Now it has been spoken
He would come again
But would we recognize
This king among men
There was a man in our time
His words shine bright like the sun
He tried to lift the masses
And was crucified by gun…

He is a picture of Jesus
In his arms so many prayers rest
With him we shall be forever blessed

Ben Harper, “Picture of Jesus”

By R. William Carroll

I’m writing this on the eve of the feast of Martin Luther King. He was assassinated forty years ago, on April 4, 1968. With the rest of the country, we celebrate his birthday in January, but there is something even more powerful about the day of his death. Saints are remembered then, because many of the first saints were martyrs. King was certainly a great martyr, a Christian witness who gave his life for his testimony to the Gospel. He was also a pastor, who died tending God’s flock. In response to the teaching and example of Jesus, King came to understand that oppression was not only bad for his people, but for all people. “Until all are free, none are free.” At the same time, he understood the dreadful asymmetry of position between the oppressed and the oppressor: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Every saint is a picture of Jesus, who shows us possibilities for our own life in Christ. Elizabeth Johnson, in her feminist interpretation of the communion of saints in Friends of God and Prophets, makes use of J. B. Metz’s notion of the “dangerous memory” of Jesus. As we remember “blessed Martin, pastor, prophet,” (LEVAS II, hymn 46) his memory is also dangerous. We remember King as “moral conscience of his nation,” “teacher of Christ-like non-violence,” “preacher of Christ’s love for neighbor,” and “champion of oppressed humanity.” (Ibid.) We dare not let our politicians tame his memory, as he becomes part of the pantheon of civil religion, invoked with ease by leaders who stand against nearly everything he stood for. As hypocrites do when we invoke God, we honor King with our lips but not with changed lives.

We need to remember how King marched with striking workers and tied the struggle for civil rights to the struggle for workers’ rights, in a society that is increasingly hostile to labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively, in which politicians from both major parties knowingly adopt policies that promote capital flight to the least worker-friendly regions of our nation and to the least worker-friendly countries in the world. (I write this from the heart of the rust belt, in the poorest county in Appalachian Ohio.)

We also need to remember King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and how he tied it to the oppression of poor people and people of color, in this country and abroad. Now, after five years of war in Iraq, more than 4,000 U.S. troops are dead, and, by one count, 700,000 or more Iraqi civilians. And for what? Has it made us safer? Has it brought democracy to the region? Or was it, as many of us suspected all along, a grab for oil, which is now at or near peak production? One can do a lot of things already with alternative forms of energy. It’s hard to fuel an F-14. The now bipartisan effort for “energy independence” (with different emphases from party to party, and regrettably including a resurgence of nuclear power and a push for so-called “clean” coal) indicates that even the powers that be know we need to do something—and soon.

Frequently, King pointed out that so many aspects of his thought were taken directly from Jesus, sometimes by way of Gandhi and the theology of the Social Gospel. So much of what he named the “beloved community” was akin to what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. Likewise, his emphasis on non-violence and love for enemies comes straight from the Sermon on the Mount. But, as obvious as it may be (for those with ears to hear) that King’s central teachings are rooted in the Gospel, it is equally obvious that the Church has not caught up with him, any more than we have caught up with our Lord.

We still live in a world that crucifies the prophets, and the Church itself is all too willing to forge alliances with the legions of death, instead of the power of love. The Good News for us this Easter season is that God’s love is real, and it is always, already with us, whether we accept it or not, whether we respond to it or not. God’s love is not even defeated by the cross, where the arms of Jesus open wide to embrace the whole world in all its ambiguity, violence, and sin. The risen Lord returns, not to condemn us, but to bless us, forgive us, and make us whole. His love will not leave us in our sins, nor will it simply accuse us in ways that make us unable to act. “I am with you always,” says Jesus. And, in him, so is Martin Luther King.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He co-edits The Covenant Journal with Lane Denson and keeps Blog of the Good Shepherd. He is a novice in the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis.

The feast of the Apostle Matthias is celebrated in some traditions on May 14 and in others on February 24.

Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, "Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus-- for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry." (Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, Field of Blood.) "For it is written in the book of Psalms,

`Let his homestead become desolate,
and let there be no one to live in it';

and

`Let another take his position of overseer.'

So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us-- one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection." So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, "Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place." And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.

Acts 1:15-26 (Feast of St. Matthias)

By Luiz Coelho

The story of St. Matthias' election as an apostle was one of the biblical stories that intrigued me the most when I was a child. I often asked myself why Jesus had chosen Judas in first place, knowing that he would hurt him so much some years later. If he had called Matthias in the beginning, there would have been no betrayal. “Jesus would not have had to suffer the way he did. He could have just ascended into Heaven after finishing his mission on Earth,” I used to think. After all, I loved (and still love) Jesus too much to imagine him suffering.

Curiously, I also have a Matthias in my own life: Matthias is my step-grandfather. Like the apostle, he became a member of my family after the “other ones”: Matthias is my grandmother's second husband, and therefore, not my biological grandfather. In fact, I never met my “true” grandfather; he died years and years before I was even born. Matthias was the only grandfather that I knew. He was the one who cuddled me, laid me on his lap and played with me during my childhood. And that also made me wonder: “why, if it was in God's plan for me to have him as my grandfather, didn't he meet and marry my grandmother in the first place?

People often ask themselves similar questions. “Why did it happen, if it wasn't supposed to be?” “Why the pain, the sorrow, the change of plans, the deception?” I often catch myself thinking about going back in time and changing things in order to prevent happenings that ended up in failure. I don't think I'm alone in such fascinations. There is even a hobby, called “Alternative History”, that seeks to propose alternative versions to some chapters of world history, if certain events had not happened.

I wonder whether or not those early disciples who gathered in Jerusalem 2000 years ago to elect a new apostle had similar thoughts. Even after seeing the risen Christ, some of them probably still questioned their new experience of Jesus, and I imagine some grieved to have Jesus taken away from them. They were human beings after all! However, they trusted God and moved on; they listened to the Holy Spirit's voice and, gathered in prayer, cast lots to determine who God had chosen to help lead the Church through those difficult times.

And, they succeeded. The Gospel message spread, more and more people heard about the Good News of God in Christ. Matthias was a blessing to the Church. He planted Christ's message in the Caucasus, and has been respected and venerated by many faithful around the world.

Like the earliest disciples two thousand years ago, we are also called to move on, to discern the Divine will, to seek to conform our lives to it, and to proclaim God's redemptive message – even in the midst of daily sorrows that fill us with despair, make us question our discernment of the Divine will and lead us to wonder how the world around us would be with the absence of suffering and sorrow. The Church is also called, as the Beloved of Christ, to struggle for truth and integrity- a calling from which God will not repent, even though we have a history of betrayals, negligence and hatred towards God's children, and even Jesus himself!

However, when we the Church humbly gather together in prayer and submit our will to God Almighty, the master of time and space, there is room for healing transformation. We do not need time machines or alternative histories; we only need the serenity of knowing that what was meant as evil against us can be redeemed by God and transformed for our good, and can become a joyful opportunity for us to learn how to follow the Divine guidance.

St. Matthias, pray for us, so that we can be God's representatives in this broken world. Amen.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Roger Ferlo

In the big Catholic church I attended when I was young, there were two larger than life statues of Mary and Joseph opposite each other on walls flanking the sanctuary, each presiding benevolently over its own side altar. Although the two statues were the same size, and given equal prominence (the church’s designers paid ample homage to the gods of symmetry), Mary’s statue was where the action was. She always had more candles lit in front of her than Joseph did. Brides left their bouquets on her altar before departing down the aisle. And to top things off, every year on the first of May someone built steps high enough for a little girl in a white communion dress to climb up and crown Our Lady with a wreath of plastic roses. Joseph never turned his head during any of this, staring straight ahead, holding a very intelligent-looking toddler Jesus in the crook of his arm.

Given how little attention anyone paid to him, you had to wonder what Joseph was doing there at all. The sculptor depicted him as relatively young, a thirty-something or so. An unusual choice, as most artists through the centuries (perhaps as a way of coping with the strange notion of a virgin birth) have depicted him as old enough to be Mary’s grandfather. In most nativity scenes I’ve seen he’s usually two steps back from the action, sometimes even asleep at his post. And even when awake, you most often see him holding on to his staff for dear life, perhaps still wondering what hit him.

Years later, living in New York City, I encountered an image of this neglected Joseph more complicated than the one that quietly presided over my catholic childhood. Around Christmastime I took the long subway ride uptown to the Cloisters to visit Robert Campin’s fifteenth-century master painting of the Annunciation—Gabriel’s unlikely announcement to Mary that she would bear a son without Joseph, so to speak, anywhere in the picture. The work consists of three panels The large central one depicts the main event as Luke describes it and this fifteenth-century Flemish painter imagined it—a ravishing angel, his wings shimmering in the exquisite layers of color of which the Netherlandish painters were masters, invading the quiet space of a courtly lady’s bedroom. Campin paints Mary at just the moment before she turns to face the angel (in effect, Campin allows us to see Gabriel before Mary does). In an instant, in the next breath, she will turn and see God’s ravishing messenger face to face, the way Moses saw God on the mountain. But where Moses comes away from the mountain bearing God’s word carved on tablets of stone, Mary would quietly leave this cloistered chamber bearing the silent Word encrypted in her very womb.

Once again, in this painting as in the church of my childhood, Mary is where the action is, in the full and shining Technicolor of this central panel. The panel to the left is much drabber, depicting the artist’s patrons looking in from the outside, as well a mysterious figure that may be a portrait of the artist himself, hovering at the courtyard gate. And, in the panel on the right, there is yet another clueless Joseph, hard at work in his carpenter shop, busily crafting mousetraps to catch Satan in. As usual, he is slightly out-of-it, painted facing away from the action in the central panel, totally absorbed in his task, oblivious to the great scene unfolding in the panel to his right.

I find myself again sympathizing with Joseph. Compared to Mary’s, Joseph’s encounters with God in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew is the only gospel writer who takes any interest in him) are played out in a minor key, more like our own. As Luke tells the story, Mary encounters the angel of God when she is fully awake, fully aware, in the broad daylight of a thrilling revelation. But Matthew’s Joseph encounters the angel only in the dark of night, deep in a dream, that ancient, shadowy passageway connecting divine wisdom to human understanding.

Dreams are a form of chaos, most of the time, and one would think that Joseph’s dream would reflect in some distorted and frightening way the chaos of his own life—a young woman pregnant, and not by him; the fear of public disgrace; a need to keep everything quiet; the urge to hide his shame in a darkened room, devising paltry mousetraps to ward off the Evil One. And yet, in the midst of chaos comes this startling dream—startling because it clarifies rather than confuses, but clarifies the chaos by paradoxically deepening it. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid…” The writer of this gospel must have known that this was not the first time someone named Joseph would be forced to trace his way through a landscape of dreams. That first Joseph, Jacob’s son, dreamed his way out of exile in Egypt to lead his undeserving brothers into a world reconciled and restored. And so too this second Joseph will dream his way into exile in Egypt and back (“Go, take the child and his mother, and flee into Egypt”) carrying with him in the crook of his arm a second Moses, a second Joshua, a second Adam to redeem our chaos and make our pathways straight.

We latter-day Josephs, men and women both, know a lot about chaos these days. Endless wars and bombing and fears of dying; melt-downs of public conversation; a politics poisoned by bigotry and xenophobia; God’s own earth poisoned by our own greed and unmindfulness. But it is not just the outer world’s chaos that haunts us in this Christmas season. It is also the chaos of what an artist like Campin would understand as our inner worlds—our deepest desires at cross-purposes with each other. We feel it when we want at the same time to embrace our families and to escape them; when we harbor private griefs or grievances in the midst of public joy; when in spite of the holiday, or because of it, we seek to escape to a darkened room, to banish all semblance of dreams, to sleep in blankness. And yet, as with Joseph, the dream will come however much we try to block it, making of our mixed desires and the world’s distress the stuff of revelation. If there is any hope left in a season so bedeviled by endless consumption and endless desire, it lies in Joseph’s dream: that deep in Mary’s womb is buried not the sign of our shame and guilt but the sign of our salvation.

The Rev. Dr. Roger Felo is Professor of Religion and Culture, Associate Dean and director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary.

By Roger Ferlo

About 50 new seminarians showed up here at Virginia Theological Seminary last week, three weeks before the start of the regular term. They’re here to get a head start on their required courses in Hebrew and Greek, and to undergo the time-honored training in the oral interpretation of Scripture that the seminary underground still refers to as “Read and Bleed.” Half of the newcomers seem to be in their twenties and early thirties, continuing the youthful swing we have experienced here in the past several years. (You have to admire these young people, committing themselves to a lifetime working in a church that too many people in my generation seem intent on tearing apart.) As to the other half of the class, a large number seem to be newly retired, in the way we baby boomers retire in our mid-fifties. There aren’t too many people in their 40s. My seat-of-the-pants demographic theory about this is that if you are going to go to seminary in these parlous times, you are more likely to try it either in your twenties (when you are still relatively free of commitments, except, of course, for that sizable college debt), or in your late fifties, after you’ve sort of completed the trajectory of your first career, maybe seen your kids through college, and sense that you now have permission to do with your life what you’ve always known you wanted to do.

I changed careers pretty dramatically in my early thirties, so maybe I’m projecting. To be fair, the best part of working in an Episcopal seminary is that you never really can predict where people might be coming from, or what brought them here. In their first session together last week, one guy introduced himself to the group by looking at his watch, and then declaring that it was now almost exactly 72 hours since he retired from the military. A woman of a certain age marveled that the student sitting next to her was young enough to be her daughter. Several people identified themselves as recovering lawyers. One of the youngest men wore a T-shirt that revealed an amazingly elaborate network of tattoos on his right arm—perhaps setting a new trend in clerical dress.

Whatever the case, here they are, part of our lives for the next three years, God bless them all. Their nametags dutifully hanging from their necks, they gathered yesterday with the rest of us for a Eucharist in the chapel at 8:10 in the morning. I suspect that they were too distracted by a looming pop quiz on Hebrew verbs to listen closely to the sermon, which might have been just as well, as I was the preacher, and it was St. Bartholomew’s Day, and St. Bartholomew does not provide you with the most inspiring of sermon texts even in the best of circumstances.

It was those nametags that set me going. I hate wearing nametags. Maybe that’s why I’m always attracted to the unnamed people in Scripture, like the anonymous woman who washes Jesus’ feet in Mark’s version of the story, or the unnamed young man who runs away naked to avoid being captured by the police who are arresting Jesus in the garden (did he too wear tattoos on his arm?). I think of St. Bartholomew as part of their company. He didn’t really have a name, at least any name the gospel writer cared to record. Roughly translated, Bartholomew just means “son of Tolmai.” No real claim to fame there, nothing really to put on a nametag. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention him only once or twice. John, on the other hand, seems never to have heard of him. As usual with mysterious figures like this, legends have accrued, the most persistent one being that he was flayed alive somewhere in Armenia (“read and bleed” with a vengeance), and that his body washed ashore on the Italian island of Lipari (a long way from landlocked Armenia), where a cathedral still stands in his honor. Colorful rumors, but not much to hang a sermon on.

This being the case, I decided to keep to that ancient principle of Episcopal homiletics--when in doubt, start with the collect. Whoever wrote it knew the score. The collect repeats all we know of Bartholomew—that he had the grace to believe and the courage to preach (and even the latter is only an inference from the scarcest of scriptural data). This being the case, we are made to ask not that we would love and venerate Bartholomew (it’s hard to love and venerate a relative cipher), but that we would “love what he believed and preach what he taught.” The feast of St. Bartholomew thus becomes a feast of holy anonymity.

I more or less said all this, and then looked out on that crowd of newly washed seminarians. I thought about my own ministry through the years, and realized that if what was said of Bartholomew could one day be said of us—that because of what we said or how we acted or who we were, others could be brought to love what we believed and to preach what we taught—well, then, maybe this priesthood thing would mean something in the end, long after our names were forgotten. The priestly life can be such an ego-trip—witness the clash of prelatial egos now bedeviling our common life. “I came among you as one who serves.” Bartholomew knew this about Jesus, and about himself, and acted accordingly. In spite of the occasional need for nametags, a little dose of this holy anonymity in love’s service might do all of us a world of good.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Deirdre Good

Last Thursday was St. Bartholomew's Day. How many Episcopalians know saints like Bartholomew or other saints and their days and why does it matter? Once upon a time if the saints day fell on a "green" Sunday we celebrated the life of that saint and even if people only went to church on Sunday or if the saints day fell on a Sunday once every seven years, church-going Episcopalians got to know a few saints beside the patron saint of their own local parish. If they were Anglicans they might know St George or St Patrick. Reduced knowledge of the Saints is one of the casualties of the modern prayer book. This year we lost the feast of Mary Magdalene on July 22nd even though that date fell on a Sunday. The 1979 Prayer Book mandates that when a saint's day falls on a Sunday, the saint's day is subordinated to Sunday liturgy.

Another casualty is the psalms. Even though the 1979 daily office lectionary includes the entire psalter, the Sunday churchgoer is no longer exposed to the daily office. Both of these losses, knowledge of saints and recitation of the psalms, reduce diversity in our churches. Loss of knowledge about saints reduces the diversity of models of what it means to be a Christian and loss of psalm knowledge reduces the range of human relationships with God available to the language of prayer.

There has been an effort to include more celebration of saints in "Lesser Feasts and Fasts" but for (most) people who worship only on Sundays, only the Sunday liturgy is available. Even the red-letter days such as the feasts of the apostles and St Mary, are relegated to a weekday service on Monday. And nobody goes to church on Monday! Not even (most) priests!

Starting from Advent 1, all the Psalms are covered in the Daily Office by Epiphany 8 (14 weeks) and some more than once. Why some Psalms (e.g. Psalm 1) are repeated twice is a mystery. However this is only the case if an individual says the daily office. If you go to church on Sundays you only get psalm snippets. In most of the liturgies I attend, clergy elect not to read the whole psalm.

Of course the church is always in the business of recreating itself and its liturgies. In this particular case, it simply needs to rethink privileging Sundays over Saints Days. But most churches don't present the fact that there are saints to be celebrated in the coming week or readings to enrich personal or corporate prayer life. This is a missed opportunity.

Assuming that reading the word of God is central to the life of worshipping Episcopalians, we need to be intentional about providing a context in which people have greater exposure to reading about saints and the psalms.

What might this look like in our parishes? Here are some ideas. It might look like having more than one psalm per service. It might look like inviting people to read the entire book of psalms for Lent or Advent. It might involve inviting people to follow readings like those in the recently published St Helena Breviary.

A priest friend of ours lamented that he was assigned to preach on the feast of St. Bartholomew three years in a row. Why not supplement the assigned gospel with the Gospel of Bartholomew? It contains an account of Jesus' descent into hell-a declaration of the Apostles' Creed that we say in Morning and Evening prayer, at the Easter Vigil, and at baptisms-and it provides an opportunity to think about the symbolic language reflected in the creedal affirmation that there is no place untouched by Jesus' presence. Knowledge of the psalms gives range, depth and texture to our prayer life. Reading about saints and traditions associated with them fills out and celebrates traditions of holy lives.

Deirdre Good, a professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary in New York City, wrote this with Julian Sheffield and The Rev. Dr. Kris Lewis.