I pledge allegiance...

This week, I became an American citizen. To become a citizen - after living here for five years as a permanent resident, being fingerprinted, and paying a hefty fee - I had to prove that I could read and write English and that I know basic facts about U.S. history and government. What is the Constitution? Name one of the two longest rivers in the US. What are the rights and the responsibilities of being a citizen? Who wrote the Federalist Papers? (In case you’re wondering, the answer is Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing under the pseudonym of Publius). Finally, I had to give up my allegiance to my birth country and take the Oath of Allegiance.


It’s a big deal, and something that I didn’t take lightly. But as I went through the process, I wondered, what if we treated baptism more like citizenship?


It wasn’t an original thought. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God;” in Philippians 3, he argues “ Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” When we become followers of Christ, when we are baptized, we become citizens of the kingdom of heaven, with all the privileges, the rights, and the responsibilities entailed in that.


As citizens of the United States, we pledge allegiance. We will participate in our nation's life. We will obey the law. We will serve our country - without qualification or limitation - except if our religious belief limits us in some way. There are no excuses; we don’t need excuses, because we are proud to be part of something so much greater than ourselves, and we trust that when we are in need, our nation will in turn provide for us.


It’s the same for us as citizens of heaven. There is no residency requirement, no fingerprinting, and no application fee to become a citizen of heaven. There’s not even an exam - though it does help if you know something about this kingdom you are joining. But when we are asked, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?” we are, in effect, taking an oath of allegiance to Christ. We will follow him. We will obey him. We will serve him. No matter what. We become part of something so much greater than ourselves, the work of Christ in this world. And we trust that Christ will provide for us when we are in need.


That’s the theory. But the reality is often different. We try to juggle our obligations - to work, to family, to ourselves, and to God. How do you choose between worship and much needed family time? What do you do when your employer expects you to work late on the night you have committed to lead a church activity?


There are no easy answers: the only answer that scripture gives us is Jesus’ answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” No matter what.

Feet that ache and a heart that breaks

It was a somewhat ragged looking procession, Joseph, in his homespun robe, and Mary, struggling to keep her scarf on, hesitantly moving toward the manger and the coming of the baby. It was not the first Christmas Eve, of course, but Christmas Eve last year, when the children of our parish reenacted that story that is so familiar to us, and that we gather to remember each year.

Mary and Joseph were soon joined by the baby, a bouncing nine month old, smiling and waving. Then the shepherds straggled up the aisle, clothed in bathrobes and dishcloths, followed by the angels in their Christmas best, adorned with fairy wings and haloes of dubious provenance. Finally they all reached the front of the church

and paused in a glorious tableau of worship, angels adoring, shepherds kneeling, as we sang,

“Come to Bethlehem and see

him whose birth the angels sing:

come, adore on bended knee

the infant Christ, the new-born king.”

There was a lot less carpet and a lot more dirt, but I suspect the original Christmas

would have been just as chaotic and just as glorious when finally the baby was born and the shepherds arrived and the star shone brightly overhead.

But sometimes I wonder if, wrapped in the the beauty of the familiar story, we forget its astounding significance. Because the story of Christmas isn’t just confined to that scene in the stable. After all, the birth itself was like any other one, and the appearance of the shepherds a passing curiosity.  What makes it different is that we understand it to be the time when the Incarnation became tangible: God came among us as one of us, or, as the letter to Titus puts it, grace appeared.

In Jesus Christ, grace appeared.

What Titus means, as far as we can tell, is not that some abstract thing wafted over humanity.  Rather, in the Incarnation, the grace that the people had always known as a characteristic of God materialized. It became real.  Grace with flesh and blood.

And that grace that is embodied in Jesus Christ makes a difference.  It makes a difference because now we know that God knows exactly what it is to be human, the best and the worst of it.  God knows the joy and the pain, the ordinary and the extraordinary.  God knows about feet that ache and a heart that breaks.

Because grace was embodied, we know that the physical part of our existence, our bodies, are no less holy than our spirits, our souls.  God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and in so doing entered the created world in a way that left no room for lingering doubt.  We, as created, embodied beings, are part of the good creation of God.

And grace that was embodied in Jesus Christ lived like us and died like us. And grace turned the cross from a thing of torture to a hallowed place of forgiveness. And then grace rose again, with the promise that we too will rise again.

And perhaps the children walking up the aisle to create that tableau have it right.

Because it’s the way of grace that we don’t always know where we are going; we’re not always sure what we are supposed to do. But we trust that we will be led to see our Savior - and the grace of it is that we will. God is waiting for us in the manger in Bethlehem, in the cross of Calvary, in the empty tomb and resurrected Christ, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Grace has appeared.

Living and breathing Word

Itʼs not often in Scripture that we hear about someone who has grown up in the church. 

Thatʼs not surprising, given that the books of the New Testament were mostly written in 

the first fifty or so years of the churchʼs life, and so many of the people whose stories 

are recorded were adults when Jesus came on the scene, and so were adult converts. 

Most of the disciples and the leaders of the early church appear to spring fully grown out 

of nowhere, confident and full of faith, ready to go out preaching from day one. All it 

takes is a word from Jesus and they are ready to go, with none of the struggles and 

fears that most of us have experienced as weʼve tried to work out what it means to be a 

Christian. 

Recently our lectionary has had us read the Epistles to Timothy.  And they are written to 

someone just like us.  

Timothy didnʼt ever get to meet Jesus.  He learned his faith not directly from Jesus, but 

in much the same way as many of us learn ours, from his family.  And when he needed 

help, he was advised to turn to the Scriptures, the sacred writings that would remind him 

about the God he worshipped and recall him to his faith in Christ. 

Scripture is still the touchstone of faith, the place we can go to receive encouragement 

and wisdom, as 2 Timothy reminds us, 

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 

and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be 

proficient, equipped for every good work.” 

“Scripture” in 2 Timothy probably meant the Old Testament.  Later the Church realized 

that the first writings of the early Church, the letters that were passed around from 

community to community, the stories of Jesus that had begun to be written down, were 

somehow distinctively authoritative.  In them, God spoke.  They are what we now know 

as the New Testament.  Old Testament and New Testament together form our Bible. 

The Bible is inspired by God, God-breathed.  From the time of creation, we know that 

when God breathes on something, God brings that thing to life.  Not just once, but 

continually. 

And so when we read the BIble, we know that God inspires these words.  God breathes 

life into them, even now, so that they are not just dead letters but alive, the living and 

active word of God. 

And as the living and active word, when we read Scripture, we are invited into a 

conversation with God, a conversation where the Spirit of God is active and alive in us, 

inviting us into truth. We may discover that we need to disagree with the Scriptures, to 

argue with God just as Abraham did in the book of Genesis, or to shout at God just as 

the psalms so often shout lament and scream.

We may find contradictions in Scripture, because God needed to have different 

conversations with the people at different times; we may find principles that we then 

need to apply in different ways today. We may find commands that Jesus ignored, and 

new ways of living that he commanded. We may find things that turn our stomachs, and 

things that fill us with joy. 

But when we read these living, breathing, scriptures, we are able to join a conversation 

with our living and breathing God, and be encouraged and equipped for the life of faith.

Sent to bring Christ

A small church sits on an isolated salt marsh in eastern England.  It was built in the year 654 by St Cedd, on the remains of the wall of a Roman fort.  The chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea is a visible symbol of the Christian faith, and the faithfulness which moved St Cedd to travel from Lindisfarne in northern England down to the heathen wilds of Essex on a mission to convert the East Saxons to Christ.

As Christians, we often talk about the mission of the church. But it’s not always clear what we mean by ‘mission’.  The word itself only appears once in the New Testament (at least in the NRSV version of the bible), in Acts 12:25: “Then after completing their mission Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark.”  But the word for mission here is the same word that is translated everywhere else in the New Testament as “ministry” or “service.” So it doesn’t really help us to understand what ‘mission’ means.

The dictionary tells us that ‘mission’ has a number of meanings.  It might be a religious ministry of evangelism or humanitarian work.  It might be a small church that depends on the larger church for its survival.  It might be a series of evangelistic rallies. It might be a vocation or calling.  Or, outside of religion, a group sent to a foreign country for diplomatic or political purposes, or a military task, or a space operation. Or, in the business world, an objective or purpose. I suspect that in the church, when we use the word ‘mission,’ we mean a kind of muddle of aspects of all those definitions.  

But when we dig deeper in the bible, there are hints of what the church’s mission might look like.  The word ‘mission’ comes from the Latin, mittere, which means ‘to send.’  And there’s a whole lot in the New Testament about sending.

First of all, God sent Jesus, as we are reminded time and time again, particularly in the gospel of John, in order to save the world.  During his earthly life, Jesus sent his disciples, often in pairs, to preach and teach and heal.  And the risen Christ sent the apostles to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them.

If we read on in the New Testament, we discover that the early Christians saw their mission, saw their ministry, as being to build up the body of Christ, to testify to the good news of God’s grace, of freedom, justification and transformation, to share, and to praise God.

As Christians today we too are sent, like the early church, to build, to testify, to share and to praise.  We’re sent, like the apostles, to make disciples, to baptize and to teach.  We’re sent to preach and teach and heal.  We can’t save the world - at least not on our own - but we can become God’s partners in that work.  And at the heart of it all is Christ.  We are sent to bring Christ to the world, to embody Christ in the world.

It’s not always easy.  Sometimes we look around us and wonder if anyone is listening.  “Why bother?”

But that little church in the salt marshes of Essex reminds us that this mission of the church is the mission of God, and God is faithful.  Fourteen centuries later, people continue to meet Christ in that place, and the mission of Cedd, and the mission of the church, our church, continues to be fulfilled.  By God’s grace.

I decided to take a chance

Last week, I spent a day on retreat.  It began with Morning Prayer, and ended with a visit to my spiritual director, but in between was a blank slate.  And I have to admit that I was anxious about that blank slate.  What would I do?  How would I spend the time?  What if I got bored?

I packed my car with lunch, coffee, knitting, a picnic blanket, bug spray, a prayer book and bible, a journal and pen, a couple of other theological books, and a novel, just in case. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

But when I reached the retreat center, I decided to take a chance.  I sprayed myself with bug spray, put on a hat, and left everything else behind.  Then I wandered down to the river, and sat on a rock a couple of feet out from the shore.  And said, “God, I’m here.”

About twenty minutes in, it began to dawn on me.  I didn’t need to fill the time; God would be there - just as God is there every instant of my life. I just don’t stop still often enough to realize it.  I’m spend more time worrying about how I will measure up to God, and trying to orchestrate some sort of God-event than I do simply waiting on God.

Scripture is full of stories of people who come to God just as they are, and God comes to them.  They don’t have to do anything to earn it; they don’t really deserve it.  It’s simply by the grace that they get to meet God. 

Our hymns echo that truth.  

Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Charlotte Elliot, 1835

I know that in my head, but there’s a part of me that just can’t quite believe it.  

But as I sat on the rock, I thought of my my eighteen-month-old goddaughter.  Much as I’m looking forward to her learning to call me Godmama, and drawing me pictures, and sharing my love of the bible, the very best times are when she puts up her arms to be held and snuggles against me.  What if God enjoys having me around as much as I enjoy having my godbaby around? 

And God does.  God created humanity, and looked upon us, and saw that this creation was very good (Genesis 1). God doesn’t delight in strength or speed but takes pleasure in those who hope in his steadfast love.” (Psalm 147)  That’s us.  God delights in us.

At the end of my retreat, I was slightly sunburned, had written three pages in my journal,  and didn’t need the knitting or the novel or books.  If anything, the time went too quickly.   Because God was there waiting, and is, and will be, any time I stop long enough to notice.

"See the world in green and blue"

For the last few months, the news has been dominated by the story of the oil leak in the Gulf.  Pictures of pelicans covered in oil and tar balls washing up on beaches crowd our eyes; we hear stories of people whose livelihoods are gone, possibly for good.  It makes us want to cry at the damage to creation, andFor the last few months, the news has been dominated by the story of the oil leak in the Gulf.  Pictures of pelicans covered in oil and tar balls washing up on beaches crowd our eyes; we hear stories of people whose livelihoods are gone, possibly for good.  It makes us want to cry at the damage to creation, and the waste of the resources of this wonderful world which we inhabit.

Over recent years, the main impetus to talk about the environment has been global warming.  But whether or not you believe that global warming is occurring, it is clear that humans are having an impact on the environment, and that impact is not always good.

One of the most consistent reminders of the importance of creation is the work of musicians.Whether it’s Louis Armstrong extolling the wonder of trees of green, red roses, blue skies and white clouds in “What a Wonderful World” or U2’s invitation in “Beautiful Day” to respond to God’s recreation after the flood by not letting the world’s beauty “get away”, they call us to pay attention to creation, to celebrate it and to care for it.

This is, of course, not new to Christians.  Most of us are familiar with the words of Genesis 1:28: “God said to [humans], ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. ” (NRSV)  The way that chapter 2 of Genesis tells it, it is humanity who are created first; the plants and animals are then created for human benefit.  It’s an incredible blessing.

God has given us creation; we are its stewards.  But sometimes we misread that gift.  We read the words “subdue” and “dominion” -- and we tend to think the earth is ours to use however we want.  

But  when we look at how those words are used in the rest of the bible, we see something different.  “Subdue” is used most often of the enemies of the people of God: armies and kings and nations who want to do them ill.  But creation has no evil intent. It is not ours to attack at will. “Dominion” usually refers to the rule of a king.  That rule may be good or bad, but the rule we are called to imitate is that of God, in whose image we are made.  

And God’s rule is benevolent, even generous.  In Isaiah, God’s rule is described in terms of a new heavens and a new earth, that peaceable kingdom where wolves and lambs, and leopards and goats, and calves and lions and bears all play together, where there is feasting and wine, justice and mercy, and there are no more tears. This dominion is wholly good for all those who live within it; it is a rule of blessing.

That then, is what we as the people of God are called to.  We are called to bless this earth of ours.  And that means being wise stewards of its bounty, on both the macro and the micro level.  We need to work to influence the decisions of governments and multi-nationals, but there are also things we can do on a local level.  We can choose public transport over cars where it is available, and walk shorter distances. We can choose to drive more fuel efficient cars.  We can consider alternative forms of power such as solar and wind. We can eat food grown locally rather than imported.  We can vacation closer to home.  And there are benefits: fresher food, more relaxed travel, and so on.  And above all, the knowledge that we are acting as good stewards of God’s creation, becoming ourselves a source of blessing -- as God blesses us.

To be a pilgrim...

It’s a long way from Chester to Lichfield. Seventy-six miles, according to Google maps, and a little longer if you are walking.  Which is what I was doing, in May, the first pilgrim on a new English long distance trail, stretching from the shrine of St Werburgh to the shrine of St Chad.

I’d planned carefully, booking bed-and-breakfasts, making contacts with parishes, packing light, and hauling out my well-worn boots.  The first two days were wonderful:  morning prayer and a blessing for my journey at Chester Cathedral, a long morning following the canal, an afternoon crossing fields and visiting the church where my 6th-generation ancestors were baptized, married and buried, a cup of tea with a vicar and Eucharist in a market-town church where more of my ancestors had lived and worshiped. 

But on day three came the blisters.  Not just on my heels, predicable for a long-distance hiker, but on the soles of my feet.  Thirteen miles in, I could barely walk.  And I had a decision to make: hobble on my way to my night’s lodging, and risk having to abandon the rest of the pilgrimage, or find alternative transport and maybe be able to pick up the trail the next day.

I thought about the pilgrimage I had hoped and prayed to make.  I thought about my medieval forebears, and how grateful they would have been if the driver of a passing cart had offered them a ride.  And as I turned from the canal down into a housing estate, following the trail, I saw an elderly man getting into his car.  “Excuse me, would you mind giving me a ride to the church in Trentham?” (a mile or so, and I guessed the nearest bus stop).  

The man was gracious, and drove me to the church, and I caught a bus on to my night’s stopping place, all the while feeling as if I were somehow disappointing God if I didn’t walk every step of the way.

But then it dawned on me.  I don’t have to earn my way to salvation.  God probably doesn’t care whether I walk every step of that pilgrimage, or catch a bus the whole way,  What God cares about - and knows - is my heart.  

Ever since the time of Christ, the church has debated about the relative value of faith and works.  We are justified by faith alone, said Paul, through the grace of God. Faith without works is dead, said James. The grace of God on the one hand; our actions on the other.  Somehow, it is both that are essential.

Late afternoon of day five of my pilgrimage - walking again - I finally saw the triple spires of Lichfield Cathedral.  At evensong, I was welcomed alongside pilgrims from parishes across the UK, and our diocese was prayed for. And I knew the grace of God, in a long and sometimes painful walk; in an elderly man willing to give a hiker a ride, and a public bus; in a cup of tea, and bread and wine.  

God speaking?

“What’s your favorite bible story?” I ask my nephew.

“Jesus throws them out of the temple!”

“What happens before that?”

“Jesus goes to Jerusalem”

“And after it?”

“The money.  The lady has a patch on her arm. Her sleeve is torn.”

“And what happens after that?”

“They plot against Jesus.”

I sometimes think that my three and a half year old nephew has a better grasp of the chronology of Jesus’ last days than I do. Night after night he chooses those stories to be read to him - or the Jacob and Esau cycle, or the stories of Moses. It’s part of his bedtime ritual, along with Thomas the Tank Engine and Goodnight Moon.

But something happens when we grow up.Our bedtime rituals change; we drop story time, and reading the bible somehow gets dropped along with all the other stories.  That wouldn’t matter if the bible were just that, a book of stories, but Scripture is far more than that. The Catechism (which begins on page 845 of the Book of Common Prayer) reminds us that God speaks to us through the Bible. 

Every so often, I find myself wishing that God would speak to me.  I’m faced with a dilemma, a difficult choice, or I’m feeling down, or I have doubts.  “But surely if God spoke to me directly,” I think, “my problems would be resolved.”

Of course the problem with God speaking through Scripture is that something written down two thousand years ago is not going to be able to directly answer many of the questions we have today. The bible won’t be able to tell us which car we should buy or what is an appropriate curfew for our teenagers or who we should vote for. 

But if our Catechism is right, then God does speak to us.  Not in a voice that we can hear with our ears, but in the words of Scripture that record God’s interaction with human beings throughout generations and centuries.  We hear the call of Moses and the prayers of David, the poetry of the prophets and the wisdom of the apostles.  And all of it is laced through with the divine: in Scripture we are invited into a relationship with God, who through the Holy Spirit can guide our lives, and we hear the passions and the priorities of God, passions and priorities that we are invited to share, that will help in our decision making.

But none of that will happen if our bibles stay on their shelves, only opened when we have to choose the reading for a wedding or a family funeral. We need to take them down and, as the collect for Proper 28 reminds us, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the scriptures, so that we might know God more fully and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life in Christ.

Today is a glorious day.  The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and my cat is desperate to escape outside to eat some grass.  After the long gloominess of winter, it’s good to be able to get out in the fresh air and enjoy the sun.

Creation is good.  Remember the first chapter of Genesis?  At every stage of creating our world, God declares that what is created is good - and in the case of human beings, very good.

That’s easy to believe in springtime.  But at other times of the year, or when we get bitten by a mosquito or suffer from the frailties of the human body, when we begin to wonder if creation is so good after all.  And there has been a long tradition in human philosophy and theology of believing in a dualism in which matter is deemed evil, and the mind or spirit deemed good.  In the early centuries of Christianity, this was expressed most clearly in Gnosticism, and was decreed heresy.  Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in gnosticism, with the discovery of ancient gnostic manuscripts in the early twentieth century and their subsequent publication, and the inclusion of gnostic ideas in popular culture, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and Stargate SG1.

Part of that resurgence is, no doubt, a response to our experience of creation as distorted by evil.  Mosquitoes not only bite, but spread disease.  Our bodies are destroyed by disease or simply wear out.  We no longer live in the perfect creation of the Garden of Eden. 

But the promise of Easter, the promise of the Resurrection, is that creation itself will be renewed, and us along with it.  The full glory of that restored creation won’t be apparent to us until the whole earth is renewed under the final reign of Christ.  But even now, even imperfect as it is, creation is a testimony to God’s love for us.  And it invites us to give thanks to God, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poem, Pied Beauty.

   Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: 

                                                Práise hím.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), first published 1918.

The Resurrection: So what?

When I was a teenager, the big issue among my Christian peers was how to argue that the resurrection really happened.  We became amateur archaeologists; we read books and argued endlessly about which evidence was more reliable, and which was more believable.  Our purpose was to be able to argue our non-Christian friends into faith, and the evidence was pretty convincing. 

Except, our friends didn’t seem terribly interested in our proofs.  It was, to them, an academic exercise, and whether you won or lost didn’t really matter.  I had the same feeling myself after I read Frank J. Tipler’s book, The Physics of Immortality. Using theories of quantum cosmology, Tipler argues that the consequence of Omega Point Theory is the resurrection of all human beings. His arguments are (at least to this quantum-cosmology-ignoramus) quite convincing, but at the end of it all, I found myself asking, “So what?”

Archaeology and quantum cosmology have their uses, but they can only answer the question, “Did it (or can it) happen?” That is only the first question of faith; the second is, “What difference does it make?” Or to use the language of the New Testament, Jesus doesn’t simply say, “Do you believe me?”  He says, “Follow me.”  

The bible and the creeds are clear Jesus was resurrected and we will be too. And what that means, is that the life giving force of God is let loose to work among us. Death is not the end: it is not the most powerful thing in this world.  God is, and God gives us life.  And that life, once let loose, can never be conquered; that life can never be bound.  Death no longer has the power to control us; the tables have been turned. The powerful are brought down, and the lowly lifted up. The hungry are filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty.

Yet the only way to this resurrection life is the way of death. The death of Jesus on the cross, and our death with him. In baptism, we are buried with Christ.  It is a serious matter, and a costly one. In baptism we turn from sin, we turn from envy and greed and bitterness. We sign our own death warrants.

But in baptism we take hold of the promise of Easter. Just as we died with Christ, so too are we raised with Christ. We may sign our death warrants, but God signs us into resurrected life. And while we will not know the fullness of that resurrection until after our physical deaths, we taste it now.  We know the life of God let loose in us, we know the love of God engulfing us. It means we have forgiveness, it means we have hope, it gives us new life.

What does that look like?  The best example of resurrected life here and now that I know is a seminary friend of mine, whose cancer recurred.  No amount of chemotherapy helped. As the cancer spread, as her bones began to crumble, as she lost the ability to breathe alone, she finished seminary and was ordained. She spent her final two months as chaplain in a nursing home, working alongside those who like her, were dying. And fourteen years ago, on Easter morning, she died, her final words, “Christ is risen indeed.”

God be in my head...

After I wrote my last entry in this blog, I was reminded of the time I taught religious education to first graders in Australia.  One year, my class really liked singing, and we learned children's hymns and rounds and Taize chants, but their absolute favorite was "God be in my head."


Six year olds are concrete thinkers.  Image and metaphor are alien to them; they need to know God in tangible ways.  And so we sang this beautiful blessings with actions.  As they touched their heads, their eyes, their mouths, their hearts, and yes, their ends (the occasion of much laughter), they were making a connection between the God about whom they learned and to whom they prayed, and the incarnate God who cares about our heads and eyes and mouths and hearts and even our ends.


We adults like to think that we understand images and metaphors.  But I suspect that deep down, most of us yearn for the concrete faith that characterizes six year olds. We need a God who is in our greying hairs and presbyopic eyes - as well as our understanding, looking, speaking, and thinking!

Conflicting Messages About Our Bodies

When I was a child, I was the one who came last in pretty much every race (occasionally I beat my best friend); I was the one chosen last in team games. It didn’t matter what sport it was (except swimming, where I made it to average), I was hopeless.


But on New Years Day, 2009, I decided to try one more time. I made a resolution to try skiing. I first went skiing in 1978, and hated it. The next time was 1994, and it wasn’t much better. But this time, it took. With the help of good instructors and recent advances in ski design, I’ve finally discovered a sport that I love and can do moderately competently - and have experienced that wonderful sense of having my body function as it was created to do, with strength and (relative) grace.


What does this have to do with theology? For many of us, our bodies are something that we leave out of the faith equation. What we believe involves our minds and hearts and souls - but we often treat our bodies as if they are a necessary evil, to be controlled and endured.


We live in a society that sends us conflicting messages about our bodies, and our faith is no better. Scripture is at best ambiguous. God creates human beings, male and female, and they are part of the good creation. But the first casualty of the fall is the body ― Adam and Eve cover themselves, because they are ashamed. In Leviticus, laws protect people’s bodies from abuse, but certain essential parts of the body ― such as blood ― can make people unclean. The Song of Songs celebrates human love in its bodily expression; in other writings, denying bodily needs and desires ― whether it’s food or sex ― is a sign of faithfulness. In the New Testament, the body is both the temple of the Holy Spirit and an obstacle to union with Christ; physical needs are to be met, but desires often to be suppressed for the sake of the gospel. No wonder we are confused!


But there is one exception, and it’s the exception at the heart of our faith: Jesus Christ himself. The very act of incarnation tips the scales decisively in favor of the body. What in Genesis was just speech ― that all creation, including human beings, is good ― in Christ is an event: God made flesh, come among us. There is no inherent contradiction between the goodness of God and the status of the body. If God took human form, then human form ― our existence as embodied beings ― must be inherently good. That’s the gift of the incarnation.


That means our bodies are good. They are the means by which we live out our lives of faith, the ‘strength’ with which we love the Lord our God, along with our hearts and minds and souls. So go ahead - ski! - or walk, or kneel or run or garden, and know the presence of the God who created you and knows that you are very good.

Look for the Connections

Thinking theologically is what we do when we look for the connections between God and our lives. One of the things we know is that God doesn’t change, but the perspective we see God from does. Each of us connects with different aspects of the nature of God, and the way we do that is usually shaped by our backgrounds, life experiences, education, and so on.

That said, it’s probably time for me to tell you a little more about who I am, and the things that shape my understanding of and relationship with God.

I was born in Australia, where my father worked for IBM and my mother was a teacher. Dad had immigrated from Northern Ireland as a young adult; my mother is a fourth generation Australian. We moved frequently for my father’s work as I was growing up; church was one of the few constants in our lives. Some of my earliest memories are singing at Sunday school when I was 3 or 4, having morning tea and collecting acorns under the oak tree after church, and sitting on the floor looking at the prayer books during the 8 a.m. service which I sometimes attended with my Dad.

I was baptized and confirmed at the age of 14, went to an Anglican high school, and slowly began to sense a call to full-time ministry, though there were no women clergy in Australia at that time. At college, I majored in psychology and church, and discovered I could preach. I began studying theology part time (as well as a graduate degree in women’s studies) and worked for the government for three years before going to seminary (during which time women were finally ordained priest in Australia). I’ve served parishes in four different dioceses, ranging from evangelical to Anglo-Catholic, and under the ministry of eight bishops.

Preaching has been at the core of my own calling, and that led me to the US to do a PhD in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, focussing on Homiletics (which means preaching). I co-edited a book of sermons using the lyrics of the Irish band U2 called Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog, and have written Steeped in the Holy: Preaching as Spiritual Practice. I share my home with a beloved cat Bede, and enjoy reading mysteries, knitting, whitewater kayaking, hiking, and skiing - and my nephews, nieces, and godchildren.

So how does this shape my understanding of God? The core of my call has been the call to preach; that, and my training in practical theology causes me to constantly ask “How does what we know shape what we do?” and “How does what we do shape how we know God?” Living and serving in so many places makes me aware of how God reaches people in such a variety of ways. God’s creativity in creation feeds my own creativity. And because of who I am, the way I most often imagine God is as someone sitting quietly in the armchair beside me, enjoying a blazing fire and occasional conversation.

How does your own life experience shape your understanding of God?

Blogging about God-Talk

When Bishop Provenzano asked me to accept appointment as Canon Theologian, he asked me to help us in the diocese to think theologically. The word theology comes from two Greek words, theos, meaning God and logos, meaning words or thought or thinking. So theology is words to do with God. In its formal sense, it’s the study of God, or, as Richard Hooker put it in the 16th century, “the science of things divine.”

All of us have thoughts about God. Each of us understands God a little differently, because of the ways we have been taught and the experiences we have had.When I was in 8th grade, I was cast as God in a play – and dressed up in a white toga (bedsheet) and a cottonwool beard. As an adult, my understanding of God has changed, so that I think of God less in terms of a costume, and more in terms of our relationship – and so today when I imagine God, it’s often as a person sitting in an armchair beside me in front of a fire, in the midst of a never-ending conversation.

You all have your own images of God, and some of what I’ll do in this column and its associated blog is explore some of the ways we think of God. But our faith isn’t just in our heads. Being a Christian is also about how we live – and so thinking theologically is not just thinking about God, but learning to live our lives with God in mind.

Recently I was in Washington, DC, for a conference, where I heard the chaplain to the Senate, Dr. Barry C. Black, preach. He spoke about how in Bible studies – with senators from both sides of the political divide – they discuss how to make ethical decisions, and reflect on how they would answer to God for the decisions they make.

That’s thinking theologically.

In a Bible study in my parish a few weeks ago, we looked at Colossians 3: 12-17, where it talks about forgiveness. Forgiveness sounds like a good idea, until it comes to forgiving someone you have loved, who has wronged you. So how do forgive people who hurt us? The conclusion of one group member was to make a commitment to pray for the person who had caused her so much pain. That’s thinking theologically.

A few years ago, in a Sunday School class, we read 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, which describes the church as being like a body, and I asked the kids what part of the body they were. One eight year old, the clown of the class, said, “The funny bone!” (He also told me that when he receives communion, he thinks of Jesus and how he loves us and died for us.) That’s thinking theologically.

Thinking theologically is what we do when we look for the connections between God and our lives. Sometimes we’ll begin with God, and say something like “If God is like _____, what difference does it make for the way I live?” Other times we’ll begin with something going on in our lives – a struggle, a joy, a dilemma - and ask, “What has God got to say about this?” or “What would God have me do about this?” or even “How is God responsible for this?” – and in that case “How do I respond?” Thinking theologically is at the very core of how we live out our faith as Christians.

So please, join the conversation!

I’ll be writing a more or less weekly blog at the diocese’s website: www.dioceselongisland.org/god-talk

And I’d be happy to receive your questions by email at: rjwhiteley@dioceseli.org