Charles Stuart, King and Martyr (Jan. 30)

 

Charles Stuart, King and Martyr

Homily preached at Thursday Noon Healing Eucharist

Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Rector

January 30, 2020

Sirach 2:12-18, Psalm 20, 1 Tim 6:12-16, Matt 20:25-28

 

O God, give us hearts to feel and love.  Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh

.

“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.”  (CoE Collect for the Feast of Charles Stuart, King and Martyr)

 

January 30 in the calendars of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, an several other constituent church members of the Anglican Communion, is the commemoration of Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland executed in 1649 by the Puritan-controlled English 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 greater religious uniformity to his realms  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 an army to pressure the King to abandon his devotion to Arminian, or anti-Calvinist, religion.  The House of 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, radical Calvinists wanted to try him and abolish the monarchy.  They could only do this, however, if they controlled the Parliament.   So they staged a palace coup by arresting and excluding from chambers a little more than half of the House of Commons: the moderate MPs comprising the majority.  Oliver Cromwell and the remaining “Rump” Parliament offered Charles a choice:  undergoing capital trial for his part in the war or granting the “Rump” Parliament everything it asked for, including a limited constitutional monarchy with few 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 humanity, I commemorate and honor Charles Stuart 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” (jury members) 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.  Charles was offered amnesty by Cromwell if he banned bishops and the prayer book; he died to keep these treasures in the English Church, treasures that keep it and the churches descended from it part of the one holy catholic and apostolic religion.  All sides in the wars of the three kingdoms committed atrocities.  Charles was faithful to his call and his commitment to Christ's true religion.  It is wrong to not recognize him as an exemplar of faith. 

 

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.  

 

 

Contextual Theology (Midweek)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Contextual Theology

January 29, 2020

I had a t-shirt that I wore in the 1990s that I loved: it expressed my commitment to openness and inclusion and racial fairness.  It read: LOVE SEE NO COLOUR.  The idea was that using race or color as a means of categorizing people was wrong: discrimination and treating people as if they were mere adjuncts to their race was antithetical to love and compassion.  Move forward 25 years:  now, not taking into account a person’s whole life situation, including race and color, is seen as a not-so-subtle way of supporting systems of oppression and white supremacy. “Colorblindness” was once seen as a positive value:  remember Martin Luther King, Jr. saying, “I have a dream that my children will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”  But now it is seen as a self-deceptive way of turning a blind eye to the very real ongoing legacy of racial injustice.  “I see no race or color” is usually booked as a micro-aggression against people of color.  What was a positive aspiration became a negative way of avoiding the remaining hard work of dismantling institutional racism.  The context changed.  “Love see no color” remains true when that means “if you love people, you treat them as people, not as racial examples.”  But it is false when it means “Let’s not take into account all the factors in a person’s life and work to correct remaining injustice.”  A similar example is found in how we use inclusive language:  when once “brothers and sisters” was seen as a step forward, including women who had previously been ignored in a male-dominated society, trans-gender and non-binary people today see it as excluding them. 

These are but two examples of a larger process in human life:  when we are faced with a problem, the way we phrase questions about it determine in part how we see it and respond to it.  Answers that we may find to such questions themselves have a meaning and value in that context.  But once the answer is accepted, a different set of questions can result.  And when we use for a new question the same words and images that we used as the answer to a previous question, their meaning changes, in large part because as answers they bring with them all sorts of implications and inferences never present when they were used as questions. 

We see this regularly in scripture study and in historical theology, and this is the main problem, to my mind, with fundamentalist approaches to scripture or history.  “The truth never changes” or “God is never-changing” miss this point:  the meaning of any phrase or image changes in time just by the virtue of being in time. 

A clear example is how we understand what Jesus did for us on the Cross.  An early Jewish-Christian writing in Alexandria and using that city’s famed allegorical approach to interpreting texts  sought in the tractate “To the Hebrews” to explain how in his mind Christianity was superior to traditional Second Temple practice of Judaism.   Jesus, though not a Priest or Levite by lineage, was seen as analogous Gen. 14’s mysterious figure Melchizedek, Priest of the Most High God and King of Salem, to whom Abraham paid tithes.  Melchizedek has no lineage or genealogy listed, yet is seen as a priest of sorts.  So too with Jesus.  Similarly, the detailed sacrificial system of the Temple was seen as the way of getting right with God.  Though Jesus did not perform any such rites, his death and resurrection were seen as having the same effects, indeed, as having better and more lasting results: 

“Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary. For a tent was constructed, the first one, in which were the lampstand, the table, and the bread of the Presence; this is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a tent called the Holy of Holies. In it stood the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant; above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy-seat… Such preparations having been made, the priests go continually into the first tent to carry out their ritual duties; but only the high priest goes into the second, and he but once a year, and not without taking the blood that he offers for himself and for the sins committed unintentionally by the people… But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” (Hebrews 9:1-14)

Thus, to the writer of Hebrews, the Temple and its sacrificial system is an allegorical type for what Christ did and does for us.  His argument is “What Jesus does for us is like what those sacrifices and blood-shedding in the Temple did for those observing them.”     But when you take this out of the context of an active Temple cult and the question of “how can you defend the validity of Christ?” and make it into an assertion of eternal, unchanging truth, “Christ was sacrificed to drive out sin; Christ’s blood and suffering paid the penalty of our wrong-doings,” you end up with a gross distortion of what Hebrews intends.   God ends up blood-thirsty and without compassion, and this most definitely is not what Hebrews intends to say.   

As Father Morgan Silbaugh says often, “When someone says, ‘the Bible says,’ always ask, ‘and what else does the Bible say?’”  I would add, “When someone says the Bible or tradition teach a particular truth, always ask, ‘And what question was this trying to answer?’ and ‘How does that question differ from the question we are trying to make it answer today?’”   

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+

NOTE:  This Sunday is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple, the traditional end of the Christmas season.  We will be blessing candles used in Church, and invite you to bring candles for use at home in the coming year so we can bless them as well.  Remember, since it is our Parish Meeting, we will have only one service at 9 a.m. 

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The Power and the Wisdom (Epiphany 3A)

 

The Power and the Wisdom
Homily delivered the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
25 January 2020; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

In a week full of horrible and depressing news items, two things jumped out at me, small symptoms of the sorry state our nation has sunk to through its bitter partisanship and cult of violence: reported threats by a close confidante of the U.S. President that Republican Senators who voted against the President would “have their heads put on pikes,” and a tape clip of the President last year ordering the firing of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch with the words of a Mafia don ordering a hit, “take her out!”   The left has been known on occasion to use similar violence-laden imagery in its critiques of party opponents, or the not sufficiently “woke” in their own ranks.  Bullying and power-posturing has become the coin of the realm.  There is a certain karmic justice in this: we have sown the wind of our belief in the redemptive power of violence—be it gun rights, military power, or Die-hard fantasy—and we are reaping the whirlwind of the law of the jungle.   We have planted hatred of the other and “we are number one!” and now are reaping Might-makes-right killing any hope we may have had of building community.

Today’s lessons are about loss of hope and community and how trust in God can heal, bringing light and life. 

Isaiah is writing in the 730s BCE.  A new thing in history had appeared: the first transnational military Empire, Assyria under its aggressive new leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who was conquering all the Middle East.  Whole countries simply ceased to exist, their leaders slaughtered and populations deported far away in the name of national security and political order.  Among the first in Palestine were the regions Zebulun and Napthali, near the Sea of Galilee, turned into an Assyrian province early on.   Eventually, all of the Northern Kingdom would disappear.

Isaiah says, “In past days, [God] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future, he will make glorious … Galilee of the gentiles.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”  This light will bring liberation: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.”  Gideon’s defeat of the huge army of Midian with just 300 warriors was for these people an icon of victory against overwhelming odds. God is the one who gives victory and light—this is the message too of today’s Psalm. 

Zebulun and Naphthali, along with the rest of the North, were never reconstituted historically—they became the proverbial “lost ten tribes.”  This left a feeling of an unfulfilled prophecy or broken promise: this is why the Gospel writers make such a big deal over the fact that it was in Galilee that Jesus began and performed most of his ministry.  The great light seen by those who sat in darkness, the great liberator, is understood as Christ. 

Christ’s ultimate victory over death and the grave is also seen by St. Paul as a victory against overwhelming odds.  In today’s epistle, he argues against divisions and factions in the Church, divisions based in clever arguments, appeals to wisdom, authority, and group identity.  Christ and no one else is the source of unity, Paul says.  That’s why using Christ as an identity group banner is so wrong. 

Paul, addressing a bitterly divided church at Corinth, says true unity comes only from the “power of Christ’s cross.”  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  A few sentences later, he adds, “[W]e proclaim Christ on the cross, a stumbling block … and foolishness” to the two main identity groups of his world.  But to those who follow Jesus, regardless of identity and background, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18, 23-25)

Jesus, dying on a public torture board of the Empire, is strong?  Christ, abused and outcast, is wiser than the deepest tradition of the sages?  Paul admits it:  if you don’t have faith in Christ the cross can only be seen as nonsense.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was the religion of the weak, of victims, or losers.  Its emphasis on compassion and pity, he said, simply put a guilt trip on the strong and victorious, who really had nothing to be ashamed of.  The will to power was all that mattered, not artificial concepts of sin and noble suffering.  God on the cross, for him, indeed was a god who was dead.  Any other way of seeing the cross, he said, was self-deception and foolishness.  This idea was taken up fully by objectivist writer Ayn Rand, who instead of supermen made free by the will to power and victim sub-humans rather speaks of the “producers,” and “creators” of society and wealth on the one side, and “parasites” and the dregs on the other.   

For Nietzche and Rand, it’s all about the strong overcoming the weak, the winners beating the losers. It's about “really great” people, “quality” people, casting aside and excluding “losers.”  

For Christ, it’s all about welcoming, inclusion, and service.  It’s about the strength found in vulnerability.  It’s about wisdom in marginalization. As Oscar Romero once taught, “only eyes that have cried can see certain things.”   It is those who sit in darkness that see the Great Light. 

Our confident hope is that in the end, right and justice, truth and love will prevail.  If they have not yet prevailed, that is because it is not yet the end.   Nikos Kazantzakis, in his great novel The Last Temptation of Christ, says, “A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, despairs. You’ll ask me why. It is because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

Living life as one great conflict and struggle for power is the shortest way for making life a hell on earth.  Those who live by the sword die by the sword.  A winner of the rat race is still a rat.  Nietzche and Rand’s argument for striving to be a winner, quality people, at all costs is the death of our humanity.  Says Jesus, “those who seek their life will lose it and those who give up their life will win it.”

Beloved, the cross is the way we follow Jesus: suffering for others, accepting shame, pain, and even death in pursuit of God’s reign.  But Christ on the cross is the power and wisdom of God.  We may want an easier, softer, more ego-flattering path.  But there is none.   On the way of the cross, we experience death and sit in darkness.  Embracing and accepting the way of the cross is the way we can get out of the rat race, out of the constant division, conflict, and turmoil.  Because on it, even as we sit in darkness, we see a great light.

In the name of Christ, Amen.     

All We Need to Know (Comm. Bl. Marcus J. Borg)

All We Need to Know

Homily for January 23, 2020 Noon Healing Mass

Commemorating Blessed Marcus J. Borg, Theologian and Teacher

(March 11, 1942 - January 21, 2015)

Trinity Parish Church Ashland Oregon

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

1 Chron 16:23-27, Psalm 103:1-17, Acts 17:22-25, 27b-29, Mark 3:19b-21, 31-35

We are doing something today that Christians have been doing since the earliest days—honoring and commemorating a dearly departed sibling in Christ not simply with prayers for the state of their soul, but with thanks for the service and witness they gave, and hopes that they continue in paradise to pray and work for our good and growth—and this without need of that person appearing in a sanctorale, or list of the saints approved by the larger Church.   Such local commemorations have always been encouraged for the edification and strengthening of church members, whom St. Paul always called saints, or holy one, themselves.    We celebrate the teaching and witness of Professor Marcus J. Borg, who was a faithful member of this diocese for decades, and whose books, articles, and teaching sessions have helped so many of us reconcile our faith with our varied experience, with history and science, reason, and the compassion Jesus so clearly taught again and again. 

Marcus entered into eternal glory five years ago this week.  I think he would have been amused and humbled that we want to so honor him.  Near the end of his life, he wrote,  “So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.”

“All I need to know”—powerful words from a man who spent his adult life seeking truth, being unsparing in holding up his beliefs to the harsh light of evidence and the facts.  This is no fundamentalist throw-away line to the tune of “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”    It expresses the powerful, irreducible core of his faith: not a parroted line from a received teaching, but rather an expression of what he called not “believing” but “beloving.” 

A leading scholar in the "Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus," an original member of Robert Funk’s “Jesus Seminar,” a biblical scholar of some note, Marcus always tried to make the results of his research available and understandable to the masses, and for this he was pilloried and labeled a heretic by some.  Raised Lutheran, he became an Episcopalian early on and was married to Marianne Wells Borg, an Episcopal priest and once canon at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, where Marcus was named “canon theologian.”  With characteristic humility and humor, he explained that “canon” is Episcopal-speak for “big-shot.”  

 He was above all, I think, a teacher, struggling with and challenging his Gen-X, -Y, and Z students from the Pacific Northwest’s great pool of “spiritual but not religious” “none-of-the-aboves.”      This is clear in so many of his aphoristic-like statements:  

“Imagine that Christianity is about loving God. Imagine that it’s not about the self and its concerns, about ‘what’s in it for me?’, whether that be a blessed afterlife or prosperity in this life. Imagine that loving God is about being attentive to the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Imagine that it is about becoming more and more deeply centered in God. Imagine that it is about loving what God loves. How would that change our lives?”

“Experience of God, not belief in God, is the invitation of Christianity.” 

“’Be compassionate as God is compassionate’ is the defining mark of the follower of Jesus and the ethos of the Community of Jesus.” 

“Reality is permeated indeed flooded with divine creativity, nourishment, and care.” 

Marcus’s major insights, I think, were the careful distinction between what he called the pre-Easter and the post-Easter Jesus, what most scholars call the Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith, the nature of faith as trusting and giving one’s heart to rather than subscribing to a proposition or dogmatic position, and how panentheism, the doctrine that God is beneath and behind all, is distinct from pantheism, saying that somehow God is the same as all things.  As Marcus underscored again and again, panentheism is an important core part of the Christian heritage from the beginning.  

For him, God is not “out there” waiting for us to convince him to break into nature by miracle, but rather, always there, implicit and pervasive.  One of his great lines was that when students told him they did not believe in God, he would ask them to describe what they didn't believe in, invariably a supernatural patriarch keeping scores.  His response was invariably, I don’t believe in that, either.  

Religious News Service in its obituary for Borg wrote, 

“[He] loved to debate but was no polemicist, and over the years maintained strong friendships with those who disagreed with him, developing a reputation as a gracious and generous scholar in a field and a profession that are not always known for those qualities.

“For example, Borg co-authored a 1999 book, “The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions,” with N.T. Wright, an Anglican biblical scholar [and Bishop] who took a more orthodox view of the Gospels. But Wright also recommended many of Borg’s books and lectured alongside him on occasion.

“Spanning the study of Jesus and a wide variety of subjects, Marcus shaped the conversation about Jesus, the church, and Scripture in powerful ways over the space of four decades,” Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr., of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, wrote… “I came to different conclusions about a number of issues, but Marc was always incisive, tenacious, thoughtful, and unfailingly gracious; and over the years he became a cherished friend”…

“The Rev. Barkley Thompson, an Episcopal priest and rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, … spoke of how much he had learned from Borg and how close they remained even as Thompson’s beliefs became more traditional and veered away from Borg’s[:] ‘I once introduced Marcus to a church audience by saying, ‘I agree with roughly 75 percent of what Marcus will say to you this evening. When he stepped into the pulpit, Marcus quipped, ‘I’m tempted to forgo my notes and discuss with Barkley the other 25 percent!’  During a question-and-answer period with parishioners at one event, someone asked Borg, ‘But how do you know that you’re right?’  Borg paused and responded: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m right.’"

Marcus came here to Ashland just a year and a half before his death, and he challenged us, and built us up.  We are blessed to have studied under his tutelage, and to have seen the witness of his faith. 

In the name of Christ, Amen 

+++
 

Marcus J. Borg, Teacher and Theologian

+ January 21, 2015

Local Commemoration

Trinity Episcopal Parish

Ashland, Oregon

Collect [Common of a Teacher and Theologian (GCW)]  

Almighty God, you gave to your servant Marcus Borg special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth as it is in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Proper Preface for a Saint

For the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all your saints, who have been the chosen vessels of your grace, and the lights of the world in their generations.

First Lesson

1 Chronicles 16

²³ Sing to the Lord, all the earth.
    Tell of his salvation from day to day.
²⁴ Declare his glory among the nations,
    his marvelous works among all the peoples.
²⁵ For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised;
    he is to be revered above all gods.
²⁶ For all the gods of the peoples are idols,
    but the Lord made the heavens.
²⁷ Honor and majesty are before him;
    strength and joy are in his place.

The Psalm

103:1-17  Benedic, anima mea (BCP 733-34)

1  Bless the Lord, O my soul, *

   and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.

    

2  Bless the Lord, O my soul, *

   and forget not all his benefits.

    

3  He forgives all your sins *

   and heals all your infirmities;

    

4  He redeems your life from the grave *

   and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness;

    

5  He satisfies you with good things, *

   and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.

    

6  The Lord executes righteousness *

   and judgment for all who are oppressed.

    

7  He made his ways known to Moses *

   and his works to the children of Israel.

    

8  The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, *

   slow to anger and of great kindness.

    

9  He will not always accuse us, *

   nor will he keep his anger for ever.

    

10  He has not dealt with us according to our sins, *

     nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.

      

11  For as the heavens are high above the earth, *

     so is his mercy great upon those who fear him.

      

12  As far as the east is from the west, *

     so far has he removed our sins from us.

      

13  As a father cares for his children, *

     so does the Lord care for those who fear him.

      

14  For he himself knows whereof we are made; *

     he remembers that we are but dust.

      

15  Our days are like the grass; *

     we flourish like a flower of the field;

      

16  When the wind goes over it, it is gone, *

     and its place shall know it no more.

      

17  But the merciful goodness of the Lord endures for ever

     on those who fear him, *

     and his righteousness on children’s children;

The Second Lesson

Acts 17:22-25, 27b-29

²² Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³ For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴ The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵ nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things… [I]ndeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸ For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’  ²⁹ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

The Holy Gospel

Mark 3:19b-21, 31-35

Then Jesus went home; ²⁰ and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. ²¹ When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for they were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”  … ³¹ Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. ³² A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” ³³ And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” ³⁴ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Through Thick and Thin (midweek)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Through Thick and Thin

January 22, 2020

From the earliest of the human experience, we have always wanted gods—or less ambitiously, guardian spirits—who look out for us, give us what we need and want, and can deliver the goods.  One of the features of polytheism was the idea that some kinds of higher power had control of different, specific areas of life, and could deliver the goods in such discrete fields:  Astarte or Aphrodite were goddesses of fertility and sexual voluptuousness; Ares or Mars, success in war and armed struggle; Marduk, of civic order, prosperity, and might; Caishen, of wealth; Asclepius, of health.   Each nation or city had its own god.  Many gods were modeled after forces of nature, and since nature is so complex and mysterious, gods were seen to be in competition with each other.  The trick in getting a god to deliver for you lay in worshipping the right god at the right time. 

But a small tribe in the Near East in the early bronze age had a great insight:  they began to worship a god who created nature itself, who was above and beneath all things, who stood alone, and who brought all things, both good and ill, into being.  They called him Yahweh, a verbal form that roughly means “the one who brings everything into existence.”  He may have started out as a tribal deity, but soon was seen as the real god for all nations, one that could bring weal or woe to his own people.  Yahweh stood above the fray, yet was found in all the polarities and spectra of the time, space, and things he had created.  When Moses was called, he complained that his stutter made him a bad spokesman  Yahweh’s reply tells us much:  “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?” (Exod 4:11). 

While solving the problem of gods not truly worthy of trust and worship because they were so limited and constrained, this expansive view of God presented its own problems:  an all-encompassing and all-powerful God was to be blessed for the Good, of course, but could also be blamed for the Bad.  You could get him off the hook in different ways.  One extremely popular one is to say he is the source of all good but no bad.  Bad comes from not following God, and good from following him.  Attribute to God rational and just reasons for bestowing blessing (when you’re good) and cursing (when you’re bad).   God thus blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. Ethical monotheism declared that how we behave matters to the one who created us.  But it easily devolves into the simplistic formula of the Deuteronomist: follow the commandments and God will bless you; disobey, and he will curse.  It can go further into the self-righteous casuistry of the Chronicler: if you are prospering, it is because God is blessing you for your obedience; if suffering,  because you are being punished by an angry God. 

In the modern church, this line of thinking takes one the face of capitalistic success:  the “prosperity gospel” of some evangelicals is one of the great heresies of our modern age.  Remember the Book of Job is one great complaint against the idea that if you are blessed, you are good and if you are suffering, bad.  Accepting these distortions of the Deuteronomist, Chronicler, or Gospel Profiteer means you have again made God limited and a partisan on one side or the other, rather than beneath and behind all things. 

A better way to understand it, I think, is to see that bad is not the opposite of good, but rather its absence.  God is wholly good and all good comes from God.  But in order to make space for a world apart from himself, for creation, God and good must withdraw in some way.  We perceive this absence of Good and God as Evil and bad things.  In this view, God remains behind and beneath all things, enticing for good and blessing, but not forcing it.    When understood with a confidence that in the end, God and Good will once again permeate all of creation, you keep God good and overarching, while saving him from petty tribalism and capricious favoritism.  We don’t have to blame God for bad things, but we don’t have to give up on trusting God. 

This, I think, was what Jesus had in mind when he said that you find God in the very places where you expect him the least:   Blessed are the poor.  Blessed are the starving.  Blessed are those dying of thirst. Blessed are the downtrodden.  Blessed are the persecuted. 

 

It is what Madeline L’Engle meant when she wrote:   

“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”    

Grace and peace. 

Fr. Tony+