“Humor is the universal solvent of the abrasive elements of life.”
Former Senator Alan Simpson speaking of President Bush “41”
Goodbye President 41
Reply
Category Archives: Anglican
Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky
Bishop of Shanghai, 1906
Every October 15th, my mind turns to this odd little man, a Polish Jew, converted to Christianity, becoming in due season, the Anglican Bishop of Shanghai. The years of life spent at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL I sat opposite his grace’s stained glass window for at least three services a day.
We remember him because of the extreme example of the work of the Spirit was done in and through him. He was fully paralyzed expect for minor use of one hand. With that limitation also came, as he said, “patience, otherwise I would never have sat and translated the Scriptures into Mandarin Chinese. And indeed this thing came to pass and we are amazed not for his stamina but for his interpretation of his circumstances. JWS
God Bless Them Everyone
The Right Reverend Michael Curry, Bishop of North Carolina holding forth in the pulpit at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN. at convention 2006. He was good then.
As The Most Reverend, Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, he was above splendid today at Saint George’s, Windsor UK preaching at the Celebration of the Marriage of TRH The Duke & Duchess of Sussex. The Gospel was preached.
I was really proud of being an Anglican today. I was proud of being a priest of a church led by Michael Curry. God bless you sir. God bless the marriage of Prince Harry and his Duchess.
JWS+
Going Through Home, Again.
The Chapel of the Cross, Madison, Mississippi, 1848
Last Sunday afternoon, I preached at the Chapel of the Cross, Madison, Mississippi. It was almost seventeen years since last I stood in that ancient place, built by slaves of bricks made from the very ground on which it sits. Fr. Ben Robertson, present Rector of the parish, was very kind to invite me “home” again.
Indeed it was home to me from All Saints Day, 1989 until midnight of New Years Eve 2001. It was a rich time. I learned many things as the congregation grew from 125 or so to the mid-800s in a decade. Of course in that time, I received more credit and blame than I deserved (is it not always so?). When people remarked on the growth, I learned to reply, “I can’t make people come here, but I can keep them from staying,” (that too is always true).
So many people I loved in Mannsdale have departed to greater life. As I reverenced the altar the other night, trough the clear glass of the altar windows the tombs of the dead were framed by magnolia leaves. Some, I had said the words over their mortal remains, Chapel members having dug the grave as they continue to dig them even today. Sitting through the night with the dead is a rare privilege we can give each other. Keeping the establishment open all night does not appear on the business plans of the funeral industry.
I struggled to find the right words. Finally, I settled on a series of meditations from Easter Week 2016, ending with the last three paragraphs from my sermon on Easter Day 2015. Please find it embedded below.
I suffered burnout in 2000 and 2001, culminated by an eleven week stay at Menninger Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. I recovered but realized late in 2001 that I could no longer sustain the kind of workload that required at least twelve her days on numerous days per week. So, I stepped down. Later in Memphis, I found that I had Type 2 Bi-polar disease and through the support of Marilyn, Doctors and my staff at Saint John’s, I have come to a good place with that disease. It is, by the way, the most under diagnosed disease of American adults.
“You can’t go home again,” as Thomas Wolf declares. You can, however, “go through home again,” as I have learned about the various “homes” of my life. It was healing to go through The Holy Ground of the Chapel of the Cross last Sunday. God bless you all who welcomed me home and saw me off back home to Memphis. I love you all.
I live in hope, in spite of the facts.
John W. Sewell+
Leave Taking 2003 – 2017
EPIPHANY 4, January 28, 2018 – Saint John’s Memphis, Tennessee 20111
I was warned in advance nobody can really prepare you for the circumstances you face in ministry. If they told you just wouldn’t believe it. In 1981 I left Seabury-Western with every intention of doing the sort of careful, appropriate liturgies Lee Mitchell trained me to do. I was assigned 2 parishes 30 miles apart. One of them was Fort Payne, the seat of Knox County, Alabama. There I became the deacon-in-charge of Saint Philips,
housed literally in a former school house, painted bright red, the flowers were red, and the dogwood was red. Even the newly minted deacon’s hair was red in those days, at any rate I set out to inflict on them everything I had ever thought about doing in ministry – all at once. But then reality reared its head in the vineyard of the Lord. It came about on this wise…
The organist at Saint Philip’s was actually a Presbyterian elder who lived with his Momma and ran title searches for a living. His name was Erskine Davenport (you can’t make this stuff up!) Well I laid out the service and got the bulletin ready, we were singing some lovely hymns and it being Rite I, the Willan Mass setting that we all know and love. We sang the Kyrie and that went pretty well. Then we got to the Sanctus/Benedictus, I opened my mouth to sing and then I heard the entire congregation recite the Holy, Holy, Holy and I learned a lesson that day that has stood me in good stead all these 36 years. You can’t sing what the organist can’t play! [wait] O and did I mention that Erskine had cerebral palsy? I didn’t think so. From that very first Sunday – we arrive at this very last Sunday a day of Farewell. .
Look at the Gospel reading for today: MARK 1:21 They went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching— with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
Note that Jesus taught with authority not like the scribes. Scribes – scholars who spoke with verbal footnotes, spouting bibliographies as they taught. Jesus spoke from his core, his experience – his being one with the Father. All he did in the flesh he accomplished through his obedient humanity. So we’re not off the hook. Then he did a little psychic housekeeping for a fellow on the back row. His reputation got around in a hurry. This is the Jesus we seek union with. This is Jesus we must experience directly personally.
I grew up Southern Baptist and they taught me things: Principally Bible content and the inescapable reality that each of us owe God one soul. However, I had an itch that was never scratched there.
Christ Church, Albertville AL.
Chapel of the Cross, Madison, MS
Saint Luke’s, Mountain Brook, AL
Saint John’s, Memphis, TN
I wandered the halls of John Wesley who taught me about life in the Spirit and came in due season to The Church of England. Our practice of pulling the extremes toward the center is not easy, after all the middle of road is a good place to get run over. But at our best it a life-giving posture that most any Christian can practice
I get ahead of myself. When I was a sophomore at The University of North Alabama, 47 years ago, I joined a Bible Study sponsored by The First Methodist Church of Tuscumbia. There was a hunger among us, a kindredness, a growing belief and experience that God is real and that God can be experienced, directly. In those days we thought nothing of praying all night.
One night in the manse of a Cumberland Presbyterian Preacher, the group prayed with me to contract, I’ve learned to call it. Tzim Tzum, the Jews call it, to make room for the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity- Karl Rahner called the Spirit: God penetrating history and existence – For God to have a freer hand, more room to operate, that I be more conscious of his call and that he have the option to call on me day or night and that what he had given me needed to be available to the Work of Christ in the World, God had first call on it.
Later that night, I drove home to the farm where four generations of Sewell’s have lived and went to bed. The next morning when I awakened and was aware of being me in my body: I found I was praying in the Spirit. I have never been the same since.
That is not to say that “I and all I know from that day to this, lived happily ever after ever. Almost 20 years ago I was hospitalized at Menninger Hospital for depression, later diagnosed as (type 2) Bi-Polar disease.
Thank you for taking a risk and hiring a crazy priest 15 years ago. It has been intimated of late that perhaps “Poor Saint John’s can find a rector who doesn’t talk quite so much about Jesus.” While intended as derision, I count it a badge of honor. I’m asked what is the hardest part of this Job/Work? Wanting so much more you than you have wanted for yourselves.
I knew I was getting old when I learned about 2 years ago that people were collecting, The Sayings and Aphorisms of Father John. Let me share some of them with you this final time. If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing poorly. We have low standards not no standards. Father Bronson Bryant, mentor and friend of my soul, said to me about 35 years ago, “Oh John, We are always prepared for God to do nothing.”
I’ve pondered what to say today. Most of it comes from the last five years as the culture changed and the churches continue shrink.
Today, in Church and out of Church, there are thousands of souls who realize in varying degrees of clarity that what they want from religion is not a collection of doctrinal ritual symbols, nor a series of moral precepts. They want God himself, by whatever name he may be called; they want to be filled with his creative life and power; they want some conscious experience of being at one with Reality itself, so that their otherwise meaningless and ephemeral lives may acquire an eternal significance.
For hundreds of years Western man has been convinced that he could ultimately solve every one of his problems by doing something about it. It is a beneficial exercise in humility for him to come up against a problem about which he can actually do nothing. Yet the problem has to be solved. The situation would be maddening and impossible if that were all there is to it. But that is not all, because, as we have seen, mystical knowledge is something given to the soul by God, and there is a sense in which it is already being given to the soul—now and always.
In this same sense, God is the most obvious thing in the world, the most self-evident, and union with God is the primary and most unavoidable reality of our lives. Yet God is so obvious and so unavoidable and so close to us that we are not aware of him. To try to see God is like trying to look at your own eyes, for he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Alan Watts
“The Word is always being born, but if he is not born in me, of what use is that to me.” — Meister Eckhart
Forty-five years ago I dissected a frog. I say that not by way of confession but to examine a paradox. As is common in secondary science curriculum, during a unit on anatomy one of the exercises involved dissecting something. At Lexington High School in Lexington Alabama, we were not so exalted as to warrant fetal pigs so we tackled the more prosaic amphibian. The lab reeked of thermaldohyde as we took up scalpels and performed exploratory surgery on the supine corpse. The exercise was informative as to vascular systems and the ordering of bodily functions. At the end of the smelly process by my station there was a small pile of frog parts. I had learned a lot but the frog wouldn’t hop.
What do it mean by this? Experiencing God is the goal. Learning facts about God, while useful, can never replace union with the Lord Jesus. This brings me again to the knot I am worrying these days. What is needed must move us beyond mere “frog data” to “frog hopping.” How do we hop? We take up those ancient practices that formed the first Christians in faith that the Holy Spirit that led them into truth will do the same for us. But then I experienced the really of giving up ego control.
In the winter of 1978, I was driving on the Bluegrass Parkway in the central Kentucky. 1978 was a brutal winter over all this country. Snow was deep and the road icy and dangerous. I say that because I was literally had seen no other car for miles and hours. Well, I was doing pretty well, having experience in icy weather. That was when it happened. Suddenly, without warning the car began to spin 360° – as the landscape began to spin, time slowed & I thought, I hadn’t planned on this what and I going to do after the car turns upside down? My right foot and leg and already learned that slamming on the brake was a really bad idea. Steering wildly had no good outcome.
Then I had that moment of clarity. A thought came to me, one so outrageous and counter-intuitive I would never have entertained had I any other option. But, I was flat out of options. There was simply nothing I could do to fix my problem. I could makes things worse but not better. I took my hands off the steering wheel, held them in mid-air. No longer in charge, having given up any power I had remaining was just along for the ride. The car righted itself. Now, I was headed in the wrong direction and grateful. What I learned that day in the frozen hills of Kentucky has served me well all these years and decades in two different centuries.
Dealing with matters of power and faith is like driving a car on ice. Doing what comes naturally, is almost always not the thing to do.
Let me share with you what I have learned the past 5-years of Renewal Works – On the National Episcopal News Feed on Friday, Jay Sidebotham described renewal works and spoke of Saint John’s as an example of what can happen when people experience God. .
- Saint John’s exists as a place to encounter God. Period. Nothing else. If people cannot find God here. It has no reason for being. In the coming years more than one Episcopal Church in Memphis will fail. It might be this one unless people find God consistently at 3245 Central Avenue.
- Clergy must re-invent themselves.I am not a professional Christian. I cannot be Christian in your stead so you need not bother with it. Only you can be a Christian for you.I am here, Bob is here, Dean is here next Sunday, to practice our own Christianity and Coach you in yours.
We are player-coaches not truant officers.
I have my job and my work. My Job is to keep this place going, tend the functions, services. My Work is the Cure of Souls –
- Lay Ministry is the way forward. Lay initiation, lay leadership is the only way forward. Now that Western Culture is no longer Christian Culture – leadership from above WILL NOT WORk! Leadership from below will. That is why we took up Renewalworks and invented SOULWorks these past five years.
Two Octobers ago I was in Washington DC at a memorial conference for Rabbi Edwin Friedman my teacher. As I sat there and the voice in my head I have known for 47 years said, “John, Today begins the Third Act of your life.” Nothing more. For a year I pondered, finally realizing that my work here was the end of ACT2. On Wednesday I step down from my job as Rector. I do not step down from my work: The Cure of Souls. Stephanie Brown and I with the help of many are founding a new Non-profit, called ACT3, 1049 Cresthaven Road 38119. – Is my new laboratory of faith. The moving van comes tomorrow. I love you. In the name of God …
Christmas Eve
The Annunciation – Henry Ossawa Turner
The Kingdom of God comes, as our Lord put it, “without observation.”
Even so it was a particularly inauspicious beginning. Gabriel had come to a young woman in Nazareth named Mary. He told her that God had chosen her to be the mother of God’s only son and that the Holy Spirit would accomplish it. She agreed, and it was so.
Joseph, Mary’s fiancé, at first thought to divorce Mary quietly. But then Gabriel let him in on the plan and so he took Mary for his wife. I’m sure there was unpleasant gossip about the pregnant bride and her husband who some in town thought a fool for marrying her at all.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
In response to the census decreed by the Emperor Augustus, Joseph traveled to the hometown of his ancestor David. Apparently Joseph didn’t want to leave Mary alone so late in her pregnancy she rode a donkey 75+ miles to Bethlehem. There was no room in the inn so they wound up in a stable. Tradition says it was a cave.
It was not an auspicious place for a birth.
And there her first born son was born – laid in a manger – with the animals all around.
It was not an auspicious nursery.
James Tissot – Angels Appear to Shepherds
An Angel appeared to shepherds who had the night shift watching the sheep. The angel said, “To you this day in the city of David is born one Christ the Lord.” Then suddenly more angels appeared. Was it 2, 20 or 200 angels? It’s hard to discern the aggregate when you have so little practice seeing angels. “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth.”
It was not an auspicious audience.
The shepherds went into Bethlehem and indeed it was so: Emmanuel – God with us.
It was not auspicious in any way we would usually recognize! But the truly important things in our own lives have always come with out auspicious beginnings. We never saw their importance at the time. It is only in getting still and looking at our life that we see the outline of meaning. Oh, we say, that’s what that meant.
How amazed would Augustus be to know that more people know him from the opening line of the Christmas Gospel than from any inscription on a building in the forum in Rome?
Quirinus
Quirinus is the only Roman Governor of Syria now remembered and that for an event which he never knew came to pass.
Those taking the census, those who could afford rooms in the inn that night never knew that an event born out poverty would be the very event by which we divide history before and after.
“Here in time we have a holiday because the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time, in human nature. St Augustine says the birth is always happening. But if it happen not in me what does it profit me? What matters is that it (the birth) shall happen in me.” Meister Eckhart
The inauspicious surroundings of our lives are the very occasion new birth in us!
It is the dark recesses of the stables of our souls that new birth begins.
It comes quietly hardly noticed by the turning of new leaves and amid the litter of good intentions.
It is when we are powerless and come to know it that the birth pain begins.
When we give up and know that we cannot make it on our own – there is a sudden irresistible movement of grace and there it is – new life – laid in the manager in amongst the ruin of our well laid plans.
This is not what we expect. This is not what we desire. We want drama. We want the earth to tilt further on its axis in order that we will know that we are alive and that all is well. But that is not how it happens. Meister Eckhart: “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.”
The Age of Augustus – Jean-Leon Gerome
Tonight heaven and earth meet in that inauspicious event born of poverty. Earth is drawn up into heaven. In the great silence — without observation – He is come!
CS Lewis once said, “What a sorry place the world would be if it were always winter and never Christmas.”
Well, it is finally winter even in Tennessee. And it is Christmas — let us be still and silent before him that he may be reborn in us.
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2017
With the arrival of Mary Sunday we have reached the third trimester of Advent. We began Advent looking to the Second Coming of our Lord. On the two middle Sundays we heard the words of John the Baptizer proclaiming the coming Messiah. Last week we heard John say that he must decrease that the Messiah may increase. Today we hear again the story of the Annunciation. It is the story that is read on March 25 at the Feast of the Annunciation, which liturgically is set nine months to the day from Christmas. It happened like this.
In the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptizer, The archangel Gabriel was sent by God to Galilee to visit Mary, the fiancée of Joseph. Tradition has it that Mary was at the well drawing water when he (Gabriel) first appeared to her. She was so disturbed by his appearance that, abandoning her water jar, she went home. Later he appeared to here again. Most artists have depicted her in her home reading.
Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Ave, Hail, or as we would say, Hello.” Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.”
She is troubled by his words and pondered what this might mean. Gabriel said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Mary said, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
Let me say a few things about this passage.
- Angels are sometimes called God’s thoughts. They are everywhere but easy to overlook. One must be sensitive to the greetings of angels. Tradition praises Mary as a model for dealing with angels, for her readiness to acknowledge the angel’s greeting, and of course for her willingness to embrace the fate announced by the angel. Paintings show her in a contemplative mood, in her room, reading. It would seem to take a degree of expectancy and intellectual preparedness to glimpse the angel when he appears.
- Mary is a model for dealing with angels because of her humility. “Humility is an important virtue of psychological life that allows things to happen, allows a world to exist beyond the one we know and understand. It is one of the most important psychological attitudes, required if we are to return to a life graced by angels.” [Thomas Moore, The Angels]
- Word: St Bernard of Clairvaux speaks to the importance of words: “For God, word is the same as deed. For God alone it is the same thing to do as to say.” In Annunciation word is efficacious.
- “Overshadowed” This is a word full of Old Testament imagery. “The Spirit that comes upon Mary is closer to the Spirit of God that hovered over the waters before creation in Genesis 1:2. The earth was void and without form when that Spirit appeared; just so Mary’s womb was a void until through the Spirit God filled with it with a child; but since Mary is a virgin who has not yet lived with her husband, there is no yearning for or human expectation of a child — it is the surprise of creation. No longer are we dealing with human request and God’s generous fulfillment; this is God’s initiative going beyond anything man or woman has dreamed of.” p. 314 Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah
The angel comes with a new idea. Someone has said that God’s favorite practical joke in the Old Testament is old women getting pregnant. Elizabeth, now pregnant with John the Baptizer, is the latest in a long line of Matriarchs, beginning with Sarah, who give birth after such conceiving should be impossible.
In western art we often see Mary wearing a red dress under a blue cloak. The red symbolizes earth/humanity overshadowed symbolically by the blue of heaven/divinity. Here God is doing a new thing.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, The White Queen advises Alice to practice believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast.
Here God is doing an impossible new thing before breakfast.
What is that to us, we ask?
In his essay in the anthology, The Angels, [edited by Robert Sardello] Thomas Moore writes, “Annunciations happen every day in the plainest circumstances. Religious festivals like the Annunciation always call to mind eternal happenings, forms and images that give structure and value to every life. The Angel and the Virgin are always engaging in dialogue: the angel announcing some impossibility, the virgin taken aback, questioning, agreeing. In this particular event the soul – virginal, patient, expectant, prepared, receptive, modest – begins to carry new life and personality, a child, as the paintings often show, miraculously fully formed from conception. (Every time we use the word “concept,” an annunciation, probably hidden and forgotten, lies in its history.)
Here in the third trimester of Advent the angel announces the conception — pregnant moment of new life.
- Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia “Wherever you go you must be pregnant with Christ. When a woman is with child, people recognize the life that is within her . . .. She is a witness to life. She carries life around with her.”
- Advent is about slowing down.
- Advent is about watching
- Advent is about waiting
- Advent is about taking a wheel off
- Advent is about decreasing, making room
- Advent is about listening to the hello of the angel.
- Advent is about accepting the new life announced by the angel
- Advent is about preparing for new life.
As St. Basil the Great once said, “Annunciations are frequent; incarnations rare.” Let us with Mary listen to the hellos of angels. For an angelic hello is a sign of grace now and always, that the Word will be born in us as well.
Amen.
ADVENT ONE
YEAR B
December 3, 2017
John W. Sewell
Saint John’s Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee 38111
Christ in Judgement – John De Rosen Mural Saint John’s Memphis
The long season after Pentecost is ended. For the next four Sundays we reflect on the Coming of the Christ.
We do this in three ways:
1. The yearly remembrance of his First Advent.
2. His presence here in the sacraments and community
3. Looking to his Second Advent.
On this first Sunday of Advent we look to our Lord’s Second Coming. The lessons from scripture this morning are lessons of anticipation and judgment. The prophet Isaiah writes of his longing for God to visit his people with judgment. He sees the presence of God to be like the effect of heat on water or fire on brushwood. The presence of the God of Israel changes things. This is a God who works for those who wait for him. Now keep that in mind. This is a God who works for those who wait for Him. The consequences for those who have not waited for God, who have fallen into sin and are alienated from Him, are dire, “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind will blow us away. Yet, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Things are bad but God will come and like a potter and Father will remold and restore all things.
In his Gospel, Mark sees that the prophet’s prayer has been answered. Indeed God has come and will return a second time. The Sun will darken. All sorts of natural disasters will occur and THEN the Son of Man will come in great glory. And this coming, says our Lord through the Evangelist Mark, is a promise. The heavens and the earth will pass away but my WORD will not pass away. Here “word” is best translated, “creative energy.” This word is not static, but dynamic. Our response must also be dynamic. The dynamic response is to WATCH.
“Take heed!” he says. It will come like a man going on a journey. He leaves his home and leaves his servants in charge and commands the gatekeeper to watch. For we do not know when the master will return at midnight or evening or morning. Watch, so that he does not find you asleep. WATCH THEREFORE!
God’s will is that his creatures mature. We do that by facing challenge. So, here is a good opportunity for growing ourselves up and calming ourselves down.
Yet we are commanded to mature and thus to watch and not fall asleep. This is hard. But there is good news for us in the Epistle reading. In his letter to the Christians in Corinth, Paul gives thanks for the grace of God, “So that you are not lacking any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of Our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end.” This is good news. We are told to watch and not fall asleep AND Jesus will enable us to do just that. “Come,” says Isaiah. “Watch,” says Mark. “And,” says Paul, “God will sustain, hold you up, be by you, as you await his coming.” So we wait. We will be judged by the quality of our waiting. Will we wait and watch passionately or will we become distracted and forget to watch at all?
In order to watch and wait appropriately, we need an adequate theology of time.
How many of you have a digital clock? In a way a digital clock is a violation of what it means to be human. Why? Because all a digital clock tells you is now! Now! Now! Now! It is a violation of humanity because it has no reference to the past or to the future.
A CIRCADIAN clock (the old-fashioned one with hands) which marks the twenty-four hour rhythms of the earth’s rotation is better theologically because it marks time in reference to the past and future. It is half-past the hour or a quarter until the hour. We need these reference points:
Past = memory = remorse & gratitude
Future = expectation = anxiety & excitement or despair
There is a tension this time of year between digital and circadian time keeping. There is much talk about the “commercializing” of Christmas. If we are seduced into the manic, Now, Now, Buy Now! No matter that the Christmas trees up are up and it’s not Halloween yet” of digital time, we will be disappointed again! A digital culture is not accustomed to waiting. Circadian thinking says, “Wait a minute, it’s not time yet.” It’s not even Thanksgiving yet. Let’s wait until it is the time to do these things. So the day after thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year. But even circadian thinking is not enough.
An adequate theology of time has an understanding of time that is not digital, now, now, now, fixed on the moment time, or Circadian, with reference to past and future, calendar time.
A deeper Christian understanding of time concerns KAIROS. Not Digital = constantly NOW, there is not past or future. Not Chronos = calendar time = what time is it?
KAIROS: divine time = what is it time for?
its Kairos, God’s time. It’s High Time. It’s mystical time. It’s the eighth Day of Creation: that first day of the week when the tomb was empty and nothing has ever been the same since.
People often say, “I don’t have the time.” The truth is that we have all the time there IS. God calls us to discern the time and ask, “what is it time for?” Advent is in the season to clarify our theology of time. A great symbol of Advent is the Advent wreath. In Northern Europe people took a wheel off their cart and put the Advent candles on it, lighting each in turn, thereby marking the days until Christmas. Taking a wheel off your cart is a proven aid to slowing down. So I invite you to take a wheel off. Light one candle, light another, think, reflect, be. Take time. Do less.
- Wait with Mary, remembering that in the fullness of time, she gave birth to the savior.
- Remember that since that birth earth and heaven are joined.
- Remember that Jesus lived among us without sin.
- Remember that he preached the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven to all people.
- Remember that he died, rose again from the dead, ascended to the Father.
- Remember that he left us to continue the work that he began among us.
- Remember that we gather to encounter the risen Jesus in bread and wine and each other.
- Watch brothers and sisters.
- Watch for chances to touch others in his name.
- Watch brothers and sisters because life is short and there is much to do.
- Watch therefore sisters and brothers, for Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
- Let us watch and wait, discerning the hour and the day.
-
Asking not only what time is it, but what is it time FOR.
Amen.
JWS+
He saw this in 1947!
Image
“To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality.”
Alan Watts – Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion [pg. 70]
Gospel as Comedy not Tragedy
In his book, Telling the Truth, the Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy and Fairy Tale, Frederick Beuchner says that if you can’t take a joke you’ll never understand the Gospel. There is a profound difference between tragedy and comedy. In a tragedy the hero pits himself against the gods and is destroyed by the process. Tragedy is concerned with struggles of power. Comedy, on the other hand, is about ambiguity, and the transformation of roles. We think it is one way and it turns out another. Tragedy invariably ends in death; comedy ends in marriage – a criss-crossing of boundaries and limits. One is serious and the other is playful.
The Gospel lesson today is a tragic-comedy. The setting of the readings for today is feasting and partying. Here in the first act, if you will, of today’s production. The prophet Isaiah marches out mid-stage and issues the invitation of God to a party. The aristocratic prophet from Jerusalem in his best prophetic voice proclaims, “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
This is a to be a lavish party with the best vintage wine and rich food full of fat. This is long before most of the human population had to worry about fat in their diet. This is a time when fat was good news not bad news. Not only will the eats be great, but as a further act of excess God will shallow up death forever. He will wipe away the tears from ALL faces. Not only will the feast be of the finest food full of fat and taste but the shroud of death will be removed. It will write paid to the old saying of eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die. Wrong, eat, drink and be merry for death is swallowed up and tears are wiped from every face. Death is no more. Furthermore, the disgrace of the people will be removed. God’s salvation — restoration and healing will be unveiled to all the guests — to all people: what an extraordinary vision. We can eat anything that appeals to us without remorse for the things that trouble our consciences and with the sure and certain knowledge that death is no more. Not a bad first act.
Now on to the Main act: Jesus picks up the setting of a party in the Gospel reading today. “The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared,” says Jesus, “to a King who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” In the ancient world one received an invitation to a feast by messenger. Then messengers then delivered a second message that the feast will soon begin. The King sent servants with the message; “The ox has become barbecue. The fatted calf is now filet minion. Countless cases of Dom Perignon are chilled. The tables are groaning with everything from Buluga caviar and Italian truffles all the way to MOON PIES and R.O.C. cola. There is some of whatever you want to warp your beak around. (It’s enough to drive the editors of Gourmet Magazine wild.) Come to the Wedding banquet,” they said. BUT — the guests made light of it . . .One went to his farm — One went to his business, while the rest seized the servants, mistreated some and killed others.
The King’s reaction is like a scene out of Rambo or The Terminator: Houses exploding in flame. These are the beautiful people from “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” They are the very folk we admire. They are beautiful people who have everything but the one essential thing, namely, trust — the only, from God’s point of view, that matters. They have everything but lack the one thing essential, namely, trust — faith, the only from God’s point of view required. That is the tragedy. They have trusted themselves when that is the only thing that will not work. They are like the long list of winners who lose: the Pharisees, the Priests, the rich young ruler, they are you and me, they are all of us . . . who live the twin mistaken notions: Our good works will get us into the marriage feast. And that God’s nature will absolve us from having to sit through it if we happen to have other plans. Both are tragic mistakes. As the guests learn they are dead wrong. Salvation is not by works and the heavenly banquet is not optional. We are saved only by accepting a party already in progress and God has paid the price with his own death. He counts only two things grace and faith. Nothing else matters!
The scene changes – Act II, Scene 2, The King says to his faithful butler, “the wedding is ready, but those invited are not worthy (by their unfaith.) Go into the streets and invite those you find to the wedding feast. Out all the uniformed flunkies went. They went out and gathered all they found: good and bad. (Note he does not invite the good and snub the bad, he invited ALL, while we were yet sinners. He simply invites us to trust his invitation. So the poor, the prostitutes, bag ladies, men with missing front teeth and the smell of Thunderbird on their breath, all the ner-do-wells completely overlooked by the beautiful and important are all home free. See the comedy breaking out? So the hall is filled with guests.
Act II, Scene 3: Now, let me admit that what I am about to say is conjecture. Just go with me, here, … you can’t hold it against someone if they are shanghaied to a party and you don’t like what they wearing. So I think . . . the “sudden guests” are provided wedding clothes, suitable clothes — Bill Blass – Valentino — all sorts of designer rags in exchange for their filthy ones. As the King comes by to mingle with the guests he spies a man without a wedding suit. He apparently came in since he was forced but he will not put on his suit. The King said to the man without a wedding suit. Friend (or as Ann Landers used to say, Buster) How did you get in here without a wedding garment?! The man was speechless! And then they threw him out. Even in a comedy some will always insist on tragedy. You might make some people show up, but you really can’t make them like it, after all, can you?
What is this tragic-comedy telling us? Invitation is the principle judgment in this parable. Notice that “Nobody is kicked out who wasn’t already in. Hell may be an option; but if it is, it is only one that we insist on after we had already been invited to the heavenly dance. The first Guests are worthy. They just wouldn’t come. Their unacceptance was the issue. The Replacement guests become guests by accepting the invitation. The man without a garment wouldn’t accept or even speak and out he goes. The King insists on dragging everybody and their brothers to the party. Everyone is a member of the wedding party and is only shown the door AFTER they were invited in.
GRACE is the only basis of entrance into the Kingdom . . .Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus EXCEPT our unwillingness to accept his INVITATION. The difference between the blessed and the cursed in one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is a done deal for both groups before either does anything about it.
Here in the epilogue, [following my device to the end] in the reading from Philippians, Paul writes from the perspective of one who has said yes to the heavenly banquet. “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. … I have learned to be content with whatever I have. [That sounds un-American] I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
If God accepts us then we no longer take our identity from our circumstances. We begin to relax in the comic “joke” that what we have always been told about who is in and who is out just isn’t so. Let’s relax, this show isn’t a tragedy after all. Yes, Jesus does die, really dead, on the cross. It’s not stage make-up and fake blood. He’s dead, really dead. That would be a tragedy, if that were the end of the production. But it isn’t. God raised Jesus from the dead. That same resurrection is ours, if we’ll just take it. Therefore things for us are not necessarily how they appear. Let us not be defined by circumstances. God is giving a party and all that is required is that we accept the invitation and show up. There is no end to the party he has prepared for those who love him!
Amen
Beyond Contradiction 