That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Daily Office (Page 21 of 70)

Strong and Courageous – From the Daily Office – June 2, 2014

June 2, 2014 / / 3 Comments

From the Book of Joshua:

I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Joshua 1:9 (NRSV) – June 2, 2014)

Suffragettes MarchingThese are among the words spoken by Yahweh to Joshua son of Nun, the assistant to Moses, as he is commissioned to succeed Moses as leader of the Hebrews and lead them into Canaan.

It occurred to me as I thought about them that they can mean very different things depending on the audience to whom they are spoken, or at least they can seem to. It also occurred to me that although there are similar admonitions given to various people throughout Scripture, none of those people are women. There are women who are lauded for their strength and courage, Deborah the judge and Yael who killed the general Sisera, for example, but they are exceptions to the rule (the Scriptural rule seeming to be that women are to be meek and compliant). But I can think of no instance in which a woman is directly instructed to be “strong and courageous” (or anything similar).

I suppose my thoughts run in that channel this morning because of something I heard during an NPR discussion of the recent mass killing in Isla Vista, California, the motivations of the killer, and the public conversation in the aftermath. Two news analysts were talking about the Twitter hashtag #yesallwomen and one of them quoted novelist Margaret Atwood, “Men’s greatest fear is that women will laugh at them, while women’s greatest fear is that men will kill them.” I’d not heard that comment before, but a look at that Twitter hashtag feed made me appreciate the truth that underlies it.

Reading the various Tweets from women under that hashtag is a real eye-opener! Here are a few (edited to remove Twitter identifiers and vulgarities):

Because I thought I was safe walking 2 blocks home in my town ’til rape reports started piling up last year. I wasn’t safe; I was lucky.

Because this is “humor”: Never trust anything that can bleed for seven days straight and doesn’t die.

Because I was recently told by a man that I was “forcing him to have impure thoughts” by the way I was dressed.

Because I’m made out to be a slut for being a single mother.

Because when I’m walking home at night, instead of self-reflection or self-improvement I think about self-defense.

Because when I walk through a parking lot and get catcalled I’m told to ignore it rather than standup for myself.

Because when my intellect stuns someone, attacking my weight is an obvious second choice.

Because when women share stories of being scared or hurt, some people say “Yeah? Prove it.”

Because when you hit on me, my curves are sexy, and when I reject you, I’m a fat bitch you’d only ____ with a paper bag on.

Because I was advised by a male supervisor to flirt with men to get them to sign a petition.

Because when a guy posts a post-workout pic he’s “confident” but when a girl does the same thing she’s “attention-seeking”.

The other eye-openers on that hashtag thread were the Tweets by men. I simply can’t repeat many of them here! To call them misogynistic would be an understatement; to call them vile would be closer to the truth.

As the child of a single mother and the parent of a single woman living on her own, I thought I appreciated the difficulties of women in our society. I was wrong. I didn’t and I probably still don’t, but what I took away from reading through those Tweets is a more visceral (if still partial) understanding of patriarchy. Those Tweets flesh-out and give substance to what, for most men (I think), can be nothing more than an intellectual concept. I suggest my brethren do as I have done and spend some time reading through those Tweets. You’ll be amazed by the comments of the women and appalled by those of the men. You’ll have to be strong and courageous to read them, but in the end you’ll be better for having done so.

So God told Joshua, “Be strong and courageous,” but I can think of no instance when God gave similar instruction to a woman. It occurs to me that perhaps the reason those words aren’t spoken to women in the Scriptures is that they don’t need to be. Women don’t need to be told to be strong and courageous; they already are. Women growing up and living in patriarchy simply have to be.

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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.

We Always Have Choices – From the Daily Office – May 31, 2014

May 31, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Gospel according to Matthew:

There was a leper who came to him and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Matthew 8:2-3 (NRSV) – May 31, 2014)

ChoicesI admit that I’m never quite sure how to read this publicly, what tone of voice to use for Jesus. I suppose I could avoid that question by reading in that dull monotone some lectors chose, or in that “stained glass church voice” many clergy affect. However, the bible is mostly story, and the Gospels are entirely story, and I believe stories are to be read, especially in public, as stories — living, breathing, interesting, engaging stories.

So how to read Jesus in this narrative? Angry? Authoritative and decisive? Amused? I once heard a deacon read this tale in a way that made Jesus sound surprised that he had a choice, with a tone of voice that said, “Really? I don’t have to do this?”

Sometimes it seems to me that the Gospel is presented in such a way as to suggest that Jesus had little, if any, say in anything. “This was God’s design, the plan of salvation from the very beginning, ba-blah, ba-blah, ba-blah . . . .” as if Jesus were simply some preprogrammed automaton. But, of course, Jesus always had a choice; everyday Jesus had to make the decision whether to continue, whether to “set his face toward Jerusalem” even knowing the probable outcome of his choices.

And so it is with all of us. Life is a series of choices. We don’t always get our way; the choices we would like to make a sometimes refused us. Today in the church is the Feast of Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a day set aside to honor Mary’s visit with her cousin Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. It is the day on which she sang the Magnificat. It is the day I chose to be ordained. However, it was not the day my bishop chose to ordain me. Guess whose choice prevailed.

So, no, we don’t always get our choices, but we always have choices to make. I simply do not understand and cannot accept the sort of religion that denies that. Not to long ago, I read a devotional text in which the writer asserted that “God is strategic. He has laid out an exact plan for our lives right down to the smallest details. God has it all figured out. He is orchestrating your life right down to the very second.” That sort of spiritual belief has always seemed to me a cop out. It lays our bad choices, our poor decisions at God’s feet, denying our own responsibility.

And it is a belief which can’t be sustained. Within a few pages of that statement, the author then wrote that God can “turn any situation around” because “it doesn’t matter how you got there, whether it was by your own poor choices or maybe someone else treated you unfairly.”

Which is it? Either God has a plan for every second of everyone’s life and is orchestrating every detail or human beings have free will and are always making choices; it can’t be both ways. Or perhaps it can. As the great Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was fond of saying, “We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”

We always have choices.

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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.

La La La, I Can’t Hear You – From the Daily Office – May 30, 2014

May 30, 2014 / / 1 Comment

From the First Book of Samuel:

Hannah prayed and said,
“There is no Holy One like the Lord,
no one besides you;
there is no Rock like our God.
Talk no more so very proudly,
let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
and by him actions are weighed.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Samuel 2:2-3 (NRSV) – May 30, 2014)

I Can't Hear You T-Shirt Advertisement“The Lord is a God of knowledge” may be the most important assertion in Hannah’s song. Many bible scholars believe her song to be the model of Mary’s song, The Magnificat. Both are sung by pregnant women; both extol the might and power of God; both confirm God’s preference for the poor and lowly over the rich and powerful. Only Hannah’s song, however, includes this description and her accompanying admonition to her hearers to not speak arrogantly. The translation in The Complete Jewish Bible renders her words in this way: “Stop your proud boasting! Don’t let arrogance come from your mouth! For ADONAI is a God of knowledge, and he appraises actions.”

The clear import of Hannah’s words is that actions speak louder than words and that God, “a God of knowledge,” knows both our words and our actions; if our words and actions are not in accord, God will know and judge according to the former no matter what we may say.

This morning, however, the depiction of Yahweh as “a God of knowledge” appealed to me in a different way, not as a description of an attribute of God, but as a statement of what God encourages in others. This is the God who gave human beings the capacity to learn, to engage in science and research, to explore new things, and (most importantly) to reason and apply what they have learned. And this God expects us to use this capacity, to actually do these things. As Galileo Galilei said in a letter written in 1651, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”

We are not to remain ignorant, either of the nature of the world around us or of the nature of God. In moral theology ignorance is described as either invincible and vincible. Ignorance is considered invincible if a person cannot not overcome it by applying reasonable diligence in seeking its remedy. Ignorance is vincible if the application of reasonable diligence could remove it. (Reasonable diligence is that effort that a conscientious person would exert in seeking the correct answer to a question given (a) the gravity of the question and (b) the particular resources available.)

We seem to live in an age of pretend invincible ignorance. One of my favorite science fiction authors, the late Dr. Isaac Asimov, wrote in an essay for Newsweek magazine in 1980, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” In the three decades since, things have gotten worse.

Contemporary logicians, in fact, now use the term to describe what might be the simplest of all logical fallacies, the refusal to face facts, the insistence on the legitimacy of one’s position in the face of contradictory evidence. It’s a pretty good clue that someone is engaging in this fallacy if they say something like “I really don’t care what the experts say; no one is going to convince me that I’m wrong” or “Nothing you say is going to change my mind” or even “Yeah, okay, whatever!”

Children arguing with one another stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “La la la, I can’t hear you.” We live in a world when adults seem to believe this is a proper form of political or religious or scientific argument. It’s not. This is not the invincible ignorance of moral theology, but it is immoral. This is willful ignorance, and willful ignorance is sinful. As Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologica:

It is clear that not every kind of ignorance is the cause of a sin, but that alone which removes the knowledge which would prevent the sinful act. … This may happen on the part of the ignorance itself, because, to wit, this ignorance is voluntary, either directly, as when a man wishes of set purpose to be ignorant of certain things that he may sin the more freely; or indirectly, as when a man, through stress of work or other occupations, neglects to acquire the knowledge which would restrain him from sin. For such like negligence renders the ignorance itself voluntary and sinful, provided it be about matters one is bound and able to know.” (Summa, I-II, q. 76, a. 1, a. 3)

The Lord is a God of knowledge; the Lord is not impressed with “La la la, I can’t hear you.”

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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.

Playing to an Empty Theater – From the Daily Office – May 28, 2014

May 29, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Letter to the Hebrews:

God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. But someone has testified somewhere,
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honor,
subjecting all things under their feet.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Hebrews 2:5-8a – May 29, 2014 – Ascension Day)

Empty TheaterI cannot read these verses of Hebrews (nor the verses of Psalm 8 which the author quotes) without thinking of Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither . . . . (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II. Scene II)

Hamlet may not have delighted in humankind, but the story of Jesus and the witness of Scripture (Old and New) assure us that God does. With all our flaws and foibles, God loves the human race. (There are days when I wonder what that says about God, but the Feast of the Ascension is not one of them.) On this feast, we are assured that God loves us so much that God “crowns us with glory and honor.” We read not only this assurance in the Letter to the Hebrews, but also in the vision recorded in the Book of Daniel:

As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.
(Dan 7:13-14)

As I read today’s lessons I am saddened that this Feast is so ignored by the Church. It passes by and our members never even think about it, if they even know of it. In the Sunday rota it is noted only as the day after which the Seventh Sunday of Easter comes: that’s how next Sunday’s collect is titled in The Book of Common Prayer, “Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day.” Kind of sad, because the Ascension really is the last event, the last scene of the last act of the great drama which is “the Christ event.” Fortunately, this year (Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary) we will hear the story of the Ascension from the Book of Acts on Sunday morning; this is not the case in the other two years of the rotation.

If the Incarnation (meaning the whole of Jesus’ earthly being) were viewed as a stage play, the drama of salvation would be seen in this way: Act One — In the Nativity, God becomes a human being offering great promise to humankind. Act Two — In the life of Jesus, God fully enters human existence in all its aspects making clearer the meaning of the promise. Act Three — In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God defeats death and opens the way of eternal life to all human beings setting the scene for fulfillment of the promise. Act Four — In the Ascension, a human being becomes God bringing the promise of the Nativity revealed Act One to fruition. (Pentecost and all that follows it are the epilogue, just as the story of Israel and the words and works of the Prophets are the prologue.)

The Ascension is the denouement of the entire story but, unfortunately, most of the audience, thinking the play concluded, left after Act Three; some may even have left in the middle of that act. The climax of the drama plays out to a largely empty theater.

One of the Episcopal Church’s collects for today says: “We believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend.” (BCP 1979, page 226) I think this prayer gets it slightly wrong. Our ascension with Jesus, I believe, is not a future thing that we “may” later attain. Rather, in Jesus’ Ascension we all have already ascended. God has already seated us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus; our ascension is not so much an experience to be attained, but a reality to be experienced. As St. Athanasius famously put it, “God became man that man might become God.” In the Ascension of Jesus, this theosis (deification) has already happened.

What a piece of work is humankind! Crowned with glory and honor. Given dominion and glory and kingship that shall not pass away. It’s sad that on the feast day that acknowledges this the theater is largely empty; the climax of the drama of redemption passes by largely unnoticed.

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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.

Let the Psalms Do It – From the Daily Office – May 28, 2014

May 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Book of Psalms:

Go away from me, you evildoers,
that I may keep the commandments of my God.
— Psalm 119:115 (NRSV)

O that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
— Psalm 81:13 (NRSV)

Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
— Psalm 82:3-4 (NRSV)

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Morning & Evening Psalms – May 28, 2014)

Empty Arched SpaceTwo years ago I wrote a meditation on First Timothy on this blog about our need to pray for our political leadership, especially those with whom we disagree; yesterday, I repeated that same reflection. Really, our need is to pray for everyone, including those we really don’t want to pray for: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Mt 5:44) I believe that, I really do.

Since the first publication of that reflection in May, 2012, there have been nine mass shootings in this country, including the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and this week’s killings near UC Santa Barbara in Isla Vista, California:

“Seven people are dead, including a suspect, and seven people are wounded following a series of shootings in Isla Vista. The identities of those who were killed are not being released until next of kin notifications are made. Of the seven people in the hospital, all are being treated for gunshot wounds or traumatic injuries and at least one of the victims has undergone surgery.” — Santa Barbara, California, Sheriff’s Office press release, May 24, 2014

After the UCSB deaths, this father spoke out:

“Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.” — Richard Martinez, father of Christopher Martinez, one of the Isla Vista decedents

And these gun-rights advocates responded:

“No idea how my son will die, but I know it won’t be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back.” — Todd Kincannon, North Carolina Tea Party activist, known for thoughtless tweets like this one

“[Y]our dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” — Samuel Wurzelbacher a/k/a “Joe the Plumber,” brought to national attention during the 2012 presidential campaign

And I wrote this on Facebook (after reading Wurzelbacher’s open letter):

“Between this (and that Kincannon person characterizing the Isla Vista victims as ‘cowering bitches’) we see the moral depravity, the ethical bankruptcy, and the just-plain vileness of those who have elevated the misconstrual of the Second Amendment’s provision of a right to bear arms above all other rights and laws.”

And The Onion published this biting satire:

“ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. ‘This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,’ said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. ‘It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.’ At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as ‘helpless.’”

I really, really believe in the power of prayer. I really, really believe that we are to pray for those who do wrong. I really, really believe we should pray for those we don’t want to pray for. I really, really believe that we are to pray for our leaders, even when we disagree with them and even when they are failing to lead, failing to protect the people, failing to take action that is needed.

But today I’m finding really, really hard to do that. So I’ll let today’s psalms do it for me.

Let the psalms do it.

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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.

Praying for Leaders – From the Daily Office – May 27, 2014

May 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the First Letter to Timothy:

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 (NRSV) – May 27, 2014)

Praying with the BibleThere 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.

(The reflection above is a repeat of one written on this blog in May of 2012 when this lesson was last on the lectionary rotation.)

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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 Monday of a Three-Day Weekend – From the Daily Office – May 30, 2014

May 26, 2014 / / 1 Comment

From the Book of Leviticus:

They shall compute with the purchaser the total from the year when they sold themselves to the alien until the jubilee year; the price of the sale shall be applied to the number of years: the time they were with the owner shall be rated as the time of a hired laborer.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Leviticus 25:50 (NRSV) – May 26, 2014)

German war cemetery, Neuville-St-Vaast, Pas-de-Calais Copyright David CrosslandToday is Memorial Day according to the calendar: in my mind, it’s really not, it’s just the Monday “holiday” that replaced Memorial Day which ought to be on Friday of this week. Yes, in that regard, I’m a traditionalist; I don’t hold with the change made by Federal law back when I was in college, a change that moved Memorial Day and a couple of other significant civil holidays (Washington’s birthday, for example) from their real dates to a variable Monday, creating “three-day weekends”.

As a student, of course, I thought that creating three-day weekends was a great idea, but as I’ve grown older I think back to fond memories of May 30th Memorial Days with my mother tending my father’s grave, days that were a disruption in the normal flow of everyday life, days that jarred us into awareness, days that forced us to recollect his military service and the sacrifices he and his comrades had made. The Monday of a three-day weekend doesn’t do that.

We have lost something, and what I think it is is the dissonance of that interruption and awareness that it brings. When Memorial Day fell whenever it would, forcing us in the middle of the week to take time from work and school or on a Saturday disrupting our weekend gardening or sporting events, we took notice. The Monday of a three-day weekend doesn’t do that.

The Episcopal Church doesn’t have special lessons for the commemoration of Memorial Day; this is a secular holiday, not a religious one. So when we sit down to offer our prayers in formal worship on this day this year we have three choices: the Daily Office lessons for Monday in the sixth week of Easter; the daily Eucharistic lectionary; or the lessons for the commemoration of St. Augustine of Canterbury. (In another year on another date, these options would change.) None of these offer anything one could count as particularly appropriate to the day, but I am struck by how grossly inappropriate the Levitical discussion of slavery and the redemption of slaves is . . . grossly inappropriate and yet very instructive.

One cannot deny that the Bible approves of slavery, however that evil may be embodied in a culture. Although slavery as practiced by the Hebrews was different from that of the Roman Empire and both were very different from that practiced in the American South before the Civil War, Holy Scripture was easily used to justify an inhumane practice. What was ignored in American slavery was the Bible’s insistence that slaves be treated fairly, that they or their kin be able to redeem them, and that the price of redemption be just. That’s what today’s Old Testament reading is all about, setting a redemption price that would be just and equitable.

I suppose, if I were more of a historian, my meditations on the relationship between this text and Memorial Day might have focused on the fact that the holiday’s historical origins are found in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in this country. There might be some appropriate and instructive linkage between this discussion of a reasonable price to free a slave and the horribly unreasonable cost of thousands of soldiers’ lives to free the American slaves. But I’m not that much of a historian and my initial thoughts on reading the text were more personal: I remembered those Memorial Days with Mom at my father’s grave, those special disruptions in our day-to-day lives and I wondered about the cost of moving the holiday from a set date to a variable Monday.

It seems to me that, in one sense, the alteration in the holiday has exacted too high a price and in another has cheapened the remembrance. The high price paid is in our forgetfulness and its consequences. That the day has become just another Monday of a three-day weekend, a day for gardening and sporting events and picnics, helps us to forget — or more accurately, encourages us to not remember — the horrors of war and the sacrifices of those who fight, are wounded, and die. Forgetting — or not remembering — the unjust and inequitable price of past wars, we are more willing to send our young men and women into another one.

The change also cheapens our loved ones’ loss. My father was badly wounded in France in World War II: shrapnel nearly destroyed his right leg. Surgeons were able to save it and, after more than a year of rehabilitation and therapy, he was able to walk, but I never knew him not to walk without a painful and pronounced limp. I suspect that that pain was one reason he drank to excess, self-medicating himself into numbness, oblivion, and eventually an early death; another was probably what he witnessed around him on the battlefield. A day of remembrance barging into and making a mess of our daily lives is not a high price to pay to remember the sacrifice he made and the larger sacrifices made by those who died in battle. The Monday of a three-day weekend doesn’t do that. It’s too easy; it’s cheap. And to me, the son of veteran who paid much too high a price, it’s offensive.

The Law of Moses may have approved of slavery, but it didn’t cheapen human lives. It insisted that the price of a human being be justly and equitably determined. The Monday of a three-day weekend doesn’t do that.

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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.

Doing Something – From the Daily Office – May 24, 2014

May 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From Matthew’s Gospel:

Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Matthew 7:21 (NRSV) – May 24, 2014)

Jesus Said What?I love this verse! I always think of it as Jesus’ version of “Don’t just stand there. Do something!”

If I could point to one bit of Holy Scripture that convinced me to become an Episcopalian, it would be this one. The King James Version’s rendition was the favorite offertory sentence of the Episcopal chaplain at the military academy where I went to high school and attended Evening Prayer or the Holy Eucharist everyday. I can still recite that version from memory: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

My childhood was largely an unchurched one. My earliest memories of going to church were in a Baptist congregation which eventually we ceased attending when the pastor declined to bury my non-church-member father (whose hard-drinking, Las-Vegas-Strip lifestyle he found objectionable); no more churchgoing after that. Summers were spent with my paternal grandparents who insisted that I go with them to an old-timey, very evangelical Methodist Church. The message at both those churches, so far as understood (and now remembered) by a grade school kid, was that all you needed to do to be “saved” was to claim Jesus as Lord and talk about him a lot. I never heard anything like this verse from Matthew and, by the time I was in junior high and no longer going to church with my grandparents, the talking-about-Jesus thing had worn a bit thin.

The liturgical worship of the Episcopal Church (back then, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer) resonated with me. I do have to admit that the first few weeks of attending daily chapel I was less aware of the words than of the rhythm of worship because I was getting used to the “Episcopal juggle” — when to use the prayer book, when to use the hymnal, when to use the service sheet or “bulletin” — and Episcopal calisthenics — when do I kneel? when do I stand? do I ever get to just sit still? But eventually the words started making an impact and the words of the chaplain’s favorite offertory sentence — “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” — made a particular impact.

In addition to learning about the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, I was learning about the culture of the Episcopal Church. It was the 1960s. John Hines was Presiding Bishop; he was contributing to the Angela Davis Defense Fund! Episcopalians were marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. One of them, a seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels, was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff in Alabama when Daniels moved to protect a 17-year-old black girl. (Daniels is now recognized as a martyr on the church’s sanctoral calendar.) Some Episcopalians were active in protesting the Vietnam War, while other Episcopalians served as chaplains in the military and were stationed in Vietnam — but both respected the other, worshipped together, and worked out their differences, whatever they may have been, through the church’s conciliar governance at diocesan and national (general) conventions.

I was captivated by the culture of the 1960s Episcopal Church. These weren’t people who simply claimed Jesus as Lord and talked about him a lot; these people did things! I joined, and as I got more active I found out Episcopalians did “smaller,” less noticed things — things like feeding the hungry, providing shelter for the homeless, opening their churches for free community concerts, tutoring kids struggling in school, teaching English to refugees from other countries — the list of things Episcopalians do, things I hadn’t seen in my parents’ and grandparents’ churches (although now I’m pretty sure they did at least a few of them; I hope they did), is long, almost endless.

It is my joy to be rector of a parish with an active food pantry ministry, a parish which opens its space each month for a free concert, a parish whose youth sleep outside in all sorts of whether to call attention to the plight of those without homes, a parish where youth and adults travel somewhere together every summer to build or repair the homes of those unable to do it themselves, a parish which doesn’t just call Jesus “Lord” but which actively does the things he told us were his Father’s will.

There are many, many reasons I became, and stay, an Episcopalian. An important one is that Episcopalians don’t just stand there — they do something!

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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.

Sabbath with Frank Lee – From the Daily Office – May 23, 2014

May 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

From the Book of Leviticus:

For six days shall work be done; but the seventh day is a sabbath of complete rest, a holy convocation; you shall do no work: it is a sabbath to the Lord throughout your settlements.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Leviticus 23:3 (NRSV) – May 23, 2014)

Rest Area Highway SignI am an absolutely faithful believer in the biblical concept of sabbath. I am also one of its worst offenders. No matter what day I choose to be my day “away from the office,” at least 50% of the time I will end up doing something work related. Today, for example, a Friday, is supposed to be my day off. What will I be doing? Giving my time to the church as a volunteer working on the refurbishment of the undercroft which is being converted to office space (laying peel-and-stick carpet tiles, to be precise). — This raises the interesting issue: “Can one volunteer at one’s place of employment?” I suspect the answer is “No” because whenever I am on the church property or in the church building I am “the rector,” not just some Joe who’s helping out.

If there isn’t something of that nature to do, there are (potentially) wedding rehearsals, Friday evening social events, Good Fridays (OK, only one of those each year), and other things that interfere. But is any other day a good day for clergy to take off? If there is, I haven’t found it in 24 years of ordained ministry. No matter what day I have selected as my “day off,” it has been subject to interruption and disruption. So keeping sabbath is rather difficult to do. One has to be very intentional about it, which is why God enjoined it on everyone in the Hebrew community in the Law of Moses. Left each to our own devices, we fail to do it; if everyone is doing so, one has lots of community support.

Several years ago I had a colleague whose appointment book a couple of times each week included some time with “Frank Lee.” Her parish staff were told in no uncertain terms that when she was away for her meeting with Mr. Lee she was not to be called, ever. Nothing was important enough to disturb her time with him. After a couple of years working with her, the parish secretary became very curious as to who this Mr. Lee was. He wasn’t on the parish rolls; he never came to the church office; he never called; the rector never called him. Who was this strange man the rector would go away to spend a few hours with?

My friend informed her that Frank Lee was nobody. Not a nobody, but quite truthfully nobody. He didn’t exist. He was simply a place marker for some inviolable personal sabbath time. His name was derived from a famous movie line: “Frank Lee, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” My colleague had determined that her sabbath time was so important that she truthfully did not give a damn about anything else during those few hours.

The parish secretary breathed a sigh of relief, my friend says. She’d thought the rector was having an affair! Which is both funny and sad. It’s sad that a priest has to resort to subterfuge of this sort to get that personal sabbath time; it’s sad that taking it could lead to suspicion of infidelity.

I’m not able to sustain the effort needed to maintain a “Frank Lee” of my own. Like most clergy, I’m too willing to set aside personal time to attend to the needs of my parishioners, the diocese, the clergy association, or whatever. I don’t say “No” when and as often as I should and then I end up resenting my lack of personal time. I know that this is common among parish priests and pastors because I hear my colleagues saying the same things when we get together for coffee, conversation, and mutual support.

It’s funny, though, that in those conversations no one calls anyone to account! As supportive colleagues in ministry what we ought to be doing is not commiserating with one another; we ought to be supporting one another in claiming those times with Frank Lee and strongly, forcefully encouraging one another to do so. As the ancient Hebrew community of old supported (and Jewish communities of today support) one another in honoring the sabbath, we should support and encourage one another to take our personal sabbath times. (Our denominational judicatories should do the same, but often do not.)

So, brother and sister priests and pastors, get some time of complete rest, hold for yourself a holy convocation, do no work, take personal sabbath time, get together with Frank Lee!

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

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

I’m Done with the Cassock-Alb – From the Daily Office – May 22, 2014

May 22, 2014 / / 3 Comments

From Gospel according to Matthew:

Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. * * * Do not worry, saying . . . “What will we wear?”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Matthew 6:28-29,31 (NRSV) – May 22, 2014)

Priest Vesting for Mass“In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.” This aphorism has been variously attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo, to Menno Simons the spiritual father of the Mennonites and the Amish, to Richard Baxter of the Moravians, and various others.

To the best of my knowledge, it has never been attributed to an Anglican or an Episcopalian. And with good reason! Witness a current dust-up over the cassock-alb.

Yesterday, a colleague and fellow ecclesiastical blogger posted a humorous but serious entry entitled Cassock Albs Are Destroying the Church. Cassock-albs are a modern bit of liturgical vesture which combine the virtues of two medieval garments (the cassock and the alb) and permit the abandonment of a third (the amice), which is rendered unnecessary. They have become ubiquitous since their introduction several decades ago; nearly every church supply company offers one or more versions of the garment. They are what I wear and what our altar servers and liturgical assistants wear, as well.

My colleague’s opinion piece argues that the cassock-alb symbolizes sloppiness, laziness, haste, and lack of care in preparation for worship; calling it “the strip mall of vestments,” he decried the cassock-alb as “an innovation for the sake of comfort that too much resembles other short-cuts we might take in our spiritual and devotional life.” His Facebook notice of this essay resulted in a slurry of posts either agreeing with him (most did since he seems to be followed mostly by a high church Anglo-Catholic crowd many of whom cherish many things about the ritual of an earlier era in the church) or arguing the merits of the cassock-alb (not many modernists, however).

I considered writing a humorous point-by-point rebuttal, but decided not to for a variety of reasons including lack of time and my conviction that debating things like vestments is one of the shortcomings of our tradition. As I have often said, we Anglicans and Episcopalians get our knickers in a twist over really very silly things; there was a time when members of this church excommunicated each other because one or the other either put candles on the altar or didn’t. (In the 1800s, at least one bishop-elect — James DeKoven — failed to receive sufficient canonical consents because of his support of candles and other elements of catholic ritual in the celebration of Holy Communion.)

In the past four decades we have fought about the rather more serious issues of prayer book revision, ordination of women, and the full inclusion of homosexual and transgendered persons, but we have also wrangled over such ridiculous issues as which direction clergy should face while leading worship, whether communicants should stand or kneel, and what position a person’s hands should be in while at prayer. It occurred to me that if anything is “destroying the church,” it is our inability to agree to disagree, to treat as irrelevant and unworthy of debate those minor things on which we differ and concentrate on those matters central to the faith on which we agree. So, I decided not to write in the cassock-alb’s defense.

Indeed, even though I posted a comment or two on my colleague’s Facebook entry, I simultaneously thought what that string of remarks about the merits or demerits of a bit of priestly vesture would look like to a non-church member. If I were a non-Christian (or even a non-Episcopalian) happening upon that conversation (and I’m sure each of the participants has non-Christian friends who might have taken a look at it; I know I do), I would have shaken my head in disbelief at the pettiness of it. If this is what Episcopalians consider important enough to argue about vehemently, I would want nothing to do with those people! So I determined to add nothing further to the evidence that Episcopalians fail to allow liberty in non-essentials and certainly do not practice charity in all things (especially not in regard to vestments and ritual).

Then I came upon today’s Daily Office gospel lesson and I am encouraged to say at least one more thing about the cassock-alb debate. In this lesson from Matthew, Jesus tells his followers, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” (Mt 6:25) Jesus goes on to assure his hearers that God will provide. I’m not convinced, however, that Jesus is referring simply to concern about food and clothing, in general. Certainly, I don’t believe that he is telling them to do nothing about taking care of their own health and well-being; on several occasions he advised his disciples to attend to preparations, to be alert, to take care of that which God has entrusted to them, so this is not a man to instruct people to abandon common sense self-care! What I think he is referring to are the ritual concerns about food and clothing in the Law of Moses, rituals that had become overly important in the teachings of the Pharisees, for example.

Most non-Jewish people are aware of kosher restrictions on diet which derive from the Torah: not to eat pork or shellfish, not to eat red meat with dairy, and so forth. Many may not be aware that there are ritual rules regarding clothing, as well. For example, “You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.” (Dt 22:11) Some of these rules came to be applied specifically to ritual clothing, the tallit (prayer shawl), for example: “Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner.” (Num 15:38)

I believe it is overweening concern for these ritual niceties of food and clothing that Jesus is criticizing in his admonition not to worry about what one will eat or what one will wear. Sometime later, Jesus did so explicitly, condemning the scribes and Pharisees because “they do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.” (Mt 23:5) Cassocks, albs, amices, surplices, and cassock-albs are the tallits, the phylactories, and the fringes of our tradition. Our concerns about them are very much the same as the Pharisees’ concerns, and I suspect that Jesus is just about as impressed with our vestment debates as he was with theirs.

So I’m done with the cassock-alb. I’m still going to wear them and provide them for my liturgical staff and volunteers; I believe they are a perfectly acceptable modern alternative to medieval garments that are no longer convenient, meaningful, or necessary. But I’m done debating about it, and about whether and when to wear eucharistic vestments versus choir garb, whether and when to kneel, whether and when to raise one’s hands, whether and when to use candles, and all the rest of that.

It is not the cassock-alb that is destroying the church! It is public disagreement over vesture and other equally silly things that is doing so. Let’s stop it, shall we?

(By the way, the aphorism about unity, liberty, and charity most likely was first penned by Rupertus Meldenius, a 17th Century Lutheran, during the Thirty Years War.)

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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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