Monday, April 30, 2012 -- Week of 4 Easter
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Editor and Prophetic Witness, 1879

Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 961)
Psalms 41, 52 (morning) // 44 (evening)
Exodus 32:1-20
Colossians 3:18 - 4:6(7-18)
Matthew 5:1-10

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

Power and control; greed and gluttony; money and sex. How powerfully these drive us. These are our "golden calves."

It might be interesting to take these emotional drives and take note of how many times they are stimulated today. Notice the commercials and ads on TV, billboard, radio or online; in newspapers or magazines. How many appeal to our needs for power and control, greed and gluttony, money and sex? Monitor your own inner stimuli and motivation. How often do you have emotional reactions that are triggered by the desire for power and control, greed and gluttony, money and sex?

Today in our Exodus epic, there is a vacuum of healthy leadership. Moses has disappeared on the mountain. There he is talking with God. This is the God who brought the people freedom from the oppression they had suffered at the hands of the Egyptian culture which was a culture driven by power and control, greed and gluttony, money and sex. God rescued them. But now they find themselves in a desert wilderness feeling vulnerable and powerless, living simply and dependently, learning the new rules of communal living -- compassionate, mutual regard. The old ways and old days haunt them.

The golden calf was a powerful symbol. Archeologists have uncovered idols and statues of bulls from many ancient cultures. The idol represented the needs of the people: power, wealth, and sex. The bull is powerful. Large and strong, with dangerous horns, a fighting bull is ferocious and deadly. We want a god who is powerful enough to fulfill our needs. Male bulls with large sexual organs are an image of sexual prowess. The gold statue mirrored the people's desire for wealth and prosperity. Rituals of bull worship also included the sacrifice of great animals, with the burning of the inedible parts as a gift to the gods and the eating of the steaks as the core of a great feast and banquet. In a culture that rarely ate meat, such festivals were a great attraction. With abundant food and drink, suggestive dance and music, sexual urges and tensions could be released, sometimes with the aid of religious prostitutes.

This was Moses' competition: the revelry of a celebration of power, gluttony and sex. The golden calf is still God's competition. Politics, economics and personal status are all driven by power, gluttony and sex.

Most of us become addicted, in one form or another, to power, gluttony and sex; to control, greed, and money. The symbols of their possession are the symbols of status in our culture.

God's invitation to real life is not as flashy. Moses found that the Ten Commandments were a hard sell. The Beatitudes of Jesus which we read today aren't as hot and sexy as the lure of the bull. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, ...those who mourn, ...the meek, ...those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, ...the merciful, ...the pure in heart, ...the peacemakers, ...those who are persecuted for righteousness sake." On the elementary school playground and in many corporate settings, these aren't the qualities that get reward and respect.

In our culture, most people try the path of power and control, greed and gluttony, money and sex first. Only when it leaves us hurt and unfulfilled do we tend to turn to the alternatives. Three thousand years later, and its still God vs. the golden calf.

By Lowell Grisham

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 -- Week of 4 Easter
Saint Philip and Saint James, Apostles

Today's Readings for the Daily Office

EITHER
Tuesday of Week of 4 Easter (p. 961)
Psalms 45 (morning) 47, 48 (evening
Exodus 32:21-34
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 5:11-16

OR
Feast of Saints Philip & James (p. 997)
Morning Prayer: Psalm 119:137-160 / Job 23:1-12 / John 1:43-51
Evening Prayer: Psalm 139/ Proverbs 4:7-18 / John 12:20-26

I chose the readings for Tuesday of 4 Easter

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

What would we call it today? A slaughter; a massacre; religious genocide?

Moses returns from his absence on the mountain and finds that the people have turned from their loyalty to the God of Abraham and made a golden idol of a bull, a symbol of power and fecundity. They have been feasting and engaging in acts of religious or wanton sex, according to the custom of some cultic rituals. Moses confronts his brother Aaron, who offers a pitiful excuse. From the camp gate Moses cries, "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me!" The sons of Levi respond, and Moses has them take swords and set upon the camp. "Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor." The text says that about three thousand people died that day. (A comparison: Over 900 died in the Jonestown, Guyana, suicide-killings among the People's Temple cult of Jim Jones.)

Taken at face value, it is a grizzly story. It darkens deeply the narrative of Moses. If it is a memory of the days of the Exodus, the story may reflect a rebellion or civil war against Moses leadership, which Moses had to put down by force.

Some scholars have speculated that there may be other influences present in the story as it comes to us. The text of the long Sinai section of Exodus was composed largely by the Priestly tradition of redactors, written sometime after the fall in 587 BCE. The Priestly writers had access to many very ancient traditions, stories and texts. As they put their particular stamp upon the material, they emphasized their central priestly interest over various cultic matters involving the tabernacle, sacred objects, sacrifices and priesthood.

From the perspective of the Priestly writers, there is another civil war and rebellion that is of great significance: Jeroboam's rebellion in the 900's BCE which separated the Northern Kingdom (Israel) from the Southern Kingdom (Judah) and established a rival capital in Shechem. To prevent his people from returning to the Temple in Jerusalem, Jeroboam erected two temples at the ends of his Northern Kingdom, one in Dan and one in Bethel. He made two statues of a golden calf, one for each shrine, and he spoke the same words over them as Aaron says in Exodus: "Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." (1 Kings 12:28)

The Priestly authors are loyal to Jerusalem and to the Southern Kingdom. They want to condemn the apostasy of Jeroboam. Some scholars think that they have linked the story of Jeroboam with the story of the calf in Exodus. A few think the Exodus story was created whole as a polemic against the Northern king.

It is very possible that the bull was an alternative symbol representing not the Canaanite deities but the God of Abraham and Moses. In the North, the bull was a symbol of El, with whom the God of Abraham and Moses was identified, possibly as the invisible God atop the bull, much like the invisible God seated upon the cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant.

So, the story of the golden calf in Exodus may be a fiction to condemn the Northern rebellion, or it may have historical roots in the Exodus story, or both. It's hard to know with certainty.

What seems clear is that Moses faced murmurings, conflict and resistance to his leadership in the wilderness. The Hebrew people were challenged and tempted by the established religious cults, rituals and shrines related to the sacred bull traditions. And the division between northern and southern kingdoms created deep scars, present in the Gospel accounts in the hostility between Jew and Samaritan. Doubtless, all of these conflicts were bitter, costly and at times bloody.

As a 21st century Christian, I'm fed up with wars in the name of God. I want the world's powers to use their military might to stop genocide, especially religious genocide. I reject a God who commands slaughter in the name of right belief or ethnic purity. I embrace the God of Jesus Christ who absorbed such violence on the cross. And I turn to an ethic marked by yesterday's gospel reading of the Beatitudes and today's peaceful reminder, "You are the light of the world... [L]et your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:14a, 16)

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 -- Week of 4 Easter
Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, 373

Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 961)
Psalms 119:49-72 (morning) // 49, [53] (evening)
Exodus 33:1-23
1 Thessalonians 2:1-12
Matthew 5:17-20

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

Today's reading from Exodus speaks of Moses' practice of communion with God in the tent of meeting. We hear the dialogue. God charges Moses to take the people into the promised land. But Moses seeks assurance that God will actually be with him and with the people. Moses seeks a more intimate knowledge of God. He speaks to God, saying "Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight."

I remember being on retreat at an Ignatian monastery many years ago. I had withdrawn into my own tent of meeting in my cell, reading scripture and practicing the particular kind of meditation taught in the Ignatian tradition. I was reading Isaiah. As my heart and mind went into the reading, I had a deep longing, not unlike Moses'. I sensed God's love and care for me. But I yearned for something else. What does it feel like to know you deeply, God? Show me your presence, I asked.

I've never been able to describe what happened next. But I sensed a presence in the room, behind and above me. It was like I could see, but not see, a faint color in the ceiling corner to my left. The atmosphere was charged and tingling with energy. My heart quickened with an anticipation, and then with some fullness that I can't describe. Simultaneous with my unspoken question, "Is this? Is this what God feels like?" the presence/energy moved across the back of the room, and I felt something like a cosmic laugh saying, "YES!! Yes, this is what God feels like!" The benevolent joy seemed to laugh at and with me over my little longings, and to fill them with something so immense that it was as if the stars were laughing with God at the joke and were twinkling with a happiness shared by us all.

Then it was over, except for a tingling sense of peace and aliveness that shared something with Dame Julian's vision that all is well, that "all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." I felt a joy and fullness that seemed so comprehensive that it left nothing but gratefulness and peace.

God said to Moses, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." Moses asked for a bit of evidence. God promised to place Moses in the cleft of a rock and cover Moses with the divine hand. "Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen." Tomorrow we will read of this theophany. With the assurance of this deeper revelation, a distraught Moses -- who has just endured the rebellion of the golden calf, the breaking of the tablets of stone, and the violent deaths of three thousand -- will remake the stone tablets, return renewed to Mount Sinai, and hear the Name of God spoken to him -- "a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness..." In the energy of that presence, Moses will be healed and empowered to continue his journey.

Sometimes I am asked: “Do you like (--or know—or trust--) the African?” My answer is always, “No.” I do not like the African: but I love many Africans very dearly. I do not know or trust the African: but I know and trust hundreds of Africans as my closest friends.

You cannot love an abstraction: neither can you trust it: you can only know and love a person.
Fr. Trevor Huddleston, C. R., Naught for Your Comfort (London: Collins, 1956), p. 247.

Words from an English-born Anglican priest who was himself loved and known and trusted by many Africans, including Desmond Tutu. Words that are relevant even today as we think about relations between groups of human beings. Ultimately, it is only in the face-to-face interaction of people who speak for themselves that the work of justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation is possible. This is a most direct corollary of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the human being in the image and likeness of God. Our faith calls us to put love into practice face to face, no matter what the cost. And, it is why the work of building human community, however messy and inefficient it may seem at times, is always worth the time and effort it takes.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Friday, May 4, 2012 -- Week of 4 Easter
Monnica, Mother of Augustine of Hippo

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 961)
Psalms 40, 54 (morning) // 51 (evening)
Exodus 34:18-35
1 Thessalonians 3:1-13
Matthew 5:27-37

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

One's first duty is adoration, and one's second duty is awe and only one's third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and countless human creatures evolved... We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, or relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won't be right. *

I read that exquisite quote in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn't sleep last night. I couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking about all of the things I need to do, most of them matters of "service." Today's gospel reading from Matthew ends, "Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No';" But I've said "Yes, Yes" too often instead of accepting my limitations and saying "No, No." So, as I should be asleep, resting -- I'm thinking, planning, organizing, worrying. How will I keep too many promises?

Our Exodus reading today insists that we keep sabbath and set aside times of holiday. "Six days shall you work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even in plowing time and in harvest time you shall rest." Rest trumps even the urgency of the intense season.

Adoration first. Awe second. And only after the soul's attitude and relation is set by adoration and awe, comes service.

As if she were reading my mind, Michelle Heyne followed that quote from Evelyn Underhill with another quote, this one from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It reminds me of what I know. I find that when I take my anxieties and relax, ask God to guide me in my actions, the work happens efficiently, sometimes almost effortlessly, and things work out that I was worried about. Teilhard says it better:

All around us, to right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. But it is not only close to us, in front of us, that the divine presence has revealed itself. It has sprung up universally, and we find ourselves so surrounded and transfixed by it, that there is no room left to fall down and adore it, even within ourselves.

* (From Evelyn Underhill, Concerning the Inner Life, as quoted by Michelle Heyne in her fine little book In Your Holy Spirit - available from episcopalbookstore.com)

‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. -- Matthew 5:38-48 NRSV

You know, sometimes Jesus makes it almost too hard to be a follower, a "good" one, anyway. This is one of those passages that I really have to struggle with, and, I'm afraid, most of the time I fail miserably at it.

The law about "an eye for an eye" was a definite improvement over what had gone before. No matter what the offense at that time, it could be a death sentence. Steal something? If the owners of the stolen property caught the thief they could kill him, even if it nothing more was taken than a handful of grain. Cause a scratch on someone's arm? Well, that could get you just as dead, under that legal system anyway. Lex talonis, the law of "an eye for an eye" was a great improvement. Hammurabi, the Mesopotamian king known for setting up a whole code of laws (of which this was one), limited the punishment to that of being equal to the crime. If I ran over your foot with my ox cart, you could run over my foot as punishment, but no more than that. It was an ideal of equal punishment for the crime or offense. In the Bible, the same principle showed up in Exodus 21:23-24 which states, "[i]f any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." There were other laws that had some gradations, such as those involving injury to a slave or a pregnant woman, but on the whole, it was a pretty equal law. I could live with that, but Jesus took it to the next level.

Thinking about this "life for life" thing, it occurs to me that that's the law in this country -- at least at times, for certain people, and covering certain situations. It seems to me that quite often who commits the crime and their ability (or not) to afford a top-notch lawyer to defend them (or to prosecute the one or ones who wronged them). Justice is no longer a thing of "You can only hit me as hard as I hit you in the first place."

I wonder what the courthouse would be like if we honestly and truly did the Jesus thing of turning the other cheek? We talk a lot about being a "Christian" nation, but when push comes to shove, you push me and I'll push you back twice as hard. Being Christian has nothing to do with justice if it means getting our own back (with a little extra for our pain and suffering, of course). We accept that the saints were, probably on the whole, a more forgiving bunch, like Francis of Assisi who, when confronted by his father, took off his clothes and walked off starkers rather than fight over them. Incidents like that are probably the reason that the ratio of saints to less-than-saintly people is rather low.

I have to ask myself how often I turn the other cheek to people who, in my view or in fact, have injured me in some way. The answer is a paltry "Not very often." There are times I fight back and other times when I simply just walk away, saying some not-so-nice things under my breath. Prayers for them? Usually I fall into the case of the Psalmist who prayed that God would do some pretty hefty punishments on his enemies. How many times do I at least think of how I could get even -- or better yet, ahead? The answer to that is far more often than is good for me, even if I never actually act on it.

Jesus gives us some really tough assignments. I wonder what would happen if I were a little more "turn the other cheek" and a little less eager to get my own back plus a bit? What would this country be like if we who claim to be Christian were little less quick to claim that we're a "Christian nation" and a little quicker to actually practice what we hear preached and preach ourselves? What would that mean in my life it I were to concentrate on that homework and less on getting even? I have a feeling that writing a research paper or balancing my budget would seem like child's play compared to that.

Perfection may be totally out of my reach, but that that doesn't excuse me for not trying a little bit harder in the forgiveness area. I think God and I need to have a conversation about a few people right now. I'm sure glad God doesn't work 8-5, Monday thru Friday only.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

Psalms 24,29 (Morning)
Psalms 8, 84 (Evening)
Leviticus 8:1-13, 30-36
Hebrews 12:1-14
Luke 4:16-30

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Luke 4:16-30 (NRSV)

Today's Gospel is the one familiarly misquoted in our secular jargon as "A prophet is without honor in his hometown." It's one any of us who came from small town America and left for the bright lights in the big city for any length of time probably has our own personal version to recount.

Show of hands, please...anyone heard a variation on one of these before?

"Don't be acting all high and mighty; I've known you since you were a little fool of a child."

"I know you--you're Joseph's boy. You ain't nothin' special."

"I heard what you did in Capernum, when are you going to get around to helping anyone here?"

Yep, I thought so.

As much as I loved my late grandmother, I can still hear the "stingers" she shot my way now and then, like the time I overheard one of her friends evidently asking some sort of medical question, soliciting some roundabout advice. "Oh, she doesn't know anything about it unless it's in a jar or cut up in little pieces to put under her microscope. Don't even bother asking her."

The flip side, of course, is almost out of the same breath, small town America loves to tout their famous faces and link them to their hometown places. Marceline, MO is the hometown of Walt Disney. Little ol' Clark, MO claims the birth of General Omar Bradley. For school children in northeast Missouri, the knowledge of Hannibal, MO as Mark Twain's hometown is etched in our DNA.

It's an interesting duality, isn't it?

One of the disadvantages we have in fully understanding the Jesus story is we get the luxury of seeing it in hindsight. We tend to think (now, put on your best imitation of Chris Rock's voice, here...) "I mean, this is JESUS! Who wouldn't like Jesus?" It clouds us from understanding the possibility that Jesus might have been seen a little differently in the Nazareth street chatter. They would have seen that Jesus more or less had ditched several of his family to follow this call as a prophet and healer. That in and of itself wasn't the most laudable occupation of those times. The street corners were full of "prophets" claiming all sorts of crazy things, and huckster "healers" of the tent revival variety were a dime a dozen. People who knew Jesus as a teenager probably remembered a very different form of Jesus we think we know now. I've yet to see any artistic renditions of a pimply-faced Jesus whose voice cracked when he opened his mouth, with smelly teenaged-boy feet. No one in Nazareth would have nominated him to be the illustration in the picture dictionary under the word "Messiah."

In that light, Jesus would have been a person who seemed, in some ways, to have rejected the way of life that the folks from Nazareth prized as a "good citizen." He might have even seemed to be crazy or downright dangerous. They would have been sure they knew "who he was," or at the very least, who they expected him to be, and what they were seeing was definitely not it.

Our story in Luke reminds us that there are going to be times that people who believe they know us, and a few people who actually love us very much, that even when we are truly and earnestly following Christ, are not always going to perceive us as overly "Christian." Also, the truth is, as fallible people, we get it wrong sometimes. That gets muddy, when we recognize there are also times we think we are truly following Christ and we were actually following our egos. The painful truth is that following Christ and living out some shocking truths won't always be well received, and sometimes it will be resisted with reminders of the times we got it smashingly wrong. It might even get us a hair's breadth from being hurled off the metaphorical cliff. How willing are we to engage the truth at that price?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Monday, May 7, 2012 -- Week of 5 Easter
Harriet Starr Cannon, Religious, 1896

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 963)
Psalms 56, 57, [58] (morning) // 64, 65 (evening)
Leviticus 16:1-19
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

Today in Leviticus we read Moses instructions about the liturgy of the atonement, a complicated rite of purification involving diverse sacrifices, incense, blood, vestments, curtains, altar, drama and ritual. One of the most interesting parts of the liturgy is the role of the goat for Azazel. After Aaron has made atonement for himself and his house, Aaron takes two goats and casts lots over them. One goat is sacrificed to God as a sin offering for the people, but the other goat is left alive and sent into the wilderness to Azazel.

It may be that Azazel is the name of a goat-demon who was thought to inhabit desolate places. The second goat is driven into the remote wilderness, far from the community, into the wild and dangerous regions.

One goat for God. One goat for Azazel.

There is something powerful about making offering to the dark and wild places. We have emotional and psychological energies that are deep and dangerous. At one point Jesus speaks sharply and dismissively about these urges, "Get thee behind me, Satan." There is some danger in becoming fascinated with the dark side and it's deathly urges. It is not good to dabble with evil.

But many people find spiritual richness when they allow their dreams and subconscious material to rise into consciousness where it can be recognized and acknowledged in order to give our conscious self some power over it. There is a reality and freedom that comes when we outgrow mere repression and gain awareness of the destructive patterns of our thoughts and behavior.

We can recognize that each of us has the potential for terrible acts. We can confess our sins to God and be forgiven. We can also acknowledge our potential for the evil that we have not acted upon. Maybe it is helpful to give those energies to something like Azazel, to the demons in the wilderness where the wild and dangerous things are. We are not to act upon our most primitive urges, but it may be helpful to acknowledge their reality in us, and to give them their due. May thay always remain in the wilderness, away from community.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 -- Week of 5 Easter
Dame Julian of Norwich, c. 1517

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 963)
Psalms 61, 62 (morning) // 68:1-20(21-23)24-36 (evening)
Leviticus 16:20-34
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 6:7-15

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

The late J. Neville Ward was an early influence on me. He was an English Methodist who wrote wonderfully insightful books on prayer and spirituality. He had an annual practice to read a different book about the Lord's Prayer every year, and in 1981 he published his own reflections -- The Personal Faith of Jesus: As Revealed in the Lord's Prayer.

I flipped through some of the book this morning, noting a few of my underlines:

There is a sense in which everyone has faith, and everyone behaves quiet loyally and consistently with what he believes, that is to say, what he believes about himself and life. That faith, hugely important as it is, is not the sort that can be or ever is set out in a creed and spoken aloud in some ceremonial rite for all to hear. It is part of the inner life of the mind, the drift of secret thoughts whose precise character we are not sharp enough always to note but whose atmosphere we are breathing all the time.

When he accepted Jesus' view that God wants us to embark on a relationship of trust and love with him instead of a struggle to improve ourselves, a new response to life began to form in him. (p. 15-16)

[Jesus] was certainly drawn to the weak and sensual and broken who know it and long to see life changed into something that will make up for the wasted years, and to those who wait for someone in whose presence they can put down a tremendous burden they have been carrying all their lives. (p. 33)

Grant us now, this very day, the sense of that holy day when all will be satisfied with that which alone truly meets human desire and need. Grant us here and now the joy and affection of that time, and its sense of God, as much as it is possible for them to be enjoyed here and now and by people like us. (p. 51)

Not long ago I read of a boy who was murdered while doing his morning paper route. How can his parents think compassionately about the man who murdered their son? Never, without God. Yet there does not seem to be much hope for us unless they can manage it. Their fury must increase unless they, their son, his attacker, are called into some new kind of life in which people look mercifully at one another, refreshed by understanding. Glimpses of such a life come. The trouble is that they vanish too. It sometimes seems that a thousand eucharists, a thousand Our Fathers have left us much as we were.

...What matters is that as a result of the hundreds of eucharists, Lord's Prayers, and many other experiences mulled over as best you can, you come to understand what it means to live life in the light cast on it by Jesus, and to live it with the new shadow you are trailing now you are in his light. (p. 70, 71)

Readings for the feast day of Gregory of Nazianzus, May 9:
Psalm 37:3-6, 32-33
Wisdom 7:7-14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 8:25-32

Almighty God, you have revealed to your Church your eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like your bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for you live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.
--collect from Holy Women, Holy Men, p. 365

Although we remember Gregory today mostly because of his golden-tongued oratorical skills and his ecclesiastical duties as Bishop of Constantinople, it's actually one of his big failures in life that catches my attention--his falling out with his friend Basil the Great. It was a breach that never was repaired, from the time Gregory was sent by Basil to be Bishop of Sasima in 372 until Basil's death in 379.

Basil and Gregory had a great deal of history together, first as fellow students, later as co-ascetics and co-authors of the Philokalia, an anthology of Origen's writings. Their combined theological minds were a great force in the understanding of Trinitarian theology at a time Christianity was threatened by the Arian heresies. But despite Gregory's intellectual prowess in all this, he carried some serious wounds and some heavy resentments. All Gregory ever wanted was to be a simple monk. Yet, despite his wishes, his father insisted that he be ordained as a presbyter. One can imagine that these resentments he held towards his father "primed the pump" when Basil, by that time, Bishop of Caesarea, had Gregory ordained as Bishop of Sasima. This appears to have been a strategic move on Basil's part to put a heavy theological hitter in a spot that would strengthen his position against Anthimus, Bishop of Tyana, but it was definitely in the boonies. Gregory once described Sasima as, "an utterly dreadful, pokey little hole; a paltry horse-stop on the main road... devoid of water, vegetation, or the company of gentlemen."

Gregory never got over this slight, as he perceived it. The move irreparably tore their friendship asunder, and it was probably the theological equivalent to the breakup of the Beatles.

The story of their breakup is a reminder how old resentments and ego can create a never ending feedback loop of blame, where two people continually pace in a circle, eyeing the other, but never getting around to taking a step forward to break the pattern. What great theological truths might have been uncovered or what knowledge could have been revealed, had they patched up their differences well enough to collaborate again?

All of us, when we think back and allow ourselves to touch our own woundedness, can recall times of irreconcilable differences with people who once were very close to us. Ex-intimate partners, of course, quickly come to mind, but we are not exploring this fully if we only confine our thoughts to "those whom with we've shared sexual intimacy." It's ironic that our jargon these days talks about BFF's--"Best friends forever," when at some point, the truth is very few BFF's seem to be around a decade, let alone "forever."

How many times has a resentment towards another person or situation come out sideways in our present relationships? What great works could be accomplished if we could reconcile with those people again? How many times does our inability to reconcile seem bound up in our own feelings more than the slight that actually caused the breach? But more importantly, how do we take that first step towards the green grass in the center, when we've perfected pacing in a circle?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

John 15:9-17

There’s something about human experiences that, well, amazes you. Quick impressions are a case in point: apparently, the effects of what we absorb in the blink of an eye, for example, are highly significant.

I read about an experiment that was testing this hypothesis. A group of high school students were given lists of unconnected words, and from those lists, were to pick four words and compose a sentence.

They did this but what the researchers were actually observing was what happened after the test. The students left the room together and moved as a group, walking slowly and lethargically down the hall.

Scattered throughout the rows of words were specific words that related to old-age, words like elderly, aged, senior, senility, and the like. Without knowing it, these adjectives had slipped into their thoughts and the young people waddled away like a mob of geriatric monkeys.

Being a bit of a wordsmith, wondering about the impact of words and thoughts is a matter of life-style for me. Even if those words seem to skim across our brains like flat stones across the water, they can have a significant impact.

In this context, then, the Gospel this week is quite remarkable. Throughout the Reading, John uses the word ‘love’ at least nine times. He’s making the obvious point that to follow Jesus is to enter into a deep and intimate relationship with him and, through him, to the Father.

Without this love, everything disintegrates and falls to the ground. Or, as last Sunday’s Gospel put it, we become like a fruitless vine.

People – and even Jesus himself – call this the “New Commandment” but I ask: what’s new about it?

Is it because it’s different from the love revealed in the Old Testament? That it contrasts with the love described there?

Hardly. The love of neighbours is strongly emphasized in The Law, as is the love of strangers and foreigners. Take a gander at the Book of Leviticus (not the most riveting piece of literature, I admit) and you’ll see this illustrated over and over.

John’s Gospel doesn’t have any contrasts with the Old Testament in mind. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, we get “You heard it said … but I say to you …” but there’s nothing remotely like this in John.

Instead, the command of Jesus to love one another gets quite an airing: we can overlook its impact but it’ll be there, none-the-less. Maybe the reason why it’s new is because it is a command of Jesus, not simply a feeling or just a good idea.

There is a further twist: not only is this love shown as something to be obeyed, it is also an intimate and personal gift from God to us.

It’s as if He’s instructed us to love then, almost in the same breath, given us the wherewithal to actually fulfil that commandment. How good is our God?

It is in Christ that the whole banana is peeled and laid bare and we see love as it is: he loves the unlovable. He loves the insignificant and wayward. He loves those who hate him and those who don’t. What’s more, he meant what he said by giving his life ‘for his friends’ (verse 13) because that’s what is meant by ‘no greater love’.

Of course, this has an effect on everyone, not just the Christians and to that degree, love is universal: it is up for grabs from everyone and is for everyone.

There’s more yet. The love of which Jesus spoke is new because it has been extended to each of us personally by Jesus. He lived in this world; he breathed this air; he knows our joys and satisfactions; he knows our sorrows; he knows our disappointments and defeats.

He invites us into an intimate and deep relationship with him. It is extraordinarily personal because it is offered to each one of us as if we were the only person in the world.

The Rev. Ian McAlister is the Ministry Development Officer in the Diocese of Queensland and blogs at Reflections from the HIll

‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.

‘Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.

‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. -- Matthew 7:1-12 NRSV

There are days when the readings for the Daily Office sort of leave me scratching my head and wondering that all that means to me. Then there are days when there is so much that it feels almost impossible to take it all in. This is one of those passages. There are four paragraphs and enough there to keep a mind busy for years contemplating them.

There are so many familiar lessons here: as you are judged, so you will be judged; the log in your own eye vs. the speck in your neighbor's; don't throw pearls before swine; ask, seek and knock; do to others as you would have them do to you. These were all precepts I was taught in Sunday School as a child and still haven't been able to master despite hearing them again and again for years. They don't seem difficult, when I read them on the page, but why are they so difficult, even impossible, to live out so much of the time?

Take judging. I have an awareness that I am doing it but control it? That's something else. So why do I do it? Very possibly because it ties in with the next bit about the beam and the mote. In one situation, I feel judged because there are notes all over the databases I work in, pointing out errors that individually wouldn't amount to a hill of beans but collectively feel overwhelming. I judge in return, partly to remind myself that the person leaving the notes is far from perfect themselves. I know I'm wrong, but I seem to do it without really thinking. Why not just be more careful? I do try, but I still make mistakes. I judge the log in their eye because I feel that they don't seem able to see it; I also don't forget I've got a rather large one in my own.

The part about "do unto others" sounds so easy to do. If I want to be treated politely then I need to be polite myself. If I need a hand, I have to not only ask for it but also have to be alert to the potential needs of others that I can fill. If I don't want to be judged --- well, that's harder because it is putting a behavior on someone else that isn't mine to put on them. Perhaps if I look at it a little differently, maybe looking at it as judging others as I would expect God to judge me. Is it fair for me to expect God to use a six-inch ruler when I use a yardstick? If it weren't a challenge, it would be automatic and everybody would be doing it. As it is, it is a challenge I need to take up as I start my day and prepare to go to work to face it head on.

Jesus didn't give these lessons just to hear himself talk. He expected them to make a difference in the lives of those who heard him. Because more than two thousand years have happened between then and now doesn't dilute those lessons or excuse halfhearted hearing and little action. Sunday School lessons have a way of applying to the whole life, not just an hour on Sunday mornings.

I think I need to go back to school. I can recite the lessons but I hope God grades on the curve when I actually get to the test based on those lessons. I pray for the grace to grade others on that same curve I want for myself. I've got some lessons to relearn and homework to do to practice those lessons.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Say to the Israelite people thus: In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe complete rest, a sacred occasion commemorated with loud blasts. You shall not work at your occupations; and you shall bring an offering by fire to the LORD.

So Moses declared to the Israelites the set times of the LORD. -- Leviticus 23:23:44 (*Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society, 1985 ed.)

Leviticus is a book of law, ritual and practice, things with which the person we call the Priestly writer was intimately concerned. It is a book that is probably one of the harder ones in the Bible to read and to really get into, but it is important because it transmits not just God's wishes and commands but also establishes the way life is supposed to be lived, with God and the worship and reverence of God at the center of it all.

In this passage, God gives Moses instructions on religious observances that are to become annual events, feasts that will become hallmarks of Israelite and later Jewish religious life. The first and second days of Tishri, the seventh month, are called Rosh Hashanah, a celebration of the beginning of the new year. It arrives with the blowing of the shofar and was an opportunity to examine mistakes of the past year and resolve to do better in the new one. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, comes eight days later (the tenth day of Tishri) and is the most solemn day of the calendar, a day of fasting, prayer and repentance. The fifteenth day of Tishri marks the beginning of Sukkot, the festival of booths, a joyous time when the harvest is celebrated but also where the people build simple shelters reminiscent of the temporary ones the their ancestors made on the journey to the promised land. Sukkot is also called the Feast of Tabernacles, although the only Tabernacle was the temporary structure that went with the Israelites and served as their temple during the journey.

It seems from all the activity that Tishri was a really busy month. God planned out a lot of days where sacrifices were to be made, and a lot of time for repentance and rejoicing. What strikes me, though, is that it seems that there is a lot of down time, times when anything to do with any creative work was forbidden. There are actually 39 different classifications of "work" which include things as varied as gardening or growing crops, sewing, ripping out, slaughtering animals for meat, shearing, spinning and weaving, cooking anything that wasn't started before sundown on Shabbat, kindling a fire, using a hammer, carrying things in a public area, or even writing two letters (like A and B, not whole missives) as well as eliminating or erasing two letters. Sabbath is serious business, and the holy days and festivals of Tishri contain all the regular weekly sabbaths plus more.

What I think God had in mind for those extra days when work was forbidden wasn't just to give people time off, like vacation days or what is occasionally called in today's working world as "personal days." No, God had those extra days put in for people to stop and have time to really consider what was important -- where they were, what they had done, what needed improvement in their personal relationships with God and their fellow human beings, and what they could do about it. Yes, repentance came into it, but it wasn't the same kind of repentance that most Christians think about, the sackcloth-and-ashes kind of repentance that makes us call ourselves "miserable offenders" and feel like totally unworthy creatures. Repentance such as that practiced on Yom Kippur is more a reorientation toward God and living in harmony with the earth and its inhabitants. Sabbath time gives a person the opportunity to do that in a Godly-mandated way, a way that doesn't make it fight for time and attention with all the other things of life; it's built into the schedule.

Something the people of this world really seem to need but seldom take is time off from work to just rest and recuperate. Most of us have weekends off from work, but the weekend hours are often filled with stuff we didn't have time to do during the week and activities that we have been waiting to enjoy when we can sandwich it in between the kids' soccer games and karate classes, getting the lawn mowed and the laundry done. If we make it to church, it takes a while to settle into the quiet and a lot of effort not to think of what has to be picked up from the grocery store on the way home or has to be finished up before Monday morning comes around again. There's really very little time to really think about God much less actually spend terms cultivating the relationship.

For each of the Jewish festivals and holidays in Tishri, there are designated sabbath days that are like bookends, days before the festivals to contemplate, repent and return, days after to firm the resolve, rejoice and go out to live a more God-connected life. I wonder what life would be like if we all had those sort of mandated Sabbath days where work was forbidden and only rest, refreshment and worship were permitted? I wonder how much better we'd not only feel but actually be. For those who practice a rule of life, a discipline such as the Daily Office can be a bit of Sabbath time that one consciously chooses to do, despite whatever else is going on in life at the moment. What it does is add balance, a chance to slow down and breathe as well as connect with God. Instead of shoe-horning time for God into an hour on Sunday morning, there's a little time every day that is as important as watering the plants or tidying up the kitchen. It puts things in order and encourages growth. That, in God's wisdom, is what we are offered with Sabbath and sabbath time.

I wonder -- how might I more consciously and constructively use Sabbath time in my own life? What would it mean to me, my health and my faith? I have a feeling it would bring nothing but good, and the world would move along just fine without my having to spend every waking moment being busy, keeping the world, or at least my little part of it, humming along. I have a feeling there might be at least a few less heart attacks and stress-related illnesses as well.

But then, I have a feeling that's what God intended, just as surely as the opportunity for connection through prayer, fasting, worship and good works were. God had it all planned out; all we have to do is to do it.

Shabbat Shalom

*Reproduced from the Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985 The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

Psalm 93, 96 (Morning)
Psalm 34 (Evening)
Leviticus 25:1-17
James 1:2-8, 16-18
Luke 12:13-31

The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. You may eat what the land yields during its sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound laborers who live with you; for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.

You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property. When you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one another. When you buy from your neighbor, you shall pay only for the number of years since the jubilee; the seller shall charge you only for the remaining crop years. If the years are more, you shall increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price; for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you. You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 25:1-17 (NRSV)

The concept of the jubilee year in Leviticus is an interesting one, and one that is quite foreign to our modern way of thinking--that every minute of every day must be "productive."

As I grew closer and closer to age 49, the concept of a jubilee year intrigued me. In many ways, my late grandfather had hit the nail on the head in his assessment of many aspects of human nature. I remember him once explaining to me as a teenager that so much of how we defined "who we are" was by those ways we felt "one up" in a situation. The rules in Leviticus for a jubilee year imply that no one is one up in a business deal. What you see is what you get. Your fields are rich enough that they can stand to lie fallow for a spell and live off the natural issue of them. Consider the possibility that one's life, just as it is, turns out to be a rich and abundant one.

So I lined out the parameters for my own version of a jubilee year that would start on my 49th birthday. I would pay off all my debts, save my house mortgage. I would no longer leave unpaid balances on the charge card. I would cease buying excessive things on a whim. I would only replace the clothes that truly wore out. I would let my penchant for "accumulating" lie fallow.

Now, I wish I could have told you that every day I woke up to sunshine and that every day of that year was an amazing, uplifting spiritual experience. In my mind, of course, my big ego had conjured up a fantasy that my mere obedience to such a decree would cause the stars and the planets to move about me like I was the center of the universe, and I'd be blessed in ways beyond measure. Unfortunately, several things which mostly had very little to do with me, or ones that turned out revealing I had less control than I thought, ended up stealing the show. My best friend in town finally sold her house and moved away. I had faced the reality that I had to give up being the sole owner of my practice and affiliate with a larger group. The abbey where I used to go on retreats imploded. Some perilous truths came to light in my home parish, in my workplace, in my family, and in my own soul. Frankly, I never felt more in mortal spiritual danger, more financially impotent, and more out of balance than that year. Had you asked me "How'd that jubilee year thing go?" on day 364 of that year, I'd have told you it was a miserable failure.

But a few years have passed now, and the wonderful thing about hindsight is that I can now tell you about the seeds that were divinely sown with essentially no input from me. I began my online EfM class that year, which has turned out to be one of the greatest spiritual gifts I've ever been given. Because I felt so rudderless, I began to seek stronger personal connections with people I knew a little from the Episco-blogging world and Facebook. I began to ask for and accept help for several things that my answer had always been, "Never mind, I'll do it myself, because I can't trust anyone other than me." I began to feel the very strong pull that God had distinct plans for me within the framework of our church. I don't think I would have seen those graces had I continued my habit of accumulating things to feel in control. I don't think I would have understood the beauty of the good things in my life had not several bad things created a conjunction of dysfunction. I came to understand that a jubilee year is not about "that year." It's about what happens after that year.

I doubt one has to wait until their 49th birthday to declare one nor claim it's too late if one's 49th birthday has passed. Has the possibility of a jubilee year ever crossed your mind?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Psalm 80 (Morning)
Psalms 77, 79 (Evening)
Leviticus 25:35-55
Colossians 1:9-14
Matthew 13:1-16

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!” Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn— and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Matthew 13:1-16 (NRSV)

Matthew's account of the parable of the sower and the seeds displays a very revealing observation (although I wonder if this was accidental) about the teachings of Jesus. In his account of this parable, he shows Jesus "breaking the 4th wall," as they say in the TV and movie trade. We see Jesus first speaking to the crowds, then turning and speaking to the disciples about what he just told the crowd, and in tomorrow's reading (a continuance of this chapter) we will see him turning back to the crowd and continuing on with the parable.

The term "breaking the 4th wall" refers to a device where the main character in a dramatic work speaks directly to the audience--not just in a short aside, but in some way, actually telling the tale (or what's about to happen in the tale) to the audience. It comes from the notion of a stage having four walls, with the fourth wall being an imaginary or iconic one separating the reality of the play from the reality of the audience. It creates a level of meta-fiction within a fiction, and acts as a sort of Venn diagram, with the intersection being the character making those two realities meet--fully a character in the play, and fully a real person speaking directly to you and the rest of the gathered faithful. (Sounds a little like "fully human, fully divine," doesn't it?)

In modern movies, we see this device being used in films such as Goodfellas and Fight Club, and perhaps even a little in Raising Arizona. But the three all-time masters at this were Groucho Marx (Animal Crackers is the perfect example,) George Burns in his old TV show with Gracie Allen, and Bugs Bunny. All three of them had a habit of looking directly into the camera and cutting you in on the secret. One could claim that Bugs even broke a 5th wall, since he was a cartoon character, and we are treating his breaking of the 4th wall like we would a human being!

Matthew lays this chapter out in a way that allows us to enter into the story, not just as a listener to the parable, but with a choice as to which level we want to hear about the parable. We can learn from it just as a person in the crowd that day did by simply hearing the parable's own story and not worrying about the dialogue in the middle--or, conversely, we can learn from it in the way a resident physician learns from a skilled teaching physician. ("Let me tell you how I handle this situation...You heard me when I talked to the patient and it was clear he didn't get what I was telling him...now watch when I go back in and ask the patient some questions and go back to what I said before...")

Let's start by looking at the first half of this passage. Jesus has told the crowd, "Okay, here's a story about four situations with the sowing of seed." It's clear from the get-go, if this were a multiple choice question, "D" is the correct answer. Choices "A," "B," and "C," will result in a bad outcome for the seed. Everyone wants to be choice "D." Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Now we move to the second half. The disciples are saying, "Why don't you just tell them outright?" and the short version of Jesus' answer is, "To teach you how I teach, so you can teach them." He points out that the disciples are the smart kids in the classroom, but it's not about them showing their theological prowess to him. It's about sharing the Gospel and the story of the Good News in Christ with "them"--the nebulous "other."

It's clear that 75% of the seeds in this parable will not bear fruit. Some will never grow. Some will begin to grow quickly, but never bear fruit. Some will be stymied by a bad situation. Only a quarter of the seeds will bear fruit, but the fruit they will bear, over time, will surpass our original amount of seed exponentially. Matthew's account of this, though, by allowing Jesus to break the 4th wall and letting us hear the story in much the same way he and the disciples did, illustrates that this exponential growth happens partly because the smart kids in the class learn how to share the Good News. They find a way to invite everyone to listen and learn on their own, to allow them to make their own insights. They find a way to make the Good News about the people who are hungry for it, rather than using the Good News to stroke the egos of the righteous. They become the good soil--the substrate for spontaneous growth--rather than engage in the futility of trying to control the elements.

Those of us who regularly read (or write) text studies can fall into a terrible trap. We enjoy the intricate details of the Bible to the degree we can make our Christianity all about ferreting out the little details of the Bible and feeling good that we are so clever at it. But too much of that puts us in peril that we will be like the seeds in choice "B"--we grow quickly, but unless we are in good soil that lets us put out roots both downward and laterally, we will bear no fruit. Matthew, however, shows us the antidote for that--it is in following Jesus' example and breaking the 4th wall. It's in simultaneously sharing the Good News both in the place where 75% (or more) won't "get it" at first, yet providing special care and feeding to the seeds that we notice are growing quickly. It's in the understanding that some people are just in a place where they can't grow at the moment because their soil is too thin, or in a place where circumstances are choking them, yet we must both keep sowing the seed and offering good soil.

Where are you called to break the 4th wall in proclaiming the Good News in Christ?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Psalm 78:1-39 (Morning)
Psalm 78:40-72 (Evening)
Leviticus 26:1-20
1 Timothy 2:1-6
Matthew 13:18-23

‘Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.’ Matthew 13:18-23 (NRSV)

Many commentaries (particularly those of a more evangelical-type theology) liken the seeds in this parable to people--ignorant ones who are whisked away in the clutches of the devil, "backsliders," ones who can't resist the call of worldly temptations, and, of course, the pious and righteous ones.

But what if this parable is simply about what it says it is--hearing the Word in all times and all places? Perhaps we fail to hear the power in this parable if we go straight to it being a dire warning about eternal salvation/damnation and fail to consider that it could be about our dull moments in our ability to perceive God's constant call to us.

As we discussed in yesterday's reflection, it's important to remember that only 25% of the seeds in this parable bear fruit. In the first scenario (the seeds on the path) they never got a chance, the birds gobbled them up. It makes me wonder how many times God tells us something but we were just too distracted or too anxious, or too raw, and whatever had our focus had its way with us. In the second scenario (the rocky soil) it's easy to recall all the times in our lives when things started to take off, it all seemed good and right and clearly laid out ahead of us, but without a mentor, or an experienced guide, well...we can only get so far on our own. The time wasn't right or the place wasn't right for it to take root. The seeds growing among the thorns remind me of all the times we can be in toxic environments at home or work or church that choke us out, burn us out, or parasitize us.

Several studies over the years have assessed the speed at which we assimilate and retain knowledge, and it's long been known that it takes a person at least seven times of using or studying a piece of information before it's retained. Yet the way we usually look at this parable is with the (false) assumption we can learn something the first time we hear it. Scripture teaches us that God's call to us never lets up; it's our ability to hear and retain that is the problem.

The people who organize and present review courses for medical board exams constantly remind their attendees of the "It takes seven times to remember something," mantra. However, for two decades I have watched second year medical students studying for Part One of their boards constantly assimilating "more" study materials rather than read and re-read and re-re-read the materials they have.

We probably have that tendency as spiritual beings, too...which is part of the beauty of the liturgy in our beloved Book of Common Prayer. Whether it's the Nicene Creed, the Collect for Purity, or our responses, most of us have several chunks of the liturgy that we know by heart.

Repetition guards us from being swept away like those seeds sown out in the open. It grounds us and helps us take root, so when we grow, we are supported. It spurs us to hang out with like-minded folks rather than be caught up in the thorny world, unable to even see out, as well as calls to us to share the Good News in our thoughts, words, and actions. It's a pretty safe bet that even under huge stress, most of us could remember something from the Book of Common Prayer.

What is heartening, though, is when something we hear in God's call to us really does take root and grow, we are so fecund and so prolific that the amount of fruit borne from the process is staggering. When it's good, it's good--but there needs to be sustenance for that other 75% of the time. In that sense, it is where the words in our Book of Common Prayer matter. We hear them again and again, we know some of them in our hearts, and not only do keep us rooted to God, they send out little runners to each other and weave us into a solid mass of roots. What we lack in depth sometimes, we gain in breadth. If you've ever tried to pull out a bed of plants whose roots are bound up with each other, you know exactly what this means.

What are the words in the Book of Common Prayer that not only root you to God, but to each other? How do these words assist you in hearing God's call to you a little more efficiently?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: ‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’ He said to them, ‘How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,

“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet’ ”?

If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?’ No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions. -- Matthew 22:41-46 (NRSV)

What is worse than a question? Perhaps it is the question to which one doesn't have the right answer, or any answer at all. The Pharisees, guys who thought they had all the answers, found that this was one where the answer they had was wrong.

In my humble opinion, questions are what make the world go around and keep it turning. Every time we think we have answers, it is like the questions change and we're back at square one, looking for answers again. The image of the toddler who is just beginning to wander around comes to mind, along with the inevitable and unending questions they always ask, "What's that?" or worse, "Why?" There are a lot of times we don't have an answer to that "Why?" but we still get our feet held to the fire by a three-year-old for whom "Because" is not a sufficient answer.

I wonder if God gets tired of "Why?" prayers. Why is there suffering in the world? Why do ducks fly rightside up instead of upside down? Why did I survive an accident where someone else died? Why are there mosquitoes? Why was this person born with physical or developmental challenges? Why can't I ever remember where I put my keys or parked my car? Why do I have this illness when I didn't do anything wrong to cause it? I don't think even Solomon could stand up to an onslaught like that. Luckily, God's got patience and, incidentally, all the answers -- the right ones.

One thing about being an EfM mentor is that I get to ask questions, lots of questions, in our TR sessions. What's even better is that I don't have to have the answers because each person's answers are usually different and geared to their own personal journey. The best thing, though, is even though I go into a TR with an idea of how I think it should go, quite often it goes in a totally different and totally unthought-of direction but I still end up having my own insights as well as sharing in the insights of others.

Humankind has always questioned and I don't think that's ever going to change. The disciples had a lot of questions for Jesus, but what they got weren't cut-and-dried, easy answers. We still ask questions of all kinds, silly ones, ponderous ones, wishful ones, even agonized ones at times, but we ask all the same. The answers I get aren't always ones I want to hear, just as sometimes I don't really seem to get any answer at all, which personally drives me nuts. Still, I question, I look for answers and I try to be open to whatever comes from the search.

My question now is what am I supposed to be doing in my life -- oh, and where do those stray socks go when only a single sock of a pair comes out of the dryer?

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

Thus, the Church is founded on Christ. It is His Church, the response to His call, the obedience to His will. It is important to keep this in mind, because Christians themselves often forget and being to view the Church as “theirs,” as an organization essentially called to serve them, to satisfy their spiritual and non-spiritual needs and demands. Yet the very word Church shows above all that is the union of those who are called to serve Christ, and to continue His work. It is service not to self but to God. ~Alexander Schmemann, Celebration of Faith, vol. I (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), p. 116.

This General Convention will no doubt see a flurry of activity about restructuring and much wrangling about the budget. All parties will play lip service to being mission-driven. There will be, as there already have been, a number of charges and counter-charges about who is giving into anxiety, resisting necessary change, and preserving a deadly status quo.

These words from Fr. Alexander Schmemann challenge us to a wider perspective. What would happen if we really did what we say we do at General Convention and prayed and listened for the voice of the Holy Spirit.

I submit that the Spirit would draw us deeper into the mission and ministry of Christ, calling us to forms of dying and rising that we have scarcely begun to imagine.
But this will only happen to the extent that we all remember that the Church belongs not to us but to God…and remain open to deeper conversion to each other and the world for which our Lord gave his life. It will necessarily involve renunciation of privilege and power and renewed dedication to the teaching and example of the Lord Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Again, as we climb higher, we say this. It [i.e. “the Cause of all”] is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving, or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing beings do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial. ~Dionysius, Mystical Theology, v. in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988 ), p. 141.

That’s quite a few words about something about which nothing can be said. This passage from the conclusion of Dionysius’ Mystical Theology is the locus classicus for the relationship between apophatic, or negative, theology, and cataphatic, or positive, theology. Literal minded readers may trip up on the apparent contradictions in this dialectical text, which circles around a divinity that is utterly transcendent (even of divinity) yet gives itself out of sheer ecstatic goodness (even as it is beyond goodness).

Earlier, in his Divine Names, Dionysius insists on our need to use names, especially those given in Scripture, to approach God. And yet, in the end, we can speak only about “what is next to” God and not about God per se and even the term “God” is misleading.

In some ways, concrete symbols like the “Rock of Ages” or the “Lion of Judah” are less dangerous because we are less apt to confuse them for the “thing-in-itself,” as we might be prone to do with more relatively adequate symbols like being, goodness, or oneness.

Various theologians have various ways of living with the tension between assertion and denial. Not all would reach first for the Neo-platonic language of Dionysius. In the life of faith, we wrestle with a God who is really given yet remains Absolute Mystery.

Ultimately, there’s quite a bit in this brief chapter. The heart of the matter is this: God is not just beyond every assertion but also beyond every denial.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

So the Lord said to Moses, ‘Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you. I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.

So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.

Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.’ And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, ‘My lord Moses, stop them!’ But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!’ -- Numbers 11:16-17, 24-29 NRSV

The Israelites are still wandering around, but the bloom is clearly off the rose insofar as their joy at being freed from the bondage they had in Egypt. In the part of the reading that was omitted, the people moaned and groaned, griped and moaned some more about being so tired of eating manna. They wanted meat, lots of meat. What God promised them was that they would have meat, indeed, they would have meat so plentiful and so often that they would literally have it coming out of their noses. That part always makes me smile, but it isn't part of today's lesson.

Moses had found that being the go-to guy for this group had its drawbacks. Not only was he on call with God but it seemed everybody else wanted his ear (as well as his attention and his judgment -- in their favor, of course). Moses probably felt like he was losing his mind. But then came the brilliant plan to delegate; any good businessperson worth their salt today comes pre-programmed to do that but for Moses and the Israelites it was a new concept. Instead of Moses being the sole arbiter, now there were seventy elders who were given the authority to be the go-betweens, solving the problems where they could, and bringing the big stuff for Moses to discuss with God. Moses must have felt a huge weight off his shoulders.

But then there's almost always a fly in the ointment. Two of the designated had stayed in the camp instead of attending the conclave. Worse yet, they were actually prophesying in the camp, something that evidently at least one person thought was beyond the pale. "Moses, Moses, those people over there are doing something they shouldn't be doing." Joshua was all for rushing back to the camp and taking care of the problem right then and there, but Moses stopped him. "Let them alone. They are doing what they should do and I would to God there would be more like them!"

This story reminds me of the one about Jesus' disciples who griped about people who weren't part of their group doing the same things the disciples were -- preaching, teaching and healing. Jesus and Moses both responded in pretty much the same way, "Let them alone. They are doing what they should do."

Nobody really likes a snitch, and often the snitch ends up getting the worst of it because the boss often agrees with the snitch-ees rather than the snitch-er. Too often it's micromanagers and disgruntled people who run to management and complain about someone else's (real or perceived) flaws, faults and shortcomings, often to cover or redirect attention away from their own. I know I've been guilty of it, and I suspect I'm not alone in that boat.

Ken Blanchard is credited with coming up with the phrase "Catch them doing something good." Instead of focusing on what is wrong, give folks a pat on the back for doing good things, right things, positive things. Like most parents, I didn't praise my kid enough for doing the right things because I was busy trying to get him to fix the things he did wrong. I've worked for people who are pretty much the same -- much more focused on pointing out every error while never really saying much about the 99 things I did right. I realize now how focusing on the wrong thing affected my son, because I see how it affects me in my daily life and work. It does make me a bit more aware of fault-finding and the destructiveness of a constant diet of negative feedback where a little positive feedback might be a whole lot better.

Jesus and Moses might not have had a handy phrase for what they wanted the disciples and the elders to model, but I think the general idea was there. Clean your own house before you start cleaning someone else's. Don't be quick to judge another's doings because they might just be doing precisely what they were supposed to do. Even if you aren't part of the inner circle, take the example Moses and Jesus set and follow them to the best of your ability.

Now there's a business concept. I think I'll have to try that at work next week, at least try a little harder to look for the good and catch someone doing it. And I have the perfect place to start looking... just don't tell my boss!

Psalm 66, 67 (Morning)
Psalm 19, 46 (Evening)
Exodus 3:1-12
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 10:17-24

Be joyful in God, all you lands; *
sing the glory of his Name;
sing the glory of his praise.

Say to God, "How awesome are your deeds! *
because of your great strength your enemies
cringe before you.

All the earth bows down before you, *
sings to you, sings out your Name."

Come now and see the works of God, *
how wonderful he is in his doing toward all people.

He turned the sea into dry land,
so that they went through the water on foot, *
and there we rejoiced in him.

In his might he rules for ever;
his eyes keep watch over the nations; *
let no rebel rise up against him.

Bless our God, you peoples; *
make the voice of his praise to be heard;

Who holds our souls in life, *
and will not allow our feet to slip.

For you, O God, have proved us; *
you have tried us just as silver is tried.

You brought us into the snare; *
you laid heavy burdens upon our backs.

You let enemies ride over our heads;
we went through fire and water; *
but you brought us out into a place of refreshment.

I will enter your house with burnt-offerings
and will pay you my vows, *
which I promised with my lips
and spoke with my mouth when I was in trouble.

I will offer you sacrifices of fat beasts
with the smoke of rams; *
I will give you oxen and goats.

Come and listen, all you who fear God, *
and I will tell you what he has done for me. Psalm 66 (BCP)

Let me cut you in on a little secret. I have one of those voices that...well...carries. Now, I don't really try to be that way. But whatever gene gives people...um..."their indoor voice"...well, my gene just has a big ol' deletion there. It doesn't exactly lend me to being anonymous in church. When I supplied for the Presbyterians a few weeks ago, someone at my church said "I knew when you got back from supplying b/c all of a sudden in the middle of church I heard you. I mean, you know, it's not like we don't notice when you are gone."

Well, and another thing...I sing pretty much a full octave lower than most of the women in church. My high school music teacher used to dump me in with the boys who sang tenor. It's not what anyone would consider a "pretty" voice for a female. But it's resonant, and it's loud, and in a weird way, it's kind of dichotomous, depending on who you talk to. It doesn't sound all that great with many songs in the 1982 Hymnal. I know one person who often teases me that she's pretty sure no one at church is going to ask us to do a duet. Yet, I always notice she is normally not a big singer, but when she stands next to me she seems to feel a little emboldened about singing.

On the other hand, give me some of the tenor parts in many of the Taizé songs, and I sound pretty darn good. I know one person at our Taizé service who tells me, "I always just love hearing you do the tenor parts. It makes me feel good singing my part."

I've only had one person in my life try to shut me up when I sing in church, (he told me it was "distracting," and that it drowned out the women with beautiful delicate voices) and I remember how he would look over at me and make subtle "you are so annoying and uncool" faces. I felt ashamed about that for a while, then one day I got tired of feeling ashamed, and I just quit looking at his reactions and sang anyway.

But there it is. My voice. There's really not much I can do with a lot of it, should I choose to use it. It's taken me a lot of years to even halfway make peace with the good and the bad of my singing voice, and these days I just sing joyfully and let the chips fall where they may. The truth is, I like being joyful in church, and if my singing and praying aloud voice is "joyful noise," well, it's just going to have to be joyful noise.

Have you ever just kicked back and thought about the beauty of the gathered voices on any given Sunday in your home parish, from the shrieking child to the most elderly patriarch? When I think back to the death of one friend in my parish and the relocation of another friend to another state, I recall acutely missing the sound of their voices among the baseline of the gathered voices--yet at the same time feeling the baseline of our typical Sunday singing simultaneously carrying me through my grief. These days, I swear I hear those people in the background now and then. Sometimes, I swear I hear the heart voices of the people whom I've never heard sing an actual note. I think about the times I've heard the voices of others be tearful, and the times my own voice has cracked in awe of the beauty filling my ears. I think about the voices I've heard grow up in the parish, from little thready sing-song child voices to voices beginning to burst open to reveal the adults they are becoming. Somehow the mystery of all of it--the harmony and the dis-harmony, singing in tandem--works out to something bordering on saintly.

Our Psalm today invites us to simply sing from a voice focused on what God has done for us, and to listen to the voices around us. What do we hear when we quit fretting over what we sound like?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Monday, May 21, 2012 -- Week of 7 Easter
John Eliot, Missionary among the Algonquin, 1690

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 965)
Psalms 89:1-18 (morning) // 89:1952 (evening)
Joshua 1:1-9
Ephesians 3:1-13
Matthew 8:5-17

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

Many of us live with presumptions of privilege, including divine privilege. Sometimes God turns our expectations over, and extends blessing beyond our imagination.

Psalm 89 articulates two expectations of privilege that were core to Israel's identity. "I have sworn an oath to David my servant: I will establish your line for ever." (89:3b-4a) "I shall make his dominion extend from the Great Sea to the River." (89:25)

The Hebrew Scriptures articulate in several places the expectation that God would bless and protect David's royal dynasty for all times. The Scriptures also make a geographic claim. In today's reading in Joshua and elsewhere, Israel hears the promise that God gives them a wide expanse of land, from the Mediterranean all the way to the Euphrates River in modern Iraq.

Those expectations have been defined by many in nationalistic terms, in terms of power and privilege.

Psalm 89 recognizes that God did not keep the promise to David according to their expectations. The Psalmist reminds God of those promises and asks God to restore the monarchy. It is a prayer that will not be answered, a promise that will not be fulfilled, at least not in the expected way.

Even in its brief moment of widest political boundaries, Israel never had sovereignty extending to the Euphrates. For centuries it was a people without land -- a people who learned to live faithfully in exile. God did not fulfill the promise of land, at least not in the expected way.

Today some are reclaiming that latter promise. Christian Zionists promote a map on behalf of Israel that claims God gave Israel the lion's share of the Middle East. They reclaim that geography and urge political action to support it. Yet these are the ancient homes of many other peoples, including many Christians. The potential for conflict is world threatening.

Next to some of these nationalistic claim of power and divine privilege are other traditions, traditions of wider inclusion and blessing.

In our story from Matthew, Jesus remarks on the faith of the Roman Centurion in Capernaum, saying, "Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (8:10b-12) As Matthew writes, those presumptive "heirs of the kingdom" could be Christians as well as Jews.

In Ephesians we hear a defense of Paul's mission to the Gentiles -- to the "others." "The Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel." (3:6)

God often surprises us by refusing to meet our expectations of privilege and power, even those articulated in scripture. God often expands the boundaries of divine blessing and inclusion, even toward those people excluded in some accounts of scripture. It seems to be a lesson of history that we create much tragedy and violence when we try to enforce the privileges we presume are ours to claim from God. It seems to me that we are more likely to be following the track of God's intention when we hold our sense of privilege lightly and when we expect to discover God's blessing and presence in the unexpected.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 -- Week of 7 Easter

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 965)
Psalms 97, 99, [100] (morning) // 94, 95 (evening)
1 Samuel 16:1-13a
Ephesians 3:14-21
Matthew 8:18-27

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

Today's readings include a wonderful prayer (Ephesians) and a picture of stability in the midst of challenge and chaos (Matthew).

Let's start with the prayer. Read it slowly. Claim this prayer for yourself.

I pray that, according to the riches of God's glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God's Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

What a marvelous prayer. It strengthens us with God's power and grounds us in God's love, inspiring our trust that Christ dwells in our hearts. Our source and root and grounding is love, for God is love -- love so broad and long, so high and deep that it surpasses all we can know, and fills us with God's own life. With the indwelling of divine love breathing us into being, we are empowered to accomplish more than we can imagine, to the glory of Christ. This is a description of our daily inheritance. Each morning we are invited to accept this gift of loving presence to empower our day.

Will Christ's presence be enough to sustain us through what we must face? What does that love-in-action look like? We see Christ's stabilizing presence in the stories from Matthew's gospel.

Some people face homelessness or other threats to their security. Jesus himself knows their plight and lives with them -- "the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." I have known homeless neighbors who could speak with such authenticity about their trust in Jesus. For some, Jesus is their only hope, for they have nothing of themselves. They know Jesus is with them and near them. I've looked into their eyes, hopeful eyes, and I've recognized the deep trust in Jesus, who they know will not let them down.

Some people find themselves in deadly, life-crushing circumstances. Trapped, stuck, weighed down, oppressed. Jesus liberates us from death. "Let the dead bury their own dead." Jesus offers us resurrection and enough self-definition to enable us to separate from unhealthy dependencies and to live with authenticity and power.

Many of us experience times of chaos, when we feel overwhelmed, like we are sinking and swamped. Jesus is in the boat with us. He can rebuke the winds that we fear will overcome us; he can bring calm to our raging seas. Dwelling within us, in the center of our being, Jesus is the stillpoint of peace.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012 -- Week of 7 Easter
Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, Astronomers, 1543

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 965)
Psalms 101, 109:1-4(5-19)20-30 (morning) // 19:121-144 (evening)
Isaiah 4:2-6
Ephesians 4:1-16
Matthew 8:28-34

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

The witness of scripture invites us into interconnectedness, union -- what Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn calls "interbeing" -- the reality that we are all connected with each other in an intimate relationship of unity and interdependence. That's a theme found in every enduring religion. This passage in Ephesians is one of our Christian treasures about that theme. The upcoming Feast of Pentecost is one of our festivals about that theme.

For Americans, a deep sense of oneness with humanity may be somewhat counter-cultural. We are taught to be independent and self-reliant. We reserve our deepest forms of pride for individual accomplishment.

The writer of Ephesians seems to know this. The appeal for unity begins with an exhortation on behalf of the virtues of humility, gentleness and patience -- the precursors to interconnectedness, the antidote to individualistic pride.

It's not easy to live in a world with other people. Only in a context of humility, gentleness and patience will we be willing to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

It is profound to say there is "one body and one Spirit, ...one hope, ...one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all." A mystery. And I think it is a mistake to use this hymn of union to divide humanity into a religious "us" and "them," limiting the Spirit to only the one form of faith and the baptism of our particular religion. I am convinced that there is a greater unity than can be employed by any single religion. God's Spirit is ubiquitous. With humility, gentleness and patience we can recognize the Spirit universally, in other faiths and baptisms, and honor our interconnectedness.

Our organic union with God's humanity is the context for the use of our individual gifts. Our call is to grow up, to become mature, to help humanity evolve consciously together as a race. The image is organic. We belong to a body. Each of us are members of that body. We work together to help the body heal and mature. All are included.

Go through this day with an intentional sense of organic unity with each person you encounter. Claim every person you encounter, in person or online, and connect with everyone you read about in the news or see on the television as though they were part of your own body. Begin with an ethos of humility, gentleness and patience. See if you can deepen your connectedness into an experience of being one in union with all. Then use your gifts for the good of the body. See if you don't experience a more satisfying and deeper context for your own work and actions, in union with all.

The immensity of this work of Christ, a work incomprehensible to the angels, so St. Paul tells us, cannot then be enclosed in a single explanation, nor in a single metaphor. The very idea of redemption assumes a plainly legal aspect: it is the atonement of a slave, the debt paid for those who remained in prison because they could not discharge it. Legal also is the theme of the mediator who reunited man to God through the cross. But these two Pauline images, stressed again by the Fathers, must not be allowed to harden, for this would be to build an indefensible relationship of rights between God and humanity. Rather must we relocate them among the almost infinite number of other images, each like a facet of an event ineffable in itself. Looming large in the Gospel are the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep, “the strong man” who triumphs over the brigand, ties him up and takes his spoils from him, the woman who rediscovers and cleans the drachma where the image of God lies printed beneath the dust of sin. Liturgical texts, particularly during Holy Week, have for their leit-motif the theme of the victorious warrior who destroys the enemies and breaks down the gates of Hell where, as Dante writes, “their banners enter in triumph.” There abound also in the Fathers images of a physical order: that of the purifying fire, and particularly that of the doctor who heals the wounds of the people. Indeed, since Origen, Christ is the Good Samaritan who tends and restores human nature wounded by brigands, that is, by the demons. Finally, the theme of sacrifice is much more than a metaphor. It is the culmination of a typology which participates in the very reality it announces, in the “blood of Christ” offered “in a spirit of eternity,” as is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where this image completes in death the legal symbolism. ~Vladimir Lossky, Orthodoxy Theology: An Introduction (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), pp. 111-112.

Much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes that there is a simple answer to the question of how Jesus saves, usually some form of penal substitutionary atonement. Since I’ve returned to the Bible belt, I’ve noticed this cropping up even more, but it is never really absent in a society where conservative evangelicals are the loudest Christian voices.

Lossky, drawing heavily from the Scriptures and the liturgy, as well as the Fathers, comes up with a number of metaphors, all of which surround the immense and ineffable mystery of the saving work of Christ. We might add to the mix or question Lossky’s particular emphases, but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make, namely that there is astounding breadth, even in the most traditional of materials.

I suspect that the attempts to zero in on one metaphor to the exclusion of others equally well attested in tradition amount, in fact, to heterodoxy. Penal substitution is, arguably, not present in the early tradition at all (though it is a kind of development of what Lossky calls the metaphor of redemption). In my view, the one-sidedness of zeroing in on a single metaphor, where Scripture and tradition are internally diverse, is the root of heresy in the worst sense. It is far more dangerous than the particulars of the option chosen. We can highlight certain metaphors and bring their implications into focus (even as we downplay or sideline others), without either undoing their tension with other voices in the tradition or subverting the provisional character of all true Christian witness. At a minimum, Christian witness is provisional because it dares to speak of the ineffable God.

Often, the early witnesses, like the contemporary Body, are diverse for a reason. Theology too, like the human beings who do it, stands at the foot of the Cross, waiting on the gift and promise that consummates all things in Christ. May that Gift, the Holy Spirit, bind us in charity and lead us now and always into Truth.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Friday, May 25, 2012 -- Week of 7 Easter, Year Two
Bede, the Venerable, Priest, and Monk of Jarrow, 735

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 965)
Psalms 102 (morning) // 107:1-32 (evening)
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Ephesians 5:1-20
Matthew 9:9-17

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

In the Ten Commandments and again in the covenant begun in Exodus 34, we hear ominous words of judgment passed down from generation to generation. God speaks as one who will visit the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generation.
During a time of national threat and chastisement, Jeremiah's generation feels the weight of that curse. In the early years of Jeremiah's vocation, the good King Josiah had inspired a revival of faithfulness and observance of the Law. But Josiah died suddenly in battle, and political and religious hopes unraveled quickly. The people became disillusioned and helpless. Much of Jeremiah's testament gives words to their misery and suffering.

But now, Jeremiah speaks words of hope. He says to them, You've seen the tragedy -- "I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil." Now God is planning good -- "so I will watch over them to build and to plant."

Throw off the helpless feeling of doom, the destiny to live out the curse of your ancestors' wrongdoing. The rules have changed. No longer will you speak the old folk maxim "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." But now, each will be responsible for your own actions and not inherit the curse from your parents.

Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant. The law will no longer be a set of external words of instruction, but an internal presence in your hearts. You will know God intuitively, immediately. You will no longer reference the external teachings, but God will live in your heart.

That religion of the heart is what we aspire to. At the feast of Pentecost, Christians say that God's Spirit, God's own life is in us at the center of our being. We are made one with God in the Spirit. We call that our new covenant. It releases us from the curse of the past through forgiveness and regeneration. It guides us into a new future through the indwelling of the Spirit.

Today, let us walk in the Spirit. Let the intuitive presence of God guide and lead us. It is our inheritance. It is our blessing. God is with us. Jeremiah's hope has come true in the gift of the Spirit through Jesus: "For they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more."

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute-players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, ‘Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district. -- Matthew 9:18-26 NRSV

I think that of all the stories in the Bible, this one, or actually these two, are probably my favorites. They are repeated in both Mark and Luke, but this one seems like the Reader's Digest version, a condensation that hits the high spots and leaves out a lot of details, unlike the stories in both Mark and Luke. Still, the three of them all feature the same kind of "sandwich" format -- Jesus is going to heal a child, is stopped by the touch of an older woman followed by her healing, then he continues on to his destination not to heal a child but to raise her from the dead. In a sense, two women were physically raised from the dead that day, one from true physical death and one from a kind of cultural death that resulted from not only from illness but also isolation and invisibility caused by cultural norms and practices.

I was just thinking about the story when I realized that I was usually drawn to the elder woman, the one who was healed by the faith that if only she touched a tassel on Jesus' clothes, she would be freed from the illness that had plagued her life for twelve years. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), twelve years was the same number the young girl had lived on this earth. I usually see myself in the woman, not because of her faith but more because of her age and her less-than-visible ailment. I wish I could say I had a quarter of her faith, but the truth is that only sometimes can I even come close. Still, I look at her and feel not just compassion but connection. She is my sister, perhaps moreso because in her I see some of my own struggles.

Today, though, my thoughts went to the girl-child who began and ended the scripture passage. I think too of the "rest of the story" in the other recountings. This girl was a child of promise, as all children are. She had already beaten the odds many times by surviving to the age of twelve, the very threshold of womanhood and the beginning of her life as wife, mother and probably grandmother. That was her promise, and now she lay sick unto death with something the physicians could not cure. Her father had the faith that Jesus could heal her if only he would come to her bedside since she could not come to him. The delay with the hemorrhaging woman must have been agonizing to him, risking the life of his precious daughter to cure some unknown woman of something that still allowed her to walk around, had been with her for years without being imminently fatal and surely could have waited a few hours if not a day or so for a cure. But Jesus chose to stop and the father had no choice but to wait.

I wonder about what the girl-child was thinking as she waited for her papa to return to her. Surely no matter how close to death she was, she would wait for someone who had loved and protected her all her life to return to her and make her better. Kids have faith that their parents can do that; I know I thought mine could. I trusted that they could take the pain in my legs away, which they did with hot water and leg rubs, both of them sitting up with me until the cramps subsided and they could put me to bed and then return to their interrupted slumbers themselves. Maybe the girl-child didn't have faith that Jesus could heal her but I bet my bottom dollar she had faith her daddy could.

Two women, two stories, two cures, two lives turned completely around by the God-given power of one man, the presence of God and the faith that Jesus could do what human beings could not do and cure what they could not. I have to ask myself what can I learn from the story that I haven't learned before? Where is my faith, in my papa or in my Parent/Brother/Guide? Of what do I need to be healed, a physical ailment, an emotional breakdown, a spiritual desert? For what am I looking, a cure or a healing? They are different things-- one removes a disease or difficulty while the other removes the need to fear it or let it define me. Cures are wonderful things but healings are priceless.

Today I can see myself as both women at various times in my life. Their stories become mine and I learn from both of them. I can ask for what I need and I can have faith to believe that even the unasked will be answered in some way, even if not exactly the way I would want it to be. The person I reach out to touch might be the one who helps to heal something in me, and the one I pray for might be the one who again proves to me that prayers can change lives.

Pretty powerful lessons for a morning's thoughts and eight short verses of what amounts to a Reader's Digest version of a story. It makes me want to examine my life to see where the cures and the healings are. Am I one of the walking wounded or am I lying there waiting for someone else to bring me help? Most of all, in whom and in what do I put my faith?

I think it's going to be an interesting contemplation for the rest of today -- and beyond.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

Psalms 118, 145
Deuteronomy 16:9-12
Acts 4:18-21, 23-33
John 4:19-26

"Sir, I see that you are a prophet."

It has to be one of the greatest understatements in the Gospel. Unfortunately, our reading today starts at the punch line; it's the discourse preceding this that makes the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, and is worth a read along with today's passage--take a few minutes to read what just precedes our text.

At the beginning of this story, the Samaritan woman is mostly delivering a load of snark at Jesus. "Yo, dude! Have you noticed I'm Samaritan and you're Jewish? Like you are going to share anything with me? Riiiigggghhhhtt....living water? Now how you gonna do that without a bucket? 'If I knew who you were'...are you bigger than our ancestor Jacob? Or maybe you've just been out in the sun a little too long, hmmmm?"

Generally speaking, it's also an understatement to say there was no love lost between Samaritans and Jews. In the eyes of the Jewish people and the Hebrew scriptures, Samaritans were pagans and half-breeds. Jews often put extra mileage on their journey between Judea and Galilee by crossing the Jordan and avoiding Samaria entirely, for fear of contamination. Those fool enough or desperate enough to travel through Samaria would be met with bullying and taunting. (Evidently, one of the taunts was that the Samaritans had an older copy of the Torah and that they were actually following its precepts better.)

We aren't shown entirely why this woman continues the conversation instead of kicking dirt at Jesus or hurling a rock at him, but as the conversation progresses, we see the conversation move from snark to curiosity ("Well, now, if you're serious about this living water stuff...well, it would sure save me a lot of trips to the well...") and finally outright dumbfounded awe when Jesus, out of the blue, reveals that he knows her rather checkered marital history, which is where today's reading picks up.

At this point, he has her absolute attention, and he proceeds to cut to the heart of what separates Samaritans and Jews--the "correct" spot where God chose to establish the kingdom. For Jews, it was Jerusalem; for Samaritans it was Mt. Gerizim. Deuteronomy 12:5 states, "...you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes as his habitation to put his name there..." and uses the phrase "shall choose," implying it's yet to be.

But we're back to that business of that older Samaritan copy of the Torah again. That manuscript describes the place God "has chosen" (implying it's already been chosen," and Samaritans identified that place as Mt. Gerizim.

Jesus goes on to tell her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

What's incredibly interesting here is that it's clear Jesus has her ear, and he could have given her the "correct" answer in this dichotomy, but he doesn't. He could say "who's right" and "who's wrong." It is, after all, a prophet's right to do such things. Instead, he swings a circle big enough to hold both places--Jerusalem and Mt. Gerazim. The circle is big enough to hold the things Jews and Samaritans were sure they knew, and the things Jews and Samaritans didn't know, yet remain hopeful for truths that are not evident at the moment.

This discourse reminds us to examine those times in our lives when we were absolutely positively sure of what the "Christian" perspective was, and our response to anything challenging it was pure snark. How many times was our surety destroyed by being face-to-face with an unavoidable and revealed truth? Did we, like the Samaritan woman, change our attitude and approach it with awe, using it as an opportunity to hear and learn? Or did we bristle and throw more snark at it?

Additionally, as we head into General Convention, perhaps this passage calls us to consider those things we claim to be "sure" about regarding the hot-button issues that will be facing our deputies and bishops. Are we insistent on being on the side of "the truth," or should we be taking a cue from Jesus to draw a circle big enough to hold it all, until time passes and more truth is revealed?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

Monday, May 28, 2012 -- Week of Proper 3, Year Two
John Calvin, Theolotgian, 1564

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 969)
Psalms 25 (morning) // 9, 15 (evening)
Proverbs 10:1-12
1 Timothy 1:1-17
Matthew 12:22-32

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

On Memorial Day there is something I can think of that would be an appropriate act of solidarity with those who have sacrificed for the protection of freedom and for the security of our families. It would be to go to the U.S. Citizenship and and Immigration Services website and offer a comment to support a proposed rule change that would allow families to stay together in this country while they petition for residency status for one of their loved ones.

Currently, if a U.S. citizen wants to petition for a parent or spouse or child to be allowed to waive the requirement for their family member who does not have legal status in this country to be able to apply for a hardship waiver, that immigrant has to leave their family in this country and risk a 3 to 10 year wait in their country of origin, hoping their application will be approved. These things usually take years.

Families are unwilling to let their bread-winner, or their child, go back to a country that they may have left a decade ago or more, on the chance that they will be given a wavier. What is the family to do in the meantime?

Maria is a local mother of three children -- all citizens of the U.S. Maria was brought here by her husband when she was seventeen. They entered illegally in a harrowing walk through the desert. She's been here seventeen years. She's an upstanding neighbor and a regular parent volunteer in two local schools. She would like to apply for legal status. To do so, she would have to leave her three children -- 16, 12, and 10 -- in order to apply for residency. She's now a single mother. She can't do that.

But there is hope. There is a proposed policy change that could help good people like Maria. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing a rule that would allow an application for a provisional waiver of the 3-to-10 year bar while remaining in the U.S. If Maria could show that her being barred for that time would pose an extreme hardship on a U.S. citizen, she could pursue legal status without having to abandon her family or taking them to a country they do not know.

For those of us who are pro-family, this is good news. But we need to speak up now to support the proposed rule change. USCIS is taking comments on the rule through the end of May. Go to www.nilc.org/statesidewaiver.html to learn more. Or to submit your own comment, to go http://tinyurl.com/crsfgz2 (note the widow only stays open for 20 minutes, so work quickly).

Hurry. You've only got through this Thursday. Help our laws keep families together rather than separating them. Submit your comment of support to give families like Maria a chance to stay together, a chance for a good life.

What a good thing to do on Memorial Day. Advocate for families who wish to pursue the American Dream -- to live in freedom. Advance the values so many have given their lives for.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (inscription on the Statue of Liberty)

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 -- Week of Proper 3, Year Two

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 969)
Psalms 26, 28 (morning) // 36, 39 (evening)
Proverbs 15:16-33
1 Timothy 1:18 - 2:8
Matthew 12:33-42

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

The LORD tears down the house of the proud,
but maintains the widow's boundaries. (Proverbs 15:25)

It does seem that when we rely on our own powers and seek control to bring about our self-directed ends that things tend to unravel.

Sometimes they unravel through circumstance and failure. We meet our limits. We wear out in frustration or find we can't maintain control of all that we feel responsible for. We mess up. We don't live up to our intentions. The proud house cracks and crumbles.

Sometimes they unravel through success and accomplishment. We meet our goals and gain our ends, but they prove ultimately unsatisfying. They are like cotton candy, big and beautiful with a burst of instant sweetness, but once consumed, they melt into air and do not sustain. We look for the next big thing, like a restless addict. The big, proud house feels empty and cold.

The widow is a model of vulnerable trust. With no status and power of her own, she trusts God alone for her simple needs. Within her modest boundaries the Spirit maintains her essential needs with gentle grace.

Centering Prayer is a widow's prayer. When we practice Centering, we gently let go of all of our distracting thoughts and plans and worries. We narrow our boundaries to a willing consent to the presence and activity of God, within and without. When the false self tries to erect it's proud houses, we let them go, returning to the gentle poverty of a sacred word. Instead of assailing heaven with our possessive thoughts and personal agendas, we let the Spirit pray from within our silence. The indwelling Spirit prays faithfully and continually.

When the Spirit dwells within a person, from the moment that person has become prayer, the Spirit never leaves them. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray within us. Whether we are asleep or awake, from then on prayer never departs from our soul. Whether we are eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else we may be doing, even if we are in the deepest of sleeps, the incense of prayer is rising without effort in our heart. Prayer never again deserts us. In every moment of our life, even when it appears to have ceased, prayer is secretly at work within is continuously.

One of the Fathers, the bearers of Christ, teaches that prayer is the silence of the pure in heart; for their very thoughts are the movements of God. The movements of the heart and the intellect that have been purified become voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to the hidden God.
(Isaac of Nineveh, from The Ascetical Treatises; quoted by Robert Atwell, Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury Press, 1999, p.296.)

Wednesday, May 30, 2012 -- Week of Proper 3, Year Two
Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc), Mystic and Soldier, 1431

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer, p. 969)
Psalms 38 (morning) // 119:25-48 (evening)
Proverbs 17:1-20
1 Timothy 3:1-16
Matthew 12:43-50

[Go to http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html for an online version of the Daily Office including today's scripture readings.]

There is something disappointing, but understandable, that happens when we move from reading the letters from the apostle Paul to reading letters like 1 Timothy, written by a later generation's leader invoking Paul's authority. We sense the development of a different focus and vision and structure.

In Paul's letters we feel the tension and excitement of the expected imminent return of Jesus. Long-term institutions like marriage have little interest to Paul since they are part of the passing age; Paul encourages sexual passion to be diverted into passion for the Lord. Paul welcomes charismatic leadership -- let anyone with gifts use them for the common good. Women host churches and have active leadership. Faith is a verb. Faith is our active trust in God, who has made us righteous, who gives us the gift of an intimate, alive relationship with God in the living Christ. There is a new energy and vision in Paul that is dynamic and expansive.

In the letters to Timothy and Titus we see the church at a later point of evolution. Jesus is no longer expected to return at any moment, but we celebrate his remembered appearance, as we await with patient endurance his eventual postponed manifestation "at the right time." It is a time of institutional focus -- the time of making by-laws and constitutions. Leaders are less charismatic and more respectable. Marriage is the honored estate for enfolding passion and raising children. Faith is a noun, a collection of traditions to be guarded and preserved. Women are silenced. There is a defensive establishment of order and authority to protect and administer the institutional church.

Some evolution is necessary when any movement becomes an institution. When vision becomes established norms, there is a needed entrenchment of structure and order for the continuation of the work and identity.

Healthy institutions need both kinds of leaders -- the visionary and the orderly. Often they exist side-by-side with one another, usually with some tension. "Respond now to this compelling need!" cries the visionary, connecting the original spirit of Jesus' calling to the circumstances of the present age. "How will we pay for it and maintain it?" asks the orderly leader who creates foundation and structure for an ongoing ministry of presence and service.

There is a cross-like creative tension when we live in visionary institutions like the church, as we hold on to both demands. Too much energetic vision creates chaos. Too much orderly structure make a deadened institution.

How can structure serve vision? How can institution promote inspiration and service? How can tradition support renewal? That is our constant quest in the church. We see the same dynamic in our political and social institutions, even in our marriages. Energy and stability. Innovation and continuity. Risk and endurance. Nearly anything with life and durability needs both vision and order.

This [i.e. the infant Christ] is a child who cannot bear to be separated from his mother. We have seen that God is not ashamed to be our God, to be identified with the one who is involved with us; here, though, it is as if he is not merely unashamed but positively shameless in his eagerness, longing to embrace and be embraced. It is not simply that God will deign not to mind our company: rather he is passionate for it. The image of God’s action we are presented with here is of a hungry love.
Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things: Praying with the Icons of the Virgin (Franklin, WI and Chicago: Sheed & Ward, 2002), p. 25.

These words come from a meditation about a type of icon called the Virgin of Loving Kindness, or the Eleousa, the most famous example of which is perhaps the Virgin of Vladamir. Williams presents the hunger of the Christ child as a revelation of God’s passionate love for humanity. Perhaps God longs for us just as much as we long for God, not out of any lack but out of a superabundance of love in all its forms. Notwithstanding the powerful insights of the theologies of agape, God also has an eminent capacity for friendship and desire. The basis for these loves which ground human community and intimate partnership is found forever in the blessed exchange among the three persons of the divine Trinity, who give and receive eternally within the divine society in which “none is afore or after other.” In the mystery of the Incarnation, this love spills out to bless the world tangibly, revealing in an especially vivid way the inner dynamic of God’s fruitful love that leads God to create and redeem the world in freedom. What is more, in Christ, God’s love becomes our love, as love is returned for love and we are swept up, in the grace of the Spirit, into Christ’s own relationship with the One he called “Abba, Father.”

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog