Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Daily Office (Page 2 of 70)

A Meditation on Mortality (for the parish newsletter)

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A “Rector’s Reflection” offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston in the July 2016 issue of “The Epistle,” the newsletter of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

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firefliesThe week of the summer solstice was an interesting one in the Funston household.

The night of the solstice there was what is known as a “strawberry moon,” a phenomenon which only occurs when a full moon coincides with the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice, longest day of the year. The moon takes on an amber or pinkish glow which astronomers explain is caused by the setting sun’s positioning, affecting the angle at which the sun’s rays pass through Earth’s atmosphere and, thus, the apparent coloration of the moon.

The name “strawberry moon” was given by the Native American Algonquin tribes of northern Michigan and Canada. They believed that a full moon in June signified that it was time to start picking fruits, including strawberries. It is also known as the Rose, Hot, or Honey Moon (the latter being the origin of the name given a newly married couple’s post-wedding get-away). The last time there was a “strawberry moon” was during the so-called “summer of love” in 1967.

Biblically, the summer solstice and the nearest full moon are associated with punishment and death. It was taught by the rabbis in their commentaries on Scripture that this was the time when Moses disobeyed God and was told he could not enter the Promised Land with the rest of the Hebrews, but would die instead.

I made note of the “strawberry moon” as I took Dudley for his last walk of the evening before going to bed. I also noticed a large number of fireflies winking in the trees and lawns of our neighborhood. Fireflies always remind me of two things: summers spent with my grandparents in Winfield, Kansas, during the 1950s, and burying my late brother in 1993, also in Winfield which was his home town. The night after his burial in late June, the fireflies were more numerous and more active than I had ever seen them before, nor have I ever seen that many since!

So the “strawberry moon” and the fireflies were, in a sense, a reminder of mortality. The next day, I was scheduled to visit a urologist at the request of my primary care physician. The reason: elevated prostate specific antigen levels in my blood. “Not a big deal,” I thought. I have always had a high PSA level. However, after taking my history, asking a lot of personal questions, and conducting an examination, the urologist told me that I have the classic signs and symptoms of prostate cancer and referred me for a biopsy. That will happen later this month.

“Still,” I thought, “No big deal.” Prostate cancer is slow growing and can often be left untreated without any real impact on a man’s health. However, given my family history of various sorts of cancers, it’s a matter of some (though not a lot of) concern.

I thought that would be the big medical news of the day until late that night. I had gone to bed and was sound asleep when Evie woke me up gasping for breath and obviously very anxious. We headed for the hospital where, eventually, it was discovered that she had two pulmonary emboli, blood clots, in her left lung. (See note below.)

That was yesterday. As I write, she is still in the hospital and will be for a few days while the doctors try to determine how and why she developed these clots.

So in the course of 24 hours, we have both been reminded of our own mortality and, I have to say, I think we’re taking it rather well. Several years ago, the New York Times Magazine ran an article about how we modern human beings face the reality of our own mortality (Facing Your Own Mortality, 9 Oct 1988).

The article contrasted a 60-year-old woman “stricken by two life-threatening ailments – insulin-dependent diabetes and breast cancer” – with a man in his 60s, a doctor “crippled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

The woman, the author wrote, “stares death down every day. Despite the odds against her, she accepts the possibility of her imminent death with astonishing serenity. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she did not ask, as many patients do, ‘Why me?’ Instead, she thought, ‘Why not me? Rather than crying about your affliction, you have to live every minute you have as a gift.’”

The man, on the other hand, was described as “unable to overcome his anger at being crippled.” He “refused to acknowledge his encroaching impairment. He became hostile toward those around him. As his condition forced him to give up his practice, his anger often exploded. His wife, his full-time caretaker, bears the brunt of his fury. She has confided to friends with great sadness that she awaits the time when both of them will be released from the prison of terminal illness.”

What is it that makes it possible for some of us to face our own deaths with equanimity while others become anxious and angry? I believe the answer is faith, not necessarily the Christian (or even religious) faith, but that sense that life has meaning and that there is a greater purpose in the universe than simply our own meagre existence.

As I write on June 23 for the July issue of The Epistle, today’s Daily Office Lectionary texts included a selection from the Letter to the Romans in which Paul writes, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, be-cause God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:3b-5) That, it seems to me, is the essence of faith, the sure and certain hope that (as Paul writes later in the same letter) “all things work together for good for those who love God.” (8:28)

I used to have a congregant (in another parish) who frequently asked me, “What will happen when I die?” I would answer her, “Martha, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know because I haven’t been there yet; I don’t care because there’s not much I can do about it.” Jesus asked his followers, “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Matt 6:27) He clearly didn’t think so, for his follow up instruction was, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

It is that attitude of faith, to live for today and not worry about tomorrow, that I think allows some to face death with calmness and composure. I commend it to you.

Live for today! Enjoy the summer!

(Note: Yesterday, the day after this was written, I was told by the attending physician that Evie had “a lot of clots, so many clots” in both her lungs. He said that if I hadn’t brought her to the emergency room on Wednesday night, but had opted to wait until morning, she would probably have died. So, take it from me, don’t dismiss even a little unexplained shortness of breath! – Return to Text)

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

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

Pragmatic vs Visionary – From the Daily Office Lectionary (22 January 2016)

Pragmatic vs Visionary

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Epiphany 2, Year 2 (22 January 2016)

Genesis 12:1 ~ Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

I haven’t written one of these Daily Office Meditations for over a month – the last was in early Advent. There’s been no good reason for not doing so other than . . . well, there’s been no good reason.

Today, however, I have a lot of work to do. Sunday will be the 199th Annual Parish Meeting of the Episcopal Church congregation in which I serve and, as we approach our bicentennial there is a lot which I should say in my annual “state of the parish” remarks. Whenever I sit down to prepare this annual address I am torn between the need to simply report the state of the parish – the improvements in all the metrics of money and membership, number of services and outreach clients served, the financial stewardship and “average Sunday attendance – and the need to cast the vision, to “write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.” (Hab 2:2)

And as I struggle with that today I am noticing that, on Facebook (yes, I have wasted time following Facebook postings and debating American party politics and Anglican Communion politics with friends and colleagues), in regard to the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, there is a great deal more heat as the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary loom large on the horizon. The heat is showing up in vehement assertions of the positive quality of one candidate as contrasted to what is cast as the negative quality of the other.

In truth, neither is necessarily a positive nor a negative. Clinton’s pragmatism is contrasted with Bernie’s vision. Some argue that a pragmatic president is what we need; others, that we need a visionary leader. We are told that Bernie’s single-payer health plan, for instance, can’t be done; it’s not pragmatic. We are told that Hillary’s comfortable (pragmatic) working relationship with Wall Street bankers hampers her ability to regulate them; she’s not visionary enough.

In this debate, I see the same contrast, the same conflict I have writing the annual parish report: pragmatism (the numbers and statistics and what can be done given the budget) vs vision (what ought to be done budget-be-damned).

Cards on the Table: I prefer visionary leadership. If I vote in the Democratic primary in my state, it will be for Sanders (at this point I am registered as an independent, although I do have a Bernie bumpersticker on my car). Here’s why . . . visionary leadership is what leads to radical change. Pragmatism produces incremental change, if it produces any change at all.

Abraham (Abram at the time of today’s reading) was a visionary. Had he been a pragmatist, he and Sarai would have stayed put in Ur. Only a visionary would take off across the desert in search of an unknown future in some “promised land.” It occurred to me earlier today that if Jesus had been a pragmatist, there would be no Christian church; much better to stay in Nazareth, earn a good living as a carpenter and just make things better in the local synagogue. If Buddha had been a pragmatist, he would have lived and ruled as prince and made incremental improvements in his local kingdom. If Mohammed had been a pragmatist, he’d never have gone to that cave on Jabal al-Nour where he encountered Gabriel.

There’s nothing wrong with pragmatism. We need pragmatists; they make great managers. But they don’t make very effective leaders of change. For that, we need visionaries.

In politics, visionaries from “one side of the aisle” challenge the pragmatists from the other side (as well as from their own side); they encourage (or sometimes force) the pragmatists to change. Pragmatists, on the other hand, have the important role of holding the visionaries back; that’s a good and necessary thing! Unchecked visionaries can cause more than change; they can do real damage! Fortunately, in national government, we have two huge bodies of pragmatists (one with 100 members; one with 438) which put a brake on visionary leadership at the top. In church governance, a few pragmatists on the vestry (or session or parish council or whatever) are a good thing; pragmatists make super parish treasurers!

Sometimes (though not very often) there is no need for major changes; in those times, pragmatic leadership at the top is fine. But when there is need for radical re-direction, pragmatic leadership becomes no leadership. Pragmatists of on one side of the political divide attempt to negotiate with pragmatists on the other side trading tit for tat, pushing here while holding back there, agreeing to incremental changes in one direction here in exchange for incremental changes in another direction there. The net result is very little change at all; the net result is very pragmatic stalemate. Sometimes we elect leadership we believe to be visionary and find we have a pragmatist on our hands . . . .

Clergy, I think, are called to be visionaries. I struggle with the pragmatism thing; probably most clergy do . . . . we know that when Habbakuk, speaking for God, tells religious leaders to “write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it,” he’s talking directly to us. On the Meyers-Briggs, I am an INTJ, which means I tend to see the “big picture” and ignore details, so I may be a bit prejudiced in arguing that “big picture” visionary leadership is the clergy’s business. Nonetheless, I do think that’s our job and that’s probably why I am attracted to that sort of political leadership, as well.

There is nothing wrong with pragmatism; it is not a negative characteristic and it has its place in national politics and church governance. There is nothing wrong with vision; it is not a negative characteristic and it has its place in national politics and church governance. The question that we face in both church and politics is whether this is the time and place for one or the other. Is it time to get up and hit the road to the “promised land,” or is time to stay the course, remain in Ur, and maybe just make things a little bit better there?

One thing I do know . . . it’s time to get that annual “state of the parish” thing written!

Save and Deliver: Fourth of a Series – Sermon for Advent 4 (20 December 2015)

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A sermon offered on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 20, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are Micah 5:2-5a; Canticle 15 [Luke 1:46-55]; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page.)

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hen-with-chicksLanguages and the study of languages fascinate me – if you didn’t know that before this series on the Lord’s Prayer, you probably know it now – and I am therefore always keenly aware of the difficulty of fully appreciating the Holy Scripture if we only consider the meaning of the English translation.

In the 1950s the social scientist Noam Chomsky proposed the idea that the ability to communicate complex data with our fellows is one of the characteristics that distinguishes human beings. He went so far as to propose that all humans, unlike all other animals, are genetically programmed with a limited set of rules for organizing language; this became known as “the Universal Grammar.” Chomsky’s idea became received wisdom and pretty much the basis for all academic study of linguistics despite the fact that there was not a shred of objective, empirical data to support it.

In fact, there is now plenty data contrary to Chomsky’s notion. We now know that a variety of animal species are able to communicate among themselves and convey very complex information to one another. Furthermore, studies of human languages around the world have repeatedly demonstrated that there are no linguistic universals; instead, there is abundant variation at all levels of linguistic organization. For example, there is a language spoken by one small group of people on one of the South Pacific islands in which verbs have no tenses; we would, I suppose, say that the verbs are all in the present tense but that would be misleading because their verbs, in fact, carry no sense of time. That sense is expressed, instead, by adjectives, and specifically by color adjectives; the color variation ascribed to the subject and object of a verb conveys the idea of past, present, or future.

Can you imagine how difficult it is to translate from that language into English, or vice versa? A direct translation

I bring this up because, although the difficulties are not nearly so great in the translation from Greek to English (which we must do to read the New Testament in our own language), such difficulties are nonetheless there, and especially so as we consider the last of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” in the older liturgical form; “save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil,” in the newer.

Some of the difficulties that confront us are (a) Greek words which can be translated in more than one way; (b) Greek word order which differs from, and is less important than, word order is in English; and (c) the fact that biblical Greek uses no punctuation, leaving us to guess about phrases and sentences. (I’ll only address the first today, but the others are also present here.) And, then, there is the overarching matter that Jesus, in teaching us to pray, is also teaching us something about God and such teaching is always contingent, partial, and problematic; no human language can encompass the reality of God. Any human attempt to describe God, even Jesus’, is incomplete and may be ultimately misleading.

In today’s Gospel, Mary pregnant with Jesus visits her kinswoman Elizabeth who is pregnant with John the Baptizer. Elizabeth greets her, commenting on how active her own baby becomes at the sound of Mary’s voice and then praising Mary as “blessed” because she “believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Mary’s answer is the Magnificat, the song which we recited as our Gradual, in which she says of God that God casts down the powerful, scatters the proud, and sends the rich away hungry, but that God lifts up the downtrodden, feeds those in need, and remembers those with whom God has made covenants. This doesn’t mean that God has nothing to do with the rich, nor that God ministers only to the poor, nor that God is not active in the lives of those outside of God’s covenants. It gives us a picture of God’s commitment to justice, but only a partial picture.

The same is true of the Lord’s Prayer. This petition (like all of the petitions in this prayer) is loaded with more meaning than we are aware of. Methodist theologians William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their book Lord, Teach Us, say this about this petition:

Words like “save” and “trial” and “deliver” are words of crisis. They remind us that to pray this prayer means to be thrust into the middle of a cosmic struggle. At this point the temperature rises within the Lord’s Prayer. Things are not right in the world. It is as if something, someone has organized things against God. You pray this prayer faithfully, attempting to align your life to it and the next thing you know, it’s like you are under assault.

How often is salvation presented as some sort of helpful solution to everything that ails us. “Lonely? Come to Jesus and get that fixed.” “Alcoholic? Come to Jesus and be delivered of your addiction.” “Confused? Join the church and find all the answers.” In such a presentation of the gospel, salvation is the resolution of all your problems, the way to fix whatever ails you.

But this petition, in which we ask for salvation, deliverance and help in time of trial reminds us that salvation in Christ is an adventure, a journey, a larger drama. Praying this prayer is the beginning of problems we would never have had had we not met Christ and enlisted with Christ’s people. The forces of evil do not relinquish their territory without a fight and, in being saved, God’s newly won territory is you. (Willimon, Wm. H., and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us, Abingdon, Nashville:1996, ch. 8)

“At this point the temperature rises . . . . ” What a great way to present the tensions of this petition and of the protection for which it asks!

So let’s take a look at some of these “words of crisis,” as Willimon and Hauerwas label them. The first are the words translated in the King James Bible and in the earlier liturgical prayer as “lead us not into,” in the NRSV as “do not bring us into;” this is the Greek phrase me eisenenkes hemas eis, and either translation may be correct. The root verb is eisphero which can mean “lead”, “bring”, “carry”, or even “sustain.”

A problem for many people is not so much in the translation as in the idea that God could or would lead someone into temptation. Walter Kaiser in his book Hard Sayings of the Bible (InterVarsity, Downers Grove, IL:1996, p 366) exclaims, “Why should we ask God not to lead us into this? As if God would do any such thing! ‘God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone’ (Jas 1:13).” This is why the newer liturgical form paraphrases the Greek as a plea for protection – “Save us from.”

Save us from what? The Greek word is peirasmon. If that is translated as “temptation”, and that in turn is understood to mean an enticement to evil, then it does seems strange and perhaps even offensive to ask God not to do what God would never do. However, “temptation, when the word occurs in the older versions of the Bible, means more than temptation to sin; it has the wider sense of testing.” (Kaiser, 367) A 1st Century Greek physician and natural philosopher named Dioscorides used the word peirasmos to describe medical experimentation (Mat. Med. Praef. 5.12), and a Greek-speaking Indian philosopher of the century before named Syntipas used the word to denote the afflictions of life which tend to crush those who do not possess sufficient inner fortitude. It is in this way that Jesus or the evangelists seem to have used it when he went with the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper.

When they arrived at the garden, he went away by himself admonishing his friends, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” (Lk 22:40) When he returned to them, he found them asleep and again he admonished them: “Get up and pray that you may not enter into the time of trial.” (Lk 22:46) In the Greek of the New Testament, the words of Jesus’ admonitions are nearly identical to this petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, the full first half in the new liturgical form is, “Save us from the time of trial.”

The second half of the petition is rendered the same in both liturgical forms, “Deliver us from evil.” Sometimes the Biblical versions are personalized, “Deliver us from the Evil One” on the basis of some Greek variants, which would seem to limit it to being a request for protection from (perhaps) Satan. However, most translators and commentators support the more general understanding, many noting that Jesus seems to be using a Hebrew literary or poetic form known as parallelism. “‘Lead us not into temptation’ and ‘deliver us from evil’ mean just the same thing: Prevent us being brought into temptation too great for us to conquer.” (Palmer, Albert W., Humanity’s Greatest Prayer, in Prayer and Spiritual Living, Vol 2, Kregel, Grand Rapids:1995, p. 10) As Lutheran writer Lois Tverberg says, “[This petition] is an all-encompassing plea for God to protect us from what is outside us, but what is inside as well.”

The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff suggests that this petition “presupposes a bitter awareness that human beings are fragile, subject to temptation of betraying their hope, becoming unfaithful to God, actually succumbing to temptation, and consequently being lost.” (The Lord’s Prayer: The Prayer of Integral Liberation, Orbis Books, Maryknoll:1983, p 97) And Franciscan author Michael Crosby observes, “We cannot offer this petition without being aware of how we ourselves might be contributing to the very evil (for others) that we pray to be delivered from ourselves.” (The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us, Orbis Books, Maryknoll:2002, p 171)

With that “better awareness” we know, even as we utter this prayer, that there will be times of trial. I’m sure that even as Mary sang the praises of the God who “casts down the mighty from their thrones,” she knew that she would still have to deal with life in an occupied Israel under the control of Imperial Rome. Even as she thanked God for “lift[ing] up the lowly” and “fill[ing] the hungry with good things,” she knew that she and Joseph would have to work hard earning very little to support themselves and the baby she carried. She knew and we know that there will be times of trial.

This petition, then, is for us, the family of Jesus, who know that despite our best intentions every day we will be faced with and tempted by choices which may be bad and unhealthy for us or for others, who know that left on our own we will give in and make (some of) those choices. This is a petition that God will give us the protection and the resources we need to resist those choices. “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil” is a prayer for God’s protective guidance and strength to endure, because on our own, we cannot resist temptation; we cannot do what is right and good. It is a prayer that what Paul wrote to the church in Rome will be true for us:

[S]ince we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Rom 5:1-5)

Endurance, character, hope, and love: these are the protective gifts we ask for when we pray, “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.”

An oft-repeated alliterative aphorism sometimes attributed to former Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan summarizes the Lord’s Prayer as one for provision, pardon, and protection. We pray for our basic needs; we pray for forgiveness; we pray for safety from evil, both that of others and our own.

Despite the difficulties of translation from Aramaic to Greek to English, despite cultural differences between 1st Century Palestine and 21st Century America, in our world with all of its complications, in our world which is (as Willimon and Hauerwas remind us) a battlefield where the battle may already be won but still must be fought, this prayer reminds us that these three things – provision, pardon, and protection – are ultimately all we need to live for God, whose was, and is, and will be “the kingdom, the power, and the glory . . . now and for ever. Amen.”

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

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

Action and Fruit – From the Daily Office Lectionary

Action and Fruit

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Saturday in the week of Advent 1, Year 2 (5 December 2015)

Matthew 22:16 ~ “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.”

People say a lot of things; people often say a lot of things they believe and, pretty much just as often, they say a lot of things they don’t believe. The Pharisees and the Herodians who said this to Jesus pretty obviously didn’t believe what they said to him. If they had truly believed that Jesus taught “the way of God in accordance with the truth,” they would not have been trying to trap him with a trick question about taxes.

Our nation is still coming to grips with the latest mass shooting, the 355th of the calendar year to date. The killing of 14 people at the San Bernardino Inland Regional Center and the wounding of many more is the worst mass murder since the Sandy Hook school shooting. We can all, I’m sure, remember the statements of our political leaders at that time: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” We remember them well because they have said them again after this week’s event, as they have said them after every mass murder between Sandy Hook and San Bernardino.

I don’t believe them anymore, and I don’t believe that they believe them. I have come to believe that a politician standing before a microphone saying “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families” is no more sincere than were the Herodians and Pharisees talking to Jesus in the Temple. Their words are lies and they know it.

Saying “our thoughts and prayers are with you” is a lie. The politicians who say it aren’t thinking at all … if they thought the least little bit, they would think of ways to regulate gun ownership. They also aren’t praying … real prayer leads to action. “Never pray for anything you aren’t willing to work for,” my grandfather taught me.

He also was fond of the old saying, “Actions speak louder than words.” Jesus said something similar, “You will know them by their fruits.” (Mat 7:16) The silence of our political leaders’ inaction is deafening. The bitter fruit of their inaction is inedible.

The Bible most of them claim to follow says very clearly: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:15-17)

If a nation is riddled by daily gun death, and one of you says, “I’m praying for you,” and yet you do nothing to end the gun violence, what is the good of that? So prayers, by themselves, if they have no attendant action, are a lie.

These politicians who “think and pray” but do not follow up with action, who do not bear fruit, cheapen both thought and prayer into meaninglessness. I don’t believe their words anymore, and I don’t believe they believe them.

Appearing with the Bishop of Los Angeles shortly after the San Bernardino shooting, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry said, “We must combine our prayers with work.”

This is what it means to believe: to combine prayer with work, to follow thought with action, to offer prayer and produce fruit.

Liturgy Done Well – From the Daily Office Lectionary

Liturgy Done Well

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Friday in the week of Advent 1, Year 2 (4 December 2015)

Matthew 22:2 ~ “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.”

Jesus goes on from this statement to tale a rather weird and disturbing parable about wedding guests who refuse to attend because of more pressing business, of a host so outraged that he sends soldiers to murder the invited guests and sends slaves into the streets to drag in the uninvited, and of a dragooned and thus unprepared attendee who thrown into prison because of his attire. In these days of mass murders, of hostage takings and political kidnappings, of violence done in the name of disagreement . . . that parable is not something I want to touch in any way!

So . . . I’ll just stick with the basic opening metaphor of “kingdom of heaven is like a wedding banquet.” I can deal with that. It’s a nice analogy that makes sense. It tells me what that other analog for the kingdom of heaven, corporate worship, should be like.

Wedding banquets: food, drink, music, dancing, people having a good time, love and commitment on display and celebrated, gifts given and received, speeches filled with remembrance and silly jokes, toasts and blessings wishing all well into the future . . . What’s not to like about wedding banquets?

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from someone I believe to be a fellow Christian, but a co-religionist of a different ethic and a different aesthetic, who told me that God does not like liturgy. Citing Isaiah’s condemnation of the Temple worship of faithless Israel – “Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them (Isa 1:14) – he suggested that God does not applaud our liturgy, but is instead sickened by it.

I rather doubt that. The God Incarnate who enjoyed weddings and even catered wedding banquets (remember Cana of Galilee?) knew what he was saying when he drew his analogy. If the kingdom of God is like a wedding feast, then worship should include food, drink, music, dance, remembrance, jokes, blessings, and gifts, and when liturgy is done well, it does!

I believe that that makes God glad.

You Did Not Return – From the Daily Office Lectionary

You Did Not Return

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Thursday in the week of Advent 1, Year 2 (3 December 2015)

Amos 4:6 ~ . . . . yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.

The fourth chapter of the prophet Amos is a litany of the things God had done to punish the people beginning with the oddest of all, “I gave you cleanness of teeth . . . ” obviously a reference to lack of food. After each calamity is described, God laments its ineffectiveness with these words, “Yet you did not return to me.” Five times this is repeated in today’s Old Testament reading. The reading concludes, then, “prepare to meet your God.” You did not return to me, therefore I am coming to you. The implication, of course, is that this meeting will not be pleasant.

Yesterday the 355th mass shooting of the year for the United States took place in San Bernardino, California. (A “mass shooting” is defined as an event in which four or more persons are killed or wounded by gunfire.) Immediately, politicians of every sort began to tweet, to post on Facebook, to issue statements, to hold press conferences, to be questioned by news reporters . . . and in every instance some variant of these words were uttered: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” This year . . . 355 times people have died; 355 times politicians have offered thoughts and prayers. “Yet you did not return to me.”

The Washington Post reported that there are now known to be at least 357 million firearms in a country with a population of 317 million. That’s more than one gun for every man, woman, and child from newborn infancy to deathbed old age. “Yet you did not return to me.”

Even though the Congress refuses to fund gun-injury and gun-death research or to allow the Centers for Disease Control to treat gun-injury and gun-death data as a matter of public health, such research and data exist. The statistical correlation between prevalence of gun ownership in a population and the rate of gun death or gun injury in that population is well established: more guns, more death. It’s a simple and statistically valid correlation that our political leaders refuse to acknowledge. “Yet you did not return to me.”

Repentence. That’s what the Lord’s lament is about. A failure of repentance, really. To turn around and return to sanity; to heal relationships among people, and between people and God; to get off the treadmill of daily mass shootings; to end the until-now ceaseless refrain of “thoughts and prayers” and replace them with effective action.

Does anyone doubt that the time has come for something more than thoughts and prayers? Does anyone doubt that the time has come to do something about the prevalence of excessive gun ownership in this population? Does anyone doubt that the time has come to permit the CDC to do its job and treat gun violence as a public health concern? Does anyone doubt that that the time has come repent?

If we cannot, if we do not, there will be a meeting . . . and it will not be pleasant.

#AdventWord #repent

Imperfection Incarnate – From the Daily Office Lectionary

Imperfection Incarnate

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Wednesday in the week of Advent 1, Year 2 (2 December 2015)

Psalm 119:1 ~ Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.

The Old Testament can be so unforgiving! Who is “blameless”? What human being can attain such perfection? I wrote the following reflection on perfection for the December issue of our parish newsletter.

A few weeks ago, my wife Evie and I went to the movies! We saw Bridge of Spies (which I strongly recommend, by the way) and several promotional “trailers” for up-coming movies, one of which is playing in the local theater as I write this reflection.

The movie is a holiday comedy starring Diane Keaton and entitled Love the Coopers; I know nothing about this movie and hadn’t heard of it until seeing the trailer. As the promo begins, we see Keaton in a department store speaking to someone and saying, “It’s the only time of the year when we’re all together! I want the perfect Christmas!”

As soon as I heard those words, I turned to Evie and said, “O my God! She’s my mother!”

I love my late mother and miss her dearly, but if she had one besetting sin it was holiday perfectionism. Whatever the holiday – New Year, Easter, Fourth of July, end-of-summer Labor Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas – these were times for the family to gather and the festivities had to be perfect! And . . . of course . . . they never were. The holiday wasn’t perfect, Mother was disappointed, and her disappointment made the imperfection worse. Especially at Christmas.

Thank God that perfection is not what Christmas is all about! If it were, there would be nothing at all to celebrated because, in all honesty, it would be a dismal failure for all of us. Quite to the contrary, Christmas is about imperfection, about weakness, about foolishness.

If the Incarnation was all about perfection, the Word of God would have arrived as Someone like the Greek god Apollo, riding in a flaming chariot, bedazzling humankind with Sun-like brilliance. If the Incarnation was all about strength, the Savior would have come as Someone like Hercules, wrestling serpents and conquering lions. If the Incarnation was all about human wisdom, the Lord might have appeared as Someone like the lady Athena, the Greek goddess who sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus.

Instead, the Word of God arrived not in a shining chariot but in a dirty stable; the Savior came not as a strongman but was a weak newborn; the Lord appeared not uttering words of wisdom but unable even to communicate for himself. Foolishness indeed. Imperfection incarnate.

“Love came down at Christmas,” wrote Christina Rossetti and though it isn’t usually associated with Christmas, her verse makes me think of St. Paul’s First Letter to the church in Corinth: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Cor. 13:4-8) Love does not insist on perfection or strength or wisdom; love accepts and works through those human frailties, not against them.

As the infant born in Bethlehem grew and became a man, his life was filled with what we might call imperfections. He soon became a refugee in a country not his own: “Get up,” said an angel to his father, “take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you.” (Mt 2:13) He was rejected by his family and friends: “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house,” he said. (Mt 13:57) He wandered as homeless person: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” he once remarked. (Mt 8:20)

Love came down at Christmas to be a refugee, rejected and homeless. Christmas is about love, not perfection:

Love shall be our token,
Love shall be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and to all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

Forgive yourself and others whatever imperfections there may be. The Incarnation is about love, not blameless perfection!

May your Advent preparations and Christmas festivities, imperfect though they will be, be filled with love!

How does Scripture speak to the insane? – From the Daily Office Lectionary

How does Scripture speak to the insane?

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Wednesday in the week of Proper 29, Year 1 (Christ the King, 2015)

1 Peter 4:12-15 ~ Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or even as a mischief-maker.

Another shooting in America. Another shooting in a world gone mad.

Actually a couple of them yesterday. White (probably politically conservative, probably avowedly Christian) males were the perpetrators. The big splashy shooting was at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs: according to the last report I saw three are dead, nine are injured, and the gunman is in custody. The less-noticed killing was at a Waffle House in Mississippi: a waitress asked a diner not to smoke in the restaurant, so he took out his concealed pistol and shot her in the head.

Many are making note of the fact that the former shooter is being described by press and pundits as a “mentally deranged lone gunman,” as an individual not as a part of (or a person influenced by) a political movement opposed to the abortions offered by Planned Parenthood. The suggestion is made, not without cause, that when the perpetrator of such an atrocity is a person of color, a member of an ethnic or religious minority, or a foreigner, his (they usually are male) identity with that group is emphasized; he is seen as representative of the collective of which he is a part, the whole group being castigated as violent and frightening. When the gunman is a white male, he is always nothing more than a “deranged individual.” That would clearly seem to be the case with the Waffle House killer, though probably not so much with the Planned Parenthood gunman.

I haven’t written one of these Daily Office meditations for quite a while, and I gave up writing them on a daily basis a long time ago, not because I don’t meditate on Scriptures everyday (I do), nor because I came to doubt whether anyone else was getting any benefit from them (I do, but then I write them for myself more than others), but because I am struggling to understand how the Bible speaks to a world gone mad and I have little to write until I can make sense of that.

I think the Scriptures are meant to address a sane world, a world where being “a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or even . . . mischief-maker” is something outside the norm, a world where though “fiery ordeals” may exist they are not understood to be the normative state. That is not our world, however. We live in a world that is mad. We live in a world where mass murder has become a daily reality. We live in a world which is a fiery ordeal. We need a new hermeneutic for understanding Scripture in this milieu. We need a hermeneutic of madness. How does Scripture speak to the insane, the ones whose world is not the rational cosmos created by God, but the the irrational delusions they themselves have created?

About that “lone gunman” thing . . . I don’t believe any longer that there are lone gunman. Remember John Donne: ” No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent . . . .” Each of these gunmen, the two yesterday and all who have come before them, Da’esh (aka ISIS), the Israel security forces, the Russian air force, the Syrian armies . . . all of them are part of a great societal mental illness that is killing our world, an insanity that is spreading and eating away at humanity.

I don’t really believe in end-times prophecies. I really don’t believe there will be an end of the world in the literal sense; I really don’t expect to see Jesus coming in power in the company of the angels descending from the clouds. I never have. I understand all of that to be metaphorical of personal faith, not a prediction of how the world ends. If I give credence to any prediction, it is T.S. Elliot’s: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

These men with their guns are not making the explosive reports of men rationally and arguably justifiably at war, they are not firing the “shot heard around the world” of revolutionary change and social justice, they are not even going “bang-bang” like children playing at cops-and-robbers; they are whimpering. They are the whimpers of a world cowering like a madman in the corner of his asylum cell. How does Scripture speak to the insane?

Never Again! – From the Daily Office Lectionary

From the Daily Office Lectionary for Monday in the week of Proper 29, Year 1 (Christ the King, 2015)

Joel 3:14-15 ~ Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision! For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining.

This morning I am stumbling through the darkened valley of decision. I was pretty certain that this might the day I would have to take my dog to the veterinarian for the last time, that I would be saying “Good bye” to my almost-daily companion of the last eight years. I wished there might have been “multitudes, multitudes” who could share this burden. A sorrow shared is half a sorrow, they say, although I don’t know whether that’s actually the case. Shared or unshared, sorrow is still soul shatteringly deep.

It was 8-1/2 years ago that my wife’s co-worker, knowing that we were about year out from having lost another cocker spaniel (Josephine – “the best dog ever” we still call that little girl), said “We have a stray cocker spaniel . . . ” – my wife’s associate was then president of a local “rescue” organization.

“Let’s just go meet her,” my wife said to me. I laughed out loud! “Meet her?” I answered. “If we meet her, we’ll bring her home!”

Well, obviously, we did meet her, and when she came home with us we named her Fionnaghuala (usually just Fionna or even Fi). She didn’t like me, at all. She didn’t like large, bald men in general. There was some speculation that she might have been abused by someone of my description. Eventually, however, she got used to me although it took her a while longer to be comfortable with other bald men; I’d had her only about three or four months when she bit a parishioner who reached out his hand toward her in friendly, but rather to rapid gesture.

She has gone to the office with me almost every day since that first meeting. She has gone on pastoral visits. She has played with parishioner children and nuzzled the hands of aged church members. She has insisted that the bereaved who have come to plan funerals forget their grief for a minute or two to scratch her ears. She has filled the silence of a lonely church office with her soft, snuffling snore.

But several months ago she developed a heart murmur, which revealed an enlarged heart, which developed into congestive heart failure. Medication has, until the last few days, relieved her symptoms, but it’s clear now that her heart is giving out. She is easily exhausted even just stepping outside to “do her business”; she has dad little interest in eating; she pants and whimpers in her sleep.

So, today, I am in the valley of decision. We went to see the vet. A shot, some special food, another day, another week, maybe another month. But I know the day is coming soon. I have been here before – with Josephine and Rascal and Kelly and Shadrak and Tina and Baron . . . and every time I have said “Never again” and every time . . . . Yes, I’ve been here before.

That’s the nature of the valley of decision. The Lord may have promised the Israelites that “strangers shall never again pass through” Jerusalem (v. 17), but somehow the valley of decision is a place we pass through many times. “Never again” never seems to work out that way!

So, it wasn’t today, but I’m pretty certain that some day soon, I will have to take my dog to the veterinarian for the last time, that I’ll be saying “Good bye.” And I will probably say, “Never again!” And nonetheless, I will also, probably, some day, be back in the valley of decision.

JOLT! – A Sermon for Proper28B, Pentecost 25, November 15, 2015

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A sermon offered on Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28B, Track 1, RCL), November 15, 2015, to the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The lessons for the day are 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10; Hebrews 10:11-25; and Mark 13:1-8. These lessons may be found at The Lectionary Page. The collect for the day, referenced in the sermon, is found at the same site.)

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JOLTWhen you sit there in the pew and I stand here in the pulpit and say to you “The Bible says this . . . .” or “The Church teaches that . . . .”, how do you know that I’m telling you the truth? When the writer of the Letter to Hebrews admonishes you to “approach [the sanctuary of God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith,” how do you have that assurance? When that writer, again, encourages you to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,” how do you know what that confession is? And when Jesus commands you, “Beware that no one leads you astray,” how do you make the judgment to exercise that caution?

I submit to you that all of those questions have one answer: on-going Christian formation, lifelong Christian learning, adult Christian education, call it what you will it boils down to the same thing – using, on a regular basis, the sense, reason, and intellect with which God has endowed us to enter into ever-deepening understanding of our faith. And it begins, as our opening collect suggested, with hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the Holy Scriptures.

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 28, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 236)

One of the first things Thomas Cranmer, the first Reformed Archbishop of Canterbury, did after being appointed in 1533 was to convince King Henry VIII to publish an English translation of the Holy Bible and to authorize its public use. Cranmer hired Myles Coverdale to undertake the task and between April of 1539 and December of 1541 seven printings of this translation were made. Because of its large physical size, it was called The Great Bible. Copies of it were distributed to every church in England, chained to pulpits or lecterns, and there made available to any literate person who wished to come and read the Holy Scriptures for themselves. In addition, a reader was provided in every church so that the illiterate could hear the Word of God in plain English.

Cranmer then undertook, with the assistance of other bishops and scholars, to translate the church’s liturgy from medieval Latin into the common English of the day. He is the chief architect of The Book of Common Prayer, the first edition of which was published in 1549. Cranmer’s vision was of an English national church gathered in household units each morning and evening, gathered in parish churches each Sunday morning, reading through most of the Bible each year. His vision was of a Christian people who would be, in the words of one of our Lenten prayers, “fervent in prayer and in good works.” (Preface for Lent, BCP 1979, page 379) Fervent – on fire – energized for their mission “to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and . . . to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” (Catechism, BCP 1979, page 855)

Our church continues that tradition with that same vision today through a Daily Office lectionary which leads us through almost the whole of Scripture over the course of two years and a Eucharistic lectionary (which we now share with many other mainstream Christian denominations) that guides us through most of the New Testament in a three-year cycle and much of the Old Testament in a six-year cycle. In this, we continue what Australian priest and author Adam Lowe calls the “extremely strong tradition” of “Anglican openness to the Bible.” (Blog entry October 29, 2010)

When Cranmer and his colleagues devised the annual cycle of prayer and reading embodied in the Prayer Book, they created also the cycle of weekly collects which begin Sunday worship services. On the First Sunday of Advent each year, their calendar of collects bid the church pray for God’s grace to “cast awaye the workes of darknes, and put upon us the armour of light.” (BCP of 1549) We still offer that same prayer on Advent 1. On the Second Sunday of Advent, they prescribed the original version of the collect which we now pray on this, the penultimate Sunday of the church year.

Although the “collect of the day” is (according to the rubrics in the BCP) normally said only by “the Celebrant,” today I asked that we all read that prayer together. I did so to underscore the corporate nature of that and every prayer said during worship; the Presider does not pray alone. The word “Amen,” in which the congregation joins at the end of every prayer, is a Hebrew word meaning “So be it.” It means, “Yes! We agree. We said that prayer with you. That’s our prayer.” So, this morning, we made it our prayer not only in agreement but in fact, our prayer and our commitment that we, each one of us and all of us together, will “hear [the holy Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” We Anglicans have all been making that commitment, at least once a year, for 466 years!

We’ve been making that commitment, but let’s be honest, we’ve not been very good at keeping it. Even though our church teaches (in the Charter for Lifelong Christian Formation) that “faith formation . . . is a lifelong journey with Christ, in Christ, and to Christ,” a lifelong process of “growth in the knowledge, service, and love of God as followers of Christ . . . informed by scripture, tradition, and reason,” I’ve been told by adult members of our church that (and I quote) “I don’t need any adult education.” Well . . . I can only tell you my experience.

When I moved back to Las Vegas as an adult in 1976 and, after a half-dozen years of not being active in the church, decided to attend Christ Episcopal Church, one of the first things I was invited to do was attend an adult education class. I’m glad I accepted the invitation. For the next dozen years I took part in at least one adult study every year, then I read for Holy Orders and got ordained, and for the last quarter century as a professional clergy person I have studied Scripture and church tradition nearly every day . . . and I still learn things. In fact, preparing for this sermon this past week I learned some things about The Great Bible that I hadn’t known before.

As I told you last week, because of my study of Scripture and church tradition, I believe that “God Loves Everyone – No Exceptions” is unqualifiedly true; for the same reason, I believe that “I don’t need any adult education” is unqualifiedly false. No one is ever too young, too old, or too knowledgeable to learn. And when we don’t make the effort and take the opportunity to do so, our fervor diminishes, the fire dies, the energy dissipates, and (in the words of our Ash Wednesday litany) we “fail to commend the faith that is in us” (BCP 1979, page 268).

So we have prayed every year for the grace to “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Holy Scriptures, and by so praying have committed ourselves to undertake the lifelong Christian formation that that implies, but what do these five educational activities entail? English priest and poet Malcolm Guite has called them “five glorious verbs” which “deepen as they follow one another in intensity of engagement.” (Blog entry December 8, 2012)

Of hearing, Guite writes that this is “where most people, at the time of [our opening collect’s] composition would start; with hearing! Most people weren’t literate, and though the reformers had made sure a Bible ‘in a language understanded of the people’ was set in every church, most people had to hear it read aloud by someone else.” And many people are still there, at the hearing stage. We may hear the words proclaimed in worship and preached on from the pulpit, but though we may have a Bible in our homes, it is seldom opened. We really have to take the next step of our commitment: we have to read Holy Scripture ourselves.

Guite correctly notes that “the translation of the Bible into English was the single greatest spur to the growth of literacy in the English-speaking world and Bible translation remains today one of the great drivers of literacy and education with all the good that follows.” It was the Renaissance scientist Galileo Galilei who said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615) When we fail to read the Bible, we do forego their use, but when we study Scripture and tradition for ourselves we honor these gifts of God, with all the literacy, education, and good that flow from them.

The third verb in our prayer is “mark,” which in Cranmer’s day meant simply to “pay attention.” I’m one of those people who actually does mark pages as I read. My books (including my study Bible) are filled with color-coded highlights and marginal notations. Guite suggests that the action flows in both directions, that when we study the words of God they “underscore in us those passages which are marked out by God to make their particular mark in us.”

We all know what “learning” is; it happens when (as the dictionary tells us) we “acquire knowledge of or skill in [something] by study, instruction, or experience.” Guite reminds us, though, that we often talk of “learning by heart” and drawing on that he describes learning ascreating pathways in and through our hearts. He tells the story of visiting an elderly woman suffering dementia when he was newly ordained:

At a loss as to how to pray I began to recite the 23rd psalm. Suddenly I became aware of a voice beside me, faint at first but growing stronger. It was the old woman joining in through laboured breath. I had a strong sense that the person speaking these words was not the wandered old lady but the little girl who had learnt them all those years ago. We made it to the end of the psalm together and she died peacefully as I was saying the Gloria. “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” were the last words on her lips.

Though dimmed with age and dementia, the fervor, the fire, the energy of her learning still coursed the pathways in and through her heart.

And, finally, our collect commits us to “inwardly digest” what we hear, read, mark, and learn. Guite reminds us of Jesus words to Satan, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4) Says Guite, “We are to live on, and be sustained by scripture just as we live on and are sustained by bread, to take it in daily till it becomes transformed into part of the very substance of who we are, giving us new strength.” Daily, lifelong learning gives us the fervor, the fire, the energy needed for life.

Adam Lowe, whom I mentioned earlier, insists that this commitment to inwardly digest Scripture demands that we study it corporately. He suggests that the three spheres in which we encounter the Bible – personal study and devotion, in small study groups, and as a worshiping community – are not separate but complementary, and that we need all three to fully “digest” the Scriptures. We learn best when we learn together. Lowe says, “We are to read [Scripture] in fullness and in depth, with each other, and also with God; with our hearts, heads, and hands. Not just that the sound may reach our ears, but be so inwardly digested that it transforms our lives and is reflected outwards and onwards.”

This is the goal of the Episcopal Church’s commitment to lifelong Christian formation, fostering and sustaining spiritual transformation so that we, individually and corporately, may live “into the reality that we are all created in the image of God and carry out God’s work of reconciliation, love, forgiveness, healing, justice, and peace.” (Charter for Lifelong Faith Formation) To that end, I am delighted that our vestry has taken seized opportunity for us to be one of five parishes working with the Vibrant Faith consultancy group to pilot a program of event-centered intergenerational Christian learning that we at St. Paul’s, Medina, are calling JOLT! – The Joy Of Learning Together!

The goal of JOLT! is to (in the words of our parish vision statement) “Set Hearts on Fire with Jesus Christ” so that all of us may

  • Grow in our relationship with God;
  • Live as disciples of Jesus in all areas of our lives;
  • Develop an understanding of the Bible;
  • Deepen our spiritual lives and practices;
  • Engage in service and mission to the world; and
  • Participate in the life and ministries of the church.

In short, the goal of JOLT! is to continue and to live into the vision of Archbishop Cranmer, the vision with which our Anglican tradition began, to form us into a people “fervent in prayer and good works,” a people who “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the Holy Scriptures, a people who when admonished to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering” know exactly what that means, a people who when commanded to “beware that no one leads you astray” know very well how to exercise that caution.

I encourage you to be a part of JOLT! Participate in the first JOLT! Event on December 9, because it is unqualifiedly true that no one is ever too young, too old, or too knowledgeable to learn, and we learn best when we learn together.

Amen.

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

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