Category: Marriage (Page 3 of 4)

Be Glad – From the Daily Office – January 8, 2013

January 8, 2014 / eric / 2 Comments

From the Psalter:

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 118:24 (NRSV) – January 8, 2014.)

Whirling Dervishes My wife and I met at a Cursillo three-day weekend event. I was a part of the team (one of the cooks) putting on the Cursillo; she was “making” her Cursillo (as the lingo has it). She claims we’d met before at a fund-raiser fair at my parish (she attended elsewhere), but I was very busy during the fair and don’t recall that. I remember meeting her at the Cursillo weekend.

The Cursillo movement and the Cursillo community became an important of the early years of our marriage. We married about six months after meeting and in another six months we relocated to another state where I attended law school. There was an active Cursillo community in that location and we became involved.

An eye-opening move, that was. We discovered that the Cursillo community in our original home had been doing things incorreclty! Not just different. They’d been wrong. They’d been violating of the agreement between the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Cursillo Movement, which had licensed the Cursillo method to the Episcopalians. And, we later learned, they knew they’d been doing so.

This comes to mind today because one of the major elements of a Cursillo weekend is music. In those communities, it was the sort of music that today might be called “praise choruses” or “church folk” or “contemporary.” Simple, easily remembered, repetitive songs accompanied by guitars, banjos, tambourines, bongos. One song common to both communities was based on this verse; in fact, it was this verse so far as I can remember.

There may have been verses and this may simply have been the chorus, but all I can recall is this verse: “This is the day, this is the day, that the Lord has made, that the Lord has made. We will rejoice, we will rejoice, and be glad in it, and be glad in it.” A catchy, bouncy little tune to which one could dance a formless dance, whirling like a dervish! It was easy to get caught up in and it demonstrated to me the spiritual power of music, simple melodies, and physical movement. Whirling and spinning and experiencing the power of the Spirit!

When my wife and I returned to our original home after three years in law school, we were asked to be the leaders of a coeducational three-day Cursillo event. We agreed, but we said we wanted to try to abide by the agreement between our church and the Roman Catholics, to discontinue those practices which violated the accord, to keep faith with our brothers and sisters who had gifted us with the Cursillo as a tool for deepening the faith of mature Christians.

There was push-back. In fact, there was outright rebellion. Members of the community refused to sponsor candidates to the weekend we were to lead; others refused to contribute to the cost of the event. Evelyn and I resigned from leadership and felt we had no choice but to withdraw from the community.

What had been an important support for us in the early years of married life became a source of grief and sadness. It still is. We miss being a part of that community and we miss the nearly automatic entry being in the Cursillo community gave us to a wider circle of church friends when we relocated. Where we live now, there is no active Cursillo community so the sharpness of the grief is dulled; there are no “Reunions,” nor “Ultreyas” (as the regular get-togethers of Cursillistas are called), so no constant reminders that we are no longer a part of Cursillo.

And yet we rejoice that we were fortunate to have been called to that community. It’s where we met; it sustained us. Like each day the Lord makes, it has passed. When it was here, we rejoiced in it and we were glad. And we look back on it still with gratitude. When I think of it, I think of this verse and that danceable chorus, and my soul comes alive in the Spirit, whirling and spinning, and expressing the joy that community gave us . . . and how grateful I am to that experience for the gift of my wife and the family we have created.

Everyday is a new day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it, whirling and spinning in the power of the Spirit.

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

Facebook friends with God – From the Daily Office – August 19, 2013

August 19, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Second Book of Samuel:

Now Absalom had set Amasa over the army in the place of Joab. Amasa was the son of a man named Ithra the Ishmaelite, who had married Abigal daughter of Nahash, sister of Zeruiah, Joab’s mother.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 2 Samuel 17:24 (NRSV) – August 19, 2013.)

Social Media Icons Reading a verse like this one from the Second Book of Samuel makes me feel like I’m sitting at my in-laws’ kitchen table, or even in my grandmother’s kitchen. Up until very recently, this is the way people connected with other people. I can hear my late father-in-law reminding my wife of someone in the small town where she was born and raised:

“Oh, you know Sally! She was married to Bob, Jim’s brother, and her uncle Fred was your second grade teacher’s (Mrs. Jones’s) husband’s brother-in-law, Bill. Mr. Jones’s sister Margaret was his first wife.”

Often as I listened to conversations like this I would find myself lost in the tangled web of interpersonal relationships, trying desperately to trace the connections between spouses, siblings, cousins, friends-of-the-family, business associates, church members, and the-people-we-don’t-know-but-talk-about that defined a person’s identity in the society of that small town and within my spouse’s extended community of family and friends.

With the advent of the internet, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Linked-In, Google+, and the list goes on . . . With the advent of social media and these means of connecting that are at once more direct but more tenuous, more easily understood but less well defined, how do we now understand personal identity or personhood?

Personhood is a social construct that entails the very relationships the writer of Second Samuel sought to portray, the relationships my father-in-law used to recall to my wife who Sally was. The ability to be in those relationships is one way to understand what it means to be a person. Personhood is defined by a human being’s ability to have relationships with other human beings and, from a theological standpoint, to enter into the special relationship human beings have with God.

Contemporary social media now allows me to be in relationship with more people more immediately than has ever been possible in the past. Some years ago in a course in pastoral practice, I read that the greatest number of close interpersonal relationships a clergy person can sustain is about fifty. We may “know” many more people, but the limit on the number of people with whom our face-to-face relationships can be meaningful in any particular sense is about fifty – maybe a little lower for an introvert like myself, possibly a little higher for an extrovert.

But now I have over 800 “friends” on Facebook and “know” maybe a similar number of additional Facebook users through discussion group pages . . . . “Oh, you know Eric! He’s friends with Michael, who’s in that glass collecting Facebook group started by Brad, who follows Sid on Twitter.”

We Christians are supposed to understand God through the metaphor of personhood — the Holy Trinity, a unity of three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). When our understanding of personhood is stretched (and some might say “warped”) by new technologies of relationship, does our concept of God change? How do we understand God and God’s Personhood in this new digital age?

I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. But I know this: I’m not just Facebook friends with God.

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

God’s Faithfulness Prevails — Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C) — July 28, 2013

July 28, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, July 28, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 10 (Proper 12, Year C): Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; and Luke 11:1-13. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Baptism “Name this child.” That’s what I say to parents of infant baptismal candidates as I take their children from them. The words are not actually written in the baptismal service of The Book of Common Prayer as they are in some other traditions’ liturgies, but there is a rubric on page 307 that says, “Each candidate is presented by name to the Celebrant . . . .” so asking for the child’s name is a practical way of seeing that done. It’s practical, but it’s also a theological statement.

There is a common religious belief found in nearly all cultures that knowing the name of a thing or a person gives one power over that thing or person. One finds this belief among African and North American indigenous tribes, as well as in ancient Egyptian, Vedic, and Hindu traditions; it is also present in all three of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The naming we do at baptism echoes the naming that takes place in Jesus’ tradition as a faithful Jew. In Judaism, when a male infant is circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, the mohel who performs the brit milah prays, “Our God and God of our fathers, preserve this child for his father and mother, and his name in Israel shall be called ________” and the prayer continues that, by his naming, the infant will be enrolled in the covenant of God with Israel. The same thing is done when a girl is named in the ceremony called zeved habat, or “presentation of the daughter” at the first formal reading of the Torah following her birth. In baptism, we do the same; the church says to its newest member, “This is who you are: washed in the waters of baptism, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever,” a brother or sister in the church, a fellow member of the household of God.

To give a name to anything, especially to another human being, is a powerful thing! In the first verses of Genesis we are told, “God said ‘Let there be Light’ and there was light.” (Gen. 1:3) God named the light before it was created; this process continues through the rest of the story. God says, “Let there be” and names the thing which will come into existence; the naming seems a necessary first step in creation. There is a sense in which the name given shapes the future of the thing, or of the person, named.

So this morning I will ask that question of Danny and Nikki ___________ (parents) and of Peter ___________ (Godfather) who will name Ryan George __________ (infant) as a child of God, and of Mary __________ (sponsor) who will name Jacqueline Ann ____________ (adult) as a child of God, and through baptism we all will welcome Ryan and Jackie into the household of faith, into a covenant relationship with Almighty God and with each of us.

In today’s lesson from the Prophet Hosea, we find God instructing the prophet to give strange and bewildering names to his children as powerful, prophetic signs of Israel’s broken relationship with God. Hosea’s firstborn son is to be named Jezreel, which refers to the location of a particularly brutal and bloody massacre of Israelite royalty; his daughter is to be called, Lo-ruhamah, which means “no pity,” as a sign that God will have no compassion for his people who have gone astray; and a second son is to be named, Lo-ammi, which means “no people,” to let the Israelites know they are no longer God’s people.

Preachers often use their children as sermon illustrations, but what God demands of Hosea seems a little extreme. These poor kids aren’t going to have to live merely with the embarrassment of a single sermon, they are going to live with these names, these prophetic, judgmental names for their entire lives! But as bad as that is, giving these awful names to his children is not the hardest thing God demands of Hosea. No, the hardest thing is marrying their mother, Gomer.

Hosea is ordered by God to (in the words of our NRSV translation) “take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.” He is to marry a prostitute who will continue in her scandalous and adulterous behavior, even though Hosea will be faithful to her throughout the marriage. Why? Because it is a prophetic sign, a prophetic action symbolizing the way in which Israel has dealt with God: because “the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” God loves Israel with all the passion and loyalty of a faithful husband, but Israel, like a promiscuous wife, has been unfaithful to God.

It is an unfortunate prophetic metaphor, for it is misogynistic to the core! Portraying God as a faithful (but dominant) husband and Israel as a supposed-to-be obedient (and submissive) wife perpetuates a patriarchalism that is inappropriate to our society. As a metaphor it may have communicated clearly to its ancient Israelite audience, but it doesn’t communicate quite so clearly to us, clouded as it is with its ancient cultural bias. So as we read and seek to understand Hosea’s message in our day and age, we must extract the meaning from the metaphor and then, perhaps, cast the metaphor aside, separating the kernel of truth from the chaff of historical baggage.

In the modern world, marriage is not the patriarchal, male-dominated institution it was in Hosea’s time, but the metaphor can still work for us. In our Prayer Book, the meaning of marriage is summarized in the introductory comments with which the presiding minister begins the ceremony. We are told that it is a bond and covenant established by God in creation and that the union of the parties “in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy [and] for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity.” (BCP 1979, page 423)

Later in the service, just before the Nuptial Blessing is given, we pray for the couple that “each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy,” and that “their life together [may be] a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.” (Page 429) In such a relationship neither party dominates the other, neither is submissive; it is a mutual and interdependent bond of covenant obligations, one to the other.

When Hosea’s prophetic metaphor is understood in these terms, it emphasizes that God is angry with God’s people for abandoning the covenant obligations they had to God, even as God remained faithful. What Hosea’s marriage metaphor communicates to us, as it did to his ancient audience, is that it is divine fidelity, not human inconstancy, that will ultimately save the relationship. It is God’s faithfulness, not our own, which prevails and redeems our relationship with God.

This is also the message of the author of the Letter to the Colossians, an epistle traditionally said to have been written by St. Paul, but which is now no longer believed to be of his authorship. The reason for that is in the very part of the text on which I want to focus our attention, the sentence where the author writes: “When you were buried with [Christ] in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” The author seems to echo Paul’s understanding of baptism in the Letter to the Romans, particularly a section we read every year on Easter Sunday. Paul writes, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? . . . . If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (6:3,5) The theology is similar, but note the significant shift: in Romans, Paul writes that we will be raised with Christ, whereas the author of Colossians asserts that our resurrection with Christ has already happened by reason of baptism. These two passages reflect the wonderful here-but-not-quite-here mysterious paradox of Christianity; we both celebrate the present reality of and anticipate the future consummation of our salvation in Christ. The victory has already been won, but not yet.

Now, what I really want to focus on is why our resurrection, our salvation, whether it is a present reality or something yet to occur, should happen at all! In Romans, Paul says that it happens “by the glory of the Father.” (v. 4) The author of Colossians asserts that it is “through faith in the power of God” according to our translation; that would seem to imply that our faith is somehow responsible for our salvation, that the means for our resurrection is our fidelity. But there is a growing body of scholarship which suggests that this is a misunderstanding of the original Greek of the text. The Greek is dia te pisteo te energeia tou theou . . . literally: “through the faith the working of God.” Traditional English translations add the preposition “in” into the interpretation which would imply that this powerful, operative faith is ours, but the Greek can also be understood to mean not “faith in” but rather “faith of” – in other words, it is God’s faith!

The 18th Century Lutheran translator Johann Albrecht Bengel suggested exactly this in his Annotations on the New Testament when he translated this text to say that our salvation, our resurrection comes about through faith which is a work of God. This text, he says, is “a remarkable expression: faith is of Divine operation.” (Gnomon of the New Testament, A. Fausset, tr., Clark:Edinburgh 1858, page 171, emphasis in original) Our resurrection with Christ is not brought about because of our faith; it is not because of us, or anything we do or believe! We are saved through the faithfulness of God who, by his glory and power, raised Christ from the dead.

It is also God’s faithfulness to which Jesus alludes in the parental metaphor which he uses in his instruction about prayer: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” God is the faithful parent who always responds when we ask, who is always there to be found when we search, who always opens the door when we knock. It is God’s faithfulness, not our own, which prevails and redeems our relationship with God.

On this we can rely; in this faithful God, we can have faith.

So let’s go back to Hosea’s marriage metaphor. The Lutheran Book of Worship, used by our brothers and sisters in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with whom we enjoy a relationship of full communion, says this about marriage: “The Lord God in his goodness created us . . . and by the gift of marriage founded human community in a joy that begins now and is brought to perfection in the life to come. Because of sin, our age-old rebellion, the gladness of marriage can be overcast, and the gift of the family can become a burden. But because God, who established marriage, continues still to bless it with his abundant and ever-present support, we can be sustained in our weariness and have our joy restored.” (LBW 1978, page 203)

It is into the household of God, the community of joy restored, the covenant of mutual help and comfort sustained by the faithfulness of God, that we welcome Ryan George and Jacqueline Ann this morning. They (and we together with them) will make the statements of belief and the promises of action set out in the Baptismal Covenant (BCP 1979, pages 304-04), and they (and we) will try faithfully to keep them. Fortunately, however, it is God’s faithfulness, not theirs (nor ours), which will prevail and redeem them (and us), and their (and our) relationship with God.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, by our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, you turn us from the old life of sin: Grant that we, being reborn to new life in him, may live in righteousness and holiness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP 1979, page 254)

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

What a Long, Strange Trip – From the Daily Office – June 10, 2013

June 10, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Second Letter to the Corinthians:

Look at what is before your eyes.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 2 Corinthians 10:7a (NRSV) – June 10, 2013.)

Road to the Desert Horizon Do we ever really know what is “before our eyes”?

I’ve been saying the Daily Office and reading the associated lessons of the two-year-cycle lectionary for the better part of 40 years and never before has this short sentence jumped out at me like it does today!

30 years ago tonight, my wife and I made the short trip from our small bungalow in East San Diego, where we had lived while I attended law school, to Sharp Hospital in Kearney Mesa where she would, early the next morning, give birth to our son, Aidan Patrick. If anyone had said to us, “Look at what is before your eyes,” we would have described a life of law practice and stability in our home state of Nevada. We had it pretty definitely planned out. We were very definitely wrong!

As I thought about the last three decades, a line from a song kept popping into my head. I’d like to be all religious and spiritual and pretend it is a line from a hymn . . . but it’s not. The words are, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” From Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead. Now that song is an ear-worm which probably will eat away at me all day. What it’s definitely done is taken over this meditation.

So rather than write some other words, I give you the lyrics to Truckin’:

Truckin’ got my chips cashed in.
Keep truckin’, like the do-dah man
Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin’ on.

Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
Chicago, New York, Detroit and it’s all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.

Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans;
New York’s got the ways and means; but just won’t let you be.

Most of the cats that you meet on the streets speak of true love,
Most of the time they’re sittin’ and cryin’ at home.
One of these days they know they gotta get goin’
Out of the door and down on the streets all alone.

Truckin’, like the do-dah man.
Once told me “You got to play your hand,”
Sometimes your cards ain’t worth a damn, if you don’t lay ’em down,

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been.

What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same
Livin’ on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,
All a friend can say is “Ain’t it a shame?”

Truckin’, up to Buffalo. Been thinkin’, you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go, and just keep truckin’ on.

Sittin’ and starin’ out of the hotel window.
Got a tip they’re gonna kick the door in again
I’d like to get some sleep before I travel,
But if you got a warrant, I guess you’re gonna come in.

Busted, down on Bourbon Street, Set up, like a bowling pin.
Knocked down, it get’s to wearin’ thin. They just won’t let you be.

You’re sick of hanging around and you’d like to travel;
Get tired of traveling and you want to settle down.
I guess they can’t revoke your soul for tryin’,
Get out of the door and light out and look all around.

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me, What a long strange trip it’s been.

Truckin’, I’m a goin’ home,
Whoa whoa baby, back where I belong,
Back home, sit down and patch my bones, and get back truckin’ home.

Now that I sing it through, I realize this is a song that’s all spiritual and religious. It occurs to me that life is a trip and, despite Paul’s admonition, no matter how careful we scope it out, we really can’t see what is before our eyes. We always end up looking back and saying, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”

Strange and wonderful. Thanks be to God!

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

Life Is Like Time Magazine – From the Daily Office – May 20, 2013

May 20, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Ruth:

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion; they were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. When they had lived there for about ten years, both Mahlon and Chilion also died, so that the woman was left without her two sons or her husband.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Ruth 1:1-5 (NRSV) – May 20, 2013.)

Time Magazine cover, December 23, 1929 And there you have it, ten years in the lives of six people, and the deaths of three of them, put to rest in five short Bible verses. As Antonio said to Sebastian, “What’s past is prologue” (The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1) and for the author of Ruth apparently not very interesting prologue. The storyteller is (pardon the pun) ruthlessly efficient in his introduction (I assume the author was “he” – maybe not). He clears away the unnecessary detail of sixty “person-years” of life to set the stage for what is to follow.

When I realized that, it hit me pretty hard. I’m sixty years old! Could the sum-total of my life be as easily summarized and shuffled off simply as prologue for something else? I suppose it could, but I would hope not.

Recently I was at a gathering with a bunch of other clergy and at some point during our deliberations comments were made about the use and organization of time; someone else made a remark about how we compartmentalize the different areas of our lives; and then I heard someone say something about a magazine. I have to be honest and admit that (a) I wasn’t paying close attention and (b) I don’t know if these comments were all made in the context of the same conversation. In my head, though, they merged into a rumination about Time magazine as a metaphor for a human life.

I used to be a very faithful subscriber to and reader of Time magazine. I took out my first subscription when I was in high school (1967) and didn’t stop subscribing until I attended seminary in 1991. And before that, my parents and my brother had been subscribers, so I’d been reading that magazine for a long time. It didn’t change much in all those years and I suppose it still hasn’t, at least insofar as the magazine is organized.

The classic issue of Time magazine is a study in compartmentalization. There are “departments” for all the areas of news, or if you prefer the areas of life (although Life is a different, if related publication): U.S., World, Politics, Sports, Lifestyle, Religion, Fashion, Tech, Science, and so forth. Which departments appeared in a given weekly issue depended on what was making news that week. There were always overlaps between these departments, of course, and I suppose the editors would have to determine if a story about regulation of new oil technologies fit better under Politics or Tech or Science; one would guess that the decision would be based on which subject predominates.

Life (life, not Life magazine) is a lot like a Time magazine. We have “departments” – Family, Job, School, Church, Friends, Hobbies, Politics, and so forth – and somehow, like the editors of Time magazine, we decide how all the stories of our lives get organized. We decide what order they are put in and how, like the magazine, they are arranged; we put some things closer to the front cover of our lives, where the public is most apt to see them, and other things we bury in the back pages. Then stories are neatly bound for our presentation of self to the world.

Time magazines were held together with staples through the spines. Sometimes, the pages would come loose from the staples. First, the four center pages would come away. You’d put them back in and hope the magazine would hang together until you finished reading all the articles of interest, but it wouldn’t always work out that way. Sometimes someone would take the magazine apart because they needed a picture for a school report, or wanted to send an article to someone in a letter, or whatever . . . sometimes the staple would get pulled out or work its way out on its own, and then all the pages would be loose. If you weren’t careful, the pages would get mixed up in a mishmash. As you were sitting out by the pool, a breeze would come along and blow them away, and you’d chase them across the yard hoping to gather them all. Some would blow into the pool and get soaking wet; some would blow into the neighbor’s yard on the other side of the fence and you couldn’t get them because of the vicious dog; some would take flight and get caught in the branches of trees. The articles would be all jumbled and some pages would be missing and the stories would be incomplete and not make sense.

And sometimes life can be a lot like that unstapled, jumbled, blown apart, partly missing, chaotic Time magazine, too.

Suppose someone actually did report on everything you did everyday for a week, on every work related task, about every friend or co-worker or family member with whom you talked, on every school assignment, every leisure activity, every television program you watched, on everything. Suppose they wrote it all out, organized it into departments, bound it with a staple, and produced a magazine of your week. Suppose they did that every week. Suppose those magazines were stacked week after week, month after month, year after year. Can you visualize those stacks? Can you see the piles and piles of magazines with your face and your name on the cover like the Time magazine Person of the Year?

Now think about this . . . if Antonio was right that “what’s past is [simply] prologue” and some storyteller were going to summarize what’s in those stacks of magazines, those piles of stories as foreword to a new story, would five verses be enough? Do you think it could even be done in a way that would honor your existence? I don’t.

I think life is a lot more like Time magazine and a lot less like the introduction to the Book of Ruth! And I believe the Author of life is a lot more interested in the stories of our lives than the author of Ruth was in the stories of Elimelech, Mahlon, and Chilion. And for that, I’m grateful.

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

The Helplessness of God – From the Daily Office – May 6, 2013

May 6, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Deuteronomy:

Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Deuteronomy 8:5 (NRSV) – May 6, 2013.)

Frustrated Man Recently, I sat down with a fellow clergy person, a cleric about my own age who is also a parent. We were talking about our kids and how there are times when, as mothers and fathers, we simply have to let go and let our children live their own lives and make their own mistakes. He made the interesting comment that, until he was parent to a maturing teenager, he hadn’t really understood what helplessness is. “As parents, ” he said, “we are essentially helpless.” This, he suggested, gives us a clue to understanding God.

I told him I wasn’t quite comfortable with the concept of helplessness; it feels somehow negative and akin to “playing the victim.” But then none of the synonyms of helpless – powerless, ineffective, inadequate, impotent – seem any better. I know what my friend is getting at . . . how to express it, that’s the issue.

I read this single verse of Deuteronomy and, as parent to adult children, I think, “How does one ‘discipline’ an adult child?” One doesn’t. It’s that simple. Adult children are adults, free to do as they will. The “children of Israel” had come of age. Like any nation, like any adult individual, they were free to do as they would. How was God the parent to discipline this mature, adult nation? Disinheritance? It wouldn’t work; I can attest to that from personal experience.

My parents, shortly after both turned 21 years of age, married in the face of parental opposition on both sides; neither set of my grandparents approved. So what did my grandparents do, on both sides? They disinherited my parents. And what did that accomplish? Nothing, except to alienate my folks from their siblings, and deprive me and my brother, my children and my brother’s children of any possibility of first-hand knowledge of our heritage. Who got punished? Who got disciplined? Certainly not my parents. I think the only people who really got hurt were my grandparents.

How does one “discipline” an adult child? One doesn’t. One simply loves them. One acknowledges that one is . . . helpless . . . it really is the only word to use . . . and one simply loves them. That’s a pretty good clue to understanding God.

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

Blindness and Sour Grapes – From the Daily Office – March 18, 2013

March 18, 2013 / eric / 2 Comments

From the Gospel according to John:

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 9:1-3 (NRSV) – March 18, 2013.)

Sour Grapes I’m not the least bit sure I like the last thought of Jesus reply . . . Is he suggesting that a loving God caused this innocent man’s blindness so that Jesus could come along and heal him with some mud made of spittle and demonstrate his power? I mean, really, is he? I don’t want to get into that today, but surely there must be another interpretation for Jesus words and perhaps someday I’ll explore that.

Today, I want to focus on the first clause of his answer, which is basically just a wordy, “No.” As a parent, I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that the man’s blindness was not his parents’ fault! Because accepting that blame is all too often our parental response when things go wrong in our children’s lives . . . . It doesn’t really matter what it is – accident, illness, bad grades, suspension from school, trouble with the law, break-up with their partner or spouse – it doesn’t matter what it is, when something goes wrong in our children’s lives a parent’s response is often an overwhelming sense of guilt. “What did I do wrong that this happened to my child?”

This is, after all, a perfectly acceptable biblical view! In the Book of Exodus, Moses told the Hebrews that God does not “clear the guilty, but visits the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exod. 34:7 NRSV) And again the same words are reported the Book of Numbers: “The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and the fourth generation.” (Numb. 14:18 NRSV) And, again, in Deuteronomy, Moses says, “Be careful to obey all these words that I command you today, so that it may go well with you and with your children after you forever, because you will be doing what is good and right in the sight of the Lord your God” (Deut. 12:28 NRSV) implying that disobedience would mean things wouldn’t go well for the kids! Finally, there is that great biblical proverb reported by both Jeremiah and Ezekiel: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” (Jer. 31:29 and Ezek. 18:2 NRSV)

So there is plenty of biblical support for our parental guilt pangs! But here is Jesus saying that the sins of parents are not responsible for the misfortune of their son. Thanks be to God! What that says to me is that we need to start looking at our feelings of parental remorse in a different way.

Not that those feelings are “wrong” or “bad.” Guilt is a basic human emotion. Everyone feels it and, when it comes to parenting, whatever we do is liable to cause us a little bit of guilty self-reproach because it sometimes seems that “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” What if, instead of beating ourselves up over these things, we think of what feels like guilt as simply evidence that we are being good parents, good enough to be constantly thinking about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it? We care enough to do our best at the very important, frequently frustrating, often terrifying, and even more often incredibly rewarding job of raising children we love more than we will ever be able to tell them. No parent is perfect, but the ones who worry about whether they are doing it well, probably are doing it well, really well.

Here’s something I know. During the past sixty or so years that I’ve been alive, I’ve had a lot of rough patches, a lot of problems. I’ve done some bonehead things and made some really stupid mistakes. I’ve been in trouble with various authorities, and broken up with lovers and partners. And you know what? Very little of any of that was my parents’ fault! On the other hand, I’ve gotten through those rough spots. I’ve solved the problems. I’ve learned from my mistakes and avoided doing even more boneheaded stuff. I’ve made up with the lovers and, if I haven’t made up with the authorities, at least I’ve figured out how to work with them. And you know what? Most of my ability to do so is due to what I learned from my parents, from what I observed of the way they lived their lives and from the values they taught me. They may have eaten some sour grapes, I don’t know, but my teeth were not set on edge.

I love my kids a whole lot more than I can ever tell them, and I can only hope they have learned from me the way I learned from my folks.

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

The Holy Families – From the Daily Office – March 2, 2013

March 2, 2013 / eric / 2 Comments

From the Gospel of John:

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.” After saying this, he remained in Galilee.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 7:1-10 (NRSV) – March 2, 2013.)

Holy Family Icon Thirty or so years before the episode described here by John, Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” in a town called Bethlehem. (Luke 2:7) We are told here and elsewhere that Jesus had brothers, and his brothers were named “James and Joseph and Simon and Judas.” (Matthew 13:55) He had sisters, too, but their names are not reported in Scripture.

We know next to nothing about his family life. His siblings are not mentioned in the two stories we have from his childhood and adolescence. One supposes it was pretty typical of his time and place. We are told that a Jewish man in First Century Palestine live a life of hard, physical labor either in the farm fields or in the workshop. His wife prepared meals, kept the house, made and washed clothing, and bore and cared for the children. Babies were breastfed, and weaned after 18 months to 3 years. At the age of 13, boys entered adulthood and were apprenticed to learn a craft. Although there is no evidence that boys at the time underwent a ritual bar mitzvah as current Jewish adolescents do, Shmuel ha-Katan a Talmudic scholar writing at the close of the First Century AD does indicate that the completion of the 13th year marked the age for responsibility to the Law. Girls assisted their mothers with domestic work and rearing the younger children; at the age of 12 they were eligible to marry.

If we assume Mary’s and Joseph’s family followed this pattern Jesus and his siblings lived together for at least their formative years. Furthermore, it appears from this story (and others in the Gospels) that as adults the children lived nearby. This seems to have been a tightknit family, although maybe one with some issues. Modern psychology has shown that first born children hold the exclusive attention of the parents and grandparents until the birth of the next child. This is believed to allow for the development of a confident individual who is certain of his place and does fear competition. Jesus would certainly seem to live up to this expectation.

Eventually, the first born does have to deal with the challenge of newcomers. The second born usually ends up in a fight for attention that starts even before he or she is weaned. The expectation that the second will achieve the same standards as the older sibling can result in self-undercutting behavior or in over-achieving behavior in competition with the elder sibling. We don’t know who was the second child in this family; if the listing of Jesus’ brothers’ names in Matthew’s Gospel is in birth order, perhaps it was James. Given that James later became the first Bishop of Jerusalem, that is an interesting possibility.

The arrival of more brothers and sisters may lead second and later children to “middle child syndrome” where the child, being neither youngest nor oldest strives to find a rational role to fill within the family. The youngest children of a large family can face a variety of confusing relationships. Could this be the reason that “not even his brothers believed in him?”

Of course, all this is speculation. We don’t, as I said before, really know anything about Jesus’ early family life. Nor do we have any basis for supposing that the family of Joseph and Mary conformed to these modern psychological stereotypes. What we do know is that Jesus grew up in the bosom of a family, reared by a loving mother and foster father, surrounded by brothers and sisters. In doing so, he sanctified family life in whatever form it may come – large families like his own, childless couples, single-parent households, same-sex couples with or without children – in whatever configurations human beings may form themselves into household units, those families are holy families because each, in its own way, replicates the family in which the Son of God was reared.

The Book of Common Prayer (1979) of the Episcopal Church includes a traditional prayer for families. I’ve edited it to be more inclusive than the original:

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, you set the solitary in families: We commend to your continual care the homes in which your people dwell. Put far from them, we pray, every root of bitterness, the desire of vainglory, and the pride of life. Fill them with faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness. Knit partners together in constant affection. Turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents; and so enkindle fervent charity among us all, that we may evermore be kindly affectioned one to another; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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

Choose a Party over Purity – Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany – January 20, 2013

January 20, 2013 / eric / 2 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, January 20, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Epiphany 2, Year C: Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 96:1-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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In our gospel lesson today, Jesus turns water into wine. He does so, somewhat unwillingly it seems, because he and his mother are at a wedding banquet and the couple is about to run out of wine for their guests. Mary brings this to Jesus’ attention because she apparently believes he can do something to save the hosts from embarrassment. At first, however, he seems disinclined to do anything about it. Not the least bit phased by her son’s reluctance, Mary tells the servants to do whatever he tells them, and she goes back to the party. I have always imagined that as she turned away Mary gave Jesus the same sort of look my mother would give me when I tried to not do as she wanted, the same sort of look I’ve seen my wife give our children. So . . . Jesus turns water into wine, and (as you will see) not just any water into not just any wine, but really good wine! Now, one supposes that Jesus could have done something else to assist the wedding couple, but he chooses to do this, to turn water into wine.

Wine is a very special sort of drink, especially in the Jewish tradition and, thus, in our own Christian faith. Wine gets a special mention in Psalm 104, which is a long song of praise to God for all the things God has created, especially those things that are good for human beings. Along about the middle of the psalm, the singer gives praise to the Almighty that among the “plants to serve mankind” are those from which we get “wine to gladden our hearts.” (Ps 104:15-16) In Jewish tradition, grape wine is considered such a gift to humankind that it alone of all alcoholic beverages has a special prayer of thanksgiving: Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, bo’re p’ri ha’gafen (“Blessed are you, O Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine”).

I would like you to keep that in mind. I’ll return to the subject of wine and glad hearts in a short while, but first I want to share with you a news story that crossed my desk a couple of days after Christmas. It is from the Jewish publication, The Tablet:

Climate change has been blamed for a host of devastating events, from Hurricane Sandy to the evaporation of Greenland’s glaciers. But earlier this year, a dramatic weather event had a small but important impact on the Jewish community: In July, as a drought brought the effects of global warming to the Midwest, the only mikveh in Omaha, Neb., went dry.

The mikveh, a ritual bath, is an essential part of any Orthodox Jewish community, so when one goes dry, it’s a serious issue — especially in Omaha, where the next nearest mikveh is a state away. “The mikveh is one of the most basic institutions of any Jewish community,” explained Jonathan Gross, the rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue, Omaha’s Orthodox congregation. “How are you supposed to have young families if you don’t have a mikveh?”

Refilling a mikveh isn’t a simple matter of turning on a faucet; there are rules about what kind of water can and cannot be used. The community in Omaha prayed for rain – one of the approved methods for replenishing the water in a mikveh – and their prayers were eventually answered. But by the time those rains came, another solution was already in place, a solution that involved one ton of ice.

Mikvehs typically serve multiple purposes. The first and most important is as a place for women to purify themselves after completing their menstrual cycles; immersion in a mikveh is a critical part of the laws of Taharot HaMishpacha, family purity, and without immersion a woman is forbidden to have sex with her husband. New vessels, like pots and pans, must be immersed before they can be considered kosher and thus usable. And converts need to immerse to conclude their conversions. Customarily, men also dunk, before holidays and before their wedding day, although this isn’t mandated by modern Jewish law.

Like many mikvehs, the Omaha Community Mikvah is composed of two below-ground pools. The first pool fills with rainwater through a hole in the roof, and the second, larger pool is used for the actual bathing. To be considered halachically valid, a mikveh is required to have at least 40 se’ah of natural water. A se’ah, a unit of halachic measurement, corresponds to roughly five gallons of water, according to one stringent opinion – meaning that 200 gallons of natural water are required for a kosher mikveh. The water must fill the mikveh through naturally occurring sources, either by rain or through a connection to a spring or river. Water that is transported to the mikveh through direct human means – in buckets, for instance – is called she’uvim, drawn water, and cannot be used to fill a mikveh. Tap water is also forbidden, though this wasn’t always the case—and tap water can be added to the mikveh once the required 200 gallons of natural water are present.

[Preacher’s Note: The author is being generous in equating 40 se’ah to 200 gallons. A se’ah is 12.128 litres. Doing the math yields a more accurate conversion of 40 se’ah to just under 130 gallons. This is the approximate volume of water changed to wine in today’s gospel lesson. See The Jewish Encyclopedia.]

In July, Omaha’s mikveh was accidentally emptied when a maintenance crew member thought that cleaning the mikveh meant emptying it completely. In most circumstances, a mikveh can be refilled relatively easily through rain or snow, but this summer’s drought made that impossible. “Had this happened in January with all the snow we would have been filled up in a week!” Gross lamented on his blog.

The mikveh was out of service for almost two months. Women traveled to the next closest mikveh in Des Moines, Iowa, or Kansas City, Kan., each more than two hours away. Dishes went unpurified. The receptionist at the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home, where Omaha’s mikveh is located, received calls every time it rained an inch, asking if the pool had somehow miraculously filled. As the weeks passed, different ideas were thrown around: The supervising rabbi of the mikveh suggested the community pray for rain. They did. Another rabbi tried to open up a larger hole in the roof to allow more water, but that didn’t work. Some scientific-minded congregants suggested lighting giant Bunsen burners, evaporating water and then allowing it to condense over the mikveh; this was deemed impractical and was never tried.

The town finally turned to Rabbi Yaakov Weiss, 34, the pastoral service coordinator of the Blumkin Home and one of the supervisors of the mikveh. Another rabbi brought up the idea of using ice to fill the mikveh, and Weiss began looking into it. Using ice was a sort of loophole or leniency: Since the ice was solid and not liquid, if it was moved into the mikveh while still in its frozen state, when it melted it would be considered non-she’uvim water, and the mikveh would be kosher. This procedure, while not common, is almost universally accepted.

“I know it had been done in Nova Scotia once, but I had never heard much about it prior or since,” Weiss said.

Weiss called Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Zvi Sobolofsky, two important legal minds at Yeshiva University in New York. They referred him to a mikveh expert, Rabbi Yirmiya Katz, who went through the exact requirements of filling the mikveh with ice.

Weiss’ first thoughts were to use the large ice machines in the Blumkin Home, but that plan was quickly vetoed since the ice would have melted too much by the time they put it in the mikveh. Weiss, with Katz’s help, figured out that he’d need a lot of very frozen ice put in the mikveh very fast.

Weiss called every ice company in Omaha (“Did you know that while there are many ice companies – Arctic Ice, Omaha Ice, Glacier Ice – they are all actually the very same place?” he wrote on Gross’ blog) and finally found one that could deliver the required amount: 250 10 pound blocks of ice. The ice was paid for by the Jewish Federation of Omaha, on whose campus the Blumkin Home is located.

On Friday, Aug. 24, Weiss and a group of volunteers wearing special gloves that wouldn’t melt the ice amassed outside the mikveh at 8:15 in the morning. But the truck showed up an hour late, and by the time Weiss opened the first package, the ice melted in his hands.

“Apparently this was their version of solid blocks of ice: It was a block of crushed ice pushed together in a brick,” explained Weiss. “It doesn’t stay as cold as a real block of ice.”

Weiss went back to the drawing board where he found Muzzy Ice, an ice company that makes blocks of ice for ice sculptures. He had found them earlier but decided against using them given the large size of their ice blocks. “I didn’t want to risk damaging our mikveh,” Weiss said, but he relented once he realized that was the only option.
Three weeks later, on Sept. 11, a Muzzy Ice truck pulled up to the mikveh. Inside the truck were seven 300-pound blocks of ice. An extra 100 pounds of dry ice was shoved inside the truck to ensure that nothing melted.

In less than an hour, staff members of the Jewish Federation moved the ice into the mikveh. Along the way, little pieces of ice would chip off and fall on the stairs; Weiss and a colleague would rush to pick them up to make sure that the chips wouldn’t liquefy and contaminate the mikveh water. “It was very intense and very stressful,” recalled Weiss. “[But] it was quite an experience. I’ve never dealt with a ton of ice in a small contained area.”

Once all seven 300 pound blocks were moved, the question became how long the ice would take to melt. Estimates ranged from two days to a week.

They never got to find out.

The next evening a huge torrential storm hit the Midwest. In several hours, the bor z’reih, the place where the rainwater collected, was filled to capacity and the first pool was filled. “I went in the next day and said, ‘Wow.’ ” Weiss told me. “Now our only problem was our mikveh was filled with ice.”

Both Weiss and Gross said that the whole effort pulled Omaha’s roughly 6,000 Jews together and led to a newfound curiosity about the mikveh, even among those who don’t really use it.

“Was it a waste of energy and time? Or conversation and money?” Weiss considered. “We often say that our efforts and actions have repercussions for good and bad and perhaps this was a repercussion. It’s a community mikveh and it’s integral to us. Perhaps by showing how much it means to us, I think . . . we saw a response or sign from God. For our action, we have God’s reaction: ‘I’ll give you the rainfall you were looking for.’ ” (The Day the Mikveh Went Dry, The Tablet, December 27, 2012)

I wanted to read that article to you because it gives you a picture of how seriously the Orthodox Jews of our time treat what John in today’s gospel lesson calls “the Jewish rites of purification.” Modern Orthodox Judaism is the direct descendent of, and the closest thing we have in our world to, the village religion of Jesus’ time and place. The seriousness with which the Orthodox Jews of Omaha, Nebraska, dealt with the filling of their mikvah gives us clue to how gravely the Jews of Cana, and Jesus himself, would have regarded the 130 or so gallons of water that Jesus just sort of willy-nilly turns into wine for the wedding banquet.

OK. Yes, I’m being facetious. There is nothing willy-nilly about this. Jesus isn’t just turning water into wine. Jesus is doing something called an “enacted parable”. An “enacted parable” is one told through actions rather than words. The prophet Hosea, for example, married a prostitute to illustrate the unfaithfulness of Israel; the prophet Jeremiah wore a yoke to symbolize the oppression of the Babylonians. An “enacted parable” has been described as “an extravagant action which upsets the conventions of life” (A. Richardson, Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Westminster:1983, p. 426). This is precisely what Jesus is doing when he changes the water of ritual purification into wine to celebrate newlywed love; he is upsetting the religious conventions of Jewish life.

Jesus is enacting the distinction that St. Paul will later explicate into a theological contrast between Law and Grace. Now don’t get me wrong, Jesus is not overthrowing the Jewish religion! Jesus was, himself, a good and faithful Jew, and the Law’s insistence upon ritual purity is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. But the point Jesus seems to be making here is that given a choice between Law and love . . . choose love! Given a choice between worrying about water for purification on the one hand or enjoying wine to gladden the heart on the other . . . choose gladness. By changing the water intended for the mikvah into wine for the party, Jesus is saying that joy ranks higher in the scheme of things than purity. Given a choice between celebration and seriousness, says this action . . . choose celebration.

Judaism, of course, is not a religion entirely of Law, ritual purity, and seriousness. As anyone who has been to a Passover supper or a Chanukah party or a Jewish wedding feast knows, there are occasions of great merriment and fun, of joy and celebration. Here, at the beginning of his public ministry, the Son of God makes it plain, that these are the higher ranking values of the reign of God. He will do so again at the end of his earthly life when, in the joyful context of the Passover banquet, he will take bread and wine, wine which gladdens the human heart, and tell his friends to do the same again and again, “whenever you do it,” in his memory.

One of my very favorite motion pictures is Auntie Mame starring Rosalind Russell; I just love that movie. There is a scene in it in which Mame is speaking to her stenographer Miss Agnes Gooch (played by Peggy Cass):

Mame — Oh, Agnes! Here you’ve been taking my dictations for weeks and you haven’t gotten the message of my book: live!
Agnes — Live?
Mame — Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!

I want to suggest to you today that Mame was preaching the gospel, that that is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with miracle at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee, that it is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with Lord’s Passover supper in the Upper Room, that it is a Christian sentiment fully in keeping with our weekly gathering for the Lord’s Supper in Holy Communion.

Choose wine over water, choose love over Law, choose gladness over worry, choose joy over gravity, choose celebration over seriousness, choose a party over purity! Life’s a banquet! Enjoy it! Amen.

Swords Into Ploughshares – From the Daily Office – December 5, 2012

December 5, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Isaiah:

Out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Isaiah 2:3b-4 (NRSV) – December 5, 2012.)

In the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York City, at the northwest corner of First Avenue and 42nd Street is a small municipal public park, Ralph J. Bunche Park named in 1979 for an African-American diplomat who had been instrumental in the working out of the 1949 Palestinian Armistice Agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In 1950, Dr. Bunche became the first African-American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The park is across the United Nations Plaza from the UN headquarters building. There is a granite staircase there which, since 1981, has been named the Scharansky Steps in honor of Soviet dissident Natan Scharansky. On the northern wall of the steps, now known as the Isaiah Wall, the latter part of this quotation from the prophet is inscribed. The stairway with the wall and inscription were originally built in 1948.

I made my first visit to New York City in the spring of 1968 when I was 16. On a trip to the UN, I saw that wall and was immediately transfixed. I love Isaiah’s words and every time I have returned to the city, visiting that wall has been a priority. It’s something of a pilgrimage for me, visiting a shrine to a vision of a dream not yet achieved.

We read a lot of Isaiah during Advent, or we hear a lot of Isaiah images – the peaceable kingdom, infants playing with poisonous snakes, lions eating straw with the oxen – “and a little child shall lead them.” (Isa. 11:6) There’s good reason for that; after all, it is in Isaiah that we read, “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” (Isa. 7:14)

As we go through this season of preparation, reading these particular words, I know there’s not much any one individual can do to move the nation toward not learning war any more or to prevent the nation from lifting up the sword against another. Those are decisions “above my pay grade” as the saying goes. However, I wonder if I have some personal, metaphorical swords that could be beaten in the spiritual ploughshares, some spears I could bend into pruning-hooks.

According to Freud and his followers, our psyche is a battlefield; instinctual urges and drives at war with societal norms, constraints on our ego at odds with our impulses. As a result we all have defense mechanisms, e.g., denial, repression, fantasizing, acting out; there are dozens of these psychological defenses. Some are mature and constructive; some are not. During Advent, could it not be possible to convert some of the destructive psychological defenses, these mental swords and spears, into constructive behaviors, into emotional ploughshares and pruning hooks? I’m not a psychologist or a therapist, so I make no suggestion how this would be done, but I have faith that that it could be done. Like most things, however, it won’t be done unless we take the first step.

Advent is the beginning of the Christian year. A beginning seems like a good time to take first steps, especially first steps toward beating swords, real or metaphorical, physical or emotional, into ploughshares.

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

Category: Marriage (Page 3 of 4)

Be Glad – From the Daily Office – January 8, 2013

Facebook friends with God – From the Daily Office – August 19, 2013

God’s Faithfulness Prevails — Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C) — July 28, 2013

What a Long, Strange Trip – From the Daily Office – June 10, 2013

Life Is Like Time Magazine – From the Daily Office – May 20, 2013

The Helplessness of God – From the Daily Office – May 6, 2013

Blindness and Sour Grapes – From the Daily Office – March 18, 2013

The Holy Families – From the Daily Office – March 2, 2013

Choose a Party over Purity – Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany – January 20, 2013

Swords Into Ploughshares – From the Daily Office – December 5, 2012

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