That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Tag: Theology (Page 9 of 12)

Lenten Journal 2019 (12 March)

March 12, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lenten Journal, Day 6

“… rendering unto thee most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same.”[1]

A few days ago, a fellow priest complained about the difficulty of saying these words from the “traditional language” service of Holy Communion in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, especially early in the morning (which is about the only time they are said in most parishes anymore, if they are said at all). I responded with the snarky remark that if my colleague had grown up with them, rather than being a “convert” from another Christian tradition (as he is), they would not be difficult at all.

I did not grow up with them myself, but I did hear them at least three times each week during the academic terms of my high school years. A non-Episcopalian, I was enrolled in an Episcopal Church affiliated boarding school more than a thousand miles from home. Like all the students of that school, I was required to attend chapel which most days followed the liturgy of one of the Daily Offices but twice each week was a celebration of the Eucharist. Then on Sundays, unless one was attending church off campus, there was another mandatory service of Holy Communion.

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Lenten Journal 2019 (11 March)

March 11, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lenten Journal, Day 5

“Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’”[1] This is a verse from today’s Daily Office Old Testament reading; it’s supposed to be Moses’ words spoken to the Hebrews about to enter the Promised Land as recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, a reminder of the debt of gratitude everyone owes to God, but today it reminds me of a political episode of a few years ago.

President Barack Obama, in a 2012 campaign speech, said, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.” The “that” in that sentence was meant to refer to “roads and bridges” he had just referenced in the previous sentence, to the infrastructure which he had just described as the “unbelievable American system” that allows businesses to thrive.[2] That was clear to anyone who heard the speech.

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Lenten Journal 2019 (10 March)

March 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lenten Journal, Day 4 (First Sunday in Lent)

I fell in love with science when I was in junior high school. I did well in chemistry and biology  and in math classes in high school. I went to a particular university because it was well-known as a training ground for scientists. I wasn’t sure which of the sciences I wanted to go into – marine biology and medicine were both especially attractive, but so too was physics – but I was definitely headed into the sciences. And then I met integral calculus … and ended up getting a degree in literature, then another in business, another in law, and two more in religion.

I am still in love with science; it’s just that I seem incapable of wrapping my head around abstract mathematics. In another universe, I might have been able to do that and might have followed a different path. Perhaps that is why quantum mechanics, superstring theory, and the multiverse fascinate me. I may not quite grasp the math, but the ideas make all sorts of sense to me, especially the notion of multiple universes and alternate realities.

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Lenten Journal 2019 (9 March)

March 9, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lenten Journal, Day 3

I have a morning ritual; I suppose everyone does. I get up in the darkness of 5 a.m. and carefully, quietly walk down the stairs from our bedroom to the den and kitchen (a combined “great room” as our house is laid out). I turn on the coffee maker which has been set up the night before, then I sit down in my recliner to await its task completion. My dog, Archbishop Dudley, a black cocker spaniel, rouses himself (he sleeps in the den) and comes to me; I lift him onto my lap and the two of us fall asleep.

When the coffee maker wakes me with its signal that the brew is ready, I put the dog to floor, slip a coat onto me and a leash onto him, and go for a short walk around our cul-de-sac. The dog does what he must and we return home; he gets his breakfast and I get my first cup of coffee along with a handful of pills. While I drink it, I read scan my online subscriptions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and (occasionally) the Los Angeles Times, and read a few news reports and op-ed pieces. Then I check out Facebook.

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Lenten Journal 2019 (8 March)

March 8, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lent Journal, Day 2

Yesterday afternoon the dog and I went for a walk in the snow. I should clarify: we went for a walk while the snow was falling and we walked on the sidewalk. The snow was that sort of big, fluffy-flake variety that my wife calls “snow globe snow.” As it coated the sidewalk, the path had the appearance of the first layer of blown-in insulation in an attic, a cottony, almost-fibrous, semi-transparent white coating laid over the concrete.

I was wearing a pair of slip-on canvas shoes with a textured sole, the sort that leaves very distinct patterned footprints in such snow or on the damp sand of undisturbed beaches. We’ve had several such snow falls this year and I’ve noticed that when the snow continues to fall and covers up those footprints, they harden. Later, when my neighbor or I get out our snow blowers and snow shovels and clear the sidewalk, those footprints left in the first snow fall remain, like the white-on-white pattern of an expensive dress shirt, evidence that someone has walked this way before.

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Lenten Journal 2019 (7 March)

March 7, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Where to begin?

I’ve decided to spend at least one hour each morning on the task of writing. That’s the advice given all aspiring writers, “Just do it. Set aside time and discipline yourself to do it. Write whatever comes to mind.” So here I am, coffee cup at my side, fingers on the keyboard of my laptop, sitting at the kitchen table. I would prefer to use a paper and pen, but the arthritis in my hands simply does not allow me to actually write much anymore. I can “type” so much faster and more accurately than I can scrawl now (and auto-correct, as much as I hate it on my phone, is a great aide in my word processing application).

The furnace is on. It’s snowing outside and the Weather.com app on my phone said it was 21ºF when last I looked. There was a weather notice of a burst of snowfall moving through the area limiting visibility and making roads dangerously slick.

Anyway, the furnace is on and I can hear the rush of air through the registers. Normally, I never pay attention to this; I don’t even notice it. It is simply background white noise. This morning, however, it seems to be abnormally loud, very noticeable. If I were still in the preaching business, I might make myself a note about the furnace background noise, a reminder that it could be used a sermon illustration. I don’t know what biblical text or theological idea it might illustrate, but that’s the nature of sermon illustrations, isn’t it? You don’t know how you will use them until you do. File this one under “background noise” for now and move on.

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Lenten Community: If I Were Preaching, Lent 1, 10 March 2019

March 6, 2019 / / 0 Comments

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. – Deuteronomy 26:5

I’m not preaching on the First Sunday of Lent, but if I was . . . I might preach about Lenten community.

“What?” some will ask. “The gospel lesson[1] is about Jesus going off into the desert to be alone and to fast for forty days! Shouldn’t we be preaching about solitude and sacrifice and privation and that sort of thing? You know, Lenten discipline?”

Well, sure, you can do that. I’ll bet you’ve done that every year. I’ll bet our congregations have heard dozens, hundreds of Lenten discipline sermons. They can take another one.

However, as I read the gospel lesson again, it occurred to me that Satan’s temptations of Jesus are all the temptations of solitude: the self-sufficiency of miraculously producing bread without any other assistance – to which Jesus answers, “One does not live alone;” the loneliness of rulership – to which Jesus answers, “Worship and service,” an answer implying relationship and community; the selfishness of self-destruction – to which Jesus simply answers “No.”

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Walking Away: A Post-Retirement Meditation

February 15, 2019 / / 1 Comment

I didn’t intend to walk away from religion when I retired from pastoral ministry, but it is sort of happening.

After decades of writing sermons (and posting most of them in manuscript form on my blog), I thought I would keep up the discipline of reading each week’s Lectionary texts and writing a brief meditation as if I were preaching. “If I were preaching,” I would write . . . and then follow it with some personal reflection on a verse or two from the readings. I’m not a theologian (any more than in the sense that we are all theologians) nor any sort of bible scholar; I’m just a guy who occasionally has some minor insight into the meaning, or at least the application, of Holy Scripture. So I thought this would be an exercise that would keep my faith focused and maybe be of some help to preachers.

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Weddings & Marriages: If I Were Preaching, Epiphany 2, 20 January 2019

January 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. – John 2:1-2

I know that the natural inclination of preachers during the season of ordinary Sundays after Epiphany is to focus on the gospel stories of “manifestation” and we certainly have one this week, the miracle of water-into-wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. The story is ripe with focus possibilities: the miracle itself, the presence of the Holy Spirit as the activating force of Jesus’ power (suggested strongly this year by the lectionary pairing of this gospel tale with Paul’s listing of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12), the always popular look at the relationship between Mary and her son, Jesus’ attitude toward his public ministry at this time.

What is seldom preached on this Sunday is the context of the story: a wedding! So I think I might go there this week if I were preaching. The lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures positively invites us to do so; marriage is Isaiah’s metaphor (as it is other prophets’) for the relationship between God and Israel:

For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your builder marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.[1]

I’ve been thinking a good deal recently about the nature of the marital estate. I recently had major orthopedic surgery (a total knee replacement) and find myself absolutely unable to attend to many of the everyday activities of life, some of them quite mundane, some quite intimate and personal. I am dependent upon my spouse to whom I have been married now for nearly 40 years. As she attended to one of my needs the other day, I quipped, “Ah yes, I remember well that part of the service where we promised to do this for each other” (which, of course, we hadn’t). We make formal promises in weddings to love and honor, to cherish and comfort, to faithfully keep one another “in sickness and health,”[2] but we don’t get into the nitty-gritty details. Perhaps we’ve been counseled in advance of the wedding as to what these vows mean and what that nitty grit might be, but no pre-marital instruction can cover everything.

My father-in-law probably didn’t realize in 1947 that those promises would commit him 50 years later to caring for an invalid wife suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the last eight years of their marriage, feeding her, bathing her, wiping her bottom, and all while she tried to fight him off because she didn’t know him. Those vows long before the onset of my mother-in-law’s disease had become water under the bridge, replaced by the fine, strong wine of human love and commitment. And though she hasn’t (I hope) had quite the same level of difficulty to handle, my in-law’s daughter follows in her father’s footsteps taking care of her temporarily invalided husband.

So . . . if I were preaching this week, I’d consider that context, a wedding. Weddings become marriages, brides become wives, grooms become husbands; those are transmutations, transformations, and differences as profound as water become wine. That alchemy of marriage manifests the Lord in our midst everyday.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text.

[1] Isaiah 62:5

[2] The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 424

Murkiness: If I Were Preaching, Christmas 1 (30 December 2018)

December 27, 2018 / / 0 Comments

If I were preaching this coming Sunday (which I’m not … but if I were …), I’d look at darkness. Strange choice, perhaps, for the Sunday after Christmas Day, but the Episcopal Church lectionary always specifies the prologue of John’s Gospel as the gospel lesson for this Sunday and it includes that verse: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”[1]

My friend Scott, a scholar of all things Scottish (“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” — Thank you, Mike Myers, for that memorable proclamation![2]) recently posted to Facebook the Scots version of the verse in question: “An, aye, the licht shon i the mirk, an the mirk dinnae slacken it nane.”

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