grandparents

I can relate to this story from Presbyterian Outlook:

A mother sent her child to Sunday School for the first time. When he came home the mother asked, "Did you like Sunday School?"

"I guess," he replied.
The mother asked, "Did you like your teacher?"
"She was all right."
"What's her name?"
"I don't know, but she is Jesus' grandmother."

"How do you know that?" the curious mother asked.
"Well, all she could talk about was Jesus, Jesus, Jesus...and she
kept showing us pictures of him."

what is retained?

I've been studying the Bible so long that it's exciting to me
when I come upon a new idea about a passage.
Barbara Reid, O.P., is professor of New Testament at Catholic Theological
Union in Chicago.
She writes that the words of Jesus from the cross in John 19.30 have
usually been rendered, "he gave up his spirit," indicating death.
But she says the verse should be translated, "he handed over the Spirit."
The Spirit (Holy Spirit) was 'handed over' at the moment of the death
of Jesus.
I've never heard that interpretation before.
It's an interesting idea.
I'll have to study it more.

Reid also gives a new rendering of John 20.23.
The usually translation is, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you
retain the sins of any, they are retained."
But she points out there the word 'sins' is not in the second half of the verse
in the Greek text (which is correct).
So, it should be translated, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain anyone, they are retained."
In other words, Jesus gives the apostles the power to forgive and to 'retain' everyone in the fellowship, just as Jesus himself didn't let a single sheep be lost.
(Of course she doesn't mention Judas.)
Again, I'll have to study this more.

New ideas are exciting!

[from the Jesuit magazine, America]



.

married popes

Pope Hormisdas (died 523) was a married pope.
He had a son named Silverius who later also became Pope (died 537).
The Catholic Church has not always had celibate priests, bishops and popes.
For the first thousand years of the Church, celibacy was not required.
There is a great shortage of priests in North America,
but the Catholic Church will not even consider changing the rules
and going back to earlier rules which allowed marriage among the clergy.

Churches are by nature conservative.
They don't change quickly.

I value Tradition and traditions.
I have a conservative streak in me.
However, I also have a liberal streak in me.
The radical nature of the kingdom of God as preached
and demonstrated by Jesus the Galilean
opens me up to change.

On questions of women's rights and gay rights
and scientific advancement
I tend to side with those who take radical stances.

At the same time, I feel the tug of the need to
affirm values from the past that are foundational.
The Bible says both good and bad things about tradition.
Jesus shot down some types of traditions because the traditions
themselves have gone beyond foundational truths.
On the other hand, Paul tells the churches to keep handing on
the traditions that were handed down to him.

I wonder what St. Hormisdas and St. Silverius would think
of the Catholic Church's intransigence today.
Paul said that celibacy is a good idea for some people,
but you have to be 'gifted' to live that way. (see 1 Cor. 7)
Maybe both Catholics and Protestants are imposing celibacy on
the wrong people.

church names

I was sharing with the session the other night some names of churches
that I found interesting...

There is the...

Barbecue Presbyterian Church, Olivia, NC

Waterproof PC, Waterproof, FL

Wampum PC, Wampum, PA

Cranks PC, Cranks, KY

Black Jack PC, Batesville, MS

Scrubgrass PC, Scranton, PA

Ideal PC, Ideal, SD

and...

Flippin Christian church, Flippin, AK

Leaners Chapel Chr. ch, Washington, NC

Morgue Chr Ch, Sewell, KY

***

Names are important.
People were first called 'Christians' in Antioch of Syria -- see Acts 11.

If you could rename our church right now, what would you call it?

A big flock

The preacher at the National Cathedral on May 3 preached on Jesus the Good Shepherd (the lectionary reading). He sets forth an ecumenical interfaith perspective. If you are interested in reading or listening to this perspective, see below.

Watch the sermon here.

Or read it below:

May 3, 2009 11:15 AM • Easter IV

Who’s In, Who’s Out?

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III

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Listen or download MP3 | Watch (Windows Media) | Sermon Archive

---

One of the riches of life in this National Cathedral is that it forces you to think about big questions. Just three months ago we hosted here the National Prayer Service following the presidential inauguration, and in it you could hear the voices of many faiths—Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox—all speaking and praying from their own traditions. They represented the broad sweep of religious practice in our nation.

America, you know, has become the most religiously diverse nation in the world. There are more Muslim Americans than there are Episcopalians by far, more Muslims than Jews. Los Angeles, according to Harvard scholar Diana Eck, is the most complex Buddhist city in the world. You can now spot Hindu temples and Muslim mosques dotting the metropolitan D.C. landscape.

On most days, though, we gather here as Christians to worship, explore, and grow in living the Christian faith. We are part of a Christian cathedral and community serving a multi-faith nation and world, at a time when religious faith itself has become one of the most powerful forces on the globe.

And so one of the big questions we face as Americans and Christians is, How do we live with religious differences, especially in a time when many religions are growing around the world and are often intensely tribal and divisive? Faith traditions can be fiercely particular. Often the more committed you are to a religion, the harder it is to compromise. Is there room in God’s heart, and in our hearts, for people of other faiths?

One of the chief impacts of the 9/11 attacks was the fresh realization of how dangerous religious faith can be. The attackers were radical Muslim zealots who believed they were carrying out their destruction as an act of religious devotion. We know, of course, that Christians have been capable of the same thing, in the Crusades, for example, in the pogroms in which Christians over the centuries have gone on rampages killing Jews. And of course, there have been countless Muslim-Christian wars, Hindu-Muslim clashes, Hindu-Sikh and Arab-Israeli conflicts, and much more.

“Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you,” someone scribbled on a wall here in Washington after 9/11. Religions are powerful–and dangerous. It’s enough to make you ask, In a world that seems to get more interconnected and yet more tribal by the day, is it possible for religious people, and especially Christians, to be forces of healing and hope in this dangerous twenty-first century?

This question of inter-religious understanding often surfaces in the most basic of ways. Someone will ask in a course I’m teaching, Can people who aren’t Christians be saved? Sometimes it emerges out of concern for friends or relatives who are nonbelievers or believers in other faiths. Underneath that question is another one—is it possible to recognize in someone of another faith a full human being and a beloved child of God? There are many Christians who believe if you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior you are going to hell, just as other Christian traditions have insisted that only the baptized faithful can ever get to heaven. Given the billions of people across the face of the earth and down through the centuries who are not Christians, the ranks of hell must be filling up fast.

Every Easter season we hear from John’s gospel part of Jesus’ teaching about being the Good Shepherd. It’s one of the oldest and most loved images for the Risen Lord. “I am the good Shepherd,” Jesus says. “I know my own and my own know me…. And I lay down my life for the sheep.” This Risen Lord is active and at work, this passage says, shaping and guiding the lives of his flock, and the flock, of course, consists of his disciples and followers.

But then Jesus throws a curve. “I have other sheep who are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” Did you hear that? There are other sheep and other folds. God’s love isn’t limited to just one people, his followers, he seems to be saying.

Scholars don’t know exactly what Jesus’ words point to. But what’s clear is that this flock is open-ended, not closed. There are always others who belong to the shepherd and in some unimaginable way will find their way into his fold.

Who is saved and who isn’t, who’s in and who’s out? I remember puzzling over that as I made my way back into the Christian faith as a graduate student. Christians believe that in Christ God was reconciling the whole world. And yet if that meant God was only reconciling Christians, there was a problem. I looked around and what I saw didn’t add up. My closest friend, and one of the finest human beings I knew, had grown up in a hellfire and brimstone church in a small town in the South, and he literally would break into a sweat any time he walked into any church. Because of his early life, faith for him was impossible, and yet his life was in so many ways a model for mine.

The finest teacher I had in graduate school was a secular Jew, who loved Shakespeare and St. Paul. As I heard him talk about King Lear or Measure for Measure, I found my own faith growing deeper and clearer. I heard Christ through him.

And later as a professor I knew well a Muslim colleague who was one of the gentlest, wisest people I had ever encountered. None of these was Christian; all of them were luminous, even holy, human beings.

At the same time I remember thinking back over my own church experience growing up. There were, of course, many good souls, but there were also many who seemed hypocritical, insincere, angry, or self-righteous too. This was the South of the 1960s, and many of them were strong segregationists. How could it be that these people were somehow in and my un-churched friends were somehow out?

Only later did I encounter St. Augustine’s sobering words: “God has many whom the church does not have, and the church has many whom God does not have.”

What became clear to me then was that God is bigger than all our formulas, more mysterious than all our ways of drawing the line.

What kind of God could it be, when you think of it, who would consign to everlasting damnation any who do not believe by a certain formula, or who do not duly join the right church, or even who don’t believe in God at all? Christianity proclaims a God who is unbounded Love, whose love for everyone is literally beyond our imagining.

The best analogy we have for that has been the love of a father or mother for a child. But what parent would ever choose under any circumstances the eternal suffering of his or her child? How can it be that some people place God on an ethical level lower than what they would expect of any parent? A parent’s love at its best is endlessly loving and forgiving—even when the parent believes that what the child has done is wrong. Surely God’s is that and more.

The biblical vision of God is far grander than that. In the Old Testament God makes a covenant with Noah after the Great Flood, promising to bless the whole creation. In Isaiah, God proclaims a salvation that is to reach to the ends of the earth, not by everyone becoming Jews, but by everyone learning from the Jews to live in God’s ways of justice and peace.

In fact, Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Great Britain, says that God’s vision for the world is that it be a place of marvelous variety, including a variety of religions. Each religion has a different story to tell of how they have experienced God, and we all have much to gain by learning from the experience of others. There is one God, but many faiths.

Do all religions say the same thing? No. Even though they often have many things in common, there are profound differences. Do all religions basically believe in the same God? Not if you probe very deeply. There’s no blending of these different faiths into one.

What makes us Christians is that we believe that this God who loves everyone everywhere, and has reached out to the human race in every time and place and through countless religious traditions, actually came among us in one human life. In Christ we Christians see a God who taken on our flesh, lived, suffered, and died for us, and promises never to leave us. No other religion claims anything like that.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have important things to learn from the Muslim sense of awe before God, from the Jewish passion for living God’s Torah, from the Buddhist sense of compassion and surrender of the self, from the Hindu sense of the sacredness of every part of the world.

If you glimpse how grand God’s love is, you realize that the question is not who’s in and who’s out, but who knows this love and who doesn’t. The whole human race is in the fold of God’s love. What Christians believe is that we have been privileged to see the depth and breadth of that love in a one-of-a-kind way. And it’s our duty to tell that story as generously and imaginatively and energetically as we can.

The role of the church is indispensable. That’s where we come to reconnect with that love, to be fed by it, to understand it, to find the compassion to live it. Without the church there would be no Christianity. It is our lifeline, and with all its failures, it’s meant to be God’s essential instrument for healing the world.

But what saves us is love. “God is love,” it says in the First Letter of John, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

The final measure of every life—Christian and non-Christian, believer and non-believer—is this: Did we ever grow out of our fear and self-absorption, our sin and violence? Did we ever discover God in the face of the stranger and of those close to us? Have we allowed God’s love to shape the way we live? We need the practices, the disciplines of our tradition to do that, as people of other faiths need theirs.

It is a natural Christian hope that people everywhere might come to know the depth of God’s love that we see in Christ. But God’s ways are mysterious. And we must never forget that God has other sheep and other folds and will stop at nothing, now or for all eternity, to lead every human being, in ways we cannot imagine, to know and to grow in this immense love.

I’ll never forget the service I was part of after the terrible events of 9/11. Like this Cathedral and so many houses of worship across the country, the church I served offered a service of grief and commemoration. To it we invited Jewish and Muslim friends, and a rabbi and an imam spoke and prayed with us. The music was deeply moving, and the prayers we offered, Arabic and Hebrew, spoke of the calling of the God we have known in our different ways to be healers and peacemakers.

But the part that lingers with me still was near the beginning when a Muslim muezzin stood up in the back balcony and chanted long and hauntingly a call to prayer. Then a Jewish rabbi lifted his shofar, the ancient ram’s horn trumpet of the desert, and made it sing with the call to Yahweh. And then our own Christian choir sang its beautiful, familiar chant.

We had come together in our grief, fear, and yearning for a world of harmony and peace. We each sensed the calling of the God we knew. And we found ourselves being drawn closer together as we called on the God who made and loves us all, who has come to us in such strange and different ways, whose mercy and patience are more than we imagine, and whose desire is our joy and delight with each other.

That is the God that we human beings seek. And that is the God who calls us in Christ to follow and to serve.

“I have other sheep,” Jesus said, “who are not of this fold.”

.

Heart talk

Marj Carpenter tells this story:


Years ago Cheryl Maddox was a missionary in Zaire. One day she overheard her young son talking to his sister. "Feel your heart," he told his little sister and placed her hand over her heart. He said, "Do you hear it?" "Yes," she said. The boy: "That's because God is in your heart," "Well," she said, "he's thumping a lot."

[my comment]: Let's all remember that God is thumping around in our hearts every day.




.

Roach Spirituality

My last post on roaches got me to thinking (which can be dangerous)...

Why (I asked) am I afraid of such a little thing?
Here's where my mind connected with that question
after I thought more:

Don't we all worry about 'little things'?
Aren't most of our worries focus on small parts of life?
We stew over little dark things in our lives.
Didn't Jesus tell us not to worry about the hairs on our head?
(Hairs are little things.)
Or where our next meal will come from?
(Well, that's bigger.)

We allow small things to bug us.
Why not focus instead on the Big Things of life?
Like God.
(She's big.)

But there are nasty little dark things in our lives
that we shouldn't ignore.
[The author of the Song of Songs talks about
the 'little foxes' that cause trouble.]
Perhaps journaling, or actually confessing to someone else
our 'dark things' -- or at least talking about them to a friend --
could help.

Or we could just squoosh 'em.

At any rate, the nasty little things are probably there
for a purpose.

Roaches

I admit it -- I'm afraid of roaches.


I don't know why.
They're small.
I'm probably 1000 times their size.
They don't usually bite, I'm told.

I guess I picked up the message when I was younger
that some bugs are friendly and some aren't.
I don't mind moths and small spiders and daddy long legs
and ladybugs.
So why roaches?

Perhaps I was taught that they are ugly--
and mean and nasty.

There is something about a big bug crawling over
my arm or leg that freaks me out.

Roaches do look EVIL!

But my fear is irrational, isn't it?
It's just a little, tiny creature.
It's probably afraid of me.

Could I overcome my fear of those nasty little things?
Perhaps I'll try.

old pianists

Old people can really swing!

Just watch this video from the Mayo Clinic....

Click here

Narrow and Broad

I heard a preacher say recently that truth is black-and-white.
Everything is either right or wrong.
All you have to do is look in the Bible and
the answer is there.
He called his theological perspective the 'narrow way' that Jesus talked about; as opposed to the liberal viewpoint, which is the 'broad' way.

Well, maybe not.
There's another way to look at it.
Maybe the 'broad' way--being the 'easy' way--is that preacher's perspective.
After all, if everything is black-or-white, that's pretty easy.
Nothing complicated about that!

However, if life is more complicated than that--
if moral questions become complex,
that makes life more difficult.
Which in my view would be the 'narrow' way--
the more difficult way.

I know he would disagree with me.
He would say that I am wishy-washy.
No. I have strong convictions.
I strongly believe that life is more complex
than some people make it out to be.
He would say that I am afraid to say that anything is wrong.
No. I am quite willing to say that he is wrong.

[The photo is of the Great Miami River. Is it narrow or wide? That depends on the larger view, doesn't it?]

The look

I'm innocent!
I'm innocent, I tell you.
I didn't do it!

teeth

Look! I have teeth!

shoe

Look! I can wear big shoes.

Cosmo

Norah's dog, Cosmo, says,
"That little girl is getting all the
attention."

Fallen

There was an old priest who got sick of all the people in his parish who kept confessing to adultery. One Sunday, in the pulpit, he said, "If I hear one more person confess to adultery, I'll quit!"Everyone liked him, so they came up with a code word. Someone who had committed adultery would say instead that they had "fallen."

This seemed to satisfy the old priest and things went well until the priest passed away at a ripe, old age.

A few days after the new priest arrived, he visited the mayor of the town and seemed very concerned.

"Mayor, you have to do something about the sidewalks in town. When people come into the confessional, they keep telling me they've fallen."

The mayor started to laugh, realizing that no one had told the new priest about the code word. But, before he could explain, the priest shook an accusing finger at him and shouted, "I don't know what you're laughing about, because your wife has already fallen three times this week!"

Having Fun

Can't think of anything fun to do?
Well, here's a list of 50 things....

Are You Having Enough Fun? - Fresh Living

Apocalypse

Our study of the Book of Revelation on Mondays has been enjoyable. We are learning that this strange book is not all that difficult when it is read in its historical context. The dozens of symbols in the book almost all come from the Old Testament, especially from Ezekiel and Daniel.

Of course, the basic theological approach one takes to this book will determine how one understands it.

(1) There is the 'Historicist' approach, which sees each of the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3 as a particular period in history (each church is about certain centuries). This is a rather artificial way of reading Revelation. The seven churches are real churches in Asia Minor, not symbols of historical periods. No one actually preaches this approach anymore. There are no contemporary commentaries on Revelation that use this approach. But there are remnants of its philosophy around.

(2) Then there is the 'Futurist' approach. These writers/preachers see the book as a message about the soon-to-come end of the world. There are two sub strands here: One is general pre-millennial perspective. The other is the pre-millennial Dispensationalism. This is the Hal Lindsay or Tim LaHaye 'Left Behind' school of thought. It's actually a relatively new scheme invented in the 1820s or 1830s and spread around by John Nelson Darby. It is a man-made grid that has been overlaid on Scripture. It relies on artificial distinctions between Jews and Gentiles that are clearly obliterated in the gospel. It applies prophecies to the contemporary nation of Israel which were already fulfilled before the birth of Christ. And it (ironically) takes the literal parts of Revelation and makes them symbolic, while taking the symbolic parts and makes them literal. Dispensationalism is the popular interpretation that sells lot of books and movies today. It is the 'Rapture' school of thought. But it is also a human invention with no basis in Scripture.

(3) A third approach to Revelation is the 'Preterist' approach. It comes in different versions. I think it has a lot to commend itself. The very first verse of Revelation says that this book is about things that will "soon" take place. What if that means exactly what it says? What if the things in Revelation did take place soon after it was written? Is that possible? Yes. If the Judgment that Revelation describes was the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem that took place 65-70 A.D., then it has happened already. Could that be? Interestingly, yes. Once you stop and think about it, it fits perfectly with the message of the last book of the Bible. I think this approach needs to be looked at with more seriousness.

(4) The fourth approach to Revelation throughout church history is called the 'Spiritualist' approach--better known as 'Amillenialism.' Augustine taught this way of understanding the Apocalypse. As I read Presbyterian documents, I understand this to be the contemporary 'Presbyterian' approach to Revelation; though some in the Presbyterian tradition have accepted the Postmillennial position (such as Jonathen Edwards). Generally, the Millenium has been understood as symbolic and not a literal earthly 1000 years in the Reformed Theological Tradition. In other words, what is presented in Revelation is not about just the past or just the future or just on period in history; rather, its message is about all time everywhere. The 'events' of Revelation is always happening. There is always a Beast (or two) around; there is always 'tribulation' or suffering around; the Dragon is always out to get us; God is always on his throne. Revelation is a long poem about reality at all times.

We don't need to make up the meaning of the symbols of Revelation. Most of them are explained in the book or allude to symbols already in Scripture. We don't have to wonder what the book is about. It is obviously about the Roman Empire of the first century (or alternatively, Jerusalem). It is a book of hope and encouragment. The believers are told to endure and be patient. Not to take revenge; not to become militaristic; not to get ready to be launched into the air; but to be faithful. That's a good message.

The Chair

I read a comment recently by Earl Palmer in The Presbyterian Outlook.
He wrote: "Do I dare to put my weight down upon the promises of Jesus?"

I heard something like that frequently when I was young.
The evangelists who came through town would try to explain what it means
to trust Jesus.
They would say, "Trusting Jesus is like sitting in a chair. You have to put your whole
weight down and trust the chair to hold you up."

I think it's a useful analogy.
It's a kind of passive activity.
You do something -- but the something is nothing.
You let yourself be held.

In daily life this is not easy to do.
It's hard to let go.
To completely let go.

As the man in Mark's gospel said, "Lord, I believe; but help my unbelief."
That's me.
That's most of us.
We believe; we trust; but we won't sit down--not all the way.
The miracle of grace is that the 'chair' (Jesus) is not pulled away from us--
it stays right there in place--waiting, just in case we do in fact sit down
and place our whole weight on it.

The good news is that we can sit down.
The chair will always be there.
Someday we will get tire and sit down.
God is patient.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whoever puts their whole on him will not wear themselves out,
but will have eternal life.