize the actions (political or otherwise) of other people and how in modern America we seldom hear positive actions (other than those expressly undertaken by the church) characterized as Christian! Programs which aid the poor, the elderly, the very young, or others in need are criticized as “socialist” even though that is precisely what the apostles set up in their first century community (long before, it should be noted, any western European economics theorist coined the term “socialist”). They are referred to as “entitlements”, a word often said with a sneer. If they are defended, it is on the grounds not of Christian practice but of some theory of economics or general ethics. The Constitutional separation of church and state, I suppose, is at work here. But for those who do support them and are Christians, if we really mean what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer (or any prayer of intercession for the poor and the needy for that matter), shouldn’t we applaud such programs as consonant with our faith? Shouldn’t we be giving and working toward their success because they are, in fact, elements of that world Jesus intended?

My staunchly Methodist grandfather taught me a number of things. A couple of them come to mind today. He taught me to never approach the altar of God without a gift of thanksgiving. Even if you’ve already made your weekly tithe (and he insisted that one give a tithe, a tenth of income), if you attend another prayer service give another offering. Those offerings, he said, are means by which God’s church carries out God’s work and answers at least some of our prayers. He taught me the same thing about taxes. I don’t know if he was familiar with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous statement, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,” but that was certainly his attitude. He taught me that paying one’s taxes is the way the citizen enables the government to do the work it is created to do: the Preamble to our Constitution says that that is, among other things, to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Providing for the poor, the elderly, the very young, and other needy persons sure seems to me to fit in there.

Another thing he taught me was never to pray for something I was not willing to work for. If you pray for someone to be healed, be willing (and available when called upon) to care for that person. If you pray for war to be ended, be willing (and available when called upon) to do the work of creating peace.

That’s what prayer was to my grandfather: giving and working. I think that’s what citizenship was to him, as well. If everyone who prays “your kingdom come” actually gave and worked toward the kingdom’s appearance, if everyone also looked at their citizenship that way, I suspect that we’d hear a lot less criticism of “entitlements” and that the world would look a lot like what is described in that short bit from the Book of Acts.

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

Missing Millennials – From the Daily Office – August 7, 2012

August 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From the Psalms:

He gave his decrees to Jacob
and established a law for Israel, *
which he commanded them to teach their children;
That the generations to come might know,
and the children yet unborn; *
that they in their turn might tell it to their children;
So that they might put their trust in God, *
and not forget the deeds of God,
but keep his commandments.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalms 78:5-7 (1979 BCP Version) – August 7, 2012)

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”!

Exactly what the causes of this movement are is anyone’s guess. A lot of author’s have made suggestions. Ross Douthat in his recent book Bad Religion blames it on the churches’ movement away from conservative dogma toward a liberal agenda. Diana Butler Bass in Christianity After Religion, on the other hand, suggests a failure of religious institutions to continue an awakening begun in the mid-20th century, falling instead into a reactive fundamentalism reinforcing conservative dogma in the last quarter of the century. Local pastors give anecdotal evidence of parishioners drifting away from Sunday church services to other alternatives including youth soccer and little league, major league sports offerings, Sunday morning TV programs, or spending the morning with the New York Times; they say American families have become “over programmed” and have relegated religion to the hopper of optional activities. Everybody has a different story to tell about what’s gone wrong with American religion; everybody has a different story to tell about how someone else has gotten it wrong.

I don’t know which of these and many other suggestions is most accurate, which story truly tells the tale of the American church. I suspect that to some extent they are all correct and that for every person, millennial or older, who has left “organized religion” behind there is a mix of stories reinforcing one another. And what this means for the church is that the answer to attracting the millennials is not going to be a single program, a single style of worship, a single ministry style, a single outreach, a single anything. There is no silver bullet, no quick and easy answer.

I nearly wrote “attracting the millennials back” in that last paragraph and then stopped myself, because a lot them were never here in the church to begin with. They represent a new mission field, not a lost membership group. They claim to be “spiritual but not religious” because, truly, they’ve never been a part of religion. They may be spiritual; all human beings are if St. Augustine of Hippo was right that “our hearts are restless till they find their rest in” God. If we in the church are to attract them to a religious expression of that spirituality, it is going to take hard work, time, and most of all its going to take integrity.

The past half-century has seen the church lose its integrity. Various parts of the church have taken up competing political and societal positions, so that the church has fractured even beyond the denominational divides of the Reformation. Instead of focusing upon the core values and teachings of the undivided church, we have taken up social causes that, though important, have divided us. Each faction seems to be telling a different story, so that the church can no longer claim (as it once could despite denominational differences) to be one. Because of the differing stories, the church can no longer lay claim to a unity based on shared moral and ethical principles. The church needs to recover that, to stop fighting with itself, to stop telling these contradictory stories.

If we could just do that, we’d be a much more attractive venue where the millennials (and everyone) could explore the spirituality they claim and clearly have. Just that . . . if we could just stop the internal bickering and fighting, stop telling stories about each other and, instead, tell stories of God. Wouldn’t that be novel?

Well, no . . . as the psalm suggests, it’s an idea that’s been around for a few years. “He commanded them to teach their children, so that they might put their trust in God, and not forget the deeds of God.”

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

Bombast and Bluster: American Political Discourse – From the Daily Office – July 31, 2012

July 31, 2012 / / 1 Comment

From the Psalms:

Those of high degree are but a fleeting breath, *
even those of low estate cannot be trusted.
On the scales they are lighter than a breath, *
all of them together.
Put no trust in extortion;
in robbery take no empty pride; *
though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 32:10-12, BCP versification – July 31, 2012)

WARNING: I reveal my politics in this post. If you don’t want to read about them, don’t continue!

There are no words that can adequately convey how thoroughly disgusted I am with the tone and content of political discourse in the United States of America as we approach the November 2012 elections. I make no bones of the fact that I am a liberal or a “progressive” as the Left now calls itself. My favorite senator is Bernie Sanders of Vermont. If there were a functioning Socialist Party in the US, I’d probably be a member. As it is, I’m an independent who tends to vote for Democrats, but frequently I find myself not voting for any standing candidate.

I am not one of those who goes in for the false equivalency of saying, “Both sides do it.” Yes, there are some on the Left who go overboard in their rhetoric, but in my estimation and opinion it is the Right, the Republican Party and the so-called Tea Party, who engage in the worst of the political nonsense. Much of what one finds on the internet coming from those quarters is racist and inflammatory; it is ill-informed; it is downright false and untrue. The words of our president or other Democrats are taken out of context and twisted completely away from their original meanings . . . the gullible, party-faithful fall for it and parrot it back without ever checking the facts. Statistics are distorted and history is ignored. It’s shameful!

But the worst of it all is the constant barrage of bombast in favor of continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans on the grounds that they are “job creators”! They are not! Money put into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money does not make its way into the marketplace. Money in the pockets of business owners does not encourage them to hire people. It is only money given to those who actually spend it, to the middle-class consumers who create product demand, that creates jobs. This is simple economics which our politicians are simply ignoring.

Which brings me to the admonitions of today’s Psalm: “Though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.” Increasing the wealth of those of “high degree” who are “but a fleeting breath” is not the way to increase the prosperity of the people. It accomplishes none of the good we are to accomplish under the Law of Moses or the mandate of the Gospel! It does not further love of God nor of our neighbor. It does not feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, nor heal the sick; it does not increase care of the widow or the orphan or the stranger who is in our land. It accomplishes nothing, not a shred of those things the Bible commends society to do. So long as our political discourse focuses only on questions of wealth and its increase, it serves no good purpose, whether it is the bombast of the Right or the bluster of the Left.

There are no words that can adequately convey how thoroughly disgusted I am with the tone and content of political discourse in the United States of America as we approach the November 2012 elections, but these will have to do: our political discourse does not honor God; it does not honor our neighbor; it does not honor our country. It is an embarrassment.

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

The Heart of the Gospel – From the Daily Office – July 18, 2012

July 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Jesus told of the separation of sheep and goats:

The king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Matthew 25:34-40 – July 18, 2012)

More than any other story in all of the gospel accounts, this one underscores for me what is at the heart of the Good News of Jesus Christ: love of neighbor, service to others, care for those who are unable to care for themselves, and in so doing to demonstrate our love of God.

The First Letter of John sums it up beautifully: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” (1 John 4:20-21)

Samuel Johnson was quoted by his biographer, James Boswell, as saying “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” A similar sentiment, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members,” is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi. In his second inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide for those who have too little.”

In the sacristy of the first church I served as a cleric (which was also the parish that raised me up as a candidate for Holy Orders) was a quotation from the Rt. Rev. Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar from 1908 until his death in 1924. Speaking at the conclusion of a worldwide Anglo-Catholic Congress in London the year before his death, Bishop Weston had reminded his listeners, “You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.” He concluded his speech with these words:

You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.

This message has been proclaimed by many speakers in many ways and at many times, but however it is said, it all boils down to the simple fact that as and what we do for the least in our community, we do for God. If we fail to provide for them, all our words and rituals count for nothing. This is the heart of the gospel.

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

A Prophetic General Convention – Sermon for Pentecost 7, Proper 10B – July 15, 2012

July 15, 2012 / / 3 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 15, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 10B: Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; and Mark 6:14-29)

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In our lessons today, we have two stories about silencing the prophetic voice. First, a snippet of the not-very-familiar story of the Prophet Amos which is, frankly, cut from its context so badly that some explanation really is necessary. Second, the almost-too-familiar story of the beheading of John the Baptizer.

Amos, as he is at pains to say to the priest Amaziah, is not a professional prophet: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Nonetheless, Amos was commissioned by God in the middle of the 8th Century before Christ to leave his home in the southern kingdom of Judah, travel to the northern kingdom of Israel, and deliver there a condemnation of Israel, its monarch and its people. In this portion of his story, he tells of God showing him four quick visions, of which the plumb line is the third. First, he is shown a swarm of locusts, illustrating that God will wipe out Israel just as locusts wipe out a crop. Second, he is shown a shower of fire that would “eat up the land.” After each of these, Amos speaks up in defense of Isreal and God relents. Third is the vision we heard in the lesson, the plumb line; Amos, however, does not defend Israel after this vision. Instead, the series of visions is interrupted by the tale of the priest Amaziah and his attempt to silence this prophet.

Amos has delivered his message to Amaziah, a message to the whole of the country, but Amaziah, who is high priest at the king’s shrine at Bethel, has edited it before delivering it to the king. Instead of a message to the whole of society, he has made it sound like nothing more than a personal threat against the king and now, certain of the king’s reaction, he warns Amos to flee, to return to the south to make his living as a prophet there, but never to prophecy again in Israel. This is where Amos protests that he is not a professional prophet, but earns his living in agriculture; and this is where the lectionary reading ends. But it is not where the story ends.

Because of his attempt to silence the prophecy, Amos speaks a word from God for Amaziah, predicting that his family will fall in ruin and dishonor and that he himself will die “in an unclean land.” Amos then tells of the fourth of his visions, a bowl of fresh fruit which God explains illustrates that God’s patience with Israel is at an end. It’s a pun in Hebrew, the word for fruit being qay’its and that for end being qets. In English, I suppose, we would say that God is calling it quits with these people. The story ends with God’s final word to Amaziah, to the all of Israel, and to anyone who would muzzle his prophets: “Be silent!” Those who would interfere with God’s word to God’s people are themselves to shut up or face consequences like those promised Amaziah!

Which brings us to the gospel lesson and the beheading of John the Baptizer. It’s so familiar it hardly needs rehearsing, but let’s just refresh our memories, anyway.

Herod imprisoned John in an attempt to appease his wife Herodias because John had been raling against her and her marriage to Herod, who was her brother-in-law before he was her spouse and, therefore, John considered the marriage adulterous. (Some suggest that Herod did so to prevent Herodias from killing John herself.) At a birthday party he threw for himself, Herod witnessed a dance by his step-daughter and was so taken that he made a rash promise to give her anything she might ask for, up to half his kingdom. Consulting her mother, the girl asks for John’s head on a platter. Hoist on the petard of his public promise, Herod has no choice but to give her what she asks, even though he was quite fearful that John was, indeed, a prophet of God. Not recorded in the Bible is the fact that not too long after the events portrayed in the Gospels, Herod was deprived of his kingdom and all his property, and died in squalid poverty exiled to Gaul. Silencing God’s prophets, again, is obviously a really bad idea!

While I would be the last to suggest that the Episcopal Church or any of its leaders are equivalent to Amos or John the Baptist, I do believe that from time to the Church does speak with a prophetic voice. I believe that, in part, because of Christ’s promise that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20) and because it has been the tradition and belief of the church since the very first Ecumenical Counsel that (as some Lutheran bishops recently put it) “we trust that God’s Spirit will form the wisdom of God’s faithful people gathered in deliberative assembly.” (ELCA Conference of Bishops, March 10, 2009)

Over 1,000 Episcopalians on Thursday concluded the bicameral deliberative assembly known as The General Convention of the Episcopal Church: 165 bishops participated as voting members of the junior house; 844 lay and clergy deputies, as voting members of the senior house. They were presented with over 440 pieces of business ranging from courtesy resolutions commending the host hotel’s staff to the adoption of a budget for the next three years to the approval of new liturgies to the election of new leadership. Much of that was done quickly, with little fan-fare and hardly any notice. Much of it was done with the boring, long-drawn-out tedium that careful legislative work often seems to entail, but again with little notice. Some of it has received and will receive the attention of a secular press itching for scandal and sensationalism, eager to sell its advertising by selling the world a picture of a church gone (as Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina, in fact, urged it in his keynote sermon) crazy! (Of course, Bishop Curry was encouraging the church to go “crazy for Christ,” something the secular press will overlook.) Some of what the church did at the 77th General Convention will, I believe, be seen in years to come to be truly prophetic, in the best sense of that word, speaking God’s Truth to a world in need of hearing it, and I suspect that there will be those who try to silence the Convention’s message or stop its actions as Amaziah and Herodias did those of Amos and John the Baptist.

Of all the work done by the Convention, there were three areas in which I believe its actions are the most important. First, it acted in regard to marriage and the promises couples make to one another when forming life-long, loving, and committed relationships. Second, it affirmed the church’s traditional understanding of the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Third, it committed the church to structural and organic reform.

With regard to life-long interpersonal commitments, the Convention called for an in-depth study and proclamation of the church’s contemporary theology of marriage. This, in my opinion, has been needed for many years. Holy Matrimony is one of the five sacramental rites of the church which our Articles of Religion tell us arise from “states of life allowed in the Scriptures” but which have neither “visible sign [n]or ceremony ordained of God.” (Art. XXV, BCP page 872) Marriage is one of those “Traditions and Ceremonies” that it “is not necessary . . . be in all places one, or utterly like.” (Art. XXXIV, BCP page 874) Since it was first identified as a sacrament in about the 10th Century, marriage practices “have been divers,” and the Articles of Religion assure us “may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners.” (Ibid.) After a thousand years of monkeying about with marriage willy-nilly, and believe me we have done just that throughout the church’s history, taking a good, hard, methodical look at our theology and practice is a great idea!

In the same area, the Convention approved a provisional rite for the blessing of the committed, life-long relationships of same-sex couples. This is the one action that I am sure will be most discussed and most mischaracterized in the secular press. The Standing Liturgical Commission, which developed this rite, and the deputies and bishops who adopted it, have been quite clear that this is not marriage liturgy; it does not confer the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Furthermore, it is a provisional rite, which means it may only be used provided certain conditions are met. I confess that I have not read the enabling legislation, but it is my understanding that this liturgy may only be used in those States or foreign jurisdictions where the civil authorities have either made the legal state of marriage open to same-sex couples or have created some other form of legally recognized civil union for such couples. Furthermore, it may only be used with the permission of the local bishop.

The second area of important action was in regard to the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. There was a motion put forward by the Diocese of Eastern Oregon to change the canons of the church so as to permit, as a regular matter, those who are not yet baptized to receive the Sacrament of the Altar. This would have changed what has been the practice and tradition of the church since its very beginning; there has never been a time when it was not considered necessary that a person be baptized before being invited to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. While we do not check ID’s at the altar rail or communion station, and while we do now open our communion to all who are baptized in any Christian tradition (no longer restricting the Eucharist to those confirmed in the Episcopal Church), the General Convention was not willing to make that change. Instead, in a substitute resolution, the bishops and deputies affirmed that it is the normative practice and expectation of this church that Baptism precede reception of Holy Communion, and affirming that the Episcopal Church invites everyone to be baptized into the saving death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

The third and, I believe, most important of what I have called the prophetic actions of the General Convention is to take the first step toward reorganization and restructuring of the Episcopal Church. We have a national, provincial, and diocesan structure which is often top-heavy, unwieldy, and counter-productive. One of the buzz-words of recent Convention was “nimble” – that is not a word that in any way, shape, or form describes the Episcopal Church! It doesn’t even describe one of our parishes let alone the entire national organization! All too often we find ourselves standing in our own way, tripping over our own feet. In passing the resolution to re-imagine and restructure the church and calling for a task force made up of new and younger leaders to do so, the General Convention has said that we will get out of the way; we will get out of the Spirit’s way; we will get out of our own way!

There is much work to be done, but it seems to me that the hardest work will be the letting-go and stepping-aside . . . letting go of old ways of doing and being church, letting go of expectations of how things have always been done and how we think they ought to be done, letting go of office and power by those who have governed the church for generations, letting go of the hurt and pain of change . . . stepping aside to allow those newer, younger leaders to come forward, stepping aside to let the Holy Spirit come in, stepping aside to free the center so that it may be filled with something new and different. I hope that the hard work of letting-go and stepping-aside will get done, although I’m not convinced that it will.

Shortly after adopting that resolution, the House of Deputies was given an opportunity to elect newer and younger leadership. It chose instead to elect as its president someone who has been a General Convention deputy eight times and who has had a seat in the highest councils of the church for years. It elected as its vice-president someone who has been a deputy at every General Convention since 1973. I know both of these individuals and I know that they are faithful, dedicated, and capable, but I have to be honest – these folks are part of the well-entrenched, long-experienced cadre of church governors; this is leadership that is anything but new or young (and it pains me to say that since the new president and I are essentially the same age). Still, I live in hope that they can and will, in fact, facilitate and accomplish the change that is needed, because (as I said earlier) I trust that God’s Spirit forms the wisdom of God’s faithful people gathered in deliberative assembly.

So let me bring us back to our lessons for today. What might they be teaching us about how to respond to the actions of our recently-concluded General Convention?

Well . . . first, I suggest that the story of Amos and Amaziah, and the story of the Baptizer and Herodias, these stories in which someone sought to silence the prophetic word encourage us to be aware of the distortions we may hear from both the religious and the secular media. Just as Amaziah misrepresented and tried to silence Amos’s prophecy when relaying it to King Jeroboam, so too may we find the reports distorting the actual words and actions of the Convention in an attempt to undermine and stop them. Just as Herodias sought to behead John, so too we may find the detractors of our church trying to assassinate the character of our leaders.

Secondly, the defense of prophecy in the Book of Amos with its pronouncement of judgment against Amaziah or the end to which Herod and Herodias came might stand as cautionary tales against our own tendency to silence whatever it is that we find unpalatable in the prophetic voices of our church’s Spirit-led Convention, voices calling us to change in those areas in which we as a church and as individuals may be in the greatest need of reformation.

Finally, we might find encouragement that we, like Amos and John, despite the dangers in doing so, might heed God’s call to exercise our own prophetic voices in our communities, in our workplaces, or among our circles of friends speaking on behalf of our church which welcomes all and proclaims the Good News that God loves everyone, no exceptions.

God Did Not Make Death – From the Daily Office – July 2, 2012

July 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Paul wrote:

When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Romans 6:20-23 – July 2, 2012)

I am still thinking of my Sunday sermon from yesterday’s Revised Common Lectionary lessons. We had chosen to follow “track 2” of the Lectionary and so read from the Book of Wisdom: “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living . . . . but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” (Wis. 1:13,2:24) Paul seems to be drawing on exactly the same thought: life is the gift of God, death is the result of the things of sin. As I said yesterday, God is not in the business of death. ~ So why is it that in our modern society the most publicly zealous followers of Jesus, a certain segment of American evangelical Christians, seem to embrace a culture of death? Why do they support capital punishment, get behind exporting war into other countries, applaud when abortion clinics are bombed, and defend our government when intelligence services or military engage in “water-boarding” to gather information? As a political comedian and comentator who also happens to be a Catholic Christian notes, only in America “can you be pro-war, pro-torture, pro-death penalty, pro-land mines, pro-unmanned drones and still call yourself ‘pro-life’.” Well, really, one can’t. Those things aren’t “pro-life” and it’s just hypocrisy to claim that title while promoting a culture of death, a culture that is the result of sin, that is the outcome of the devil’s envy. None of those things are “pro-life” and (in my theological opinion) none can be reconciled with Christian faith. “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” Neither should God’s people.

(Note: The accompanying photograph is from Dazzling Design, to which the photograph links. There are some very creative photo images to be found there.)

Vomiting Turkey Vultures! – From the Daily Office – June 9, 2012

June 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Jesus said:

It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles . . . Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Matthew 15:11,17-20 – June 9, 2012)

I try really hard not politicize these meditations, but I cannot help but think of the political rancor in our country during this election season, particularly the signs that have been paraded at so-called “tea party” rallies by persons who self-identify as “Christians” or more particularly as members of the “Christian Right”. There’s been plenty on the Left, as well, but it is from the Right that the most vile “hate speech” is heard. Just yesterday I saw a news item that Terry Jones, the pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, the same fellow who threatened to burn a Qur’an several months ago, has now hung an effigy of President Obama on a gallows in front of his church. How can someone who presents himself as a Christian pastor do that? Especially in light of these words from Jesus? Especially in light of the words from Paul which are also in today’s Daily Office reading: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28) One hastens to point out to “Pastor” Jones that President Obama (despite the rantings of the far Right and no matter how one may feel about his politics) is a baptized Christian, a brother in the Lord, a fellow member of the church universal. How on earth can this man do this? ~ A couple of days ago some members of my parish and I were talking about the festival held each spring in an Ohio village near our town. It celebrates something like the return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano in California, only in this case it is the return of the turkey vultures to Hinckley, Ohio. (You read that correctly . . . turkey vultures.) For some reason I once learned that turkey vultures (and other types of buzzard) defend themselves through the use of projectile vomiting. It occurs to me on reading this text from Matthew and considering our political discourse (especially antics like these of “Pastor” Jones) in its light, that the projectile-vomiting turkey vulture just might be the mascot of present-day American politics. May God have mercy!

To Each According To Need – From the Daily Office – May 27, 2012

May 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We read in the Book of Acts:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Acts 4:32 – May 27, 2012)

According to Luke, “there was not a needy person among them” because the apostles “distributed to each as any had need.” (Acts 4:34-35) Sounds a bit Bolshevik, doesn’t it? At least it certainly sounds like Karl Marx who, in 1875, wrote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Of course, Marx believed that this sort of social organization could only exist in a society where technology and social organization had substantially eliminated the need for physical labor in the production of things, which cannot in any way, shape, or form describe the situation in First Century Judea. Nonetheless, I’ve never understood how, with Holy Scripture describing and even extolling this social organization of the first disciples, any Christian could not strive toward a society of this sort. ~ Throughout the last two millennia there have been religious orders and utopian experiments which have sought to recreate the first Christian community as separate from, rather than in the midst of, the secular world. It seems to me that we are called to minister within the world order and try to reform it. As Christians we should strive to build a world where there is not a needy person and where all receive as any has need. Jesus put it this way, “Love your neighbor as your self.” (Mark 12:31) We have a word for that sort of love. We call it justice.

Pray for that Jackass – From the Daily Office – May 15, 2012

May 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Paul wrote:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Timothy 2:1-2 – May 15, 2012)

There was a meme circulating the conservative blogosphere and email circuit several months ago in which folks of a certain political persuasion asserted that they were “praying” for President Obama by reciting a verse from Psalm 109: “Let his days be few, and let another take his office.” The psalm continues in the next verse: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife become a widow.” And the petition get even worse after that. This is not what Paul is admonishing the faithful to do in his letter to the young bishop Timothy. In fact, it is clearly the very opposite. ~ What would our country and our society be like if everyone did offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for … all who are in high positions”? One of the things I counsel folks who come to me with issues of unresolved anger toward another is to pray for that other. Not specific intercessions just simply to offer that person’s name before God with the simple request, “In this person’s life, Lord, may your will be done.” The nearly universal experience of my counselees is that over the course of time (the length of time varies from person to person) their anger dissipates; the typical observation is that is impossible to stay angry at someone for whom you are praying. ~ The purpose of prayer is not to inform God of anything of which we believe God may be unaware, to give God our good advice, or to conform God’s will to ours. Rather, it is to relinquish our own selfish desires in acquiescence to the one “whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine,” as we remind ourselves as the end of the Daily Office (quoting Ephesians 3:20). ~ What would our society be like if everyone prayed for our leadership, even the leaders with whom we have political disagreements or personal dislikes? What would things be like if I prayed for that jackass in Congress, or that SOB in the state house? I cannot imagine, but Paul assures me that we would all “lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” Maybe we (that really means, I) should give it a try.

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