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Yesterday afternoon I drifted in to Seabury, knowing that I was scheduled to say the Easter Monday mass at 5:00. I stopped by the chapel on my way in the door just to make sure I wasn’t scheduled to preach — well, you can guess where this is going. I sat down and concentrated on working out an Easter Monday homily, and managed to put something together before a student dropped in and whiled away the rest of my afternoon.

This morning I realized that that was my last sermon at Seabury for more than a year. I’m not scheduled to preach any time in the remaining seven weeks of the academic year, and then I’ll be on leave till September 2008.

That feels odd; I certainly don’t need more to do, but preaching constitutes an integral part of my vocation, and Seabury is the primary locus for my exercising that vocation. I’ll try to concentrate on the “time off” angle, and not the “invisible man” angle.

Anyway, here’s my homily for Easter Monday. . . .
Continue reading “Monday Indeed”

If I had time and resources, I would be devouring everything I could find about Wynkyn de Worde — with specific regard to his (illustrated, of course) editions of the Legenda Aurea and memento mori book, The Arte or Crafte to Live Well and to Dye Well. These works cry out for digitizing. . . .

The Christian Century website reproduces an article by Nancy Ammerman from the current issue. Ammerman argues that the (uh-oh) “mainline churches” don’t devote enough energy to religious education, especially for older children and teenagers. That should probably be uncontroversial; I know of relatively few Christian education practitioners who would say, “Golly, we’ve got a thriving program that our congregation supports unstintingly, that actually teaches young people about the Bible and the faith.”

Ammerman recollects memorizing passages from the Bible as a positive, as “a formidable reservoir of memory to call on, with words and images that remain a powerful part of my psyche.” “[W]hen we commit something to memory, it sinks deep and often resurfaces in surprising ways to meet new situations.” These points strike the exact mark I aim at in my biblical theology course — a mash-up of Nancy Ammerman with Gary Klein, extruded into a practice of Christian halachah and haggadah, not in the tractionless idiom of “I like to imagine that” or “She must have thought,” but in rich, dense, durable continuity with the reasoning of generations of saints, preachers, activists, and sages.

Mainline churches have, I suspect, become so fearful of proof-texting, brain-washing, and imposing ideology that they, we, have defaulted on the opportunity to develop a profound theological infrastructure for whatever “more sophisticated” spiritual maturity we aspire to. But that’s just plain folly. First, the decision not to “impose” religious teaching conveys the clear message that religion is a consumer choice; unlike (for instance) traffic safety or, frequently, which political party to support. Learners recognize the unstated message that “we say this topic is important, but it’s not ‘important’ in the sense that we really insist you take it seriously.” Religion-as-choice makes doctrines and practices into the spiritual ornaments by which we always accessorize the really important parts of our lives.

Second, if churches want people to deal with Scripture and theology on a level more profound than just bandying catch-phrases, they/we need to move people through that phase, not just hope (wishfully) to leap-frog them over it. And there’s no time more suitable for learning to proof-text, so as later to grow beyond it, than childhood. That doesn’t require that we jettison the exquisite work done by the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd; it does require that we/they offer more than pizza, movies, earnest discussions of nascent sexuality, and encouragement to doubt everything. And for heaven’s sake, we should at least start with Catechesis (or something as good)! From the good start that Catechesis makes, we can then draw children with us deeper into the world of Scripture, the rationales of the faith’s teaching, the marvelous lives and testimonies of our forebears.

This being Easter week, I’ll forbear speculation about whether congregations (and leaders!) would support such a commitment, and why not. But by abstemiously refusing to teach our children, we escalate a spiral of ignorance that does nothing whatever to advance the faith we at least notionally pretend to uphold.

I think that 5:30 AM gets earlier every year. Having gotten out of bed in time for the Seabury vigil service this morning (no small feat, requiring some complicated cognitive labor relative to what that beeping sound might be and, having recognized it, figuring out why I set the alarm at so manifestly inappropriate an hour), I’m groggily staggering through the rest of what I hope id for you, and everyone, a joyous and blessed Easter Day.

Happy Easter, everyone! That’s what’s most important.
 
Of less significance was my experience this evening singing the Exsultet for the Easter Vigil. It’s my favorite point of the church year, and Jeanette very kindly invited me to chant the Exsultet this Easter. I practiced and practiced it, which was fine with me because I love the setting — gave it three run-throughs just before the service. Then, in the dark of the service, with only the Paschal Candle and the hand candles of the congregation, my music went missing. The Master of Ceremonies leaned over and suggested that I go ahead and start it from memory.
 
It would be inexact to suggest that I panicked; “panic” would imply chaotic behavior, shrieking and so on. I sang the bits I remembered, and I interpolated notes for the bits I didn’t, and non-musicians who didn’t know what had happened didn’t notice. The musicians (who could tell a mile away, I’m sure) were very patient and generous with me, and in the end, all that really matters is that we proclaimed Christ is risen! with fervor and joy.
 

I’m drafting my rotisserie-league baseball team today, after last year’s heartbreak. If I weren’t re-acquainting myself with the worthwhile players in the American League, I’d be explaining why I was thinking about rhetorical questions and burying your lede; but that will have to wait. Worst comes to worst, I kept Johan Santana and Travis Hafner from last year’s team, so my roster won’t be a total washout.
Continue reading “Nightmare League”

Judging by the referrer logs, a great many people have been combing the series of tubes for ideas for Good Friday sermons. I’m not sure what about my site attracts those readers, and it’s too late for most preachers (I hope), but here’s some ideas about what one might or might not say on Good Friday.

First, last, and every point in between, Christian preachers should preach on Good Friday as though they knew that the congregation were packed with our Jewish neighbors. Opprobrious observations about Judaism — and I’ve heard oceans of them, often as not from “liberal” preachers who wouldn’t dream of insulting the rabbi in the clergy group — not only insult people who had no role whatsoever in the events of Good Friday, not only reactivate the prejudices that engender Christian cruelty to Jews, not only [usually] originate in ignorance about Judaism and first-century cultural politics, but they also falsify the Gospel. The Gospel comes to the world proclaiming release from slavery, freedom to grow in holiness, and a grace that overcomes the innumerable obstacles that human sin persistently erects. There’s just no way that Judaism per se stands against any of this — which should come as no surprise, since the faith that Jesus proclaims depends on its Judaic roots. The church has been grafted in to Israel; it has no business derogating the roots and the trunk.

Second — go back and reread “First.” It’s that important. Romans held the power of crucifixion. If you cannot say anything on Good Friday without blaming someone, blame Romans. But better far not to point fingers on a day such as today; it’s a day to confess our complicity, not to scapegoat Others.

Third, the message of Good Friday involves the suffering and grief Jesus bore — but suffering and grief are not themselves the message. As Mel Gibson proved a few years back, the lurid appeal of grotesque misery offer a perverse attraction; yet if we preach so as to play on that perverse interest, we becloud the vital theological point that the depths of human cruelty to one another have been overridden in the name of kindness, forgiveness, patience, and reconciliation. If our preaching embeds the horror of Jesus’s suffering more vividly than it conveys the beauty of the Gospel, we amplify the effects of sin more than the opportunity to escape from it.

Fourth, to the extent that we do attend to the barbaric tortures to which Jesus was subjected at the behest of the imperial power of an occupying army (and its compliant quisling clients), we ought to look around for possible examples of such state-sponsored torture in the contemporary world, and resist it. That’s not the point of our preaching itself, but it should be an inescapable consequence of the Good Friday gospel; we can’t express the truth about grace if we soft-pedal depraved indifference to our neighbors.

Fifth, have you forgotten “First”?

Sixth, there’s a point at which Good Friday’s grim outworking of human opposition to grace — an opposition no less terrible, all the more terrible when cloaked in the well-intentioned motives of religious leaders — itself begins to reveal, in the unique identity and work of Jesus, the power of God. That point is “sublime” in the sense Lyotard deployed the term: it surpasses and overwhelms our capacity to give an account of it, to explain it [away]. We can turn away from it, or we can trivialize it, or we can refuse to acknowledge it, or any of a variety of other very plausible, sound responses. Or we can recognize in that sublime witness to God’s non-coercive, patient, generous, forgiving love for all people that we too have been invited into a loveliness we could never attain on our own, we could never even imagine on our own. In that loveliness we have to give up much that we would cling to (starting with our autonomy), but the beauty of holiness will catch us up and draw out from us those elements of our identities that edify, complement, intensify, elevate the truths that God draws out from everyone else who steps out onto this thin ice.

Thin ice, but it’s here that we’ve been called. We’ll hang on tight to one another. We will sing, we will pray, we will wipe away the tears in our loved ones’ eyes, we will remember and forgive, and come what may — we will turn our hearts ever toward God. Because we have beheld God come in flesh, full of grace and truth.

If there’s a two-hundred fifty dollar 3D figure modelling program that makes photo-realistic human avatars, you might think there would be a fifty dollar figure modelling program that produces very basic cartoon-like shapes. (Poser Figure Artist is about $99, and specifically excludes cartoon figures).
Continue reading “You Would Think”

It’s been snowing today. Lightly, just isolated flakes, but snow.

In this morning’s mail, I received formal notification from the Episcopal Church’s Conant Fund that I had been granted the amount requisite to support my four hitherto un-funded months of leave time next spring. Woohoo!
Continue reading “It’s Official”

• When I agree with Stanley Fish, I do so with trepidation (as someone who thinks he knows which shell is holding the pea) — but I think Fish is quite right about “The Bible Without Religion.” “The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.” I wish he hadn’t included that husk/kernel metaphor, much less ascribed it to non-specific “theologians”; I tend to see the whole husk/kernel discourse as a massive red herring (Ha! Triumphantly mixed metaphor!). But as to his insistence that you can’t disregard theology’s claim to truth without trivializing the whole exercise, I’on board. (Thanks for the link, Jennifer!)
• Via Aaron Swartz,who illustrates for us one possible result of giving an active and brilliant young mind enough money to enable him to devote time to what interests him, Tom Slee’s riposte to Chris “Long Tail” Anderson. I haven’t read either the much-ballyhooed Long Tail or No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart, but I estimate that I would — as usual — adopt a position that doesn’t align precisely with either.
• If Kathy Sierra is a cute little kitty, is Chris Locke a big teddy bear? People whose only notion of Chris involves his role in the recent ructions should take a refresher squint at his prescient “Common Knowledge or Superior Ignorance?” from way back in 1990. Locke 1990 was already saying some of what we ought to have learned last week, that also pertains to the current convulsion in favor of speech codes for bloggers: figuring out what things mean involves intricate judgments that gross instruments (such as computer-enabled “reading” or “codes of ethics for [all?] bloggers” don’t significantly advance. I have a post gestating about the “code of ethics” reflex, but it’s not ready yet.

Continue reading “Links Stromateis”

I was delighted to observe in James Darlack’s blog a transcription of some of the mandates inscribed in cuneiform tablets in the libraries of the Ancient Near East. You just have to sympathize with librarians who faced the problem of people spilling coffee on their clay tablets, though few of us would think to pray that “all [the deities] curse him with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.” I am tempted, however, to design bookplates that say, “He who fears Anu and Antu will return [this book] to the owner’s house the next day.”