M’s Sermon for Wednesday in Holy Week

What wondrous love is this, O my soul! What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss to lay aside his crown for my soul.

In our readings, we are moving in a progression to Maundy Thursday. On Monday night, we heard how Mary of Bethany poured out her jar of expensive ointment onto the Savior’s feet and wiped them with her own hair. A simple act of love. But an act rich with meaning and rich with feeling. Her act gave us a glimpse of what pure human devotion to God looks like.

Tonight’s reading gives us a glimpse of another facet of the depth of love in the relationship between God and humanity. Monday’s reading showed us what human love looks like when humanity is at its best. Today’s reading shows us what God’s love looks like when humanity is at its worst.

A thousand years before, King David had sung in the psalms about the pain of human relationships, the pain of relationships gone wrong:

“All my enemies whisper together about me and devise evil against me. Even my best friend, whom I trusted, who broke bread with me, has lifted up his heel and turned against me.”

As David sang, as David prophesied, so Judas acted.

The one dips his bread in my bowl, this is the one who will betray me.

It’s not like Jesus doesn’t know. He knows the friend who will betray him. And yet he loves.

Of course, if it would be one thing if the betrayal had stopped at Judas. Not only did the disciples fall away in the garden, but Peter himself would betray Jesus three times. But the betrayal doesn’t stop with biblical characters either. I think of things that I’ve done and things that I’ve said. I too have betrayed him.

It’s not like Jesus doesn’t know. He knows the people who will betray him. And yet he loves.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul! What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss to lay aside his crown for my soul.

Learning to Love the OT in a Marcionite Church

The commenter Walmart Episcopalian has made a great comment down below that shouldn’t get lost. Here it is:

I know the discussion has moved on to the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan, but I wanted to continue our discussion about the Liturgy of the Word.

I spoke with my Rector about the Liturgy of the Word, following our discussion here. His experience as a lay person and then as a priest tells him that most people are bored by the O.T. and Epistle and perk up during the Gospel because they have a greater sense of connection to it.

I was wondering if the Liturgy of the Word has lost its punch/relevance in a literate, information-saturated society where story-telling is not an exciting break in routine but something against which we learn to defend ourselves. I even wondered, to my shock and surprise, if returning to the proclamation of the Old Testament in the Liturgy was a good thing.

As the first reading, often the most difficult linguistically and most distant culturally, perhaps it causes shut-down among the people and by the time for the Epistle they’ve already glazed over and turned inward.

Also, the majority of Episcopalians I’ve met are crypto-marcionites, or maybe just marcionites. In Adult Ed. I constantly hear about how the God of Love would never countenance the killing of the Hivites, Jebusites, Perrizites, Egyptians, Amalekites et. al. and they simply don’t believe God had anything to do with it. They don’t believe the God of the Holiness Code is the God of Jesus.

They generally like the psalms, however, because most of the psalms address experiences in ways that are comprehensible to them. Except for the ones where the Psalmist curses his enemies or demands death, those make them uncomfortable.

Perhaps adding the OT was a bad idea for our marcionite church. Maybe the Hebrew Scriptures can only come back when the people again believe that the God of Hebrew Scriptures is the God of Jesus.

On the other hand, maybe we need to keep the OT so that we combat the marcionite tendency through proclamation if not in fact. (I would suspect the Bishop-elect of Northern Michigan would not be a big fan of the God of the Old Testament, the God who struck down Uzzah is not a God who trifles with his ‘otherness’ from humanity)

But there’s my current thought, boredom and Marcionism have gutted the liturgy of the Word. I don’t know how this could be addressed in practice. Any thoughts?

Indeed, I think this is of a piece with the issues surrounding the bishop-elect on Northern Michigan. Our people simple don’t know the Scriptures as well as they ought. This is especially true for the Old Testament.

Part of the issue is scope. The New Testament was written in and is concerned with events that happened within a fifty year span and many of the writings—especially the epistles—are focused enough an theological issues that they can be read without a whole lot of appeal to historical context. (Although I’d would never recommend divorcing them from said context.)

The OT is completely different. The events of which it speaks spans over a thousand years and involves a lot of odd places and things done by people with strange names.

I’ve recently come to some conclusions about how biblical teaching should be done in our parishes. I’m still working out how these will look in practice, but here’s the core of my thinking.

Proposal for Teaching the OT to Anglicans

Because of the issue of scope, clergy and congregations need a set of master narratives within which they can locate any particular OT text. These master narratives are:

1. Historical (I.e., an easily understandable grand sweep of Ancient Near Eastern history and Israel/Judah’s place in it.)

2. Geographical (Where the heck is Edom anyway? Or Babylon, Assyria, Carmel, Samaria (which Samaria!), etc.? We need a basic sense of what’s where.)

3. Literary (I.e., what are the major literary divisions on the OT [TaNaK is a good start…], what are the major genres, and what can we expect from these genres?)

4. Theological (I.e., what are the top 5 major themes running through-out the books that help us locate any particular text we read?)

Yes, these are a bit reductionistic—but any big picture view is. As fond as I am of adding nuance, people need a sense of the whole befgore nuance makes any sense.

The way into the whole of the OT is through the Psalms. It’s been observed by ancients and moderns alike that the Psalter is a microcosm of the OT as a whole. One the above four master narratives are in place, select psalms can be used to help familiarize people with how these things look on the ground. You start with the psalms, then move to the other books.

Does that make sense as a start?

Just Wondering

Why are we having to defend why a bishop-elect should teach accord to the Creeds?

I don’t believe the conservatives are correct. I don’t believe that, on the whole, TEC is an “apostate church”. But it is clearly way past time for the pendulum to swing out of doctrinal experimentation to recenter on the Christian message.

Does It Get Worse?

The folks at Stand Firm have dug up a bulletin insert wherein the Epistle reading at the bishop-elect’s church is replaced by a reading from the Qur’an announced as a biblical lesson.

It’s also noted there that the preacher is a Muslim-American scholar who, in the weekly calendar is listed as giving a Q & A during coffee hour.

We don’t have much context for what’s going on here. I read this as a Muslim-Christian inter-religious occasion where a Muslim speaker is explaining his faith and the piece from the Qur’an may well be part of that. But again, we don’t know.

I will say this:

1) The inquisitors at SF have not demonstrated that this replacement of readings is a pattern at this church. But I know that it is elsewhere; there are other Episcopal congregations who routinely replace Scriptural readings with non-biblical texts. It’s wrong and it needs to stop.

2) As evidence for or against the bishop-elect, it continues a trend of poor and questionable liturgical decisions. I’d have no problem with a one-time occasion where the sermon space is given over to a speaker on Muslim-Christian relations or even a reading from the Qur’an—but not in place of a regular lesson and not liturgically treated as such.  I.e., if the speaker wishes to refer to a Qur’anic text, then it should be read in the context of his presentation. [[Ok—I was trying to be broad-minded. Nope, shouldn’t be done, especially not in a Eucharistic context.]]

The pattern that is emerging around this candidate is not good: A questionable Christology, improper changes to the liturgy, and an overly-enthusiastic embrace of the practices of another faith without  clear grounding in his own tradition. Any one of these may be a misunderstanding, but here we have a pattern of a progressive who has progressed outside the bounds for one who is supposed to be a guide, guardian, and teacher of the core commitments of Christianity.

3) In the bulletin insert, Ps 40 is “paraphrased” with “Here I Am, Lord”. ‘Nuff said—this dude is toast.

What If…

…a bishop or the diocesan offices sent out a note to all the parishes in the diocese on Monday morning, asking them to please send in the sermon preached at the church the previous day?

What sort of uproar would it cause among the clergy, and what do you think the bishop would learn about the quality of preaching, exegesis, and doctrine in the diocese?

Unsolicited Advice to the Bishop-Elect of Northern Michigan

Dude—when you’re under fire for the suspect nature of your views, you don’t come out with a statement like this.

Try something more like this:

As an Anglican, I understand the Incarntion to be an especially important way that the Triune God has shared himself with humanity. As the Creeds and the Ecumenical Councils of the Church teach, Jesus, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was both God and Man in a way that tends to defy our hollow explanations. By taking on real flesh and real humanity, Jesus honored—glorified even—our humble existence and as Anglicans we treasure this act as part of the great mystery of redemption.

I’m also informed by Eastern traditions and greatly respect Athanasius’s foundational On the Incarnation. I’ve also thought a bit about how Gregory of Nazianzus thought about it…

I’m sure you can take it from there.

Bottom line—gave us what we want to hear up front. Then get subtle. Starting out subtle makes folk think you’ve got something to hide.

State of the Liturgical Renewal

In some correspondence we’ve been having  Donald Schell  recently raised the question of the state  of the liturgical renewal in the Episcopal Church. He wondered if it were distingrating.

I replied that I’m not sure which verb is most appropriate: has it dissipated, stagnated, bifurcated, fragmented, polarized—or something else entirely…

I think it’s an important question but first we must take stock of several indeces before the question can accurately be answered.

  • How do we measure the state of liturgy or liturgical renewal overall? One of the major indeces that people “check” is web/forum/blog chatter. And I don’t know how reliable this is. For every anecdote about an exploding parish with liberal or charismatic or anglo-catholic liturgy, I can point to conter-balancing anecdotes. Meanwhile the majority of parishes keep doing what they’re doing (don’t they?). But what exactly is that? What does MOTR look like regionally and nationally—and how much effect are the ultra-progressive or totally traditional “shrine” churches having on what MOTR looks like?
  • Where are clergy receiving their liturgical formation? Is it residual formation from home parishes? Is it from what they learned in seminary? Is it adjusting to whatever their parish they land in is used to?
  • What exactly are clergy learning in seminary? Not just what books are they reading, but what are their chapel experiences designed to do—root them in a particular tradition or show them the range of “what’s out there”?
  • What exactly do we mean be “liturgical renewal”? Do we mean the teaching and discipling process that ought to accompany teaching the liturgy, or do we mean the tide of thought referred to as “the Liturgical Renewal Movement” spearheaded by Aidan Kavanaugh, Don Saliers, Gordon Lathrop, Gail Ramshaw, et al.?
  • What else is going on in the American religious landscape? Let’s not be too inwardly focused here. A large part of what we refer to as the “Liturgical Renewal Movement” (essentially the reforms of Vatican II that filtered into the mainline protestant churches)  was fundamentally ecumenical. What happened in the ’79 prayerbook was deeply related to what happened at V-II. Now when we look around, a—if not “the”—major movement in Roman circles is nothing less than the “Reform of the Reform”.  You can’t tell me this isn’t having an effect…
  • One generation is starting to lose its ascendancy; another is on the rise. Major sticking points and differences between these generations include their approach and attitude towards authority and their approach and attitude towards the past. However, anything as broad as an appeal to generations is tarring with a broad brush—what size brush is the right size?

What’s your sense? Furthermore, how do we move beyond “senses” and figure out where people are? Or, alternatively, is the church best served by the presentation of a new synthesis?

The ’09 “BCP”: The New American Missal?

As has been noted hither and yon, Lancelot Andrewes Press is coming out with a new book called The Book of Common Prayer. While it is not an officially authorized book of any jurisdiction, it’s safe to say that its intended audience is Western Rite Antiochene Orthodox and American Anglo-Catholics of whatever hierarchical loyalty.

Note, for instance, that it includes the Litany with the 1544 invocations of the BVM and other saints as well as the Proposed ’28’s prayers for the Dead.

Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament begins on p. 63; the Asperges on 485…

There’s only one serious question that I have about it—what Canon does it use? While the documentation mentions some additions, it doesn’t say to what they have been added. The 1662 Canon has some nototrious issues from a catholic perspective. I mean, there’s a reason why most Anglo-Catholic churches in England now use the Novus Ordo as opposed to the prayer book and in earlier days inserted the Roman Canon around the authorized one.

Well, we shall see. And yes, I do indeed plan on picking one up as time and funds allow.