A Chorister's Faith

 

A Chorister’s Faith

28 August 2015

Homily preached at 11 a.m. Sung Rite I Funeral with Eucharist

For Herb Cole

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

Matthew 5:3-12

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants who minister in thy Temple

Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts

And what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives,

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen

Herb sang in choirs for more than 70 years of his life.  He started singing as a boy soprano, and just kept going. 

Herb was a chorister.  No, that does not mean he was a choral director, though he did serve as choir master as a younger man in several different Church choirs.  We Episcopalians have our own way of talking about things:  our ministers are priests; what Baptists and Methodists call the sanctuary we call the Church (as opposed to the Parish Hall); religious robes, vestments;  and a basement, the undercroft.   For us, a chorister is a member of a choir, not its director. 

Herb was a chorister.  He also was a father, husband, businessman, and active churchman.  But I think chorister sums up his passion and love in his life best of all.   Choral music means being attentive to the director and listening and helping each other.  Showing up on time, staying the distance, taking critiques well, and letting the choir master take the lead.  Practice, practice, practice.  A Church chorister sings things he or she may not always quite believe, but feel they should.  But singing it all the same.  Often, a strange new song becomes your own.  Herb’s choral music is a great metaphor for many of the principles Herb lived by.

Choristers sing.  They learn early on that the most important thing in singing together is like the basic rule of physicians:  first, do no harm.  If you are getting the notes wrong, or timing the starts and finishes wrong, sing more quietly.  I knew a chorister in Washington DC who mouthed most music and only vocalized on the few tried and true pieces he had learned well as a young adult.    Herb sang well and led sections.  But doing no harm in life was a rule for Herb.  It should be a rule for us. 

The musical figures Choristers use all have a spirituality to them. 

Melody:  singing a tune, lyrical and melismatic, phrasing it so that the music flows and the text is expressed, is the heart of singing.  Learning a tune—or perhaps several—to serve as the leitmotif for your life is an important way of giving shape and direction.   The hymn we sing today, “How Lovely is thy Dwelling Place” was a leitmotif, of sorts, for Herb’s life.  He specifically asked that it be included in his funeral.  It is a metrical version of Psalm 86, a song of ascents, sung by pilgrims to the Jerusalem Temple as they climbed the Judean hills higher and higher until they reached Mount Zion.  It talks about worship, song, and its place in our lives. 

“How lovely is thy dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts, to me!
My thirsty soul desires and longs
within thy courts to be;
my very heart and flesh cry out,
O living God for thee.

Beside thine altars, gracious Lord,
the swallows find a nest;
how happy they who dwell with thee
and praise thee without rest,
and happy they whose hearts are set
upon the pilgrim's quest.

They who go through the desert vale
will find it filled with springs,
and they shall climb from height to height
till Zion's temple rings
with praise to thee, in glory throned,
Lord God, great King of kings.

One day within thy courts excels
a thousand spent away;
how happy they who keep thy laws
nor from thy precepts stray,
for thou shalt surely bless all those
who live the words they pray.

Harmony:  It is not all about unison and uniformity.  Intervals and variations are needed to give depth, warmth, and feeling to a bare tune.  Sometimes dissonance and disharmony, well placed, begun and ended appropriately, bring further depth to what otherwise might be saccharine or maudlin.  Blending different tunes produces moments of harmony interspersed with dissonance, counterpoint.    One of the things Herb found amiable in the Episcopal Church after the uniformity of the Church of his youth was our comprehensiveness, our greater diversity and the interplay, however messy it may be at times, between different voices. 

Rhythm:  Rhythm is the skeleton on which the notes are hung.  It gives shape to the tune, and emotional life.  Herb was attentive to the rhythms in our life—youth, adulthood, love, raising a family, work, retirement—and all that this implied.  He was drawn to the rhythm of the liturgical year:  Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, ordinary time, and how the moods and colors of worship change with the times and seasons.   Again, this is part of the harmony and balance we rightly should have in our lives. 

Dynamics: when to sing loudly, and when to sing softly; when to put energy in, or delicacy.  When to let things quiet into silence.   As Herb got older and suffered from increasing levels of debilitation, he was wise enough to let go of things as he needed to.  He kept singing almost to the last.  He dropped pastoral and Eucharistic visiting when he became unable to manage the scheduling and details.  He did both with grace and style. 

Rests: The proper use of silence is important in music.  As it is in our life.  It is the idea behind the Sabbath.  It is the idea behind silent contemplation. 

Death is part of life, just as silence is part of music.   It is hard to let Herb go. 

John Bukey told me that he will direly miss Herb sitting beside him in choir.  Though at times recently John has had the honor of helping Herb find his place in the score, he says that to the end he has always relied on Herb’s strong baritone voice to give him the pitch.   Russ Otte told me the choir today has left a chair open for Herb, with a cassock on it for him, plus extra copies of all the scores.  Herb always squirreled away extra copies of scores, "for future use."  It is a good thing to be missed at your death.    It is the sign of having been needed, having been loved.  It will be hard to let Herb go. 

But our confidence is that life indeed does go on even in death.  There is music hidden beneath the silence.  I take comfort in one of the images we have again and again in scripture of the life of the blessed in heaven.  It is perhaps too much a commonplace, and sometimes is seen in cartoonish, almost comical light.  But it is, again, an image of great comfort to me, a chorister.  The image is that the blessed are arranged in choirs.  Many choirs.  Good choirs.  Choirs with harps, drums, and trumpets. And almost certainly organs like none we have ever heard here below, even the most celestial. 

If the blessed sing in choirs, Herb should be feeling at home right about now.   Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Letting Go (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

August 26, 2015

Letting Go

“Fools say in their hearts, there is no God.’”  (Psalm 14:1)

Writer Parker Palmer, a Quaker whose insights on the need to combine contemplation with practice and how to help communities better their values and performance have inspired many of our day, writes the following: 

“A … shadow common among leaders is ‘functional atheism,’ the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.

“This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, [to feel resentment and frustration], stressing our relationships, sometime to the point of breaking. If often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism … explains why the average group can tolerate no more than 15 seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening…

“The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn sometimes that we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only that what we are able and trust the rest to other hands… ”

(Palmer, Parker J. “Leading from Within,” pp. 88-89, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.)

Often we act as if it’s all up to us.  As helpful as this might be in motivating us to do what we are able, there lies in its heart a prideful assertion that we are in charge.  On an emotional and social level we feel and act as if we did not believe God was beneath and behind all things, driving them toward completion and final goodness.  But sometimes our best efforts are fruitless, and prayer is the only thing left for us to do.  Sometimes, we should welcome silence.  Acceptance of things and letting go of control, turning things over to the hidden God, are essential for us to maintain health: in our relationships, in our emotions, and in our outlook on life.  It is foolish not to do so. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+

Faithful (Proper 16B)

 

Faithful

Proper 16B
23 August 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Most of us have heard the witticism about the Episcopal Church, how it is “Catholic lite”:  All the pageantry and none of the guilt.   

What many of us don’t realize is that historically, we have also been seen as “Protestant lite.”  Calvinists accused us as being “Arminian,” or “semi-Pelagian,” talking about salvation through grace, but still thinking that our works matter. Puritans felt that we were crypto-Papists. Today’s evangelicals think we have sold our biblical heritage for a mess of social justice potage. 

I have always thought such characterizations a cheap shot.  Christianity as practiced in the Episcopal Church has nothing “lite” about it, however much we Episcopalians might want this to be so. 

When I first came to an Episcopal Church and stayed after for coffee hour, I was struck by how measured and restrained it all was: bread and butter cucumber sandwiches with the crust trimmed off, some coffee for the real addicts, but mainly weak black tea with a cloud of milk.   Not at all like the hearty church dinners of my Mormon youth!   The liturgy had none of the sappy sentimentality and maudlin moralism I had grown up with, where church services aimed at making you feel convinced, getting you committed: follow the commandments, shoulder your responsibilities to God and others.  You needed to “bear your testimony,” give a public and heartfelt affirmation of your certitude of the faith.  This may have worked for many, but it no longer worked for me. 

One of the things I found most appealing about Episcopalianism was its restraint.  It seemed thin broth indeed compared to what I was used to.  And I was ready for thin broth.

We Anglicans want to have things moderate, rational, balanced and done in good taste.  Remember the 18^th century Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Edmund Gibson.  He blasted John and Charles Wesley’s call for a faith of the heart: “Enthusiasm, Mr. Wesley, enthusiasm! This simply will not do!”

Most of us Episcopalians are refugees from some kind of pastoral or ecclesiastical abuse elsewhere, whether in Biblicist churches, sternly dogmatic churches, censorious churches, churches with traditions of unbalanced and immoderate community life and doctrine. So we are cautious. 

But here’s the thing:  faith has to be strong and central if it is going to make any difference in our life.   A faith that does not demand our all is not strong enough to save us.   That’s just the way we are hardwired. Moderation taken to extremes is itself deadly—to emotions, to relationships, to community, and to emotional health.    Religion without passion is vapid: “enthusiasm, Mr. Wesley, it will not do!” 

I knew I had become an Episcopalian when I quit my old Church choir and joined the choir at All Saints’ Chevy Chase.  I was grateful for Episcopal moderation, but I still needed sustenance, affirmation of my faith:  Real faith in Christ, not merely an aesthetic or intellectual experience; A faith that made me try to be a better person, that demanded sacrifice and consecration; One that touched the core of my heart, if I were to have any sense of purpose at all. 

If it had only been about escaping a faith I could no longer stomach, I would have lasted as an Episcopalian for just a few months.   It was only later, after I became accustomed to the rhythms of the prayers, the rites, the hymns and choir anthems, and liturgical seasons, that I realized just how rich this new soup was: rich at a deep level of sentiment and thought, not on the surface of sentimentality and slogan, and rooted in the truth at the heart of things, not the external authority of the teaching office of the Church.  It focused on Jesus, not the Church.  And it was this rich, thick and at times sensuous worship and community life that rebuilt my heart.  

It’s all about faithfulness in relationship, in community, the subject of today’s scripture readings.   Joshua tells his people that if they reject Yahweh, it really doesn’t matter which god of the land they follow.  “Stick with God,” he says.  And they do.   In the Gospel, people who have been following Jesus reject him because his teaching is getting just too weird.  He asks his close disciples if they are going to leave too: Peter replies “we’re sticking with you, no matter how weird, because we hear in you there is eternal—that is the timeless, reliable, unchanging—life.  Jesus in faithful, so Peter must be faithful.  Ephesians tells us to put on the armor of God so we won’t be shaken by the things that destroy our relationship with God and the Church. 

Faithfulness and reliability is a key part of relationship.  It’s in our hard wiring.  This seems to be lost to commentators on the sad story from this week’s news: a hookup website for intending adulterers was hacked and the list of subscribers published, among them, a famous young reality-TV evangelical husband of an archetypically large family.  People are titillated, and point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of those involved.  But few note the true tragedy, the horrible fact that so many misunderstood themselves and the nature of human relationships so profoundly that they pursued such things.  If we want to have healthy relationship in loving marriage, it means being faithful to your spouse.  Wandering, as exciting as it may seem, in and of itself damages relationship, even if your spouse never hears about it.  You yourself are changed by your actions.  Emotional distance and manipulation are inserted into what had been, if not joy, then something aspiring to it.   

It is the same with us and our relationship with God, not because God needs to be faithful (He is, by his very nature), but because we need to be.

I have learned many things from visiting the sick and the dying and giving last rites.  Most important is this: The people who keep their relationships with others, including their relationship with God, in a little box off to the side, controlled and managed, are, in the end, left with nothing.   You may want to keep things moderate, balanced, and reasonable.  But debilitation, dementia, and death rob you, little by little, of each and every one of the things you put before relationships and faith.  The more focused on balance, control and management a person is, the greater their bewilderment and fear, even terror, at death. 

Those who realize that their relationships are the key thing do better.  And those whose relationship with God is the core of their relations with others do best.   God is the one relationship partner who is wholly faithful, and who cannot be taken from you.  Those who believe that God and love must trump all other concerns are those who in the end are left with an abiding sense of calm and hope at death. 

When you put faithfulness in relationship, particularly in relationship with God, first, other things, the transient and impermanent things, take care of themselves.  “Seek first the reign of God and its justice,” says Jesus, “and everything else will fall into place.” 

We can usually tell when we are putting other things first.  When they come up in the context of more central things, we feel uncomfortable, get angry or annoyed, or simply want to say, “I’m outta here!”   This is a good sign that this is a place where we still want to maintain control, where we have not let Jesus in to heal and transform.   

Politics from the pulpit is a one example.  Partisan activism from the pulpit is pastoral abuse and should be discounted out of hand.  But preaching the Gospel and applying it to the questions of the age is what the prophetic voice is all about.  And if we can’t abide what prophets are saying, we just haven’t let God into that part of our life.

Another example is letting our tastes and preferences dictate how we pick and choose our church.  The teaching must be just this way, the liturgy that way.  The music must be just so.  If not, I’m outta here.  Boutique religion, consumer Christianity is spiritual death. 

Money is another.  Trinity’s financial response campaign is coming up in a little more than a month from now.  I know as well as anyone here how uncomfortable talking about money at church can make us feel.  We just don’t want to hear that the Episcopal Church teaches that the Biblical tithe—10% of our income—is the minimum standard of giving for building God’s kingdom.  We squirm when told that everything we have is from God, and we need to give back.  It all seems so immoderate, so extreme, so unbalanced, too much like cheesy televangelists hucksters or cold-hearted organization men in green eye-shades who say God is behind their fund drive. 

Jesus criticized religious institutions that bleed people dry with a promise of blessing from God: that’s what the widow’s mite is all about.  But here’s the deal: if we cannot face the issue, or talk about it with an open heart and mind, that’s a warning sign.  The real issue here is generosity and spiritual devotion, and wanting to avoid it should tell us that this is an area in our life as yet untouched by Jesus, untransformed by grace. 

I am not saying that there is a single payment schedule or standard for all.  And I am not saying that the Church is the same as God and Jesus and the kingdom.   All I am saying is that letting such talk unhinge us or make us so uncomfortable that we are ready to walk, at least metaphorically, well, it’s like those Israelites who didn’t follow Joshua and Yahweh, and like those followers of Jesus who stopped following him because they just couldn’t bear him talking about his body and blood as food, disgusting cannibalism.  It is a sign that we have put our faith and religion in a little box off to one side, and that maintaining control—not squandering our annuity, keeping our nest egg solid, or aiming at a certain standard of life—is more important to us than relationship.   Make no mistake: this is about relationship, and the gratitude and generosity that must be part of a healthy and faithful relationship. 

Jesus bids us follow him, and always seems take us to places that are new and uncomfortable.  And that is true whether we are talking money stewardship, society and policy, liturgical style, or the interpersonal stress of parish politics writ small.   The more passionate we are about other things, the greater the risk. We must not abandon Jesus, or lose the faith.  We must be faithful.  For his words are life that lasts forever. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

"Catholic" (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

“Catholic”

August 19, 2015

Parishioners occasionally ask me why the creed uses the word “catholic” when it says we believe in one holy apostolic church.   For some, the usage seems strange given the fact that we are not Roman Catholics.   Many know that the word is Greek, kat’ –holikos, “according to the whole” and treat the word as a dolled up version of the word “universal.”   But it still feels strange. 

August 17 was the feast day for Samuel Johnson, Timothy Cutler, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler in the Holy Women, Holy Men cycle of commemoration.  These three were American colonials in the 18^th century who founded Anglicanism in the New World.  Johnson and Cutler were Congregationalist  ministers who became profoundly dissatisfied with the rampant dissent and local power struggles inherent in Congregationalist Church polity and doctrinal formation.   They found that Anglicanism and the tradition of the Church, its links to antiquity, and its view of Biblical authority mediated by tradition and reason remedied the quirkiness of American religion.  The comprehensiveness of prayer book worship was the way to escape what they saw as the peculiarities and solecisms of church life based in local congregations.    They sought Anglican orders and brought the Church to America.  Chandler was a student of Johnson who was instrumental in building the Anglican Church here.   

The idea of the Church as catholic is that the Church is more than its local embodiment.  Its liturgy is more than local usage.  Its teaching is more than what we learned from the specific people who taught us.   This is more than just geographical: the comprehensive and universal nature of the Church extends through time as well.  The 1928 Prayer Book has a liturgy of instruction that reads, "Catholic [means] it is universal, holding earnestly the Faith for all time, in all countries, and for all people; and is sent to preach the Gospel to the whole world" (p. 291).  Catholic in this sense  means being true to the faith given to the apostles and those who followed them.  This is often expressed by valuing the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, as well as the first four (or seven) ecumenical councils of the united Church. 

Our catholicism is one the reasons that people coming to traditional Episcopal worship from Roman or Eastern Orthodox communities see much that they recognize as their own.  It is also why Lutherans and Methodists, and even perhaps today's Congregationalists, do not feel too far from us. 

The centrifugal forces at work in society and history are such that each community tends more and more toward its unique character.  And that is fine, as long as it means authenticity and honesty.  But crankiness, eccentricity, and leaving the heart of the riches of the Gospel, once taught and preached by the apostles, is no virtue.  

For many, the word “catholic” implies dogmatism, legalistic brand-consciousness, and exclusion.  That comes from how some have focused too much on the externals of the tradition and defining and excluding heresy.  But at its heart, catholic faith is the opposite of these.  It means comprehensiveness, connection to others beyond our own horizon in place and time, and a broad openness to God’s grace.  

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Third Culture Kids (burial office)

 

Third Culture Kids
15 August 2015 The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

By the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.,

On the Occasion of the Funeral of Bob Bienieck

Ashland, Oregon
11:00 a.m. with Sung Mass

Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33; Psalm 23 and 121; 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:9; John 14:1-6

Losing a loved one is hard.  C.S. Lewis, writing about his own feelings after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, said that he resented it when people asked him how he was doing—how in the world could he answer such a question!  He wanted to be left alone in his grief.  But he also resented them when they left him alone—how could they be so heartless and unsympathetic!  He says he was surprised by something that no one had ever told him: the deep, visceral emotion called grief feels much like another emotion, fear.  Losing a loved one is hard. 

St. Paul, in today’s epistle, writes the following,

“So we are not about to give up!  How could we? Even though on the outside it looks like things are falling apart for us, on the inside, not a day goes by without God renewing us in some way.   For our current bit of dark suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison.  That’s because there is far more here than meets the eye.  What we can see is here today, gone tomorrow, but the things we can’t see last forever.  For we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like temporary tents and folded away, they will be replaced by something more substantial, like a building, from God.  It won’t have to be set up again and again by hand, but rather is timeless, in the heavens.  For as long as we are in this tent our lot is groaning, burdened by a heavy weight. It’s not because we want to be free of this body, but because we want more of one.  We want our body that dies to be absorbed into a body that lives unendingly.  God is the one who puts this desire in us, by giving us the Spirit as a sure foretaste of it.  That’s why we seem so cheerful despite it all.  We know that being in this body means being away from God.  After all, we live by trusting and hoping, not by seeing.    That’s why we have confidence.   At heart, we would really rather be at home with God, away from this body.  But the important thing is pleasing God, whether we are at home or away.”  (2 Cor. 4:16-17).

Paul ’s teaching here at first glance seems to disparage the world in which we live, the world before our eyes.  Remember that when God made the world, God saw it and said it was good indeed.  Elsewhere, Paul very clearly says that he sees plenty of evidences of God’s good intention and love in the world.  What Paul is talking about in today’s passage is how things seem when we are suffering, when it is hard to see any good before our eyes. 

He says that what keeps us going in such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important things.   Recognizing that all human life ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the world is changing and reliably unreliable.  What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is unchanging.  It is the vision of this in our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart” or “giving up.”

Paul contrasts our sufferings, changeable and limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance around the person of God.  This brilliance is the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, or substantial heaviness.  Paul says that our “momentary” sufferings are very light and insubstantial by comparison with this “weight of glory” around God, a timeless beauty that our sufferings actually are creating in us, unseen.  He says that the substantiality of God’s light is literally a “hyperbole beyond all hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless. 

It is important here to note that Paul is not trying to say that our sufferings are not real or truly bad.  And he is not saying the world is simply bad and needs to be ignored.  He is contrasting how things now appear with how things actually are and will be.

For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight of glory” or “timeless mass of Light” currently being created in us is actually the real thing, while our suffering, all too clear before our eyes, is but a dim shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away.    The image in our hearts of what God has promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down. 

Paul is advising a path of contemplation, of reflection, as a way of driving away despair, of being “renewed every day” so that “we do not give up.”

Paul tells us to contemplate the “invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes” that do. 

His argument parallels Saint-Exupery’s belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  

For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image is God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the world.  That is why in his writings he dwells so much on  “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the Risen Lord.  It is why he talks so much about God’s loving promises.    The Spirit in our lives is a foretaste and a guarantee of the great life in God to come. 

Bob was a teacher.  The basic job of a teacher is not to prepare kids for tests, or manage them and their time administratively.  The basic job is sharing passion for learning and the subject matter with the students.  The product of a teacher is not articles or books or lesson plans.  The product is formed and healthy human beings. 

A teacher’s task involves a lot of faith, of looking beyond the student you see before your eyes, and seeing what that person may become. 

And that is what our task today is:  looking beyond these ashes and memories that are sweet mixed with the bitterness of Bob’s illness and death, and seeing the “eternal weight of glory” that Paul talks about and is most assuredly what Bob is enjoying today.   

Bob and Sylvia have focused their teaching in international schools.  Most of their students are what psychologists call “third culture kids.”  Sarah is one, my four children are all TCKs too, having grown up in a series of overseas homes.    When in the U.S., they feel that they are not really part of the scene, that they are not really Americans.  When overseas, they feel out of the ambit of their host countries, that they are not Chinese, Thais, Arabs, or Europeans.  They have one foot in one culture, another foot in another, and both in neither.   

That also is what Paul is talking about.  We live in this world, but are not really of this world.  We feel like we are strangers and sojourners.   We especially feel this when suffering, or when in grief.  But the idea of heaven and being with God and Jesus seems very strange to us, almost too hard to imagine.  What Paul is saying is this:  we do indeed have a home, one that we have never seen, one that we were created for, but have not yet tasted.  We get little foretastes of it, little glimpses.  And it is more certain and trustworthy than anything we see before our eyes, any of the suffering or grief we experience now.  

Bob is no longer a sojourner and alien.  He is home at last. 

Thanks be to God. 

Bereavement (mid-week)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Bereavement

August 12, 2015

“When you are going through hell, the only thing to do is keep on going 

until you're through it.”

--Winston Churchill

We have had a lot of sad news in the parish in recent days, deaths of parishioners and family members, people being placed in hospice care, and profound, debilitating illness. 

It is important to remember at times where grief and bereavement are in our blood that Jesus never promised us that we would be spared suffering or sorrow.  But he did promise us that no matter what we suffer, God is there for us.  Jesus is there for us. 

The Greek word translated by “Almighty” does not mean “able to do whatever he chooses.”  It means “the one who holds all things,” i.e., always available to help.  There is no situation where God cannot support and sustain us, and make it better somehow. 

The traditional prayer book blessing is “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ.”   God’s peace indeed surpasses understanding, and can overcome anything that life can throw at us.  God’s blessing may not “fix” or “undo” what gives us pain and sorrow.  But it strengthens and supports us, and helps us to get through it.

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+

Trail Food (Proper 14B and Holy Baptism)

 

Mt. Ashland Meadow, Pacific Crest Trail

Trail Food
Proper 14B
9 August 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass with Holy Baptism

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

at the Parish Church of Trinity Ashland

Diocese of Oregon

1 Kings 19:4-8 ;Psalm 34:1-8; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

Elena and I love to hike.  We have many wonderful memories of hiking along the Appalachian Trail in the mid-Atlantic states, in the backcountry parks in Hong Kong, along the Great Wall, in the Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks, among others.  We miss close intimate connection with nature since her illness started to affect her mobility, and remain passionate in our love for it.   

Part of the challenge is figuring out what you can reasonably carry, and then going through the Zen exercise of deciding what you will do without.   Simplified meals are part of this, as is finding appropriate body fuel for the way, trail food.  Light, easy to consume, but substantial enough to give the calories and sugar lift we need to keep on going, and keep enjoying the walk, even when it is arduous and challenging.  

 

When I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings in High School, I was struck by the love of walking in nature expressed in that epic tale.  Despite hardships and risk on the trail, the beauty of walking in the natural world remained.  This was summed up in part by Tolkien’s description of lembas, the way bread made by elves.  The elven High Queen, the Lady Galadriel of Lothlórien, gives it to the company before they set out for the most hazardous part of the journey.   Light brown on the outside, creamy on the inside, crisp and wrapped in golden leaves from blessed trees, the bread keeps for months and, when consumed, revives not only the body, but lifts the heart and soul as well.

Lembas may be likened to the hard-tack crackers we eat to this day in hiking, just a bit more appetizing.  You may recall that Tolkien was Roman Catholic.  It is clear that his description of lembas, also called life-bread at one point in Tolkien’s writing, comes in part from his devotion to Christ in the Holy Eucharist.  The Lady Galadriel, giving this bread and hope to those finding themselves in the dark, echoes his devotion to the Blessed Virgin. 

Today’s Hebrew lesson is about trail food provided by an angel to the Prophet Elijah.  It sustains miraculously far beyond what one or two meals might.  Like lembas, “one bite makes a person full,” and gives strength and the will to go as long as the journey lasts. 

The other texts, while not talking about trails and walking, are about support and sustenance.  The Psalm affirms hat we can rely on God, and says wonderfully, “Taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they who trust in him.”   The Gospel is a continuation of the story of the Bread of Life discourse.  It contrasts those who partake of this bread and those who let other things get in the way of partaking of it.  It suggests that the real trail food for us in our life’s journey is Jesus. 

The fact is, it is easy to get worn down by life.  If is easy to lose our way.  It is easy to get hungry, and tired, to the point where we may want to stop putting one foot in front of the other and move along.  If we take our packs off for a moment to rest, we may not ever want to put them on again. 

The epistle, continuing our last few weeks’ readings in Ephesians, makes a series of suggestions of how to get on well in our life journey.  Here, behaviors and habits are seen as ways of getting strength and sustenance:  stop being phoney, be open and direct out of a sense of shared endeavor with others (those on the way with us), go ahead and let yourself have the emotions that come with life (anger, for instance) but don’t let these make you harm others or be malicious.  Deal with them on a daily basis, and don’t let them pile up hidden in your heart ready to break out and overwhelm you.  Don’t steal.  Rather, pull your own weight, again out of your sense of shared journey with others.  Don’t bad mouth people or tear them down.  Instead, build them up. Put away bitterness and cultivating wrath, arguing and slandering each other.   Eschew malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.  This will helps us on our way.  Jesus, again, is the model and source of such benevolence.  Jesus is our sustenance.

Today at 10 a.m. we are going to baptize young Maddie Barber.  This sacrament is the start of a great journey, our life in Christ.  The baptismal covenant gives us rules of the road and suggestions for daily recharging.  It even mentions our trail bread. 

In it, we:

·Affirm our trust and hope in the basics of the Trinitarian faith outlined in the Apostles’ Creed.

·Promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread (the Holy Eucharist), and the cycle of prayers of our community.

·Promise to persevere in resisting evil, and to repent from sin we may fall into, and return to the Lord.

·Promise to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ, seek and serve Christ in all persons, and strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being.

These all involve relationship: with God, with Jesus, with the ministers Jesus sent and those who came after them, with the living tradition of faith and practice they have given us, and with those about us.    By making and keeping these commitments, we follow the example Jesus set when he was baptized by John in Jordan.  

We turn away from, “renounce,” the things that detract us from our forward movement in our journey.  We commit to keep on walking and carrying our packs for the way, and to do the things we need to recharge and refresh ourselves for the hike. 

Paul makes the journey image clear in Romans, where he says that baptism makes us “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

One of the things we promise here to do is to persevere in the breaking of the bread.    The Eucharist is the way bread, the lembas, that helps us in our journey with God.  This is because in it we experience Jesus, and reconnect with our model.    We eat his flesh and drink his blood, and we find we can keep on going where before we were about ready to give up. 

Let us pray. 

Loving Jesus, you are the bread of heaven, the food of angels, the water of life, the wine of joy, the source of all life and strength:  help us to keep our baptismal promises, reconnect with you each day, find strength for the journey, and enable us to love and serve our sisters and brothers, and care for your creation.   Make out burdens light, protect us from losing our way, and bring us safely, with all your children, to your great hearth, home, and banquet.  For your tender mercies’ sake we pray,  Amen.