Listen with the Heart (Epiphany 4B)

 

Listen with the Heart

31 January 2021

Epiphany 4B

10:00 a.m. Live-Streamed Ante-Communion

The 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.

 

I have to confess:  I am a person of strong opinions, usually arrived at, I flatter myself in thinking, through a lot of research and reflection.  Sometimes this gets in the way of me connecting with others, since I think that by walking them through how I arrived at an opinion, they might come to agree with my enlightened position.  This is aggravated by my tendency—a tendency shared by many men—to take people’s words at their face value, and to try to “get under the hood” and fix things for others—usually by correcting what I consider their errors for them.   I have learned over the decades that often all people want is a listening ear, not a fix-it-guy.  In fact, playing Mr. Fix-it of Know-it-all drives people away.   Listening, truly listening, is to pay attention to the feelings expressed as well as the words spoken, and it most often does not require words or advice from us.   I heard last week of a young boy who told his mother he had gone next door for an hour or so to be with the elderly man living there whose wife had just died.  “And what did you say to him?” asked the mother. “Nothing, really.  I just sat there and helped him cry.” 

 

In today’s epistle, the Corinthians are having a congregation-splitting argument over what the faithful should and shouldn’t eat.   In the Greco-Roman world, 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… 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 sibling—someone Christ died for—might be lost because you insisted on rubbing their noses in your understanding, in your ‘knowledge.’ You are doing wrong against your siblings 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 in Galatians that he “stood up to Peter face to face” and accused him of abandoning Christ by even slightly 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 for others is more important that knowledge.  He is saying concern for their well-being and good conscience is more important than making a point, even a true 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.

 

Not the Weight You Carry, But How You Carry It (midweek message)

 

Fr. Robert Elias, OCD, "Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Bear His Cross"

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Not the Weight You Carry, But How You Carry It

January 27, 2021 

 

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.   For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30)

 

“He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)  

 

We are all carrying burdens:  griefs, fears, stress, and, in this long period of waiting until herd immunity against Covid is established through widespread immunization, a strong sense of our own mortality.  Some of us are mourning the loss of loved ones; others suffer frustration, confusion, and dimming hope. 

 

At times like these, the theology of the cross is all the more important:  Our Lord became flesh and experienced mortality along with us, ultimately suffering an unjust death by torture at the hands of a wicked state.    Jesus calls us to follow him, and this means, in addition to showing his love and service to all, “picking up one’s cross” and following him in his suffering.  Jesus did not promise we would not suffer hardship, but he promised that God would give us what we need to get through it.   He did not say that we would not bear any burdens, or that the burdens of mortality would be light.  He did say, though, that his yoke, the burden he himself lays on our shoulders as we follow him, is light and easy to bear.  After the cross comes resurrection, and to this we are called as well.

 

Mary Oliver says that the weight of the burdens we bear is not as important as  how we bear them.  There is still a possibility of joy and thankfulness even in the midst of suffering:  

 

Heavy
By Mary Oliver
11/8/2013

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hands in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

In Word and Deed (Epiphany 3B)

 

                                                                            Fishers of Men, by Rex DeLoney

In Word and Deed

24 January 2021

Epiphany 3B

10:00 a.m. Live-streamed Ante-Communion

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

Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62: 6-14; 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark 1:14-20

 

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

 

Years ago, when I was working at a college in Maryland, I had as a friend and coworker an older Jewish lady.  She was the kind of person who could tell you nothing but the unvarnished truth.  Once, when she hear I had served as a missionary in the church of my youth, she said, with all sincerity: “You know why we Jews detest missionaries, don’t you?  It’s so very disrespectful and arrogant—‘I have the one true way, and you do not.  Come and be more like me so God will finally approve of you.’ We hate it so much that we ourselves don’t proselytize others.  That’s why most of us loathe the Chabad movement so much: it’s too much like inquisitorial Christians.”    I agreed with her critique that much of proselytizing was cheap single brand promotion. 

 

Today’s scriptures are all about evangelism, spreading the good word, missionary work.  Jonah, after his unsuccessful attempt at running away, relents and helps the people of Nineveh to forsake their unjust ways and come closer to God.  Paul, that missionary par excellence, says we have to stop living our normal lives because the great day of God is coming soon.  The Gospel says that right after the murder of Jesus’ forbidding mentor John the Baptist, Jesus begins to proclaim broadly the happy news of the arrival of God’s Reign and calls followers to help him spread the good news. 

 

Often, we confuse the call to evangelism with a demand that we participate in partisan or sectarian recruiting.  Such a vision is part and parcel of the wrong-headed exclusivism so rightly criticized by my coworker.  The idea is that there is only one true way, one true savior who can save us from our sins if we but intellectually assent to the true teaching. So we must spread the word about Jesus so that people may be saved or condemned by God on the basis of how they react to the message.

 

I don’t believe any such thing, and I don’t think you need to either.  When scripture says things like “Jesus is the only way,” it is expressing the how reliable the writers have found Jesus, not calling him a jealous God. The call to evangelism is a call to spread happy news, joy, not make a sales pitch that will send someone to heaven or hell depending on whether they buy it.  Jesus was constantly telling people that what matters is your love of God and of others, not correct religious practices or belief systems.  In fact, he judged religious practices or belief systems on how they fostered a spirit-led life of compassion and service or hindered it. 

 

The problem with believing that you must convert the world to your way is that such a view has the outward form of love and compassion—who would not want to save people from certain doom?—while it denies the inner power of compassion and love.  You place your understanding above all others’ understandings, and make yourself or your group first.  The world is broken into us and them, the pagans and the believers, the saved and the damned.  Such thinking misunderstands the nature of faith:  it is trusting and giving one’s heart to someone, rather than subscribing to a menu of propositions so you can be part of the proselytizing faction.     It also misses the one great truth revealed by modern missiology:  that God is found everywhere, and is reflected in every tradition, so mission rightly conceived is as much about listening as it is talking.  

 

Evangelism is sharing our joy, our hope, and the experiences and reasons that lead us to find hope in Christ.  Our baptismal covenant charges us to proclaim the good news in Jesus Christ in word and deed.  St. Francis is said to have preached that we should at all times and places be ready to proclaim the Good News, and open our mouths to do so only when needed.   

 

This isn’t about browbeating people and giving them a hard sales pitch to get them to assent.  This is about letting our joy leak through, and it means listening to others. 

 

Sharing our faith, telling people where our heart is, is risky.  It makes us vulnerable.  They might reject it, or belittle it.  But that is no reason to be shy.   Acting out our faith, and living as we believe the spirit leads us is also risky. 

 

But Jesus calls us to act out the spirit-led life, the life of compassionate concern for others, especially those on the receiving end of society’s opprobrium.   And Jesus calls us to share our faith.  As in so many other things, it is a matter of heart.    It is a matter of feeling comfortable in doing what’s right.  It’s a matter of opening ourselves to God and to others.   Do justice, love compassion, and walk humbly with God. 

 

Here at Trinity I have seen wonderful scenes of people sharing their faith: a men’s group where people opened up and talked about what they experienced when sharing in the Holy Eucharist; a women’s sewing group where people talked about how they got through hard personal times; a Bible Study where we listen to each other rather than to a single voice claiming to have the true understanding.  

 

Evangelism is being on the lookout for moments when people are listening and hungry to hear stories.  We usually find them when we listen to their stories first. When Jesus calls us to fish for people, he is just saying expand the circle of the people you’re willing to risk sharing with.  It’s part of his open table fellowship and pursuit of compassion, rather than purity. 

 

This week, let’s find ways to better open our hearts to others, whether in deed or in word.  A thought experiment would be “what do I really truly believe? And why?”  And a practice is to actually bring compassion for others into our daily routine, whether shopping for groceries, driving in traffic, or in our prayers. 

 

Let us proclaim the good and joyful news at all times and places, and occasionally actually open our mouths to do so. 

 

In the name of Christ,  Amen. 

 

Forgiveness (Mid-week Message)

 

 Courtesy ABC News.

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Forgiveness

January 20, 2021

 

Earlier in the week, one of our Morning Prayer lectionary readings was this: 

 

“So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.  If anger overcomes you at times, make sure you do not turn your anger into sin.  Do not let the sun go down on your anger; do not make room for the accuser…  Do not go about bad-mouthing others; say only what is useful to build others up, as needed, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.  And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:25-32; tr. AAH).

 

Today is the inauguration of our new President and Vice-President, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.    The country, our community, and even our own parish are deeply divided.  We all talk about the need for unity and reconciliation, but cannot seem to come to a shared idea of how to do to achieve this.  We often talk about the need to hold others accountable and not ourselves, about the need for others to forgive us, not us to forgive others.   But we all seem to be are acutely aware that reconciling forgiveness can only come through painful truth telling, listening, and accountability.  Simply saying “Let bygones be bygones” without any truth telling, remorse, and amends is cheap enabling, sure to make things far worse in the long run.  It is not forgiveness, it is foolishness.  It is not love, but sappy sentimentalism.  In it there is no grace, no healing.   But holding others to account and not ourselves as well is a recipe for further, deeper, more hateful division. 

 

Since Monday was Martin Luther King Day, here are some thoughts of Dr. King that bear directly on all this: 

 

“… How do we love our enemies?  First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us. It is also necessary to realize that the forgiving act must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged…

 

“Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt. The words “I will forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done” never explain the real nature of forgiveness.  Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing it totally from his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, “I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.” Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.

 

“Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within all of our lives.  …

 

“This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts not quite representative of all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in his being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.

 

“Third, we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding. …

 

“… Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

 

“Another reason why we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.  … Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates [as to the person hated]. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

 

“… A third reason why we should love our enemies is that love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.

 

“… We must hasten to say that these are not the ultimate reasons why we should love our enemies. An even more basic reason why we are commanded to love is expressed explicitly in Jesus’ words, “Love your enemies . . . that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven.” We are called to this difficult task in order to realize a unique relationship with God. We are potential sons of God. Through love that potentiality becomes actuality. We must love our enemies, because only by loving them can we know God and experience the beauty of his holiness."

 

Excerpted from The Radical King by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited and Introduced by Dr. Cornel West. (Beacon Press, 2015).

 

Grace and Peace, Fr. Tony+

Hearing Voices (Epiphany 2B)

 

Hearing Voices
Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
17 January 2021: 10:00 am Live-Streamed Ante Communion
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP

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 had a student several years ago who shocked a French class I was teaching.  He was a well-educated Cambodian who had fled the 1975 genocide in his country, and despite his sophistication and scientific orientation, affirmed in class his belief in ghosts. He told us this story:

 

When the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Phenh, I was evacuated from the city along with everyone else.  I saw people shot on the street as class enemies simply because they were wearing eyeglasses. I was sent to a labor camp near the Thai border.  It was very hard, but I managed relatively well until I realized that there was no hope—all of my friends there seemed to be the first to be killed in a public struggle session.  I had heard that the swamp between the camp was impassable and full of quicksand, but getting across the border was my only hope. I fled in the middle of the night during a heavy downpour that limited visibility to just a foot or so.  Almost immediately I lost my sense of direction, and soon I was in water and mud almost over my head. I lost all hope.

 

But then I started noticing small blue lights—almost like flames—that seemed to call to me. I would follow them—first this one, then that one, and as I did, I noticed the ground under my feet would get more solid, and suck at my legs less. Soon, even though it was still raining heavily, I was following a path marked by blue flames on each side.  Gradually the rain stopped, and dawn came with me on solid ground.  Immediately soldiers surrounded me. But they were speaking Thai, not Khmer. I had successfully crossed the border. The soldiers did not believe that I had come that way through the night, because the swamp was a dumping ground where the Khmer Rouge had been dumping the bodies of those killed daily at the camp. “It’s haunted by all the dead,” they said, “and no one can get through.”

Now I am an educated man. I have studied science and some philosophy. I know that I had low blood sugar, and was under stress. I was probably suffering from hallucinations. I know also about swamp gas and bio-luminescence cause by microscopic plants. I know that all of this might be the explanation of the flames. But when I think about what happened to me, I realize that the only language that can even approach describing it to say that the ghosts of those killed by the Khmer Rouge took pity on me and lead me through that swamp.

 

 One of Cambodia's many monuments to the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

 

I have often thought of my student’s story when people ask me how it is that we Christians, living in an age of neuro-science, evolutionary biology, and particle physics, can say we believe in God, and that Jesus was God made truly human.

 

Most of us who come to Church regularly do so because at some time or another we have had an experience, an insight, a dream, or a deep feeling, where we felt, if only for a moment, that God was speaking to us, that Jesus was embracing us in his arms.  This is true even of us Episcopalians, suspicious as we are of too-fervent claims of endorsement by the Almighty.  Parading such experiences about in public, to us, is simply in bad taste. 

 

“I heard God’s voice” is a dangerous claim. Think of the horrors that have been justified over the centuries with the words, “God commands this”: Holy wars, inquisitions, slavery, child abuse, assassinations, terrorism, sexual predation, the subjugation of first nations, or women, or people of color, or homosexuals or transgendered people.  I have heard tapes of people involved in the sedition at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 saying “I am here because this is what God wants.”  Granted, people have also cited God’s voice in arguing for good things, including the ending of many of the horrors just mentioned.  “I heard God’s voice” is a suspicious claim, if only because it has been used to argue such widely divergent things. 

 

On the level of observable facts, what people call “hearing the voice of God” appears to be indistinguishable from coming to a conclusion or insight through reasoning, introspection, or states of altered consciousness or hallucinations, whether caused by ketosis and low blood sugar due to fasting, emotional distress, possible environmental hallucinogens like ergot, or just a genetic predisposition to neurological disturbances.   When people start talking about hearing the voice of God, then, we moderns are inclined to be like Ebenezer Scrooge when he first sees the ghost of Jacob Marley.  He denies what he is seeing, saying Marley is a hallucination induced by eating before going to bed, “a spot of mustard, a bit of undigested beef.” 

 

Yet we Christians persist in saying that we have heard God’s voice because, just like for my Cambodian student who believed in ghosts, this is the only language we can find that adequately describes what we have experienced.   

 

Hearing God’s voice is the theme shared by all of today’s scripture readings. 

 

The boy Samuel hears the voice of God in the Temple in the night and mistakes it for the voice of his master, the prophet Eli.  Eli, with more experience, finally recognizes that it is God’s voice, and tells Samuel, “Go, and listen with an open mind and heart.”   This all occurs in an age like ours where there is not a lot of vision, or hearing God.  Just as Samuel needed a mentor to help him hear God, we need community, church, spiritual direction and rules of life to help us have better hearing. 

 

Similarly, Nathanael hears Jesus’ call ambiguously at first, then more clearly, despite Nathanael’s prejudices against Jesus for coming from a backwater of a backwater.   Jesus tells Nathanael that he is the gateway to heaven, the ladder on which the angels pass between Earth and Heaven.  And so for us too, Jesus is the rule by which we must judge whether a voice is God’s voice or not.  One of the clear implications of all of Jesus’ teachings is that we should not use God’s word to tell us what love is, but rather use love to tell us what God’s word means. 

The Epistle reading makes a similar point: St. Paul is replying a letter from the Church at Corinth where some people claim to have heard God’s voice recommending things that Paul roundly condemns.   The God they hear is not the God Paul does.

 

In our world, many competing voices claim to have heard God and tell us differing views of what God’s voice says.  Learning to recognize the voice of God among such varied voices is important.   My experience is that there is one standard that is reliable and trustworthy: it is the person of Jesus himself.   In traditional Christian theology, we affirm that Jesus Christ was and is the definitive self-revelation of God.  This means that what the historical Jesus said and did is extremely important.  To be sure, this is all mediated through scripture, tradition, and reason.  The voice of Jesus in scripture itself is mediated by four very different views of Jesus found in the four Gospels.  But the ultimate standard remains Jesus himself.  Getting acquainted with his voice gives us the experience and direction that Eli gave Samuel when he misheard the voice of God.   

 

God does speak. I have heard the voice of God at times, and I believe that many of you have as well. 

“Hearing God’s voice” can only be experienced, as it were, from the inside, and does not make itself readily available for rational analysis from some theoretical objective sideline, let alone for apologetics.

We need not fear God’s voice. It is the voice of a loving savior, a dear friend.  Eli tells Samuel “Go and listen.” Phillip tells Nathanael “Come and see.” 

May we all be quick to do so. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Richard Meux Benson and Charles Gore -- January 14

  

RICHARD MEUX BENSON , RELIGIOUS, 1915 

 &  

CHARLES GORE, BISHOP OF WORCESTER, BIRMINGHAM & OXFORD, 1932

January 14 

 

Collect: Gracious God, you have inspired a rich variety of ministries in your Church: We give you thanks for Richard Meux Benson and Charles Gore, instruments in the revival of Anglican monasticism. Grant that we, following their example, may call for perennial renewal in your Church through conscious union with Christ, witnessing to the social justice that is a mark of the reign of our Savior Jesus, who is the light of the world;  and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Lessons: 1 Kings 19:9–12; 1 John 4:7–12; John 17:6–11; Psa 27:5–11

Preface of  a Saint (2)

 

Commemoration  

Richard Meux Benson (1824–1915) was a priest in the Church of England and founder of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the first religious order of monks in the Anglican Communion since the Reformation, often called the Cowley fathers because Benson organized the society while serving as vicar of Cowley, Oxford.  High Church in his liturgical practices and theology, he chanted with his brother monks Morning and Evening Prayer in choir dress (cassock and surplice) every day.  He led retreats using the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.   A measure of his incarnational theology is reflected in opening lines of the current Rule of the Society:  

 

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, the eternal Word by whom all things were created, to become flesh and live among us.  In all the signs that he did and the teaching that he gave, he made known to us the grace and truth of the eternal Father.  When his hour came the Son consummated his obedience to the Father, and expressed his love for us to the uttermost, by offering himself on the cross.  He was lifted up from the earth in his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead in order to draw all people to himself.  We whom God calls into this Society have been drawn into union with Christ by the power of his cross and resurrection; we have been reborn in him by water and the Spirit.  God chooses us from varied places and backgrounds to become a company of friends, spending our whole lie abiding in him and giving ourselves up to the attraction of his glory.  Our community was called into being by God so that we may be entirely consecrated to him and through our common experience of the glory of the Father and the Son begin to attain even now the unity that God desires for all humankind.”    

 

Charles Gore (1853-1932) was a priest, and then bishop in the Church of England.  After the death of early Anglo-catholic tractarian Edward Pusey, a library and study center was established at Oxford in 1883, known as Pusey House, and Gore became its first Principal.  Gore’s appointment initially raised some eyebrows, since his support of modern biblical scholarship was seen as a betrayal of Pusey’s earlier rejection of what was then known as the “Higher Criticism.”  Gore, however, saw the need to integrate orthodox and catholic faith to reason and science.   

 

It was his theology of the incarnation, in fact, that led him to accept Biblical Criticism.  He put forward what he called a “kenotic” theology of incarnation, using the word kenosis (emptying) from Philippians 2:7, where Jesus “having the nature of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, and took the nature of a servant.”  For Gore, incarnation and kenosis meant that in the occultation of the divinity when God became flesh, God took on the limitations of knowledge and culture along with the weakness and mortality of the flesh.  Thus things on the lips of Jesus in the Gospels about scripture, whether a reference to Noah and the Flood, or Jonah and the Great Fish, or the authorship of scripture Jesus quotes, reflect more the ambient culture in which Jesus lived rather than divine infallible knowledge.   Gore’s orthodoxy and careful scholarship of the early Church Fathers gradually brought most of his detractors around.  

 

In his magisterial Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1890), Gore did us all a favor by gathering together quotes from several early Christian theologians on how our view of nature and the world changes in light of the doctrine of Incarnation:

 

“The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came not to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things.  And then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to us as the Son of God, He took upon Him a garment of flesh and so was seen of men” (Hugh of St. Victor, Migne Patrologia Latina V 177 para 580). 

 

“As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, Who is the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external action … is named the word of the Word …  The incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and consummation of the Universe”” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles IV 13).

 

“The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that Word by which it was created” (Herbert of Bosham, Migne Patrologia Latina V 190 para. 1353.)

 

“Every creature is a theophany” (John Scotus Eriugina, Migne Patrologia Latina V 122 para. 302). 

 

“Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God” (Bonaventure, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, ci. t. ix).  

 

Gore was made a canon of Westminster late in 1894, where his preaching attracted great crowds. In 1901 he published The Body of Christ, arguing that Christ is objectively present in the Sacrament, that the Sacrament is a sacrificial offering, but questioning some later Medieval Eucharistic devotions such as Processions of the Sacrament, unknown to the Primitive Church.  Typical of Anglo-catholics, he supported strong support of the poor and social justice (siding with workers in one of England’s early major labor disputes).  At great personal cost, he opposed British Imperialism and its atrocities in the Boer War in South Africa.  

 

In the first decades of the 1900s, some Church of England clergy went further than Gore in supporting Biblical Criticism, arguing that an Anglican might deny the Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Christ and remain an Anglican. Gore was horrified, and proposed to resign his bishopric so as to devote himself to contending against a position that he believed to be destructive of all Christian faith. His friends persuaded him to reconsider.

 

In 1914, WWI broke out. Gore traveled to France twice to preach and administer the sacraments to soldiers in the trenches. In June 1918 he went to the United States for a major speaking tour on the Church and the post-war world.  Once the war ended, he spoke for reconciliation and the necessity of restoring Germany as soon as possible to the family of nations.  But the victorious powers at Versailles decided to be punitive instead, and the hardship thus caused was a major driver of the Nazis’ rise to power.  Had we listened to Bishop Gore, we may have avoided World War II.   
(--A. Hutchinson+)