Love your Enemies: Thoughts in the Aftermath of the Terrorist Attack in Paris

The Republican Party’s presidential candidates have started to promote policies against Muslims that resemble what Nazi Germany did to Jews during World War II.  In the US and Canada, there have been violent attacks, including physical, emotional, and rhetorical attacks, against Arab people, Muslims, and people presumed to be Arab or Muslim.  I have read stories of white-supremacist groups, neo-Nazi groups, TEA party groups, and government officials protesting near Mosques, oftentimes armed, and spreading racist vitriol and hate over the Internet.  Various US states, and the Republican controlled US Congress, with Democratic votes, have sought to limit and close off the process of resettling refugees from Syria seeking to escape the ongoing civil war; never mind that the process of gaining asylum in the US for refugees is very difficult.  Since the terrorist attacks in Paris, people have given into their fears.  Not only the fear that fighters from the Islamic State will follow the refugees coming from Syria, but the same fear that has been gripping the US since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the fear that somehow Muslims are seeking to destroy the US in one form or another; bearing in mind that the majority of terrorist attacks in the US since 2001 have been by white American men.

These are my initial thoughts.  Those fears are ridiculous.  The racist, xenophobic, and fascist attitudes people and politicians have been spewing since the Paris attacks are reprehensible and need to stop, now. 

Most importantly, and I think it needs to be said above all else, and though it applies to the refugees trying to get out of harms way or those living in North America and Europe seeking a peaceful life, it also applies even more so for the people who have chosen to fight for or have no choice other than to live under the Islamic State.  They are human.  They are not monsters, they are not robots, and they are no more evil than the rest of us.  Yes, some within the Islamic State have chosen to do evil, either by choice or because of fear, but that does not make them any less human than you or I.  Should those who have caused harm in the Syrian civil war be held responsible for their crimes?  Yes, but we should remember that those who have caused harm are not only to be found in the Islamic State, but in every nation that has chosen to take an active role in exacerbating the violence in the Middle East, but even those military and governmental leaders are human, no better, and no worse than the rest of us. 

As I Christian, I believe that every PERSON bears the image of God, regardless of who they are, what they look like, or what they believe.  Every act of violence, no matter if it is physical, emotional, or rhetorical, distorts and injures that image.  Whether it is done face-to-face, or through pushing a button a thousand miles away; whether it is one person being harmed, or a million, it is all the same.  It is easy to say that God loves us, and that God blesses us; but God loves the people who live under the Islamic State too.  In every land, in every nation, when someone is harmed, whether in the Syrian civil war or elsewhere, I cannot help but believe that God weeps, and we are all diminished as a people when a single life is lost to such mindless bloodshed. 

People have to break the cycle of violence against people.  It is for this reason that I believe that the people living in the Islamic State are human beings just as I am, and no matter what, God too loves them.        

What is in a Revision? A Response to Imagining a New Prayer Book

Before I get into the bulk of this post, I feel a few preliminary notes are in order.

About a week ago, there was a discussion for the Alumni Convocation at Church Divinity School of the Pacific regarding the resolution at the prior General Convention of the Episcopal Church to begin the process of revising the Book of Common Prayer.  The Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, the Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics, led the discussion, and she brought up a number of possible places to consider revision for the Prayer Book.  Following this, the Living Church, an Episcopal Church blog, ran a summary of that discussion.  Many of the responses that I have seen on social media about this presentation have been largely negative.  It almost seems as if people are afraid Ruth Meyers is going to take their Prayer Books away from them.  This is utterly ridiculous.  She was one of my professors at CDSP, and though we might not always agree on everything, I respect the work that she does and how she pushes students beyond their liturgical comfort zones. 

Nevertheless though, I decided after reading the Living Church article to actually watch the presentation.  I feel that this presentation and discussion can be one of many good starting points for a discussion about Prayer Book revision, and so I have decided to write a response to this discussion.  As a genuine millennial in the Episcopal Church (I am twenty-six years old), should the Prayer Book actually be revised, I will likely see it and use it for a good length of my adult life, so I want to have discussions as to what that revision might look like, because I will have to live with it.

I do want to acknowledge though that The Rev Dr Ruth Meyers has substantial more education than I do on the subject, liturgical studies is area of expertise, and I am a Masters student in religious studies.  She is more qualified to speak on the history, function, and theology of liturgy.  What I want though is a discussion about the meanings and implication of Prayer Book revision from the presentation. 

Finally, though many have read the post on the Living Church about the discussion, I highly recommend that you actually watch the presentation yourself.  You get a much clearer vision of what being discussed, and a greater appreciation for her knowledge and insight into Anglican Liturgy.

Here is the link to the discussion: https://vimeo.com/141953466

Onto the post:

One of the things that I have noticed about the Episcopal Church is its tendency to assume that the problems of the church and the world can be solved with one form of liturgy or another.  Pastoral, theological, ecclesial, ethical, and social issues are addressed through liturgy; women’s issues, LGBT issues, race and ethnic issues, economic issues, environmental issues can be addressed through liturgy; life events such as the passing away of a pet can be marked by liturgy.  The Episcopal Church loves liturgy, and it especially loves the Eucharist, and that drive for Christ’s Body and Blood.  Though we have this love of liturgy, and though the 1979 Book of Common Prayer refocused the centrality of the Eucharist within the Episcopal Church, the theology of liturgy is not properly understood.  The lack of connection to not only the historical patterns of liturgy, but also particularly the lack of connection to the proper theology of the Eucharist, is what lies at the problem of the Episcopal Church’s addiction to liturgy.  Namely, we see it as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.  We worship God not to affect the material world, but in praise and thanksgiving for God’s mighty acts in the creation and in the redemption of this world and us.  This is reflected in the misunderstanding of the role of “context” within the life of the church, and the purpose and function of liturgy for Christians.

One theme brought up in the presentation at CDSP is the idea that context matters.  Every generation of the Book of Common Prayer from 1549 in England to the Prayer Books of the various provinces of the Anglican Communion reflect a contextual understanding of the Christian life within the culture and traditions of particular regions or nation-states.  Indeed, Anglicanism seeks to be grounded within the context of the nation to which the church is present in.  However, Thomas Cranmer and the reformers of the sixteenth century like Richard Hooker, John Jewel, and others did not see the Church of England as merely a sect that just happened to pop out of no-where in England at that time, but as the historical Catholic Church in England that has its foundation through history to the time of Christ.  And though they sought the Church of England to be English, they desired to be rooted in Scripture and Tradition first and foremost.  That is why they were so keen on removing those things that they thought distorted the true history and tradition of the Church.  The universal then takes on forms of the local over a very gradual period of time as communities understand the nature of that universal tradition.  In a similar way Christ, the Son of God, always existed, and then entered into human history as Jesus through his incarnation as he took human form upon himself.  Though the Son of God is and always will be eternal, Jesus the human being did not exist until a particular point in history. 

If we put the context before the universality, we end up with a situation where the tail wags the dog. 

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer opened the door in a number of ways for people and communities to be creative with the liturgy.  Though my experience has shown me that very few parishes actively exercise that creativity to its fullest extent.  Most of the time the liturgies in question are Rite II Eucharists with an agenda.  However, when that creativity is fully exercised, it often times is highly problematic.  In hindsight, I think the offer for communities (and priests especially) to have that “creative” option was a mistake.  The intent was for communities to form liturgies that are contextual to their needs, but it has the byproduct of removing of that community from the larger body of the church catholic.  When a church gathers to worship God, it is not an isolated event, but an event where the whole community is drawn up before the very throne of God with all communities past, present, and future.  We worship with the One Liturgy before God where Christ is our Great High Priest.  When we decide to be “creative,” it can appear that we are worshiping our own awesomeness rather than God.  Sure, we can invoke God all we want in the prayers we write, but part of the Christian life is discipline, and part of that discipline is joining with our wider family to worship God because at the end of the day, it is not about us, but about God alone.

This, more than anything, is why we ought to say the Nicene Creed at our services, it tells the story of our faith, and unites us with not only every Anglican on the planet, but the whole of the church universal.  We recognize that we are not alone in our worship, but that we are part of a great story that flows from God through history.  The Creed is a symbol of our faith.

That is not to say that the specific issues and context ought not be ignored.  Issues like the environment and greater inclusivity within the life of the church are important and desperately need to be addressed.  But a Prayer Book revision with such contextual focuses, and with greater invitations for creativity will not solve the greater problems of the Episcopal Church at hand.  This leads to the second issue with the Episcopal Church and liturgy, misunderstanding the function of it. 

In the first round of audience discussion a very good question is raised.  To paraphrase, you have the liturgy; you have the lament for environmental sin, and then what?  It was a very good question, and one that did not receive much of an answer.  This underlines though that we in the Episcopal Church seem to act as if liturgy will somehow solve our problems.  Whether we use our creative energies to cry out for our sins towards creation, or seek to find new and expansive language for God, at the end of the day the underlying problems are not going to be solved by our liturgical language or prayers.  This is not to say that I am questioning the efficaciousness of prayer, far from it, but I am using this to point out two things. 

First, this approach to liturgy shrugs off our own responsibility for sin.  The presentation mentions the EOW Confession where we confess not only for our own sins, but those committed “on our behalf,” and Ruth cites the procurement and burning of fossil fuels for energy, actions we are not directly doing, but are benefiting from nonetheless, as an example of it.  It is a nice sentiment, but that is all this is.  The problem of this is that though people may say this confession, seemingly individuals or communities are doing little to no action because there is no explicit naming of the sin within this general confession, and no penance being directed before absolution is given.  This is why I generally do not like the General Confession in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, it lets people off the hook, and the EOW Confession makes it worse.  If we genuinely want people to care about the environment in the Episcopal Church, prayer alone will not magically cause our church to disinvest in fossil fuels, we have to take concrete action as penance for our sins.  From the top down, we all should confess, and then do things within our power to try amend our lives.  In fact, if we genuinely care about this as a Church, then bishops and priests ought to use the disciplinary rubrics and actually force changes of behavior to those of us living in sin, while also making changes on how energy is procured and used in dioceses and in the national church offices.  We have the power to make a difference; we cannot just have a liturgy and be done with it. 

This has led us into a particular trap as the Episcopal Church, we use liturgy as a masking issue for the problems we see within and without the Church.  It seems the knee-jerk response to an issue is either to make a liturgy about something, or modify the liturgy to respond to something, when really we need to look elsewhere for the problem.  An example of this is the push to have expansive language within our worship when it comes to referencing God.  On the surface, this is all well and good; there are plenty of images and metaphors of God in the Old and New Testament that are barely touched in liturgical texts.  However, we need to be honest here, most of those images and metaphors are still grounded in a masculine framework, and even the images and metaphors from Scripture that are feminine are still functioning in that masculine framework.  What ends up happening is that we end up debating over what expansive language is and what it looks like, while leaving the root of the problem unaddressed: there are a lot of people in the Episcopal Church who are not being represented within the Church.  Yes, patriarchal language may be a symptom of the problem, but avoiding saying “God the Father” in the liturgy or Prayer book will do nothing to change the fact that the House of Bishops is disproportionately male, that full-time rectorships are disproportionately male, that queer discrimination is considered acceptable in multiple diocese despite pushes from General Convention, and that on the whole, the Episcopal Church is very white, and has historically been associated with white and upper-class peoples in the US, and has a troubled history with the Indigenous communities of America and the African-American community.  Changing the liturgy to be more inclusive might give the appearance of solving the internal issues of the Episcopal Church, but unless we actually take time to genuinely tackle these structural and cultural issues, the liturgical revisions will be for naught.

Second, it assumes that people outside the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion will care AT ALL what we do with our liturgical life.  Much of the discourse throughout the presentation desires to open the rites and practices to be more accessible to the general public.  Things like opening up the service of the blessing of Holy Chrism, reimagining the place of the Nicaea Creed in the liturgy, and entertaining the idea of so-called “open table” might appear to make the church more welcoming.  It seems however that it humorously presumes that if we just make a few changes, the church will experience a deluge of people who can now understand God and were kept away by arcane language and practices.  I hate to break it to those of us in the Episcopal Church—we are not that important.  Sure, we like to think we are an established church like our English counterparts, but we are not.  No matter what we do with our Prayer Book, it will only affect us.  We might think we are special, that our Prayer Book revision might be that elusive Vatican III that so many want the Roman Catholic Church to have in order to become a liberal church.  If Christendom is truly gone, then we no longer operate at the center of society.  We now are at the margins, and we are shrinking.  We must be humble, we are not that special, and our weirdness of language, thought, and symbols, some of which are open to the public, some of which are hidden and secret, are our greatest gifts.  The weirdness is what gives life to the church, but it is a weirdness that we must grow into to transform us.  If we do not allow for that weirdness to transform us, when we say the words of the Creed or anything else, it will come off as hollow, dry, and boring.  And more than anything else, our sitting on our laurels of presumed importance and not being transformed by Christ to embody this weirdness has led the Episcopal Church to be a boring place. 

I am convinced that boredom has led more to the decline of the Church than anything else, more than the presumed liberalness that led to ordination of women or acceptance of LGBT.  Those that left for those reasons got the media attention because they were loud, but how many thousands have left because they found something better to do, and left without saying a word, and without us noticing.  They will not come if we are hip, they will not come if we are simple.  We have to be ourselves over and above anything else, we have to accept and embrace the weirdness, the same weirdness of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the Saints.  We have to learn and grow into it to learn over the course of YEARS that our actions, symbols, and words have meaning, and we must be willing to educate others and ourselves about it over the course of YEARS.  Changing the Prayer Book will not make the Episcopal Church important again, it will not draw people in with new contextual worship, and it will most certainly change a culture of boredom in the Church.     

What concerns me the most about General Convention calling for a revision to the Prayer Book is that it has triggered a sort-of Game of Thrones style contest to see who can have influence over what.  To be sure, every revision of the Book of Common Prayer has seen people attempting to influence the revision to suite their own needs, such as Martin Bucer with the 1552 Book of Common Prayer.  I must however ask the question, is this really the best time for Prayer Book revision?  For all the strengths of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and with its emphasis on Baptism and the Eucharist, I think we can celebrate that the liturgical life of the Episcopal Church has been reoriented towards the traditional practices of the church universal.  What has not occurred though is the full and complete restoration of the theology of Baptism and the Eucharist.  We see them as tools for us to use for our own ends rather than the great Sacraments and Mysteries of God.  If we say we believe that Baptism is participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, so much more of God’s vision of our lives should flow from that into every corner of our being.  If we say we believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, so much more of God’s vision of the Church should flow from that into every corner of the Episcopal Church.  Though many parishes stick to the Prayer Book and do the quiet work of the church without disturbing the waters, there are those who want to push for more changes and faster (and those clerics probably avoid using the Prayer Book all together) and yet in that rush much is left behind. 

We have not yet fully realized the implications of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer on the Episcopal Church, and therefore I believe a revision for the Prayer Book at this time is ill advised.  Instead, the time has come for a new Oxford Movement to occur in the Episcopal Church, a movement to help us recognize that we are not some Protestant sect started as a consequence of the American Revolution, or the by-product of Henry VIII wanting a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that stretches from the United States through time to the Apostles, and ultimately to Jesus Christ himself, the one who was, who is, and is to come, the one, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, to whom we owe our adoration and glory towards.

Driving away our own Snakes: A Sermon on the Feast of S. Patrick of Ireland

1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
Psalm 97:1-2,7-12
Matthew 28:16-20

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

There is a lot of evil in the world.  We see it all around us: greed, corruption, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, anger, hatred, and pride.  It can sometimes be overwhelming.  What is especially be disheartening is that we hear so many sermons these days that call out these evils, that denounces them, and offer the hope of change and reconciliation.  With so many prophetic voices that exist, surely the evil around us should be brought down by the power of our words, and with the power of our sentiment.  Sadly, it seems this is not the case.  In many we preach ways to the choir, to people who know or accept that the evil is there, that is beyond them, and that deny they contribute to it in any way.  It never seems though to truly transform the world around us.

We are in the bright sadness of this Season of Lent.  Through our prayer and fasting we are called to examine ourselves and our surroundings and work to strive to become closer to God so that we may be prepared for the Paschal Feast.  We like the idea of Lent, we like the sound of Lent, but if our way of proclaiming the Gospel is any indication of how we actually behave and act as Christians, it reveals the truth of how we relate to Lent—namely, we do not like it.  We like to shy away from the personal or individual aspects of the faith for the corporate.  In our own little ways we make it possible to deny our culpability with evil, we are uncomfortable with singular professions of faith, we avoid “I believe” and replace it with “we believe” for the Creed, we like confessions that speak of “the evil done on our behalf” because perhaps in some ways it dulls the bitterness of acknowledging the “the evil we have done” or even more so “the evil I have done.”  This is not to say that we should not have a common faith, for indeed as Anglicans we have a Book of Common Prayer.  Nor that corporate and communal sin do not exist—they do.  But too often it seems that those of us who would identify as progressive Christians tend to overlook the little picture in favor of the big picture, to speak out against the great corporate sins without examining or acknowledging how we participate in those very sins we denounce.

The devil, my friends, however is in the details, and we may not like to acknowledge how we make it easier for the Devil to work in this world. Lent stares us back in the face and says to us and to our prideful boasting—so what?  Yes, we call out evil, but we ourselves are still sinners.  We still have that evil serpent that whispered lies into the ears of Adam and Eve coiling around us, and telling us lies that keep ourselves from acknowledging that fact.

We like to follow Jesus command, to spread the Gospel to all nations, but do we even believe in that very Gospel ourselves?  And if we do not believe in that Gospel, then what is the point of it?

I am a sinner, there are times believing the Gospel is near impossible, there are times that I have said racist, sexist, and homophobic things, I hide behind my white and male privilege to escape my own faults, there are times that I accidentally leave my AC on too long, I occasionally toss plastic bottles and cans in the trash can because I am too lazy to recycle, some of the stocks I own are in companies that are less than ideal.  I need Christ for myself as much as the world needs Christ to turn away from sin.

Today is the Feast of S. Patrick of Ireland.  There is far too much that can be said about this much beloved Saint—the Patron of Ireland, the Apostle to the Irish, the cultural icon of children of the Irish Diaspora in the United States and beyond, and the person whose Feast is celebrated by many as an excuse to over drink.  And yet in and amidst the biography of the old curmudgeony saint from the 400s, I am still drawn to the old stories of Patrick.  Namely, because of S. Patrick, the snakes of Ireland were driven away.  

To be sure, this is a myth of S. Patrick, there are many myths associated with him.  Ireland is an island at a high northern latitude that is far too cold, dark, and wet for most reptiles to survive.  This was a story to help explain why Ireland lacks snakes.  Though as with any myth, there are deeper truths to be had if we look beyond the historical reality.  Myths, parables, fables, and legends are all part of how we learn about ourselves, the world around us, and God.  They are powerful because they strike that part of the brain that comes to life to imagine new possibilities and realities—simply put, we all love a good story.

Patrick came to Ireland, and in the midst of his mission, drove the snakes away.  In his ministry, he preached, he called people to accept the baptism of repentance he built churches and monasteries that still dot the landscape of Ire, he rejected payment from people to be baptized or ordained, he refused to seek the protection of local chiefs and kings in his work in exchange for compromising on the Gospel, he faced imprisonment and violence, but in the end, the Gospel was heard and received in all Ireland.  The old gods of Ireland, the old devils and snakes of Ireland, were driven away.

The message that Patrick preached was not his own, nor was it a version of the Gospel that was reworked to become appealing to the people of Ireland.  It was the Gospel that Jesus Christ gave his one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church to proclaim, a Gospel of faith, a Gospel of God’s love for us, a Gospel of repentance of our sins, a Gospel of Resurrection into new life.  It is not always an easy message, sometimes it is downright bitter because it forces us to confront our fallen state and to turn away from those actions and ways of being and thinking that cause us to sin.  It calls us to make ourselves as individuals humble before God Almighty.  We must recognize that we cannot seek to please others with the Gospel, but as S. Paul the Apostle said, strive to please only God with our proclamation.  According to S. Gregory of Nyssa in his biography on the Life of Moses, much like the bitter water at Marah was made sweet by the wood Moses placed in it, so too does the Gospel become sweet because of Christ and the wood of the Cross, the wood that defeated the power of sin and death, and restores us to new life.  The serpent of old in the Garden is put to shame as through the power of the cross, we are restored both in image and in likeness of God.

Patrick called the people of Ireland to join Jesus Christ’s one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church through Baptism.  Though there have been twists and turns throughout history, invasions, reformations, dispersion, oppression, and unification, the Church that Patrick called the people of Ireland to is the same Church that we are a part of NOW.  We are a part of something greater than ourselves, than this chapel, than this diocese, than this Episcopal Church, and this Anglican Communion.  The liturgy we celebrate is the image of the liturgy before the throne of God, and Patrick calls us just as he called Ireland to turn and orient ourselves to Christ—the Christ within us, the Christ behind us, the Christ before us, the Christ beside us, the Christ beneath us, the Christ above us;

But ultimately the Christ who is not us.

We are not Christ, we are not God, but through the Gospel we are capable of being restored to that original image and likeness of the Divine.

Light in the Dark--Gallarus Oratory

Therefore, it is fitting that the Feast of S. Patrick falls in this season of Lent.  We are reminded to orient ourselves and bow down before God.  It is only through the power of God that we can fully embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Through prayer, fasting, and genuine confession of sin, we turn away from the power of the Devil, from the serpent that calls us through sin to commune with him, and we come before the awesome might of God.  By shedding our own evil and our own sin, and by becoming beacons of God’s light within the world, we can dispel the night that eats away at the souls of humanity.  We too can follow the example of S. Patrick and shine God’s light in defiance of the powers of the world and the old gods the world worships.  The snakes of this world will flee before the radiance that comes from our prayers, our fasting, and our confessions.

If we strip away our own sins, we bear witness to the True and Living God.  Others will follow that light that shines through us and come to God.



My friends, I am a sinner, I ask your prayers of forgiveness as we all walk along in the bright sadness of Lent towards the light of Christ and the Paschal Feast.

Amen

We do not shape liturgy, liturgy shapes us.

One of the many tasks that I have at my seminary is to take part in planning the weekly community night liturgies that are celebrated in our chapel.  Week after week, a group of seminarians come together with members of the staff and faculty to plan a liturgy including its prayers, music, and movement.  It is a practice to help seminarians to learn how to plan and celebrate liturgies in their future parishes.  It also is a chance to expose seminarians to more liturgical and musical resources that hopefully can be of service to them in their future ministries.  On the whole, I think this is a positive experience, but there are certain dangers that come from such a thing.

Protestantism, and broadly speaking many Western and some Eastern Christian traditions in the twentieth century began processes of reevaluating and reexamining how they worship.  Certain things like accessibility, lay participation, and overall praxis were discussed and debated.  Older and ancient liturgical forms and documents were reexamined as a means to shed light on modern practice.  Some reforms that came into play were minor and tepid, and others quite extreme.  Some sought to return to a glorious past of liturgy that may or may not have actually existed, some sought to modernize and reform the liturgy so as to have it be contextualized into a post-modern society, some wanted to reflect on the documents and writings of the past and make certain reforms that can coincide with other developments over the centuries, and others merely wanted minor reforms that would not alter too much of their practices.

One of the oft-stated things is that the liturgy is the work of the people.  Though this is partially true, it is actually linguistically and theologically incorrect.  Liturgy, or leitourgia (λειτουργία), is more properly understood as work done for the people, or done on behalf of the people.  In a Christian context, the liturgy is the offering or sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered by the Church to God on behalf of the faithful of the Church.  Nevertheless, despite the nuancing, the popular understanding of liturgy continues to be that of “the work of the people,” and this continues to influence our relationship with liturgy as Christians.

One of the troubling things that I think is a by-product of this misunderstanding of liturgy is the formation of many liturgies by people and communities that seemingly reflect their own image rather than the image of the divine worship in Heaven.  What I mean by that is that the priorities of these liturgies seem to be off.  Instead of them placing God at the center of the liturgy, and instead of worshipping God through the Sacraments, prayers, and hymns, we instead see the centrality of certain ideas and concepts within liturgy, and the worshipping of those ideas and concepts as the central act of the liturgy.

Of course, the immediate things that come to mind with this are the clown masses, U2charists, and Macklemore mass, but there are also things that are more subtle.  Sometimes we like to have liturgies that highlight diversity, unity, hospitality and welcome, family, youth, children, and other such things.  These are good things to embody within our community, but these are things that our communities ought to strive to embody, not things we hang upon the liturgy as if the liturgy were a tree that we hang ornaments on.

One of the things that appears to be lost in our liturgical renewal over the past few years is that in our rush to try new and interesting things, we have forgotten that we do not shape liturgy, liturgy shapes us.  Within the liturgy, we engage with the all of history as time and space collapse down into the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus Christ.  We join with angels and saints before the throne of God where we offer a sacrifice of praise, and share in Christ’s Body and Blood.  In this we see our humanity, our frailty, and our salvation.  It shapes us by joining us into the Divine History, and by deifying us so that we may be restored completely into the image and likeness of God.  This happens each and every liturgy, and yet each and every liturgy is different in its own way.  This is because in the liturgy, God causes the Earth and Heaven, the temporal and eternal to coincide in the same place in time.  It is everyplace, it is no place, and it is the only utopia we will ever encounter within our lives.

This is not to say there cannot be variation within liturgies.  Beyond different hymns, prayers, and Anaphoras, there are also Feast Days and Votive liturgies that help expand our understanding of that Divine History as it has interacted with holy men and women, the Saints of God, and events where God’s hand has moved in our history.  What happens though when we place human things as the centerpiece of the liturgy, we not only fashion a liturgy that exists solely in our own image, but we run the risk of worshipping ourselves rather than God.  We can try to frame it as the God who “welcomes all” or “laughs with all” but we forget that God does not just meet people where they are at, but desires to take them somewhere else, beyond the bounds and scope of human imagination of what is possible.  Human shaped liturgies do not do this because they do not demand anything from us, whereas liturgy that focuses on God demands something from us.

In the end, the liturgy, we should not hang our own agenda onto it, but let it wash over us and transform us into being that can embody the love of Christ in the world.

St...Charles Stuart? An addendum three years later

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about the merits of calling King Charles I of England a Saint.  I recognize fully he was a lousy king.  But a lousy king can still, even in their final moments, be a faithful Christian.  To read the initial blog post, click the link below:

http://smokingthurible.blogspot.com/2012/01/stcharles-stuart.html

I have been in seminary now for nearly three years now.  My own faith and theology have been transformed as I have delved deeper and deeper into the traditions and practices of the Church.  I have learned much, I have changed , and I have grown.  In reflecting upon the state of the Episcopal Church, I find that one thing that can help us maintain our faithfulness to God, the Gospel, and to the Church that Christ called to be is to celebrate the Feast of S. Charles, King and Martyr.  I would like to expand on my initial thoughts of that earlier blog post.  

I am a proponent of what could be called the cult of S. Charles, King and Martyr.  I have come to believe that veneration of him, along with all the Saints, is an important part of Christian life.  They pray with us in our needs, in our joys, and in our distresses.  Yes, all Christians are saints by virtue of their baptism, but certain women and men throughout history are lifted up by the Church Catholic as faithful witnesses and exemplars of Christ.  

Here is another example of an unlikely saint, my own patron saint, S. Genesius.  S. Genesius did not exhibit Christian faith until he was converted to the faith a matter of days, maybe even hours, before his death by the Emperor Diocletian.  He was an actor who spent his career mocking Christianity on stage, and yet during one performance, came to believe in Christ, and openly desired baptism in the midst of the performance.  His embrace of the faith, and unwillingness to recant, while on stage with the Emperor in the audience, lead his to his death.  I believe that even if a person has sinned greatly in life, their willingness to be faithful to Christ in death outweighs the sins they committed, whether that be for S. Genesius or S. Charles.  

So many of our figures in our Kalendars like that of Holy Women, Holy Men that we are called to commemorate are problematic.  Some, like John Calvin, would be aghast at being listed as a saint in a Kalendar of a Catholic Church.  Some, like William Mayo, may have done some good in the world, but are lacking in any sense of Christian virtue that draws people towards belief in Jesus Christ.  Some, like Fredrick Douglas, were people who fought against injustice in their midst, but I sometimes wonder if we include them to assuage our own guilt about how we as the Episcopal Church contribute to structural racism and other forms of oppression both in the past and in the present.  Finally, some, like Gregorio Aglipay, deny fundamental theology of the Christian faith like the Trinity.  

Though there are many other examples as to why there may have been some poor thought in the inclusion of certain persons into the Kalendar, the most troubling aspect is the lack of a theology of sainthood present within Holy Women, Holy Men.  In essence, just because someone is a good person, did some great things while alive, or makes us feel good about ourselves, does not necessarily mean they were a saint.  The question should be whether or not this person demonstrated in their life and in their death a faithfulness to Jesus Christ, and served as a living example of Jesus Christ that leads others to him.  Furthermore, does a local community within the Church raise the person up as someone to commemorate as an example of a life of faithfulness to Jesus and to the Church.  If the memory and legacy of this person continues to bear good fruit, then we as a Church universal should join in that commemoration.  

S. Charles fulfills the standards for sainthood in so many ways.  Yes, he may have been a poor king, but he laid down his life for the Church before the powers of the world.  He could have easily chosen to give into the demands of the Puritans, and abolished the episcopacy in England.  Christianity in England would have probably become a Reformed-Protestant sect like those in Switzerland, the Netherland, or Scotland.  Instead, the choice to lay down his life serves as a faithful witness to Christ and to the Apostolic Church he called into being.  Yes, under Cromwell there was no Church of England, and officially no episcopacy, and so one could say his death was meaningless.  But the bishops survived, and they kept ordaining people, and when Charles II returned to England, amid much fanfare of the people, there were those who kept the faith and the legacy of the Apostles alive to restore the fullness of the Church of England.  He is remembered and celebrated on the Kalendar of the Church of England and in other communities within the Anglican Communion.  His martyrdom ensured that the Catholic Church in England would survive, and by extension, ensured that the Catholicism of the Anglican Communion that would emerge would be a faithful witness to Christ.  

Speaking as a member of the Episcopal Church of the United States, I do not believe that there would be an Episcopal Church of the United States were it not for the martyrdom of S. Charles, King and Martyr.  

Let us join with our Anglicans sisters and brothers in celebrating the Feast of S. Charles, King and Martyr.

Drop the Routine, Follow a Star: A Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:1-12

St. Christopher's Episcopal Church
Kailua, HI

“We observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage."

May I speak to you in the name of the true and living God, +Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Well, this has been a lovely Holiday season hasn’t it?  Christmas has come and gone, New Years has come and gone.  Decorations, if they haven’t been taken down already, have begun to be taken down.  In-fact, the displays for Valentine’s Day are being put up.  Have you thought about what you might be giving your significant other for Valentine’s Day yet?  A friend of mine in the UK posted on Facebook that his local Tesco, a large supermarket chain in the UK, has already put out Easter candy for people to buy, even though Easter falls on the far off date of April 5th this year.  People are back at work, and schools will be in session soon.  This is something I am too familiar with as I leave on Thursday to return to my own seminary.

Happy Easter?!?!?

Our lives have moved on.  We have things to do, places to go, people to see, jobs to do, bills to pay, and we move forward looking forward with our work looking forward to the next three-day weekend.  To be sure though, with so much activity over the holiday season, I am sure we are all happy to allow for the calmness of the day-to-day routine to return.

God has become incarnate in the world by the birth of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the hope of all the ages, that which prophets, priests, sages, and philosophers pointed to as coming in centuries past.  Mary accepted her role to bear the Christ-child, Joseph took Mary into his home, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and now life has moved on for them.  Even with a newborn child, the life and routine of the family can be established easily—usually around the cycle of a crying baby.

One day, or perhaps one evening, a few years after the birth of Christ, three random blokes show up at the home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem.  They are dressed in a strange manner; they look somewhat out of place among people in Eastern Mediterranean communities.  After introducing themselves and telling the befuddled family that they followed a star to their home (perhaps they spoke enough Greek or Aramaic to converse with Mary and Joseph), they come before their child, worship him, and then give Mary and Joseph gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the child.  I will presume they spent the night either in their home or in Bethlehem, and then head out the next day.

We dress this story up in very cute imagery and scenes that make it far more precious than it really is.  Imagine, in the midst of your routine, a bunch of strangers show up at your home, tell you they have been following a star, bust in, bow down before your child, and then toss very expensive gifts at you.

Of course, what is most interesting is not so much that the routine of Mary and Joseph was disturbed by the arrival of these strangers, but what would compel these strangers to drop everything in their lives, in their routine, and travel to Bethlehem following a star?  I think there are many mysteries to be uncovered here.

Did the wise men ever get lost along the way?

 Who were these wise men, these magi, these kings as we call them?  What does it mean that they come from the East?  What was it they are looking for?  How many were there?  These are questions that people have tossed around, scholars have developed some theories as to their origin, and there has been multiple depictions of them in art such as in song, poetry, painting, and sculpture.  We imagine there being three wise men, one for each gift.  Tradition even gives them names: Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior.  There are many stories that circulate around these figures, stories that have attempted to fill in the gaps of their lives.  Sure, when you look at the biblical text itself, there is no reason to assume there were just three wise men, no indication of their names, and no real sense of their origin.  

I think it might be helpful to frame these figures, these three wise men, through one of those particular depictions of them.  There is a novel called Lamb, written by Christopher Moore.  We are introduced to the wise men when a teenage Jesus and a childhood friend of his travel into Asia to learn why it was that the three wise men or magi came to Bethlehem, and perhaps to also learn Jesus’ destiny as the Messiah.  They encounter Balthazar in the mountains of Afghanistan, and he is a wise sage knowledgeable in Confucianism and Daoism, and a practitioner of the arcane science of alchemy.  They encounter Gaspar in a Buddhist monastery in China, a man who was considered by his followers and the local villagers to be a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being.  Finally, they encounter Melchior in India, a Vedic-yogi who practiced asceticism to reach Moksha, the escape from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Each of them, despite being so knowledgeable in their practices and being surrounded by everything they could want or need, material wealth, social wealth, or spiritual wealth, desired and sought something more.  It was that desire that caused them to drop everything and follow a star to seek what it was they perceived missing in their lives.

To be sure, this is a fictitious account, but I think it could be a helpful framing tool to understanding the magi and their motives.  They are clearly people who were wealthy, and had the means to travel far to Bethlehem.  In the ancient days, one required substantial wealth to afford animals and servants to carry the goods necessary to survive through the diverse terrain of Asia.  What drove them may have been that desire for something more, some greater knowledge, wisdom, understanding, or something else.  This is a natural part of the human condition, that drive for more is built into us through evolution.  It has been what has helped our species to survive, to gather during times of plenty to survive in times of famine.  But this condition can easily morph into greed or gluttony.  We desire more and more, despite having enough, and we seek to consume more and more, even when we ought to be full.

Perhaps the wise men had everything they could possibly need.  Maybe they were indeed respected figures, even enlightened.  Yet that same human desire for more drove them westward.  However, what they discovered was not some great font of wisdom, not some book with all the answers to their lives.  What they discovered was a child, the Christ, the only one who could fulfill all their desire and hunger.  Even though Jesus was still just a baby, probably no more than two years old, they saw something far greater than that child.  They witnessed God incarnate, present among us mortals, and all that Jesus would accomplish.

There is a thirteenth century hymn written by S. Thomas Aquinas that can help shape in our minds what it is that what may have gone through the minds of the magi:

Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
who thy glory hidest ‘neath these shadows mean;
lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed,
tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

Taste and touch and vision to discern thee fail;
faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whate’er the Son of God hath told;
what the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.

There is nothing more that they could do then to bow down in adoration before Christ.

That is what the power of Christ can do.  When we turn to him, when we orient our lives towards him, he keeps filling and filling and filling our wants, needs, and desires.  It is there that there can be contentment for who we are and what we have.  No amount of internal striving towards enlightenment or self-actualization can ever fulfill that human need for more, since that human instinct keeps growing despite our best efforts.  And yet the grace, mercy, and love of Jesus Christ towards us, towards God’s creation, fills those needs until it overflows like a pool in a storm, or a river overflowing its banks.  So, you better have a big appetite.

We will go about our day-to-day routines.  Perhaps we are content with our lives.  Perhaps we see others who in their day-to-day routine desire more in life.  Perhaps they have a desire to see that which is unseen  I would encourage you then to share with them the grace, mercy, and love of Jesus Christ with them.  Invite them to the Sunday Holy Eucharist service, invite them to share in this community.  Who knows, in time, they too might bow down in adoration before the Christ that is truly present in his Body and Blood upon the altar, and maybe they too may seek the waters of baptism.  We too can be that star that leads others to the Christ.

There are few guarantees of what might occur.  We are never promised a clear and concise answer to all our problems.  We may never become rich.  We may never become poor.  We may never be in the most ideal of circumstances.  However, bowing down in adoration before Christ, receiving the waters of baptism, eating his Body and Blood—all these things lead to a life filled with more wealth than even those of the top billionaires on Earth.  So go, be the star that leads others to Christ.  Share it with others, go tell it on the mountain to the crowds of people on Oahu.

O come, let us adore him.

Amen.