Charles Stuart, King and Martyr (Midweek Message)

 Icon of Charles, King and Martyr, from St. Andrewes Press

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Charles Stuart, King and Martyr

January 31, 2018

“King of Kings and Lord of lords, whose faithful servant Charles prayed for those who persecuted him and died living in the hope of your eternal kingdom:  grant us by your grace so to follow his example that we may love and bless our enemies, through the intercession of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.”  (Collect for the Feast of Charles Stuart, King and Martyr)

Yesterday, January 30, in the calendars of the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church, is the commemoration of King Charles I, executed in 1649 by the Puritan-controlled Parliament and its Army.    Charles, considered a “man of blood” and traitor against the English people by those who tried him, was immediately hailed as a “royal martyr to the faith” by his supporters, and declared a saint when the Prayer Book, bishops, and the monarchy itself were restored after 10 years of rule by the Puritan Commonwealth and Protectorate (military junta).     The Episcopal Church has never added him to its calendar because the “cult of the royal martyr” was seen as monarchist propaganda undermining proper American patriotic republicanism.   Tories and Anglicans have always loved Charles; Whigs and radical protestants, hated him. 

Charles’ trial has provided the legal precedents for most trials since of sovereigns accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, whether at Nuremburg against the Nazi leadership, or at the Hague against Serbian war-lords behind “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia.    Charles for his part never recognized the authority of the court, and defended his actions as the unfortunate but legitimate and necessary acts of a sovereign faced with mutiny and treason by the political elites of his people.    War broke out after he tried to bring religious uniformity to his two realms (Scotland and England) by trying to impose Prayer Book worship and bishops on Scotland.  This forced him to call a Parliament to raise funds, which promptly sided with the Calvinists in Scotland, voted to make itself independent of the King’s pleasure by refusing to disband on royal orders alone, and began raising a non-royal army to pressure the King to abandon his devotion to Arminian, or anti-Calvinist, religion.  The Commons was motivated in part by opposition to Charles’ even-handed approach to Roman Catholic-Protestant warfare on the continent as well as his marriage to a French Roman Catholic (Marie-Henriette, after whom Maryland is named).  When finally Charles was captured and radical Puritans in the Army overcame opposition to trying him by staging a palace coup and arresting or excluding dissenting majority members of Parliament, he was offered a choice:  undergoing capital trial for his part in the war or granting the “Rump” Parliament everything it asked for, including a constitutional monarchy and limitations on royal prerogatives, banning the Prayer Book, abolishing Bishops, and enforcing conformity to Calvinism.  Though Charles had previously shown (with the Scots) a willingness to negotiate some of these things on a temporary basis, he was unwilling, as he said, to accept Cromwell’s final offer and turn his back on the “True Religion” in order to save his earthly crown and his head.    So he was tried, found guilty, and was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649.   

Though I live in a Republic that gained its birth through violent revolt against the British crown, and firmly support the legal principle of trying rulers for crimes against their people, I commemorate and honor Charles the Martyr each year as a form of familial penance:  one of my ancestors, Col. John Hutchinson, governor of Nottingham Castle, was one of the “commissioners” (judges) in the trial who signed Charles’ death warrant, one of the “regicides.”  After the restoration of the monarchy, Hutchinson publicly confessed his error and sin in the execution of the King, and expressed his deepest remorse for the action.    Though exempted from Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion pardoning Civil War actions, Hutchinson did not suffer execution as a traitor:  his early break with Cromwell, his refusal to order reprisal killings of Cavalier prisoners, and his wife Lucy’s family ties to the men who brought the monarchy back meant he was allowed to die in prison rather than being drawn, hanged, and quartered.  

In our Church calendars, we honor both Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary and Roman Catholic martyrs under Elizabeth I.  If we are to honor in our calendars the sacrifices and faithful Christian witness of Calvinists, we need to honor the sacrifices and witness of Anglicans like Charles as well.

 

Before his death, Charles wrote a letter to his son, crowned as Charles II after the monarchy, greatly reduced in its powers, was restored following ten years of rule by the Puritans, who proved to most Englishmen that they could be every bit as tyrannical and incompetent as a bad king.    In part, he said: 

“Above all, I would have you, as I hope you are already, well grounded and settled in your religion, the best profession of which I have ever esteemed that of the Church of England….  I may, without vanity, turn the reproach of my sufferings, as to the world’s censure, into the honor of a kind of martyrdom, as to the testimony of my conscience—the troublers of my kingdoms have nothing else to object against me but this, that I prefer religion and laws established before those alterations they propounded.  And so indeed I do, and ever shall, till I am convinced by better arguments that what hitherto have been chiefly used against me—tumults, armies, and prisons.  …I cannot despair, either of [God’s] mercy, or of my people’s love and pity.  At worst, I trust I shall go before you to a better kingdom, which God hath prepared for me, and me for it, through my Savior Jesus Christ, to whose mercy I commend you, and all mine.  Farewell, till we meet, if not on earth, yet in heaven.” 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

Love Builds Up (Epiphany 4 B)

 Love Builds Up

28 January 2017

Epiphany 4B

8:00 a.m. said 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Deuteronomy 18:15-20 ; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

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

When I was in high school, the length of young men’s hair became something of a controversial topic for a while.  Short and military style suggested you might be a supporter of the disastrous U.S. policy of war in Indochina, or maybe you were a true believing Mormon boy readying for a mission.  Long, it suggested you were part of the counter-culture, maybe on drugs or sexually loose.  I remember having a long conversation with the head of my congregation: he wanted me to cut my hair, shave my moustache, and not look so much like a hippie.  “You are the student body president at school.  You need to set a good example!”  “But Jesus had long hair and a beard,” I replied, “And he was a rebel against the government and legalistic religious hierarchy.  Aren’t we supposed to follow him?’  “That was then and this is now,” he replied.  Me: “But you will admit, won’t you, that length of hair and beards in and of themselves are not really a matter of morals, sin, or righteousness, right?”  “O.K.,” he replied, “it is not a matter that really counts as important.”  I brightened.  In my mind, I had won this argument, and was feeling the power of the anthem in the rock opera of the day:  “Give me it down to here HAIR shoulder length and longer, HAIR, here baby, there Mama, everywhere Daddy Daddy, Hair!, Hair Hair Hair, Hair Hair Hair!  Flow it. Show it. Long as God can grow it, my hair!”  But then he shocked me out of my little reverie of victory and independence by adding, “But since it’s not that important, why can’t you just give a little here and follow what your parents, me, and the church leaders want, and cut it short!”  I thought to myself:  “And if it’s not important, why can’t they give in on this, and not me?” 

Looking back, the irony of the scene is striking.  Today, some leaders in that same community discourage men from having hair too short if you are not in the military, since it might mark you as “gay,” in their minds a departure from what God intends.   And coming into the Anglican communion has made me acutely aware of the rich tradition of discussion we have had all along about adiaphora, points of disagreement that are indifferent as far as the teaching of scripture, tradition, and reason are concerned, whether on worship practices, clerical clothing, or sexual ethics and what is means to be a moral person. 

 

Today’s passage from 1 Corinthians is about such a disagreement and show how Paul struggles with it.  The Corinthians are having a congregation-splitting argument over what the faithful should and shouldn’t eat.   In the Greco-Roman world in which he lived, most meat on sale at the market had been slaughtered originally in Temples of pagan gods like Zeus or Aphrodite.  Some people felt it was wrong to buy or eat such meat, since they thought it was idolatrous, an act honoring those other gods.  Other people felt eating such meat was O.K since it was not an act of worship.  And because they did not believe any such gods existed, they felt that worrying about such things was basically a silly superstition.  Knowing that Paul is generally opposed to requiring observance of Jewish purity laws, and wanting him to endorse their liberal position, they write to him saying, “We know that no such gods exist, and that there is only one God,” so how can eating meat sacrificed to them by the ignorant possibly be wrong? 

But Paul surprises them.  He starts his reply by focusing on the words in the received letter, “we know.”  He says this: “Knowing things puffs us up in pride.  People who think they know something often don’t know what really matters.  Knowledge puffs us up, but love builds up. … Loving God means that God knows you, so love brings knowledge not vice versa!” 

He goes on to say that eating such meat is not O.K., even if you know that there are no such things as other gods, since it might cause someone whose knowledge is not as firm as yours to go against their heart-felt beliefs, their own conscience.  This is how I translate what he says: 

“Here is what I say about eating such meat: idols are false.  They are nothing, really.  …  But not everyone knows this. Some people who used to worship false gods might feel uncomfortable when presented meat that has been placed before idols.  They still might feel it belongs to the false god and worry it is wrong to eat it.  And when they eat it, they feel guilty.  Food cannot make us closer to or farther from God.  We are free to eat or not eat things… But be careful with your freedom.  What you decide to do may hurt people worried about such things.  … If someone who thinks eating such food is wrong sees you eating it, and then does it too, you have encouraged them to go against what’s in their hearts.  And that’s just wrong.   This weak brother or sister—someone Christ died for—might be lost because you insisted on rubbing their faces in how you understand things with your ‘knowledge.’ You are doing wrong against your brothers and sisters in Christ by such action. You hurt them by causing them to do things they feel are wrong.  And you are also hurting Jesus.”

All this from a guy who says he “stood up to Peter face to face” and accused him of abandoning Christ by compromising with Jewish Christians still grossed out by the thought of going to Church or eating with uncircumcised gentile Christians. 

Paul here is saying love is more important that knowledge.  He is saying concern for our sisters’ and brothers’ well-being and good relations with God is more important than making a point.  He is saying openness to God requires love before all else. 

Love is an active disposition of the will; it is wanting to do well by the beloved, to do good for the beloved.  Though we often use the word “love” to mean “affection bred by familiarity,” or “desire to possess or be possessed because of attraction and natural urges,” as Paul uses the word here it means “choosing to put that person’s interests before your own.”   It implies an openness of heart and a willingness to act on it. 

Interestingly, instead of the old nostrum “to know him is to love him,” Paul says here, “to love him is to know him.” 

This centrality of love and openness is also found in today’s other scripture passages:  the prophets are prophets because they are open to speaking God’s word, not their own.  And Jesus astounds people around him because he actually helps people and then preaches what he knows from his own experience, not something he had studied and learned from others, like the scribes.  The Psalm puts it this way, “awe in the presence of God” what I would call openness and wonder, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

Don’t misunderstand me:  knowledge is a good thing; seeking to understand things is a desire God has put in our hearts, not something of the devil.  But a desire for the good of others, and empathy, and compassion for them—this is the center of growth in God.  It is the way on which Jesus leads us.  Remember that he said the most important part of all scripture was the command to love neighbor as well as the one to love God.  

Love can lead a radical like Paul to soften his stances out of consideration for others when needed. It is the beginning of wisdom.  It is what makes some teaching authoritative and confident amid so much vapid and second-hand teaching.   It is what can drive out the horrors and fears that control us so much that others think that we are possessed.   

This week, I invite all of us to act with love as Jesus did, and speak with authority as he did, telling our own stories and experience—things which no one can take exception to—and then listening to the stories of others. 

In the name of God,  Amen. 

St. Francis de Sales (mid-week)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

St. Francis de Sales

January 24, 2018

In the Roman Catholic and Church of England’s calendars, today is the feast day of Francis de Sales, who served as Roman Catholic Bishop in Geneva (1602-22).  He was one of the greatest preachers against Calvinism in his age, and came to his anti-Calvinism honestly:  as a young man, he had heard a Calvinist preach pre-destination and damnation, and was so troubled by it that he became bedridden for months.  He returned to the Catholicism of his youth in a visit to a parish church in Paris where, before the famed “Black Madonna” (a statue of our Lady of Good Deliverance) he became convinced that God is Love and desires the salvation of all (God’s universal salvific will).   He took vows as a lay monastic, and later became a priest.  One of the people he helped with his message of God’s love was Jane Frances de Chantal, a wealthy widowed mother of four who was broken-hearted at the hardness of her life.  His Lenten sermon on the Love of God gave her new life and resolve, and soon she had founded, under Francis’s spiritual direction, the women’s religious order the Congregation of the Visitation. 

Francis’ Introduction to the Devout Life gives a taste of the joy underlying his approach to Christianity: 

“The world ridicules devotion in life, caricaturing devout people as peevish, gloomy, and sullen, and insinuating that religion makes a person melancholy and unsociable.  But the Holy Spirit, speaking through the mouths of the saints, and indeed through our Savior himself, assures us that a devout life is wholesome, pleasant, and happy.  The world observes how devout people fast, pray, and suffer reproach; how they nurse the sick, give alms to the poor, restrain their temper and do similar deeds which in themselves and viewed in isolation are hard and painful.  But the world fails to discern the interior devotion which renders these actions agreeable, sweet, and pleasant.  Look at the bees: they suck the bitter juice from thyme and convert it into honey because that is their nature.  Devout souls, it is true, do experience bitterness in works of self-discipline, but they are engaged in a process that converts such bitterness into a delicious sweetness.  Sour green fruits are sweetened by sugar, bringing a ripeness to what had been unwholesome to the palate.  In the same way, true devotion is a spiritual sugar which takes away the bitterness of self-discipline.  It counteracts the poor person’s discontent and the rich person’s smugness; the loneliness of the oppressed and the conceit of the successful; the sadness of the one who lives alone and the dissipation of the one who is at the center of society.  In a word its gift is an equanimity and balance which refreshes the soul.   In the creation God had commanded the plants to bring forth fruit, each according to its kind.  Similarly, he commands all Christians… to bring forth fruits of devotion according to each person’s ability and capabilities…  True devotion, however, harms no one; on the contrary, it brings a person to wholeness.  If our devotional life is not compatible with our lawful vocation then it is manifestly false.… True devotion ...not only does no harm to our vocation and employment, it adorns and beautifies them.” 

Grace and peace.  Fr. Tony+

William Stringfellow on Pain

William Stringfellow on Pain

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

January 17, 2018

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) was an Episcopalian lay theologian, constitutional lawyer, and social activist who is now honored in many places in the church as a saint.   He sheltered Fr. Daniel Berrigan after he fled arrest by federal authorities for acts of civil disobedience against the Vietnam War, was active in racial justice and reconciliation work, was part of the Protestant lay monastic Sojourners’ House, and defended Bishop James Pike from charges of heresy by his fellow Episcopal Church bishops (saying that they were motivated by a political agenda to “make nice” with conservatives and White Southerners in the Church).  His writings are broad and many, some written with his long-term living companion, Anthony Towne.  He had a profound influence on such theologians as Walter Wink, Bill Kellerman, John Dear, and Rosemary Ruether.  Stringfellow saw his calling as a commitment, bestowed upon him in baptism, to a lifelong struggle against the “powers and principalities,” the systemic evil sometimes called in the New Testament “the power of Death.” For him, faithfully following Jesus meant declaring oneself free from all spiritual forces of death, destruction, and negation, and to submit whole-heartedly to the power of life and affirmation. 

Stringfellow was afflicted with, and finally died from, an aggressive diabetes that often obstructed his circulation and caused great pain.  Reflecting on the pain he suffered, he wrote the following, which I believe is wise counsel to any of us who suffer chronic or acute pain, or wonder about the morality of the current national debate about health care: 

“I am familiar with some of the temptations that attend pain…    I know, for instance, how preemptive pain can be—excluding practically everything and everyone else from its victim’s intelligence or consideration… [P]ain agitates vanity and, most specifically, sponsors a false sense of being justified by suffering… I am haunted by questions: Why is this happening to me? And Why is it happening now?  Or, Is this some cruel or perverse accounting for my past sins and oversights? And If I forebear to blame myself for my pain, who is left to blame but God? Again, Is my suffering of pain consequently related to the massive default and multiple failures of commercialized medicine? Is pain thus an injustice?  And is its essence more an issue of politics than of medical practice?  On the other hand, Can this endurance of pain somehow be edifying?  How is it related to the gospel? 

 

“…I have no settled answers to any of these questions (some of which truly rank as conundrums).   I just live with such issues, as I live with the pain.  And I trust the Word of God until the latter day, when all of created life, myself included, gather at the throne of judgment of this world and when the deposition of these questions and that of all questions whatsoever shall become notorious.  Lord, have mercy upon us.  Christ, have mercy upon us; Lord, have mercy upon us. 

“Meanwhile we are all called to live by grace—that is, concretely—to live in a way (even in pain) that trusts the judgment of the Word of God in history…  I realize that some … would prefer a book on “spirituality” that pronounced some rules, some norms, some guidelines, some rubrics for a sacred discipline that, if pursued diligently, would establish the holiness of a person.  I do not discern that such is the biblical style, as admirable as that may happen to be in the worldly sense. 

“All I can affirm … is that pain is not a punishment; neither is pain a justification.  There are no grounds to be romantic about pain.  Pain is a true mystery, so long as this world lasts.  Yet it is known that pain is intercessory:  one is never alone in pain but is always a surrogate of someone else who hurts—which is categorically everybody.  I consider that this is enough to know if one does trust the Word of God in judgment” (A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994] pp. 110-11.) 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+  

Can Any Good Come From Nazareth? (Epiphany 2b)

 

Can Any Good Come from Nazareth?  

Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
14 January 2018: 8 am Spoken and 10:00 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Parish Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20); 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

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

I grew up in Moses Lake, Washington, something of a backwater in a backwater, in the dry Eastern half of the state.  Many small lakes dotted the area, called potholes.  And so one of the terms of derision we youngsters had for our home town was “Moses Hole.”   After Mount St. Helens dumped about 2 feet of pulverized pumice on our town in 1980, we called it the “Ash Hole” of Eastern Washington.  I personally thought all this was sad, since I had learned, through camping and hiking in high school, to see the stunning beauty of the big sky, the channeled scablands, lakes, rivers, sand dunes and deserts around my home town. And seeing the recovery of vegetation and life after the ash fall was itself beautiful, nothing short of miraculous.  But despite this, Moses Lake remains something of a joke to its young people, yearning for the glamour and green of Seattle or just the more comfortable life of Spokane.  

Jesus’ home town, Nazareth, was something of a joke to people in 1^st century Palestine.   It was a backwater of a backwater. Galilee was kind of like the Eastern Washington of ancient Palestine.   In the Talmud, there is a story of a rabbi who replies to a less than average student by saying to him, Galili Shote' “You Galilean fool!”  And Nazareth was just a tiny village, with maybe 200 or 300 people at most.  Archeology reveals that it was made of crude unfinished stone blocks or mud wattle, with tiny narrow alleys as streets that were filled with garbage and refuse, still there millennia later after archeological digs uncovered them.  Just about 3 miles away—maybe an hour and a half brisk walk over the steep hills of the region—was the provincial capital Sepphoris, at that time a newly rebuilt, modern, gleaming Greco-Roman city complete with gymnasium, sports arena, schools and colleges, and a booming business district.  Its name comes from the Hebrew word for a bird, and it is probably the “city perched on a hill” that Jesus proverbially taught “cannot be hidden.”

So Nazareth, a punchline in a bad joke, was all the more a place from which you could not be proud to hail.  Nathanael in today’s Gospel reacts to hearing about Jesus: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”   Andrew can only answer, “Come and see!”  And so Nathanael goes, contrary to his presuppositions and biases, to see this man from Nazareth.  When he meets him, Jesus for his part, doesn’t take Nathanael’s disparagement of his home town ill: “Here comes a man without any deceit in him at all! He’s telling it like it is! But he also goes to find out on his own.”   And Nathanael begins the great journey of following Jesus, and learns just how wrong his presuppositions were. 

This last week, many of us were reminded of Dorothy Parker's witty greeting on the telephone: "What fresh hell is this?"  According to most participants in an oval office meeting, the President used a crude vulgarity for an outhouse to say that Haiti, El Salvador, and the countries of Africa were places unworthy of sending immigrants to the United States.   Faced with an outpouring of disgust and outrage at this blanket disparaging of countries with majority people-of-color populations, he denied that he had used the word, but stood by what he said was his point—that we shouldn’t accept immigrants and refugees from what he thought were defective countries.   Many of his supporters took exception with the vulgarity, but also said that “at least he’s telling it how it is.” 

What they mean by this, of course, is that the point the President is making resonates with them, rings true to them, even if the details might be wrong or the words ill-chosen. 

Herein lies a cautionary tale for all of us.   

Nathanael was a man “without guile” not simply because he told things as he saw them, but also because he was willing to go and see, and test received wisdom and bias by firsthand experience.  Simply telling how you think and feel is not enough:  the risk of self-deception is too great, the temptation to deceive others too strong. 

I raise this not to point fingers or blame one political leader or another.  I raise it to point to what Jesus is calling us to.   The fact is, we all have biases and prejudices.  Simply expressing them is not honesty.  Putting them to the test, and making oneself vulnerable by going and seeing how things really are is necessary if we are to overcome bias.  This is truer all the more if such clarity of vision puts our privilege and power in question. 

Fr. Jim Martin wrote the following in response to the President’s question:

“Why are we having all these people from [such] countries come here?”
1.) They are our brothers and sisters in need.
2.) They are often fleeing war, violence or famine.
3.) There are children among them.
4.) The Old Testament asks us to care for the "alien."
5.) Jesus asks us to welcome the “stranger.”
6.) Jesus asks us to love one another.
7.) We will be judged on how we care for the stranger.
8.) They come bringing hope.
9.) It's the right thing to do.
10.) That’s who we are."

We Americans like to think of our nation as exceptional.  But we deceive ourselves if we think that this means we are better or truer than other nations.  I have lived and worked in many countries labeled by the President, to use the Latin word, as a cloaca.  They all had stunning physical beauty, and amazing and generally warm hearted, generous, and hard-working people.   They face challenges, to be sure, and hardships we see rarely here.  But they are the homes of God’s creatures, our brothers and sisters, who have the same hopes and aspirations we have.  In my experience, America is exceptional only when it hopes and aspires to be its better self, and lives out its best values.  It is run-of-the-mill or worse when we play power politics, defend privilege, look down on others, and harden our hearts to the cries of those less fortunate than ourselves.  Honesty requires that we test all our beliefs and feelings in the light of the experience of others and in the teachings of Jesus.    

The fact is, we all tend to want to set up ourselves by putting others down.  Fr. Jim Boston from Grants Pass told me an old joke about this Southern Oregon region of ours years ago:  the people in Ashland look down on people who live in Medford.  People in Medford look down on people who live in Grants Pass.  People in Grants Pass look down on people in Kerby and Selma and the rest of the Illinois Valley.  But the people in the Illinois Valley, especially now that they are flush with cannabis money, look down on everybody else.  

Jesus was from a backwater of a backwater, a butt of jokes, a cloaca.  His neighbors and teachers tended to look down on people who did not share their religion, foreigners.  But he taught, again and again, that God is our loving Papa, our Abba, who gives the blessings of rain and sun to righteous and wicked, to Jew and gentile alike.  When he tried to exclude a Syro-phoenician woman from blessing, she turned his slur about dogs into a plea for crumbs under the table.  And he, like Nathanael, went and saw.   He opened the gates of blessing to all.  This is what he calls us to. 

    

Merciful God, give us hearts of compassion and love, and help us to stand with and serve the least of these, your family members.  Help us to hear and recognize your voice as it calls us in the night, and follow where it leads.   Help us to come and see, with Nathanael, where you are and what you what you want of us.

In the name of Christ, Amen

Little Laud to the Devil (Midweek)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

“Little Laud to the Devil”

January 10, 2018

Today is the feast day of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633-45) and martyr.  Laud was King Charles I’s principal ecclesiastical advisor and administrator in the years running up to the English civil war.  Calvinism had become the standard of doctrine and liturgical practice in most parishes of the Church of England, though cathedrals and the royal chapels had retained the style of the pre-Reformation church, now in English and according to the Prayer Book.   Calvinists insisted that if a practice or doctrine were not found in the Bible, it should be rejected.  They questioned using written prayers, organ or choral music, congregational responses other than AMEN, and any understanding of the Eucharist as something more than a mere “ordinance” or memorial meal ordained by our Lord in the Last Supper.  They saw the use of cassock (long black tunic) and surplice (white robe) in church as a “Popish abomination.”  In general, they rejected the authority of bishops and the Episcopacy as “Romish prelates” who supported the “tyranny” of the Royals and the higher nobility.    

William Laud rejected what he and the Prayer Book called the “enormities of Rome” and the Pope.  But he believed that the Church of England’s claim to authority and truth depended its being a continuation of the Church of the Apostles.  This included the three-fold ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, the traditional and orthodox teaching of the undivided Church before the schism between the East and West (in 1054), and the proper and reverent administration of the sacraments of the Church.  He felt that as archbishop he had the obligation of trying to bring order and a degree of basic uniformity to religious practices in England and Charles’ other realms, Scotland and Ireland.  His effort to bring the Prayer Book to Scotland triggered the so-called “bishop’s war.” 

Laud took seriously Paul’s words that in worship, “all things be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40).    So when dispossessed peasants now living in the cities were stirred to mob violence by (unauthorized) Calvinist preachers and started smashing holy tables that had been returned to an altar-like orientation and position in churches, burning altar rails, or breaking into vestries and throwing all the cassocks and surplices down outhouse holes, Laud felt constrained to take action.  As archbishop of Canterbury, he was responsible for “keeping the King’s peace” in the churches, and so he had prominent Puritan preachers arrested, tried for “seditious libel” and punished in what that age’s laws considered appropriate ways (branding or defacement by cropping the ears or nose).  Those thus mutilated replied that the SL brands on their faces stood not for “Seditious Libel” but rather “Stigmata Laudis” (“the wounds of Christ imposed by Mr. Laud”) and said this was simply religious persecution by a tyrannical state and a King’s “wicked minister.”   

The turmoil would only increase, and finally broke into open warfare between the Parliament and the Crown over church practices, raising money through non-tax means unapproved by parliament, and a foreign policy that included a French Roman Catholic queen (Charles’ wife Henriette-Marie) and failure to support Protestants in the Thirty Years’ War.  The Puritan-dominated Parliament arrested Laud and charged him with treason, but prosecutors could not make a reasonable case against him.  So Parliament passed an Act of Attainder against him, legislating that he was guilty of treason.  Though pardoned by King Charles, he was beheaded on January 10, 1645.   King Charles himself was to be beheaded on January 30, 1649. 

Laud was a difficult man, testy and highly protective of his prerogatives and dignities.  Slight in stature and of somewhat common birth, and suspected of having an attraction for other men, he was an easy mark for his enemies.  King Charles I fired his court jester after he had poked fun at the Archbishop’s name and height in a table grace he gave at a dinner with Laud (whose name in Latin means “praise”): “Great praise be given to God and little laud to the Devil.”  One historian has said that Laud was the “greatest catastrophe ever visited on the English Church.” 

We honor him, however, because he was in fact a religious martyr, killed because of his trying to live out his beliefs.  Laud is the single person who probably is the most responsible for the Church of England (and all Anglicanism)’s rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.  Laud, following biblical verses, believed that God wanted salvation for all, and that it was our abuse of free will that turned aside God’s grace.  Puritans labeled him an “Arminian,” after Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who in like manner had rejected Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination (some to heaven and the rest to hell).    The highly emotional label was one way that radical Puritans found a way to legislate the execution of the Archbishop. 

“Keep us, O Lord, constant in faith and zealous in witness, that, like your servant William Laud, we may live in your fear, die in your favor, and rest in your peace; for that sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, forever and ever.  Amen.”    

A Tear in the Universe (Epiphany 1B)

 

A Tear in the Universe

7 January 2018

Epiphany 1B Baptism of Christ

8:00 a.m. said and 10:00 a.m. sung Mass

Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

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

There is a detail at the end of today’s Gospel reading that is quite striking:  as Jesus is coming up from the waters of baptism, “he saw the heavens ripped open, and heard a voice.”  The Greek word here is schizo, to tear or rip asunder.   It shows up again at the end of Mark’s Gospel, in Chapter 15: “Jesus (on the cross) uttered a loud cry, breathed his last, and the curtain of the Temple was ripped in two, from top to bottom.”  The repetition is deliberate: Jesus’ baptism marks the start of his ministry; his death on the cross, its end.  At the baptism, the skies are torn apart so God’s voice can be heard.  On the cross, as Jesus cries out in his death throes, the veil of the Temple, that symbol of the division between this world and the unseen one where God’s presence is not hidden, is likewise torn.

The skies torn and God’s voice heard; Jesus’ voice and the boundary to the holy of holies ripped in two: the phenomenal universe, our day-to-day lives, what we see before us—split and divided so that we see and hear what is behind it all.  There are moments in life where things become clear, where we catch a glimpse of the hidden world through a tear in the universe. 

The baptism of Jesus is one such event; so are our own baptisms.

We are called to follow Jesus in his baptism.  Jesus receives John’s “baptism of repentance,” that is, a washing showing a change of heart and life.   He is about to leave his family’s home in Nazareth, and start his itinerant ministry of announcing the arrival of God’s Reign through word and acts of welcome and healing.     The course of his life is about to change significantly.  Immediately after he is baptized, the heavens are ripped open and God speaks, “You are my beloved; I am well pleased with you.” Jesus immediately sets out into the wilderness for the 40 day testing period preparing him for his ministry. 

Our baptism is also one of repentance, where we change our hearts, directions, and ways of thinking.   The fact that we offer this to babies shows that we believe this is a life-long process grounded in God’s grace, not in our own natural gifts or wits.   It is not just about our feelings.  It is a real thing.  

Baptism demands that we bring forth “fruits worthy of repentance,” that is, a life course and actions consonant with the promises and affirmations we make in baptism.   Included in these is a promise that whenever we fall into sin, we repent and turn again to the Lord.  Again, this is a life-time process. 

Our prayer book tradition has always seen baptism as a sacrament, an outward sign of an inward grace, a signing act in which the grace is bestowed.   Its prayers in the baptismal rite say that the newly baptized has been born again and found forgiveness of sins.   Calvinists and evangelicals have always been uncomfortable with this, preferring to talk about baptism purely as a symbol of what they see as the source of regeneration, the act of faith in the heart of the baptized.   But the catholic, orthodox, and Prayer Book view has always been that regeneration comes through the grace and redeeming work of Jesus and is found in the rite itself.  

So how does this work?   How can the act of receiving washing in water actually change our hearts?  Especially when it is done when we are little, and often as adults cannot remember it? 

Baptism is a tear in the universe.  It is an outward sign pointing to and accomplishing an inward reality.  It discloses truth, even as its outward forms continue in some ways to hide it.

It is this way with all the sacraments: in Eucharist, common bread and wine become the body of Christ, the bread of heaven, even as they remain to all appearances bread and wine.   In reconciliation, we face our guilts and fears and God drives them away, but we remain sinners afterwards all the same.   In confirmation, we reaffirm our baptismal vows, and take this initiation into a deeper, more intentional commitment, but we remain who we were before.  In matrimony, we place our deepest relationship in God’s hands, but the relationship still must be nurtured and cared for.  In orders, we consecrate our life to service in particular ways, and the community offers us up sacrificially to this service.  But take away the collar and the strange kit, and we look pretty much, in fact, are pretty much like all the rest of the laity.  In anointing, we pray for healing and restoration of good health, and we do this even at the end of life, when we expect that healing and restoration will be only at the last day.

All the sacraments take place in time, but are also eternal.   All involve sacrifice.  All involve consecration.  All involve trusting that God will change us and will change things.   Sacraments all are part of a life’s course, are all lifelong.  

We most often can’t see ourselves as changed people.   Our habits, our ways of thinking, our ways of behaving are just too ingrained.  Baptism or no, adult immersion or infant effusion, we wonder if there is any possibility of change in our lives. 

But that is exactly where the rip in the universe occurs.  In sacraments, if we see things rightly, we get a glimpse of what’s really going on. 

A major part of the light shining through this tear in the universe is expressed in what that voice says to us:  “You are my child.  I love you.  You make me happy.” 

But the glimpse through the veil, the vision through the torn skies does not last forever. 

And so we have to take a long view.  There are times when we can perceive who and where we are only by looking into the rearview mirror and seeing what we have already passed. 

Given the stresses of life, it is easy to lose heart.  It is easy to believe that people cannot change. We meet toxic individuals, and think they will be this way forever.  We run into, like in yesterday’s Epiphany gospel, wicked kings.  We run into our own failings and relapses.  That is why we promise in baptism to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and in the prayers.  The miracle and mystery of our faith is this—we can change because God can change us.  At baptism we affirm in the Apostles’ Creed that believe in “the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”  This makes no sense at all if we don’t believe that God is at work transforming us, and that we shall all be changed. 

Sacraments make us new, and help us be reborn in the direction of the image of Jesus.  Remember the classic line from African-American preaching quoted often by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Lord know I ain't what I outta be.  And Lord know I ain't what I'm gonna be.  But thank God Almighty, I ain't what I was!"

Let’s try all the harder to keep the Baptismal Covenant.   As St. Francis’s teaching has been summarized, preach the Good News of God’s love at all times and in all places, occasionally actually opening our mouths to do so.   Let’s not get discouraged in the fight against the powers and dominions, the unjust structures of power and society, and think that if we can’t see change that means there is no point in the effort?   Remember Margaret Mead’s words, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  And let’s be more regular and more fervent in our prayers, more emotionally connected by them. I think that is one of the reason we use the Psalter so much in prayer—it is a book of emotions.  As Gandhi said, “It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

It is only by taking our covenant seriously, and challenging ourselves with it, that this life-long tearing of the universe is made open to us and we can see that God has loved us all along. 

Thanks be to God. 

Amen.