Brief Q/A Announcement and a Link

The Codex Sinaiticus (mid-fourth century): the earliest complete copy of the Bible. 

Hi everyone,

In case you were eagerly awaiting this week's Q/A Round-up, I wanted to announce that we'll be holding off on posting anything related to it until next weekend. We had an absolutely fantastic biblical studies question posed ("How should we read and understand Numbers 31?"), but the nature of the question is actually rather complex, as you may note if you read the passage. We'd rather not answer rashly, as is the tendency of most apologists and interpreters of this passage, because we think a considered exploration of the passage will actually be very fruitful.

So, give us a little patience as we formulate a series of responses to this question, which will not only address Numbes 31 but also, to some degree, the very nature of interpreting the Bible, particularly its difficult passages. Until then, you might enjoy reading this post from the blog Glory to God for All Things. The post is titled "Is the Bible True?", and it deals with some issues related to the question posed above. Here's a taste:

The history of literalism is a checkered affair. Some of the early fathers leaned in a literalist direction for many parts of Scripture, though leaving room for other, more symbolic approaches, where appropriate. The great battles over the historical literalism of Scripture arose in the 18th and 18th centuries in Europe and America (battles over certain scientific matters versus literalism began even earlier).

Part of the tragedy in these battles was that the battlefield itself was a fairly newly-defined area and failed to take into account the full history of Biblical interpretation. For a young believer in the midst of America’s own intellectual religious wars in the late 20th century – my question was whether the choices presented were the only choices available.

I should preface my remaining remarks with the simple affirmation: I believe the Bible is true.

The Man

One of the things we will continue to do on this blog is direct your attention to interesting pieces. Well, for the next few weeks, we'll be posting a sermon a week from the recent preaching series at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Anglican monastery in Harvard Square. The series itself took place in September and was called "Conversations on the Way: the Man, the Message, and the Movement."

Here's a link to the first sermon, called "The Man," which considers the life of Jesus, and was delivered by Br. Curtis Almquist.

And, here's a sneak peek:

He was simply called “Jesus,” not an uncommon name, and he was born into virtual obscurity.¹  Through our internal documents – what we call the Gospels and New Testament writings – we know about the shepherds and wise men who came to worship him in infancy; however there’s no reason to think his birth caused much of any other notice.  In the eyes of observant Jews, he was a disappointment at best and a bastard at worst...


...He had these very weird parents with this unbelievable story about his birth and destiny, a destiny which had seemed to have materialized.  Well, it did materialize, but Jesus had spent virtually his entire life, not living up to the prophecy.  Even the people who had not jeered him and his family because of his “birth story” surely would have abandoned believing the Messianic prophecy stuff long ago.  Jesus proved to be quite an ordinary human being who hadn’t found his way in life.⁵

Introduction to Feast Days, and Alfred the Great in Particular

The Episcopal Church (like the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Orthodox churches) has a calendar for the year(s) which leads its disciples in remembering people and events which it finds important. Some of these are events in the story of Christ, like Christmas and the Transfiguration; some are events in the story of the Church, like the First Book of Common Prayer; some are people we know by ancient text and legend, like Saints Simon and Jude; and some are people whose faces we have imprinted on coins or photographs, like Alfred the Great, C.S. Lewis, and Evelyn Underhill.

These are called “feast days,” and for each the Church sets out a special prayer (or “Collect”) for the day, as well as particular readings (from the Hebrew Bible, the Psalms, and the Gospels) which it believes speak to the special witness and work of the chosen person.

I was especially interested in the texts chosen for this Wednesday’s Feast of Alfred the Great—a king of England “during a time of distress” and a lover of learning, born in 849. The Collect for Alfred ends with this request:

“Awake in us also a keen desire to increase our understanding while we are in this world, and an eager longing to reach that endless life where all will be made clear . . . Amen.”

            This last phrase actually comes from Alfred’s own words: “He seems to me a very foolish man, and very wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear.” (This is found in the Church’s text, Lesser Feasts and Fasts.)

            As a committed nerd—a lover of words, ideas, and strange new things—I found myself to be an immediate fan of Alfred. It seems intuitive to me to connect a curiosity about the truths of this world (grammar! physics! art history!) to the ultimate truth of reality, contained in God and fully known only when we will be able to fully know him. This is to say—wanting to understand how our hearts pump blood or why a sentences works is a natural path to wanting to understand God.

            However! I was also struck by the readings selected for Alfred’s day, because they take this love of understanding around a more complicated turn. Reading them, I thought about how “understanding” is not just a movement outward from ourselves—a curiosity, a desire—but it is also something we gather up within ourselves.

            The Gospel reading from Luke has two abrupt parables from Jesus, not about curiosity but about sources and outcomes. In the first, Jesus reminds us that “Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” In the second, one man “dug deeply” to lay the foundation of his house on rock; this is someone “who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.” But “one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation”; you can imagine how that turns out.

            Both of these images speak of having a solid center—the treasure of your heart, the foundation of your house. Out of these things come our words and actions—good or evil, a sturdy safe place or a wreck. Jesus calls this center “the abundance of our hearts.” I think part of this abundance includes the many many ways in which we understand our world—the ideas and systems of thought which we nurture, the intellectual and emotional habits we adopt, the styles of thinking which we choose to admire.  

Out of Alfred’s understanding of the world and God came Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede and Augustine, a reformed law code, and an attempt to increase literacy and education in his home. This week I want to ask myself: What understanding am I building, and where are its foundations? What do I believe about the world, and about people? What is the abundance of my heart, and what comes out of it?

The first image is a silver penny with Alfred the Great’s noble face; here is the British Museum’s page on it. The second image is of the Bowleaze Cove Jewel, also found at the BM. (You could also read the excellent kids’ page about it, if you’re too tired for academese.) And the British Monarchy has even more information about Alfred.

Sermon for Proper 24A : "Give to God"

This sermon was given at the chaplaincy last Sunday, 16 October. The readings for this week are here: Isaiah 45:1-7, Psalm 96, 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10, and Matthew 22:15-22.

     What beautiful readings we’ve gotten to listen to tonight! I’m grateful that I have only a few minutes to talk about them, since this should lower your expectations, and remind me that I can only share one tiny piece of what I’ve seen in this collection of voices, and what I have seen is itself a small piece of what is present here.
     Isaiah opens with an outpouring of power, a great rush of power and generosity from God to someone who does not even know God: “I will go before you and level the mountains”—“I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places”—“I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me”.
     Our Psalm is filled with songs and wonder—the world itself overflows with joy at the holiness and complete kingship of God.
     In Thessalonians, the good news comes to a community “not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction”; they are so full of this word that the word sounds forth from them.
     In Matthew we also find a great abundance and generosity, but of a slightly different kind.

     In this whole stretch of Matthew, learned men come to Jesus with contrived puzzles and legalistic problems. They set up a world neatly ordered by the little ties of human expectations and human power, and they want him to tiptoe around them and trip. But in each case, Christ slices through these tiny expectations and lifts our eyes instead to a much wider world.
     At the end of Chapter 21, the Pharisees ask Jesus what authority he has to teach; he responds with parables that show the world’s power structure flipped on its head, crushing our expectations. Immediately after tonight’s reading, some men come to ask about brothers, and remarriage, and who gets the widow in the afterlife. Jesus responds by rewriting their idea of the resurrection and saying that God “is God not of the dead, but of the living”. And after this, they get a lawyer to test him, by asking which law is greatest. And Christ responds with a law more bold and broad, perhaps, than they were expecting—that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Each of these responses suggests that what God has to offer us is something more than what we expected.
     In tonight’s reading! the educated folks hope to trip Christ over his own impartiality for status, so that he’ll slip into a political mess.
     But instead of attending to their concern, Christ dismisses them! In fact, I tend to imagine Christ’s whole attitude in this passage as dismissive, even a little disdainful. I imagine him taking the coin, raising his eyebrow as he asks the question, and then flipping it back to them as he says, “Give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, and give to God what belongs to God.”
     In the same way that he dismissed the other educated men, Christ dismisses this question, and in the same way, he suggests that there is something more abundant and generous than what we would expect from our small-scale ideas of power and rule. Christ takes a question about the boundaries of human authority and opens it up entirely : “Give to God what belongs to God.”
     Which, of course, made me wonder, “What belongs to God?! What am I supposed to give?”

     Christ is dismissive of that shiny coin—flimsy money, and its real but flimsy power. This is what the emperor has—and the emperor can keep it. Christ doesn’t call us to claim and spread this kind of power—the kind that builds empires and levies taxes.
     In Isaiah, God pours out power for someone who doesn’t know him. In the Psalm, the world sings out the power of God. In Thessalonians, the good news of God comes to a community “in power”.
     If God doesn’t want the domain of money and bureaucratic authority, what does God want? Where does all this power go? What is it that belongs to God and that we must give to God?

     I think that what God wants is the whole domain of our lives and our selves.
 This is the space over which God wants power. What does he care about the power to print his face on coins, to plaster his name on temples, to build statues and laws over the landscape of the earth. God’s desire is first for us, and the kingdom that he wants is the broad expanse of our minds, the caverns of our hearts, the straight and crooked paths of our actions. Every square inch, every second, every speck—God wants to fill every space of us with his holiness.
     What’s more, he wants us to give this to him. He’s not going to make it easy and just take our choices from us. He wants us to cede our sovereignty and give to him the rivers of our speech, the valleys of our repose, even the forests of our subconscious. He loves all of this, and he wants all of it.
     And when we give this to God, we open ourselves to that power in Isaiah and the Psalm : this righteousness, the reality far behind all the light and darkness, the source of all that is good, Truth itself, the one whose name is Love—we open ourselves to this.

     Now, don’t worry! The strangeness of giving ourselves to God is that when we give something to him, we don’t lose it. We don’t become automatons, with identical mild personalities and empty heads. Rather, the existing shape of our passions and skills shapes the way the power of God takes form in our lives, even as this power actively shapes them.
     Some things we give to God, and he takes and magnifies them, and through them his light shines and his name is known.
     Some things we give to God, and he takes them, and holds them, and says, “Are you sure you really want this in you?
     And some things we give to God, and I think he sort of chuckles and says “Well, that’s interesting!”
     For example, even as I give my whole life to God, I’m not convinced that I need to give up my addiction to coffee, or give up my writing, or stop sleeping in really, really late whenever I get the chance. I don’t think I need to stamp out my sarcasm, my love of arguing, or my inappropriate sense of humor. In my own life, these habits and spaces haven’t led me or others away from God, I don’t think. Once I’ve given them to God, he has even used some of them to draw me closer to him, in ways I couldn’t have expected.

     But there are spaces in my life which I think God would like to change, and fill more and more fully with his holiness. I believe that God cares about that hidden humming monologue I carry around with me inside my head. God cares about every word I choose to think, as much as every word I choose to say. The emotions and impressions we guard and nurture in our hearts—feelings about that co-worker, thoughts about that guy in our seminar, words to a friend about another friend. God cares about these smallest and biggest choices—how will I respond to this cashier whom I find somewhat irritating? how will I respond to my mother’s annoying habits? what will I do when someone is rude or even just dismissive of me? how will I spend my weekend? how will I spend my life? what do I want to do before I die? God wants all of this, and wants to fill these spaces with his voice, his love, his righteousness.
     I hope you will join me this week in considering anew what spaces of our lives we have and have not given to God. And as we walk in this wild landscape of our selves, may we remember that God is always with us, calling us by our own names, and wanting everything to do with everything about us.
     Amen.

Weekly Q/A Roundup: 1

Q1:  As a fashionable gentleman, I am fond of wearing nice handkerchiefs with my suits. As a spiritual person, I would like my fashion choices to reflect the liturgical season. Thus, I have always wondered where might I obtain handkerchiefs that match the current liturgical season. Can you help?

A1: We're glad you asked and are pleased to support the fashionable and spiritual gentleman of the 21st century! So far as we can tell, no current liturgical supplier makes such handkerchiefs for everyday use, though we suppose you could simply buy a number in the right color and wear them on the appropriate days. A quick visit to Lectionary Page in the morning will let you know the appropriate liturgical color. On the other hand, you might be interested to know that there is a piece of liturgical kit which used to be  standard, called the maniple, and was meant to recall the towel which Jesus used to wash the feet of his disciples (Jn 13:1-17). So, as another option, you could always tie a maniple to your suit in the morning, should you need to remember Jesus' admonition to serve fellow Christians as he served his disciples.  

Q2: Why do we worship on Sunday, if the Ten Commandments tell us to observe the Sabbath (Saturday), and God rested on the seventh day after creation (Saturday)?

A2: Excellent question! We know that this one is confusing to a lot of people. The Old Testament does command observation of the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week , both to commemorate creation (Genesis 2:2-3; Exodus 20:8-11) and to commemorate the deliverance of Israel from slavery (Deuteronomy 5:12-15). It is a perpetual reminder of God's creative and redeeming work on behalf of the world and of Israel in particular. Christians, however, started worshiping on the first day of the week in order to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which happened on the first day of the week (resurrection on first day of week- John 20:1; "The Lord's day": Rev 1:10; the early Christian writing Didache 14:1; first day of the week as day for worship- Acts 20:7). 

The thought is that the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday is what delivered humanity from bondage to sin and death. Also, for early Christians, the resurrection of Christ was considered the beginning of a new creation, hence the shift to the first day (there are hints of this view already in John 20). So, we still commemorate creation and redemption, but it's now oriented to the uniqueness of Christ's resurrection in saving us and inaugurating a new world. 

Feast of Luke: Physicians of the Natural Kind

Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. Luke has been remembered, since the earliest Christian centuries, as “the beloved physician” mentioned by Paul in Colossians 4:14 and is said to have practiced medicine before following Paul in his missionary journeys. Luke’s gospel was beloved by the early church for its countless retellings of miracles by Jesus, who was himself called “the great physician.”

What is rather interesting about these two designations, however, one for Luke himself and the other for his portrayal of our Savior, is that they put forth two rather distinct understandings of a physician. To call Christ “the great physician” is to acknowledge the frequency of healings in his ministry. It seems as if Jesus is constantly healing the lame, the blind, lepers, and many others, being moved by compassion for their situation. However, to acknowledge Luke as “the beloved physician” is quite different. A reading from Ecclesiastes was often read on Luke’s feast day, which we still read today to celebrate his witness.

Honor physicians for their services,

for the Lord created them;

for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,

and they are rewarded by the king.

The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,

and in the presence of the great they are admired.

The Lord created medicines out of the earth,

and the sensible will not despise them.

And he gave skill to human beings

that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.

What I hope we can take from this passage and from the witness of St. Luke and his gospel is the way that our faith includes the supernatural, but is not limited to it. Let me explain what I mean. We certainly affirm and believe that our Lord healed the sick, and I know that I believe God continues to heal the sick today. I wouldn’t pray for my friends and family members otherwise. Our faith, however, also retains respect for more than the supernatural healing that shone forth in the early ministry of our Lord and in the ministry of his apostles and the saints. There is also an affirmation in Christianity of the ability which God has given to human beings to exercise ingenuity. “The Lord created medicines...and the sensible will not despise them. And he gave skill to human beings that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.”

God is certainly glorified in the miraculous. But his marvelous work is also manifested in the skill which he has given to humanity, made in his own image. The work each of us does from day to day, our use of our God-given intellect and talents, are a revelation of God’s glory. So, as we prayed in our collect this past Sunday, that we might see the glory of God displayed in Christ, so also my hope is simply that we might see the glory of God as it is revealed in our own lives and abilities as well. For such is our faith.