That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Daily Office (Page 8 of 70)

Pray for Ali Dawabsheh – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 31, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 12, Year 1 (Pentecost 9, 2015)

2 Samuel 5:6-8 ~ The king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back” – thinking, “David cannot come in here.” Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, which is now the city of David. David had said on that day, “Whoever wishes to strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.” Therefore it is said, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.”

This morning in Jerusalem, Jewish “Settlers” burned a Palestinian home. An 18-month-old toddler was burned to death and three other members of his family were injured. Will the Settlers claim to be acting in the tradition of David? Will the “city of peace” ever know peace? ~ The psalm says, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.'” (Ps 122:6-7) Those who love Jerusalem are of many faiths, many traditions; why can’t they (we) find common ground there?

The child’s name was Ali Dawabsheh. Pray for Ali and for his family.

Police Brutality – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Saturday in the week of Proper 12, Year 1 (Pentecost 9, 2015)

Acts 16:35-37 ~ When morning came, the magistrates sent the police, saying, “Let those men go.” And the jailer reported the message to Paul, saying, “The magistrates sent word to let you go; therefore come out now and go in peace.” But Paul replied, “They have beaten us in public, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and now are they going to discharge us in secret? Certainly not! Let them come and take us out themselves.”

According to Wikipedia, “The term ‘police brutality’ was in use in the American press as early as 1872, when the Chicago Tribune reported on the beating of a civilian under arrest at the Harrison Street Police Station.” (Police Brutality article) The Book of Acts bears witness that harsh and cruel treatment of accused (or even un-accused) prisoners of law enforcement was not unknown in the First Century.

Just think about that for a moment.

What Can Flesh Do? – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Monday in the week of Proper 12, Year 1 (Pentecost 9, 2015)

Psalm 56:4 ~ In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust and will not be afraid, for what can flesh do to me?

“Flesh” is sometimes used in Holy Scripture as a synonym for other human beings; in fact, this verse is repeated later in the psalm, but with this word changed to “mortals” (v. 10) making the psalmist’s intent clear. But as I read it this morning, I thought of the ways flesh, our own flesh, can betray us.

A few days ago, my wife and I watched a movie entitled The Widowmaker. It was about heart attacks and contrasted the ways in which interventionalist cardiologists (who rely on surgery and use of stents) and medical cardiologists (who rely on medication and change in lifestyle) treat heart disease. It was also an indictment of the fee-for-service, profit-motive practice of medicine. In a sense, it was about what “flesh” in both senses can do to us.

In any event, the movie was a reminder of one way our own flesh, our own bodies can betray us. Another is cancer. A little more than twenty-two years my older brother died of a cancer called “glioblastoma.” A kind of primary-site brain cancer, it truly is a disease in which the flesh betrays the spirit, and it is invariably fatal. When Rick was diagnosed, I did some research and found that, at that time, 50% of patients died within six months of diagnosis; the other 50% all died within two years. Those statistics may have changed a little as new treatments have been developed, but (so far as I know) the long-term outlook for glioblastoma patients hasn’t improved much.

Rick’s first symptom was misdiagnosed as a stroke in October 1992; he was correctly diagnosed a few months later in February 1993, and part of his brain was surgically removed. He died four months later. We lived far apart, so I didn’t see him often during those months, but I did visit at least once a month. I watched a man who had been a brilliant constitutional lawyer, a college professor, and the vice-president of a major university become someone who couldn’t carry on a conversation, couldn’t remember the colors of the spectrum, couldn’t recall his children’s name, couldn’t walk but only shuffle with a cane and the assistance of others. His brain, his flesh, had betrayed him.

I wish I could say that his faith did not, that he trusted in God to the end, but I can’t. At one time, my brother was an active member of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. He even considered entering the ordained ministry in that tradition. However, that phase of his life did not last long and by the time of his death he had long ceased any outwardly noticeable religious practice or affiliation. I believe that he maintained a quiet and deeply personal faith ~ he celebrated my own ordinations, kept religious icons in his office, and could quote Scripture with the best of ’em ~ but he too much a secular intellectual, too much a political cynic to be public with it. So if he trusted God, he kept that trust to himself.

But his mother and his brother trusted for him. We committed him to God in our prayers and, though he was not cured of his cancer (no one is), we trusted God to receive him into the eternal habitations ” where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.” (BCP 1979, pg 499) I believe we shall meet again and the glioblastoma will be nothing more than a footnote.

Today would have been my brother’s 72nd birthday.

Don’t Carry All That Baggage – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Saturday in the week of Proper 11, Daily Office Year 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

Mark 6:7-9 ~ He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.

A few years ago I took a sabbatical. It was my first (and, so far, only) sabbatical in 40 years of professional life, 25 of them in ordained ministry. I went to England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland for a total of three months. The first two weeks I visited pre-Christian and early Christian sites in southern Scotland, northern and western England, and Wales. Then I flew from Edinburgh to Dublin. Checking in for the flight, I learned that I had misunderstood an airline website and my baggage was overweight. Substantially overweight! The fees and penalties amounted to nearly £300! (I paid more for my baggage to go one way than for myself to fly round-trip.) I’d brought books for a course of study I was undertaking in Ireland; I’d brought a summer’s worth of clothing; I was carrying a heavy CPAP machine I use while sleeping; I was way, way overweight. I could have carried nothing, ” no bread, no bag, no money in [me] belt,” and purchased everything in Ireland for less than those airline penalties. I guess I would have needed the money, but the bread, the bag, and everything else I didn’t need.

We carry so much that we don’t need. That’s what this story always says to me. We carry so much that we don’t need, that gets in our way more than it helps, that weighs us down and impedes us, that distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing. Jesus is clearly telling his disciples, originally the Twelve and, through them, us, that we don’t need all that stuff. We need some good footwear and something to lean on when we’re weary, and that’s about it. Anything else we may need we can acquire along the way; in fact, the promise of the story is that we will acquire it – it will be provided when it is needed.

When my two-month sojourn in Ireland was ended and I flew back to Scotland to join my wife for a two-week end-of-sabbatical vacation, I left behind most of what I had paid £300 to ship there. Books I could purchase again in the US, I gave to a school library. Clothing I wouldn’t need for those last two weeks, I gave to church to pass on to the needy. A second bag no longer needed, I gave to my landlady who had admired it. Things I was keeping but didn’t need to travel with, I shipped home. The CPAP machine I took back to Scotland, but for that I had pared my possessions down to one backpack; I was carrying again the same spare load I had carried on my first three-month trip to Europe when I was 16 years old. Following Jesus’ lightweight travel advice, I received the promise of the Psalmist: “He satisfies you with good things, and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.” (Ps 103:5)

Take Jesus’ advice: don’t carry all that baggage!

Choices – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 11, Daily Office Year 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

1 Samuel 31:8-10 ~ When the Philistines came to strip the dead, they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Gilboa. They cut off his head, stripped off his armor, and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to carry the good news to the houses of their idols and to the people. They put his armor in the temple of Astarte; and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan.

The Greek historian Herodotus gave us the name “Palestine,” which he adapted from an Egyptian word “pelesset” which named a sea people who may or may not have been the forerunners of the people named “Philistines” in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Roman Empire solidified Palestine’s place in geography by adopting the name for its eastern Mediterranean province which included the ancient lands of Israel and Judah.

So who are today’s Palestinians? Are they the descendants of the Philistine warriors who so brutally butchered Saul’s body (although they had not killed him)? Or are they (as Mitri Raheb argues) the descendants of the am haaretz, the “people of the land” named frequently in the biblical books of Kings, Chronicles, Leviticus, and Ezekiel, and less frequently elsewhere in the Hebrew writings? For that matter, who are the Jews? Are they the am haaretz? Today there are black Jews, asian Jews, and hispanic Jews, in addition to European ashkenazis and Middle Eastern sephardim. There are diaspora Jews and sabras.

Modern Palestine and contemporary Israel are not the nation-states of the Bible, nor are the people who call them “home” the people of the Bible. What they are, both the nation-states (whether recognized or not) and their residents, are entities which look back to myths and histories of the Bible (and the Qur’an and other texts) and lay claim to parts of those stories. What they are, both the nations and the peoples, are people who choose to be enemies of other people who lay claim to other parts of the same stories.

We choose to be who we are, individually and corporately. Both individuals and groups base their present on selective choices of the past and thereby chart their futures. We can make other choices. The ancient Philistines, happening upon the bodies of Saul and his weapon bearer and his sons, none of whom they had killed, chose to claim those deaths as their own responsibility and, thus, charted a course for generations yet unborn. Each generation, each person has the choice whether to be bound by the choices made by those before them.

Can we choose to be different? Must I, descendent of Irish Protestants, continue the enmity in which they chose to hold Irish Catholics? No, I need not. Must Palestinians and Israelis, whatever their ancestry, continue the enmity their forebears chose? I choose to believe otherwise; I pray that others can, as well.

Religion’s Sensuality – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Thursday in the week of Proper 11, Daily Office Year 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

1 Samuel 28:7 ~ Then Saul said to his servants, “Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, so that I may go to her and inquire of her.” His servants said to him, “There is a medium at Endor.”

Sometime during my childhood, I don’t recall when exactly, I was given an illustrated King James Version of the Holy Scriptures. The illustrations were color plates of a variety of bible stories, but I only remember two of them.

One was Jesus clearing the Temple with a cat-o’-nine-tails. That was an exciting picture! Jesus swinging that whip over his head, his hair flying, tables knocked over, pigeons and lambs scurrying madly away, people looking frightened. Jesus was clearly a bad ass!

The other was Saul consulting the witch of Endor and the shade of Samuel. Samuel was appropriately ghostly ~ white robe, greyish-white long hair and beard, think Ian McKellan as Gandalf. Saul was frightened, cowering before Samuel. But the witch! Ah, the witch! Not your hook-nosed, wart-faced old hag ~ this witch was young and lovely and bare-bosomed, downright erotic for a pre-teen Christian boy. The witch of Endor was a babe!

What’s become of Christianity and Christian art? Jesus is a moralistic twit these days, more worried about what goes on in people’s bedrooms than with what happens in the money-changers’ boardrooms, and God forbid there should be anything erotic in life, especially not nubile young witches!

Well, I say, we need to bring back the bad-ass Jesus who cleanses the courtyard of capitalists; we need to bring back the sexy witches who remind us of religion’s sensuality. God help us if we don’t!

The Fling’s the Thing – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Wednesday in the week of Proper 11, Yr 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

1 Samuel 25:29 [Abigail said to David,] “If anyone should rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living under the care of the Lord your God; but the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling.”

Several years ago there was a television show called Northern Exposure which was a favorite of mine. At the time it was in first run episodes, I was living apart from my family while attending seminary, living in a student dormitory. One of my dormitory neighbors owned a big screen color television and paid the fee for cable feed, so when Northern Exposure came on several of us would pile into her room, drinks and snacks in hand, for an hour (or more) of pure escape, wonderful camaraderie, fun, and games; we had a party there each of those show nights. When I read the words “bound in the bundle of the living,” when I think of church community, those evenings in my colleague’s dorm room are one of the predominant images. There was life and love, friendship and folly, sustenance and support, all bound and bundled together. ~ In an episode of the show that ran after I’d left the seminary community, a show entitled Burning Down the House, the local morning radio celebrity Chris builds a trebuchet with the intent of flinging a living cow across the town’s lake. Disappointed to learn that the Monty Python crew had already catapulted a cow in their movie Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Chris settles on flinging an upright piano instead (I’m told it was a Mason & Hamlin cabinet grand). That’s an image that comes to mind when I read of David’s enemies being “slung out as from the hollow of a sling.” I see that old piano flying through the cold air, losing some of its pieces as it goes, finally crashing in utter destruction. ~ Two images: the warmth of friends gathered in sustaining community for an evening of fun vs. the cold loneliness of being thrown to complete ruin. I’m amused (and I find it instructive) that both can be described with the same word. Fling, noun, a party, a dance, a shindig. Fling, verb, transitive, to throw, especially with force or abandon; hurl or toss. ~ At the end of the episode, as Chris prepares to cut the tension line on the trebuchet and fling the piano, he says, “It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.” Abigail’s reassurance to David reminds us that it’s also the nature of the fling and the One who flings; we choose which fling we will experience at God’s hand.

Effin’ the Ineffable – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Tuesday in the week of Proper 11, Yr 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

Mark 4:30 [Jesus] said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”

This is the question, isn’t it? (Emphasis on “the”!) This is the religious question. At the heart of every religion, every spirituality, every theology is the experience of the [power, force, spirit, god, structure, law, probability] that [undergirds, overshadows, creates, sustains, regulates, controls, defines] everything that is. What follows that experience is the question of how to communicate it: what [parable, metaphor, simile, comparison] do we use? Demonstrating the difficulty of even asking the question, Jesus uses a metaphor to do so, i.e., “kingdom of God.” ~ The unfortunate next step seems always to be to concretize one or more of our metaphors or comparisons: this has been done in Christianity with Jesus’ term here, “kingdom of God,” so that any alternative metaphor (“dominion,” “realm,” “commonwealth”) is sometimes greeted with derision and claims of heresy. Even worse is are challenges to the metaphor “Father,” despite the venerable history of the alternative “Mother” in Christian spirituality. Concretized metaphors are, themselves, the stuff of heresy; we must abandon them. ~ The philosopher Paul Feyerabend was not the first (though perhaps one of the most succinct) in observing that “Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.” Jesus’ question (and ours) is, “How do we eff the ineffable?” The first step, I think, is to let go of our effin’ metaphors.

The Rocks of the Wild Goats – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Monday in the week of Proper 11, Yr 1 (Pentecost 8, 2015)

1 Samuel 24:2 Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to look for David and his men in the direction of the Rocks of the Wild Goats.

Years ago I from a large western city to a small town in Kansas, a place I’d not lived before. Needing directions to a home I wanted to visit, a farm some miles outside of town, I asked a long-time resident how to get there. You take a particular street, I was told, until you a few miles outside of town where you come to the MacGregors’ barn used to be, then you turn there. While perhaps helpful instructions for another long-time resident who may have known the MacGregors or where their barn used to stand, this did not help me even a little bit. I sometimes feel that way about the stories in the Bible. Clearly, “the Rocks of the Wild Goats” was a place well-known to the original teller and the first hearers of the history of Saul and David; perhaps it still is to their descendants still living in the land. To one removed, however, by 2,500 or so years and several thousand miles, the meaning of the landmark is lost. ~ Landmarks, the dictionary tells, are prominent features of the landscape, natural or artificial, used for navigation; they are clearly visible and generally can be sighted well in advance (even the place where MacGregor’s barn used to be can be seen ahead of time by someone with the necessary knowledge). The term also applies to events which mark important stages of personal or social development or turning points in life or history. In this latter sense, particularly in one’s personal life, landmarks are only known in retrospect. ~ I first read this passage of First Samuel several years ago when I began my discipline of reciting the Daily Office; I’ve now read it perhaps fifteen times. On that first reading, I was struck by the poetry of the image and penned a sonnet about the images of rocks or stones in Scripture (it was an embarrassingly inept poem, long discarded). Since then, I have found it more useful as a metaphor for life’s landmark events. Often when taking stock of my life (as clergy are wont and even encouraged to do from time to time), I will ask “Where have I been in the Rocks of the Wild Goats?” Where are those events where the unsure footing has caused me to turn one direction or another, away from the path I had thought I was on? Where did I struggle to climb a difficult trail, or slide down an unexpected incline? ~ I don’t know where Saul’s and David’s Rocks of the Wild Goats were and, to be honest, I frequently don’t know where my own are, either. Only when I look back over the way I have come do I see them.

Do We Lack Madmen? – From the Daily Office Lectionary

July 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Proper 10, Yr 1 (Pentecost 7, 2015)

1 Samuel 21:15 ~ Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?

“Do I lack madmen?” asked Achish, King of Gath, when David, pretending to be mad, was brought before him. Consider what has been brought before us in recent days . . . . ~ Members of Congress condemn an important nuclear arms agreement before even reading it simply because they believe it not perfect and (more importantly) because they are in the habit of opposing everything the president (from the other party) champions. Perfection thus becomes the enemy of good and party politics the enemy of governing. ~ White citizens stand at the side of the road in Oklahoma and wave Confederate battle flags as the black President of the United States drives by. Free speech and public expression become the enemy of patriotism and simple good manners. ~ The Pope issues a statement on the moral implications of human activity causing climate change and calling for repentance and change of behavior; his decree is meant with opposition by fossil-fuel industry spokespersons (and from politicians given large donations by that industry) who suggest that the Pope leave science to the scientists. Business becomes the enemy of religion and ethics. ~ The bishops of the Episcopal Church refuse to even consider the possibility of taking a position with regard to the Israeli occupation of Palestine out of fear that church-run hospitals and schools might be impacted by government reprisals. Medical and educational ministries become the enemy of prophetic action. ~ Do we lack madmen? Have we ever lacked madmen?

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