God-Talk

Hushed waiting*

2011-11-08T00:06:00.001-05:00

There’s something special about the first substantial snowfall of winter. It begins almost like dandelion fluff, but rapidly clumps into something more like drifting petals of spring blossom. Eventually it settles on the ground, and as it piles up the outlines of the world soften and the sound of traffic is muffled and we enter a time of waiting.

The snowfalls ends, and it’s time for snowmen and snow-fights and snow angels. And a day or two later, life returns to normal: either the snow melts, or after the fun we shovel and plough our way back into motion. A few snowfalls later, a dirty crust has built up, and melt has turned to ice, and we are ready for spring. But still the memory persists of the hush that accompanied the snowfall, the suspension of time when all we could do was wait.

Advent is like that time. A time of hushed waiting. God, God’s very self, is about to come to earth. Advent is a time to stop, to catch our breath at the wonder of it all.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

and with fear and trembling stand;

ponder nothing earthly minded,

for with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

our full homage to demand.” †

This is, perhaps, the most potent of all time. We wait, we wait in holy silence, for the gift that is God among us.

It’s like pregnancy, necessary time to get ready for the change that new life will bring. That’s why the ancient church set aside this time, four weeks (or in some traditions forty days) of solemn preparation, not only remembering the first coming of Jesus Christ as savior, but also awaiting his second coming as gracious judge. It’s serious, hallowed time.

Of course, everything around us is saying the reverse.

“Christmas is here
Bringing good cheer” ‡

Da da-da da, da da-da da,

beating its way insistently through the malls and into our brains.

We have to hurry: there is shopping to be done and cookies to be baked and cards to be sent. And before we know it, Christmas will be here, the food and the gifts and the family gatherings. And then trees to take down and bills to pay and a new financial year. Da da-da da, da da-da da, da da-da da, da da-da da.

But no. Christmas is not here. Not yet. It’s Advent, and there’s no point being so busy having a shower or painting the nursery that we miss the baby’s birth. As if the baby would really care.

So stop. Take time. Listen for the hush. For Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.

* Thanks to members of the book group of St James, St James who named Advent as a time of "hushed waiting.”

† Liturgy of Saint James (fifth century); trans. Gerald Moultrie (1829-1885), 1864.

‡ Peter J. Wilhousky, 1936.

Whose church is it, anyway?

2011-10-07T23:51:00.000-04:00

Every December, members of our parish visit assisted living and nursing homes to sing Christmas carols to the residents. And every time we sing, one resident always declares loudly to anyone within hearing range, “They’re from my church.”

Her declaration is usually met with tolerant smiles from the other residents, and quizzical looks from parishioners. And sooner or later someone will whisper in my ear, “Am I supposed to know her?” No. This is not some dearly-beloved pillar of the church, forced from her usual pew by circumstance. This is someone who rarely, if ever, went to church, someone whose closest connection was through a relative. But now, cut off from the wider life she once enjoyed, she now claims us: as far as she is concerned, we are her church.

At the heart of many of the squabbles we Christians have is the question, whose church is it, anyway? Who does it belong to? Sometimes we’re referring to the building; sometimes, the community. When congregations leave our denomination, we have lawsuits over who owns the building and sometimes dueling claims to the parish’s name. When a church shrinks to the point where it is no longer viable and closing looks like the only option, questions are asked about who gets the building, and the silver, and is there’s any left, the bank accounts; local parishes vie for any remaining members. When we’re trying to raise money to preserve a historic building, we reach out to the local community. When you’re talking with clergy, they’ll often call their parish, “my church.” Sometimes people refer to a church by the When an old-time member returns after many years away, and sees different people and different traditions, they ask, “What happened to my church?” If you were to ask my two-year-old goddaughter what the building is at the end of my street, she would likely say, “my church!” And if you turn to the New Testament, you find the church described as the church of God, and Christ's own body.

So whose church is it, anyway?

Is it God’s?

Is it Christ’s?

Is it the diocese’s?

Is it the priest’s?

Is it the parishioners’?

Is it the community’s?

Is it mine?

Is it yours?

And of course the answer is, yes. It’s all of these.

It’s the paradox of the church. Whether you’re talking about the building, or the community called by its name, the church belongs to everyone. To God, Christ, the nursing home resident, the diocese, the child, the pillar of the church...all of us!

All of us - albeit in different ways - share the responsibility; all of us share the blessing. And the key is to hold all these in balance, so that no one stakeholder’s interest excludes others. Any time we forget that the church - the building and the community - belongs to everyone, we forget the far-reaching spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whose church is it? All of ours!

Unfailing curiosity and a large measure of faith.

2011-09-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

They are the words every parent fears. “Your child has a brain tumor.” The child in question was my four-year-old nephew, and the words were spoken just a few weeks ago. The summer of 2011 has passed in a whirl of MRIs, surgery, radiation and chemo, along with learning the new vocabulary of medulloblastoma, Hickman lines, and posterior fossa.

And we are learning a new vocabulary of faith. The classic question you are expected to ask at time like this is “Why, God? Why do you allow suffering?” And the classic answer of Christian theology is that suffering comes of living in a fallen world. It is inevitable in a world tainted by evil. It’s a simple matter of consequences.

But when it’s you who are suffering, or perhaps even harder, someone close to you, the questions are personalized, and we ask them not only of God, but of ourselves. “Why this child?” “Why did he get a tumor?” And “Why is his treatable, but other children in the hospital are dying?”

The generic answer doesn’t help: it doesn’t deal with the specific. Nor does scripture help a great deal. In John 9, Jesus’ disciples asked him whose fault was it that a man was born blind. He said, “No-one’s.” And then he healed the man.

We don’t have answers to the questions we want to ask, or at least, not answers we like. But what we do have is a lifetime of faith. And it is my nephew who has led us in drawing on that faith. He is the one who wrote a prayer “Dear God, please make me better. Amen” on a piece of paper, rolled it up tightly, and pushed it into a crack in the wall of a 1400 year old church (he also wrote a prayer asking for the big Lego pyramid!). He is the one who each day at the park, runs up to a large Victorian drinking fountain, puts his hands in the bowl of water, and prays “Thank you God for making me better, and thank you for making all the other sick children better too..” He greets every new experience with unfailing curiosity, and a large measure of faith.

His thick hair might be almost gone, his bones beginning to show, but his faith in God is strong and secure. Even when nothing makes sense, my nephew reminds me that God can be trusted.

God is generous

2011-08-08T09:49:00.000-04:00

“The Lord...is generous.” The words jumped out at me as I read the epistle one Sunday last month. Not so much because it was new, as because it was something I hadn’t really thought much about.

God’s generosity is something that it’s all too easy to take for granted. Sometimes - at least on the good days - we remember to thank God for the gifts of material things: the glory of creation, the food on our tables, the breath of life in a newborn baby. All good things. But when Paul writes in Romans about the generosity of God, he’s talking about something far less tangible. He’s talking about the gift of life with God.

Paul is overwhelmed with the enormity of that gift. He grew up in a world where the gift was far more limited, bounded by the Jewish law. It’s as if the law drew a circle, with God at the center. Inside the circle were those who kept the law; outside were those who didn’t. The line that marked the circumference of the circle also divided those who belonged to God from those who did not. He, and others like him, were in; everyone else was out.

But then he met Jesus on the Damascus Road, and discovered that the circle had been erased. God was still there in the center, but there was no circle defining who belonged to God and who didn’t. Instead, there was something like a web, lines radiating out from God to each individual, and then stretching sideways from person to person.

Sometimes the lines reached barely an inch; others, the reached as far as the horizon. But always they connected people to God, not because those people had been especially obedient or fulfilled some preordained role, but because they had reached out, and God had reached out, and their hands had connected.

We can talk a lot about what it means to be a Christian, about living faithfully, and spending time with God, and putting our trust in Jesus Christ. But in the end, it’s as simple as this. God is generous. Reach out to God, and God will reach out to you. And
and you will be firmly and tightly connected to God.

And a byproduct is that you will also be connected to other people, companions in this thing we call faith. Although that’s not always comfortable - because God is generous. God is generous to everyone, everyone and anyone who reaches out to catch hold of God’s outstretched hands. That includes sullen adolescents and joyous toddlers, socialists and tea partiers, overtired parents and relaxed retirees, and everyone in between, people of every race and nation and age and social standing. All of us, recipients of the generosity of God, inviting us to hope beyond fear and life beyond measure.

God is generous.

Who are the ministers of the church?

2011-06-08T09:47:00.001-04:00

Who are the ministers of the Church?
The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.

We were sitting in a meeting room some time ago, when I asked the question of our teenage confirmation candidates and heard that response. I still remember it, not because the teenagers had come up with some radical answer - after all, it came directly from page 855 our Book of Common Prayer, in the section of the Catechism about “The Ministry” - but because when I was a teenager, I would have answered differently. When I was growing up, the minister was the man up the front who talked and prayed and read from scripture. The Catechism in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer didn’t mention ministry or ministers at all, and I suspect its writers would have been someone confused by our inclusion of lay persons as ministers of the Church.

Things have changed. The Church used to be a place with clearly defined roles: the clergy did “ministry”, and lay people did what the priest couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. Men (and the clergy were men) typically didn’t arrange flowers, and that task fell to the women, along with cleaning and caring for the silver and vestments. In the mid twentieth century, bulletins became popular, and if the priest wasn’t particularly adept with the typewriter, his wife or one of the ladies of the parish might help out. Visiting was officially done by the priest, although an often almost invisible network of parishioners carried information and provided practical help to those in need. Lay people dealt with practicalities like maintenance and finance. And the priest preached sermons and celebrated sacraments and was the religious expert.

Then along came the new prayer book, and suddenly we were all ministers, charged with representing Christ and his Church, and, among other things, with taking our places in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. We became partners, working alongside one another, in the work of God.

And the boundaries blurred. Lay people started leading bible studies, and visiting people who were sick, bringing them communion, and even preaching. Clergy started talking about theories of leadership and financial stewardship. The lines between the spiritual and the temporal - and who was responsible for which - blurred. We began to pay greater attention to the gifts people had been given by God, and less to the traditional roles and expectations.

Of course, what was happening was in fact not new at all. It was simply a reshaping of our corporate life to better reflect the call of the New Testament, where it’s made clear that God gives gifts to every Christian for the good of the church. So we read in Ephesians 4:, “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift...The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” The lists of gifts are expanded elsewhere, to include administration, and healing, and interpreting, and generosity, and encouragement. There are no clear lines between clergy and laity; all of us are given gifts; all of us are called to use them.

And who does what is not so much a matter of tradition and role, but of giftedness and willingness. Of course, there are certain things - absolution, blessing, consecration - that are reserved for the ordained, and in our tradition, they are responsible for overseeing the ministry of the church as a whole. But most of who does what is up for grabs. It just might be that a child has a gift for reading, or a man for flower arranging, or a priest for singing, or a woman for preaching. And so they are trained and commissioned and set free to do the work that God has called them to. Not because the priest can’t or won’t, but because the gifts of God are spilling out everywhere, activated by the Spirit, and we’d be foolish to ignore them!

Who are the ministers of the church?
WE ARE!

Difficult questions

2011-05-02T13:33:00.001-04:00

Late last night, I was about to go to sleep when I heard my iPad ding. That’s the signal from the New York Times that there is breaking news. I went online, and discovered that the President was to make a statement on national security. It was on Facebook that I first heard that Osama Bin Laden was dead. I found myself breathing out, as if I’d been holding my breath, without even being aware of it, and feeling an immense sadness, as his death brought home all the deaths these last ten years that one way or another have been related to the 9/11 attacks - here in the US, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

And I thought of those who lost family and friends on 9/11, and especially our junior warden, whose brother-in-law was killed that day. As we waited for the President’s announcement, the Junior Warden and I began to chat online, as we struggled with how we should respond as followers of the Jesus who said we should love our enemies and forgive seventy times seven.

The reality is that it would be simplistic to say that we should have just forgiven Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Yes, we are called to forgive. But true forgiveness is not something easily done. It can take a lifetime, or longer, of intentional work, just as it can take a lifetime, or longer, to heal.

But there is another question that as Christians, we have to address. How do we deal with evil? Is it ever right to kill someone? What's the difference between revenge and doing something to prevent someone from committing more evil? Does the technological capacity to do mass murder make a difference?

Those are questions that have exercised Christian theologians ever since Jesus was crucified and resurrected. There is consensus that we should always resist evil - but there is less agreement on how we do that. Some concluded that it is right - or at least justifiable - to participate in a small evil to prevent a greater one. Others concluded that it is never right to participate in evil, and that non-violence is the only option for us as Christians. And there is a whole range of opinion in between.

We live in a fallen world. There are no easy answers or perfect solutions. There is no doubt that Bin Laden was the leader of an organization that was committed to bringing death and destruction, and was the perpetrator of evil. We are called to resist that evil.

But I do not rejoice in his death. I wish - and yes, I know it’s not particularly realistic - but I wish that he had repented. I wish he had been brought to justice. And I pray that his death will not fuel a further cycle of violence and fear. It is time to stop.

As we wrestle with these difficult questions, perhaps the best thing we can do is pray. And so we turn to our prayer book:

"O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth: deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you, through Jesus Christ our Lord." “A prayer for our enemies,” Book of Common Prayer, p. 816

Called to the Dance

2011-04-08T17:18:00.000-04:00

Here is the church

Here is the steeple

Open the doors

And see all the people.

The childhood finger game is one of my earliest images of the church. It takes some manual dexterity to push your index fingers into the form of the steeple, and to interlock the remaining ones so that the people are hidden under the church roof, ready to be revealed when we open our thumb doors, rather than dancing on it.

"Church" is possibly the most common word that we Christians use, second only - perhaps - to "God." We use it of the buildings where we meet to worship God. We use it for the things we do on Sundays, "going to church." We use it as a shorthand for our parishes and congregations. And we talk about the church at large, meaning Christians everywhere, or at least Episcopalians.

But in the New Testament, the main word that we translate as "church" is ecclesia. It doesn't mean the buildings, or what we do. It means literally "called out." We are the people who are called out, who are gathered together by God. We are bound together by our faith in Christ, through baptism, and we are bound together with the people with whom we gather to worship and pray and serve. We belong to one another, just as we belong to God.

And it's that belonging to God that shapes our relationship with one another as the church. Just as God as Trinity is in an eternal dance of relationship of mutual interdependence, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we as Christians are caught up into that dance with God, and in turn mirror that interdependence with one another as the church.

One of the places to which we Episcopalians turn to explain what it means to live as Christians is the baptismal covenant. But one of the things I've noticed recently is that the baptismal covenant doesn't do too well in expressing that interdependence. It's implied earlier in the Baptism service, where the congregation is asked if they will support the baptismal candidate in their life in Christ. But in the covenant itself, references are scarce. We say we believe in the church - whatever it is - in the Creed. But then we focus on our individual actions, in how we live our lives and in how we respond to the world around us. It's as if we've forgotten that in baptism we are not only joined to Christ, but are joined to those called by his name. We have a new identity in the household of God. And I wonder if we need to add a sixth question, "Will you use your God given gifts for the glory of God and the upbuilding of the church?"

And perhaps next time I play the church finger game with my nephew, I'll lock my fingers together the "wrong" way. Maybe dancing on the roof is exactly where the church, where we, need to be.

Making space for God

2011-03-25T17:27:00.000-04:00

Traveling through the Holy Land on the clergy pilgrimage with our Bishop, the thing that struck me most, and has stayed with me these last few weeks, is the desert. When I think of desert, I remember the backgrounds of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons, with sand and rocks, but also cactuses, or the Simpson Desert in Australia, with its endless red dunes stubbled with canegrass and spinifex. I didn’t expect to find desert with huge rocky cliffs, stone strewn slopes, and almost no visible vegetation.

Deserts are usually harsh places, and the Judean desert harsher than most. But what I remember is not just the dry, rocky terrain, but the incredible spaciousness. The endless sky seemed full of possibility; the stony ground demanded closer inspection; the cliffs invited me to go deeper. I saw an orange wing-tipped black grackle, a nut-brown field mouse, and a diligent trail of ants.

But the spaciousness was not only physical. As I stood in the desert, I felt as if my soul were opening wide in that space, opening up to God. And I began to understand why it was that immediately after his baptism, Jesus went into the desert - possibly that same Judean desert - for forty days. During Lent, we remember those forty days that Jesus spent in the desert. For him, it was a time of preparation for his ministry. But I also suspect it was a time when, in the spaciousness of that place, the three-personed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was able to commune.

We often wish that we could have an intense and visceral experience of God. Saint Augustine talks about our hearts being restless until they find their rest in God. My heart and soul are often restless because there is so much stuff in my life. It’s no wonder that Jesus told one man that as well as following the commandments, he had to sell what he had and give the money to the poor. Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with possessions - after all, Jesus didn’t give the same command to all the wealthier people he met - but because, I suspect, Jesus knew that all that stuff was crowding out God. There was simply no room left in that man’s life.

Deserts offer that space for God. But the problem with deserts is that they are lonely places. There are usually not very many people there. And while some are called to a life of solitude and contemplation, the vast majority of us are called to live in this world as the light of Christ, so that others might be drawn to him. That mission is really hard to accomplish if we are in the desert and everyone else is elsewhere. We need to be where people are, to share with them the love of God.

But we also need to know God. So perhaps we need to carry the desert with us, creating desert-like spaces within our lives, where there is room to commune with God.

This year, my Lenten discipline this year has been to make space for God. I have cleaned house, sorting through the food in my cupboards and the clothes in my closet, and giving things away. I have given up some of the TV programs I used to need to watch, and removed some games from my iPhone. I have spent time in meditation and prayer. And I have met God, often unexpectedly.

The desert still calls, but underneath I know that what - or who - is really calling, is my Savior. If only I will save the space.

Of Diversions and Arrivals

2011-02-22T14:56:00.000-05:00

You can't get there from here. No one actually ever said it, but one of the things bout traveling through the Holy Land is that you rarely travel in a straight line. Sometimes it's geography that gets in the way. Visiting the places that Jesus knew around the Sea of Galilee involves driving around the lake, unless you have access to a boat. The drive from Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea to Bethlehem looks like a straight shot, until you realize that the rock hewn mountains and stone strewn wadis of the Judean Desert are in the way. And even in Jerusalem itself, you find yourself traveling round in circles, circumnavigating the Old City time and time again, even though it would be almost quicker to travel through on foot.
One of the things that you realize when you read the Gospel according to St Mark, is that Jesus rarely travels in straight lines either. But it's not just because of the geography. From the time that he goes into the wilderness after his baptism, right to the time he is arrested, Jesus is driven by the Holy Spirit to do the work of God (Thanks to the Rev Dr Christopher King for this insight, in one of the many conversations among the pilgrims this last week). Deep down, most of us, I suspect, think that life should go in straight lines. But the reality is that life rarely works out like that. There are innumerable twists and turns and diversions. Often it is incredibly frustrating, as we look at where we want to go, but somehow can't get there from where we are. Yet looking back at our lives, we often find that what we thought were detours in fact took us places we needed to go, without which we would not be the people we have become. And sometimes we can even see the hand of God in them.
The pilgrimage to the Holy Land is over. I began this blog entry in the bus traveling through Jerusalem; I'm finishing it in an office on Long Island. I have a suspicion that the pilgrimage will, in time, prove to be one of those detours that will shape my life in unexpected ways. If nothing else, the process of pilgrimage teaches you to let go of your own illusion of control and receive the unexpected as a gift, trusting that God will lead you in straight paths and detours alike.

Experiencing unity and division

2011-02-20T13:49:00.000-05:00

Church this morning was at the Anglican (Episcopal) Cathedral of St George in East Jerusalem, on the Arab side of the city. Just a couple of blocks away, the wall marks the boundary with the Palestinian West Bank. Walking towards the Old city from the Cathedral, you travel along a busy street, lined with Arab shops and market stalls, and after passing into the Old City through the Damascus Gate, you find yourself on the boundary between the Muslim Quarter on the left and the Christian Quarter on the right, though there is no visible difference between the two.

Mostly at home, when we hear about Israel, we hear about Jewish Israelis on the one hand and Muslim Palestinians on the other. But rarely do we hear about the people caught in between: the 170,000 or so Palestinian or Arab Christians, like Isaac, who owns a shop near the Cathedral. Isaac is Israeli; he also happens to be Arab and Christian. His parents' home was in West Jerusalem, now a Jewish area; after the 1948 war they were forced to move east. When the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel proper was built, Isaac's home ended up on the wrong side. It's only two blocks from his shop, but is behind the wall. He has had to make a choice - live in his home, and forgo his Israeli identity and his livelihood, or keep his shop and live with his wife and children in one room in the Old City. He has chosen the latter, and so his home lies empty and may eventually be bulldozed.

This morning the Eucharist was celebrated in two languages. At times it alternated between English and Arabic. The sermon was preached twice, once in each language. We sang the hymns and said the responses in our own languages, English and Arabic simultaneously. And at for end, we went into the parish hall for cake and Turkish coffee. It was truly a taste of the time to come when, as Isaiah says, "On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines..." (Isaiah 25:6). Pray for our brothers and sisters in the Middle East, and for the peace of Jerusalem.

Humbly I adore thee...

2011-02-19T17:30:00.000-05:00

One of the first things that strikes you as you enter the city of Jerusalem through the Lion Gate is the golden glow that emanates from the buidlings. It's simply light falling on the sand-gold limestone that the buildngs are made of, but it almost seems as if the city itself has a halo, inviting you to reverence and worship.

As we walked the Via Dolorosa today, I was struck by the multiple forms of reverence shown throughout the ages and even today. In the Crusader church of St Ann, our voices resounded long after we stopped singing, the echoes revoicing our praise. A jumbled pile of large crosses by the ninth station bears testimony to the Friday tradition of carrying a cross while following in the footsteps of our Savior. In a small church, an Ethiopian priest kept vigil, wrapped in a traditional shawl of black with maroon stripes. And in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, women in headscarfs chatted loudly to one another, black-clad Orthodox priests lined the route of a procession, people knelt and kissed the holy places, others lit candles and offered them in prayer, and still others stood in reverent silence.

Reverence lies in the act of worshipping or paying homage to Christ. We do it when we sing and when we pray, when we genuflect or make the sign of the cross, even when we dress in our Sunday best. And yet each of these can become perfunctory, habitual actions that have lost their essential connection with our Savior. It's at times like these that being exposed to other, less familiar forms of reverence invites us to a new experience of worship and awe.

Shabbat Shalom in Jerusalem

2011-02-18T17:22:00.000-05:00

Today, when we returned to the hotel in Jerusalem after a busy day visiting Masada and the Dead Sea, the lobby was full of little girls in black party dresses, white tights, and black Mary Janes, brothers in black trousers and white shirts, and their parents, preparing to celebrate the Sabbath. Extended families gathered in the downstairs dining room, while upstairs, a rabbi with long curls and white robe and cap taught a group of young adults the Sabbath rituals. And at another table in the lobby, three preteen boys in khakis and sneakers seem to be arguing with an older sister about what card game to play, while a younger kid in a plaid shirt begs to be allowed to join in. If the babble of voices and laughter is any indication, this is a joyous time to be savored, in which family and faith are inextricably entwined.

As Christians, our the closest thing to the Sabbath is Sunday. For most of us, the days of roast dinner - or pasta and meatballs - for Sunday lunch - are long gone. And I don't think I'd want to go back to the days of blue laws and enforced churchgoing three times each Sunday. But I wonder if we have lost something in the process. Sundays are busy, filled with soccer or shopping or the incessant demands of chores. Family and faith so easily become relegated to the time left over, or perhaps even displaced altogether. And even when we make them a priority, they are often marked by sullen teenagers and harassed parents and overtired toddlers. And I wonder, what can we take home for our own weekly celebration of the resurrection?

Boundaries and Identity

2011-02-17T17:19:00.000-05:00

One of the things you notice as you travel throughout Israel is the closeness of the borders. On Tuesday, we travelled up into the Golan Heights to the Valley of Tears, where a major battle in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was fought. Less than an hour's drive from the Sea of Galilee, you stand and look past three abandoned tanks into Syria. Earlier in the day, we had looked north-west to Lebanon. Today we traveled down the Jordan Valley. To our left, sometimes within 30 feet, was a double fence, electrified, with land mines in between. Along it runs a sandy track, which is checked several times each day for the footprints of border-crossers from Jordan.

On our way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, we crossed the border - and the wall - into Palestinian territory. Neither our guide nor our driver, who are Israeli, could enter; we had to pick up a new guide and driver for our time there. As we waited at the border to cross back into Israel, with machine gun toting soldiers passing through the bus, I was aware that for those residents of Bethlehem, who work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away, this is an everyday occurrence, and for Israeli Jew and Palestinian alike, it is a restriction and ofttimes indignity.

Whether you are Jewish, Palestinian, or non-religious living in Israel, you cannot avoid the understanding that you live among your traditional enemies. And that has been the case for thousands of years. Set at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa, this land has often been fought over. Abraham entered a land that had been long settled by Canaanites; Moses led the people of God back to a promised land settled by Jebusites and Hittites and Hivites; David and Solomon had to defeat the Philistines; the prophets spoke to those who had experienced the land-hunger of the Babylonians and Persians and Assyrians. And Jesus lived in a country occupied by the Romans.

Against all that opposition, identity has always been something for which it was necessary to fight. Clear boundaries have been necessary - of language, law, and culture. As you travel this land you begin to understand why law and covenant were so important, setting a people apart for God. Here, identity has always been inexorably entwined with religion. And the faith that has grown in this soil is passionate and fiercely loyal to the God who calls it forth.

Which makes me wonder, what of our faith? For most of us, it has not been born in the context of enmity. Being Christian in America, we don't need such rigorous boundaries to maintain our faith. Most of our neighbors really don't care who or what we believe in. And the danger is that we too may cease to care.

Accretions...

2011-02-16T17:15:00.000-05:00

Today we visited Tel Megiddo, an archaeological site where there are 26 or thereabouts (depending on which archaeologist you believe) layers of civilization. Inhabited from about 7000 BC to 586 BC, it is a mound created by fortress built upon fortress. The remains include an early Canaanite settlement with its large circular altar, a circular communal grain pit from its time as an Israelite fortress, and stables with stone drinking troughs from the reigns of Solomon and Ahab.

Later in the day, as I was walking through the town of Tiberias, I realized that most of the Christian sites that we have seen are layered like Tel Megiddo. The top layer is almost always a church, sometimes Roman Catholic, sometimes Greek Orthodox. Down a layer maybe a Crusader church, or perhaps a Byzantine one. Finally, perhaps down another couple of layers, are remains that date to the time of Christ. Sometimes it's a village, or a rock, or a well; sometimes accessible, sometimes hidden behind a gate or under the floor. Somewhere down there is a place that Jesus might actually have lived or visited.

Sometimes our faith is like Tel Megiddo. Way down at the bottom is the heart of our faith, our relationship with Jesus Christ himself. Sometimes that dates to our childhood; sometimes it is much more recent. But since then, layers have built up over that initial experience. The liturgical traditions that have become meaningful to us, the hymns that we love, the architecture that speaks to us, and the people who have shared our journey all shape our experience of faith. But there are times when those accretions threaten to overwhelm our core relationship; it is at those times that we need to stop and take time to simply talk with our Savior.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Bethlehem, where apparently we will go down a long flight of stairs and see the exact place where Jesus was born. Maybe.

Fierce Landscapes

2011-02-15T16:31:00.003-05:00

I'd always heard that Israel was a land of contrasts. But I'd always thought that was the classic cliched hyperbole that you expect from tourist advertising. Of course there are contrasts - few countries are geographically uniform. But what is striking is the sheer magnitude of the differences within a few miles. From the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the fertile headwaters of the Jordan to the abandoned Syrian tanks of the Golan Heights takes little more than an hour to drive.

Somehow - I imagine thanks to my Children's Illustrated Bible - I had imagined this to be a more pastoral land, echoing the gentler contours of New England rather than the harsher reality of a land formed of volcanic eruption, earthquake, and erosion.

Imagine Jesus sailing on a lake that one moment is mirror still, and the next whipped by winds tearing past a hill that looks like it has been attacked with a meat cleaver, walking northwards through green fields spattered with stone, along a marshy stream that eventually becomes the Jordan River, and towards the cliff face in whose shadow the city of Caesarea Philippi was built, and where Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ. His own understanding of himself and his mission must have been shaped by these places. No wonder that the Jesus of the gospels is not so much "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" as a man of passion and grace in equal measure, one who healed a synagogue leader's beloved daughter and spoke woe on the scribes and the pharisees.

About ten years ago I read a book called "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes" by Belden Lane. In it, he speaks of the relationship between spirituality and landscape: the ways in which the way we experience God is shaped by our environment. The extremes of the land echo the extremes of our lives, birth and death, and their reverberations in between. And so often, it is in those extreme and liminal places that we not only meet God, but find our faith reshaped and renewed.

Blisters and blessings

2011-02-12T21:53:00.003-05:00

Recently, I received a gift. It was a small paper crown, with one word written inside it - longanimity. It was the Sunday after the Epiphany. The priest in the church I visited invited each member of the congregation to take one of these crowns from a basket, and to receive the word written therein as a gift from God, to be lived with all year. I had to look up my word in the dictionary. It means "A disposition to bear injuries patiently" or "calmness in the face of suffering and adversity." I don't like my word.

But in the weeks since I received it, I've learned to live with it. And I've realized that it has a lot to do with the way you deal with the way you travel through life.

We Christians often talk about that journey through life as being a pilgrimage. However, I sometimes think that we use the word metaphorically, without thinking what pilgrimage is really like. When I think of pilgrimages, I think of richly colored medieval paintings, red and blue and green with gold leaf, people walking sturdily towards a golden-roofed city.

But in the last couple of years, I've walked two pilgrimage trails: St Cuthbert's Way in Scotland and north-eastern England, and Two Saints Way from Chester to Litchfield, also in England. They have not been like the medieval pictures in my head. My clothing is not rich red and blue and green with gold leaf. I have well-worn gray boots, gray shorts, a washed out blue T-shirt, and a gray hat. They're chosen for their practicality - they're quick to dry and don't show the dirt.

And my walking is not so sturdy, certainly not by the time I'm within sight of my destination. Limping would be a better word for it. No matter how good my preparations, walking 15 or so miles a day means that I get blisters. You learn to live with them, but you can't forget them.

But that's not the whole story of pilgrimage. When I crested the last hill before the sea, and saw Holy Island, when I received the Eucharist in a church where my ancestors were married and buried, when I stood on the windswept moors where St Cuthbert visited his parishioners, when I received unexpected hospitality - a short car ride, a cup of tea, a pint of beer - I knew the tangible blessing of God.

The pilgrimage we are on as Christians is one characterized by both blisters and blessings. Jesus never promised us that it would be easy. In fact, he has invited us to take on his yoke, to bear the cross, to rejoice in suffering - not as some sort of masochistic hazing ritual, but as full participation in the often strenuous and sometimes costly work of God that, in the words of Romans 8:1-5, produces endurance and character and hope, and in the end, a share in the glory of God. Or, in the words of the well known hymn,
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
By the cross are sanctified;
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.
John Bowring, 1825

Longanimity is about the blisters. And it seems that as soon as one heals, my shoes begin to rub again. But every time I crest another hill, I know the even greater blessings of the glorious grace of God.

Mission: Jesus' and ours

2011-01-07T09:04:00.000-05:00

Today my youngest nephew and godson turned one. He's a sweet boy with big blue

eyes, sticky-up brown hair, and incredibly long eyelashes. He was baptized last May,

and, I pray, will develop his own relationship with God as he grows up, and will in time

serve God in whatever way God calls him to.

In many periods over the last two thousand years, the main way that the church - and

the Christian faith - grew, was through procreation. Christian people had children, and

those children took on both their parents' faith and their place in the church. When birth

rates were high (and infant mortality rates low), the church grew. But when birth rates

dropped, the church struggled.

If you've seen recent statistics on church membership, you'll know that most

denominations are losing members. Birthrates aren't keeping up - we can't rely on

babies to keep our numbers up. And so we've been forced to begin to think once again

about mission, about reaching out beyond our own immediate families with the good

news of God in Christ.

Not that this is anything new. When Jesus began his incarnate ministry here on earth,

to be Jewish was a birthright. But as he preached and taught his way around the

countryside, it became clear that by contrast, to be Christian was a choice. Jesus began

not with families, but with twelve men, commissioned to go and preach the gospel and

to make disciples, baptizing all those who believed in the name of the Father, the Son,

and the Holy Spirit. That became the model for the growth of the early church, with

followers of Christ taking any and every opportunity to share the good news with others,

whether it was to a government ofﬁcial trailing inna coach, a prison warder, or crowds

gathered in a marketplace.

In the twenty ﬁrst century in urban, suburban and rural Long Island, our experience is

more like that of Jesus than that of those intervening centuries. Now matter how much

we cling to the idea that retaining our children and grandchildren will assure the future of

the church, the reality is that what we need to do is what Jesus asked of us - mission.

Mission is about going out into the wider community with the good news of God in

Christ.

Our baptismal covenant makes this explicit. "Will you proclaim by word and example

the good news of God in Christ?" We are invited, even commanded, to share the good

news in what we say and in what we do. Both at the same time.

God is relying on us to do the work of mission. If we don't share the good news, who

will? And so it is incumbent on us to look around us and see who might need to hear

that good news. To offer to pray for them when they are struggling, to give practical help

when they are in need, and above all, to invite them, as the apostle Andrew did with his

brother Simon Peter, to come see the Savior.

Meanwhile, my nephew continues to grow. His parents take him to church; in time, his

father will read him bible stories at bedtime; his grandparents will pray for him; I'll talk

with him about faith; and he'll experience the love of the body of Christ. And he will

make his own decision about whether to follow Jesus. God willing, his answer will be

yes.

I pledge allegiance...

2010-12-13T23:29:00.001-05:00

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

2010-12-13T23:27:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-07T16:34:00.002-05:00

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

2010-09-13T15:51:00.000-04:00

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

2010-08-31T10:07:00.000-04:00

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"

2010-07-07T21:59:00.000-04:00

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...

2010-06-07T22:52:00.004-04:00

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?

2010-05-25T03:40:00.005-04:00

“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.

2010-04-07T18:46:00.004-04:00

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?

2010-03-08T17:27:00.003-05:00

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...

2010-03-01T21:34:00.004-05:00

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

2010-02-08T17:16:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-14T04:54:00.010-05:00

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

2010-01-11T11:43:00.007-05:00

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