The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard

Series on Prayer 1: Praise

2012-02-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

In the next several weeks, as we enter Lent, we'll be directing you on this blog toward a classic series of post and sermons which the Brothers at SSJE put together. Called "Teach Us to Pray: teaching on the seven classic forms of prayer," it was series which I found incredibly

Here's a link to the first sermon in the series, by Br. David Vryhof: "Praising God: Our True Vocation." And, here's a sample.

In the Rule of our Society, we echo that truth when we say, “Human beings were created to bless and adore their Creator and in the offering of worship to experience their highest joy and their deepest communion with one another. In our fallenness we continually turn in upon ourselves to seek fulfillment without self-offering. We squander on lesser things the love which is due to the one source of all being” (SSJE Rule, chapter 16).

It’s not about us. It’s about God, who created and redeemed us, and who sustains our life day by day. We have been created by God and for God, and we will find our deepest joy and satisfaction when we live in union with God.

One of the early Church Fathers, St. Irenaeus, commenting on Genesis 1:26, suggests that the primary meaning of humanity’s being made in the image of God is that God has made humanity sufficiently like himself for communion between God and human beings to be possible. Being created in the “image” of God, says Irenaeus, expresses the possibility of human communion with God. Being created in the “likeness” of God stands for the existential or moral similarity with God into which humanity is to grow as it actually lives in communion with God. We are to become more and more like God as we live in union with him.

“Our hearts are restless, O God, until they find their rest in You.” (St. Augustine)

Celebrating Saints, and Aelred's Feast Day

2012-01-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey (englihheritage.org.uk)

After I wrote about Alfred a while back, a non-religious friend asked me, “How do you celebrate a saint, or a feast day? Can Ido it too?” I imagine historians and theologians will have more specific andtechnical answers to that question; my own answer comes via an Evangelicalbackground, plus four years at Princetonfollowing the feast days at midday Eucharist and Evening Prayer.

I think "celebrating a feast day" means celebrating how Godhas been shown to us in the life of a particular person. It is a naturalextension of taking happiness in another’s happiness, feeling joyful becausesomeone is joyful, being pleased at another’s pleasure. In the lives of thesaints and holy people we commemorate, we take both pleasure and instructionfrom the aspects of their lives which make them holy. In them we see onespecific way in which a portion of the great array of virtues can be arrangedinto a life.

A feast day does this in two ways: first, in the way ittells us about the person we’re celebrating; second, in the pieces of Scriptureit selects for our attention.

It tells us about the person indirectly in the Collect,in the context of their virtues which we hope to emulate; it tells us aboutthem directly in the summary of their life in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. And the Scripture readings are smallfocalizations of the Bible—from many voices and many ideas and many times andlanguages, they pick a few which explain, enlighten, and/or complicate the lifeand virtues of the saint. Although we know the Bible is bigger and even morecomplicated than the few pages of text collected for the day, we’re invited tosee the whole through this one small window.

Which, if you think about it, is an awful lot like how wesee God through the life of a holy person.

Today is the feast day of St.Aelred, whose life and Collect narrow down the broad command“Love your neighbor” into the specific “Love your friends.” Today we pray for“the Holy Spirit’s gift of love,” so that we, “clasping each the other's hand,may share the joy of friendship, human and divine, and with [God’s] servantAelred draw many to [God’s] community of love.”

Aelredwas born in 1109, and in 1133 he became a Cistercian monk (and later the abbot) at the abbey ofRievaulx, in North Yorkshire (located sort ofin the center of that big lovely island). The Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts tells us that he “soonbecamea major figure in English church life”; on his way back from Rome, he stopped at Clairvaux, where St.Bernard (abbot of Clairvaux and church reformer) “encouraged the young monk towrite his first work, Mirror of Charity, on Christian perfection.”

And why do we connectAelred with friendship? Lesser Feasts saysthat his most famous work is called OnSpiritual Friendship, a long dialoguein which Aelred teaches that friendship “is both a gift from God and a creation ofhuman effort. While love is universal, freely given to all, friendship is aparticular love between individuals, of which the example is Jesus and John theBeloved Disciple.” For Aelred, true friendship has a “sacramental essence”—aswe love one another, we may be united with Christ in this life, and knowbeatitude in the life to come.*

The readingstoday offer us specific visions of what it might mean to love our friends.We hear first in Philippians a plea to “[d]o nothing from selfish ambition orconceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each ofyou look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

InJohn, Jesus says that we can continue to “abide in his love” if we “keep hiscommandments”. More specifically: “This is my commandment, that you love oneanother as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay downone's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

Growing up, this sentence—“No one has greater love thanthis, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”—was thrown about at everyopportunity. Reading it again this week, I find I had now the same question Ihad then: What does this mean for me, a privileged person in the United States,who has no fear for her safety or the safety of her friends—what does it mean,to lay down my life?

Philippiansoffers us an answer: laying down our lives might mean that we give up our own“selfish ambition,” our self-regard, the things in our life that seem(incorrectly) to be deeply important. Aelred says that “[true] friendship canlast only among the good” (2.41), and “the good” are those “who within the limitsof our mortal life live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world” (2.43).A friend, says Aelred, is one “with whom you may talk as freely as withyourself, to whom you neither fear to confess any fault nor blush at revealingany spiritual progress, to whom you may entrust all the secrets of your heartand confide all your plans. And what is more delightful than so to unite spiritto spirit and so to make one out of two?” (2.11).**

This whole-hearted and honest friendship leaves little room forpettiness—for grudges, for passive aggression, for resentment, or all theniggling forms of selfishness which can easily creep into our relationships.Instead, Aelred points us towards a generosity and commitment to those we love,which in turn leads us to God.

Pour into our hearts, O God, the Holy Spirit's gift oflove, that we, clasping each the other's hand, may share the joy of friendship,human and divine, and with your servant Aelred draw many to your community oflove; through Jesus Christ the Righteous, who lives and reigns with you, in theunity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

*From the Introduction byMarsha L. Dutton to Lawrence C. Braceland’s translation of On Spiritual Friendship, pages 22-23.

*From the translation of On Spiritual Friendship by Lawrence C.Braceland, SJ, published in 2010 by Liturgical Press as part of the CistercianFathers series. The “2” refers to Book Two.

Christmas Translations 2:

2012-01-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

I know it's hard to believe, but the Twelve Days of Christmas are hardly over yet. In honor of this ongoing feast, let me offer you another brief reading from the patristic tradition, this one from the work of the Venerable Bede about the "peaceful" circumstances of Christ's birth. Just follow this link to the original post on my own blog.

Posts on Another Blog

2011-12-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

In case you find yourself itching for something brief and spiritual to read during these Christmas holidays, I'll be posting some of my translations of Christmas sermons from the Church Fathers on my own blog. The first one is here.

ZG

The Hope of Advent

2011-12-11T11:24:00.001-08:00

“He came as a witness to testify to the light, so thatall might believe through him.”

John 1:7

TheReverend Luther Zeigler

Come, Lord Jesus, open our eyes to your Light, overcome the darkness thatsometimes befalls us, and brighten our lives with the Hope that only you canbring; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now andforever. Amen.

It is the third Sunday in Advent, a mere two weeks from Christmas, and yet, aswe listen to today’s readings, we seem light years from being with young Maryand Joseph in Bethlehem as they expectantly await the birth of their holychild. If you want your fix of shepherds and angels breathlesslyanticipating the birth of a Savior, you’ll have to wait for our service ofLessons and Carols, because today we’re given an Advent message that isdistinctly more sober in tone. Much as we might like to fast-forward tothe softly sentimental glow of the nativity scene, the voice of John theBaptist is still crying out to us from the wilderness for another Sunday: “make straight all the crooked places where the Lord our God may go!”

Messengers play a pivotal role in the gospels. Indeed, each of the fourgospels opens with the appearance of a messenger. The evangelists differ,however, in who that messenger is and the nature of the message. InMatthew and Luke, the messenger is the angel Gabriel who comes to Joseph andMary with the wonderful, if impossibly perplexing, news that Mary will bear ason who will be God himself. Mark and John, on the other hand, seemutterly disinterested in Jesus’ birth or its circumstances. Themessenger that Mark and John feature in their gospels is John the Baptist, andthe Baptist’s message is less about how God becomes one of us than why. Last week we heard Mark’s account of John the Baptist’smessage; this week we hear John’s.

John the Baptist is the first human introduced in John’s gospel and his messageis a deceptively simple one: I am here to be a witness. I am notthe messiah. I am not a prophet. I am a mere witness to somethingremarkable that is happening in the world. John points not to himself,but to someone else. He points to Jesus and he tells us that Jesus is theLight of the world. The world may seem shrouded in darkness, Johntestifies, but there is a Light that will finally and fully overcome even thedarkest forces in this world. God comes in Jesus to enlighten a worldthat would otherwise be blinded by darkness. Jesus is our hope.

That is John’s message. It sounds straightforward enough. Yet, itis one thing to hear John’s message of hope; it is another to witness ittransform lives.

I was privileged to have that opportunity last February during a visit toHaiti, a visit that forever changed my view of John the Baptist and his messageof hope. I was invited to Haiti by a friend, Roger Bowen, an Episcopalpriest whose ministry in his retirement is to establish a network ofpartnerships between American Episcopal schools and Episcopal schools inHaiti. Although few people know it, the Diocese of Haiti is the largestdiocese in the Episcopal Church. Amazingly, there are more Episcopaliansin Haiti than there are in the diocese of Massachusetts, or Virginia, or NewYork, or any other single diocese.

At the time of my visit, I was the senior chaplain of an Episcopal school inMaryland, St. Andrew’s. Roger had persuaded me to make the trip, alongwith a couple of my faculty colleagues, for the purpose of establishing apartnership between St. Andrew’s and a school in the tiny village of Civol,which lies in a remote hillside region, a few hours north of the capital city,Port-au-Prince. An impoverished place without electricity, running water,or any of the amenities of modern life, Civol is about as poor and remote aplace as one can imagine. The village is little more than acollection of shacks, at the center of which sits a modest, one-room Episcopalchurch with mud walls.

Civol’s school – which serves about 300 children – has no building. Classes are held outside under a portico adjacent to the church. Thestudents sit on simple wooden benches. They have no desks, no supplies,no books. To say the school is “struggling” fails to do justice to thebleak conditions under which these children are trying to learn.

Our saintly guide on the trip was Father Jeannot, the Episcopal Archdeacon of theCentral Plateau and the Haitian priest who oversees Civol, in addition tofifteen other parishes and schools in the region. Because Father Jeannotis responsible for so many parishes across such a wide region, he is only ableto visit each one a few times a year. A visit from Father Jeannot is, forthis reason, a very big deal for the town, especially when he brings along aforeign guest.

Despite their poverty, the people of Civol welcomed us with great warmth,hospitality, and joy. During our weekend stay in their village, inaddition to meeting the school’s teachers, principal and students, FatherJeannot and I performed a wedding, we sang and danced with our hosts at thewedding reception that went late into the night, and then we baptized 16 townchildren the next morning during a three-hour Eucharist service punctuated bytestimonials and songs from our Haitian hosts. My faculty colleagues andI were moved to tears when one of the town leaders rose to speak during theservice, thanking us profusely for our presence and commitment to a long-termpartnership with their school. “No one has ever visited us before,” hesaid. “Even our own government has forgotten us. You are the firstpeople to care that we exist.”

As we returned to the airport in Port-au-Prince at the end of our visit, wedecided to stop by Holy Trinity Cathedral – or what was left of it after thedevastating earthquake of January 2010. The Cathedral’s sanctuary hadbeen renowned for fourteen glorious interior murals, which had been painted inthe early 1950s by some of Haiti’s most respected artists.

As we arrived, we could see that the once majestic, spiritual home to Haiti’speople was now a heap of rubble. Only one corner wall of the Cathedralwas still standing. As we approached the wall, we could see the outlineof one of the few remaining murals that survived the quake: a colorfuldepiction of the Baptism of Christ by the great Haitian painter, CasteraBazile.

At the center of the mural is Jesus, standing ankle deep in the RiverJordan. Next to him, standing on a rock in the middle of the river, isJohn the Baptist. In his right hand John has a pitcher of water, which heis pouring over Jesus’ head. But it is his left hand that catches myeye. With this hand, John is pointing, pointing directly at Jesus’ face,as if to indicate: This is the Way, this is the Light, this is the Truth,this is our Hope.

That image of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus has become an iconic prism forme through which I have come to interpret my brief experience with the peopleof Haiti. Seared into my memory is the spirit of the people we met inthat tiny village: their joyfulness, their faithfulness, their gratefulness,but most remarkably, their hopefulness in the midst of utter bleakness. And, as we worshipped together with our Haitian friends, we could see and feelthat the hope at the center of their lives is precisely the Christ to whom Johnthe Baptist points. Their hope is for the coming of a new reality, when,as the prophet Isaiah foresees it, the Lord “shall build up the ancient ruins,”“raise up the former devastations,” and “repair the ruined cities and thedevastations of former generations.” Isa. 61:4. Their hope isfor a resurrected Haiti.

Hope is the enduring theme of Advent. Hope is what gives meaning andpurpose to the expectant waiting we do during this season. Such hope ismore than mere optimism. The optimist seeks to feel good about hispredicament by denying the reality of the darkness around him and by imagininga better world. The Christian, on the other hand, honestly confronts thedarkness of our world, but places her trust in a promised light that she knowseventually will overwhelm it. To hope does not mean to dream ourselvesinto a different reality, but to embrace the promise – God’s promise in Christ– that our present reality, suffused with suffering as it sometimes is, willultimately be transformed into God’s new world.

As the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf explains: “For Christian hope to beauthentic, we must acknowledge and not deny the darkness; otherwise, we willnever be truly redeemed. But the good news is that those who hope canconfess the dark side of their history because the divine promise frees themfrom captivity to the past. Authentic Christian hope is about the promisethat the wrongs of the past can be set aright and that the future need not be amere repetition of the past.”

In this sense, Christian hope is not passive, wishful thinking; it is, rather,an activity that sustains and animates at the same time. Think ofhope as a verb, not a noun. We strive for peace, struggle for justice,comfort the disconsolate, and heal the sick, all because we trust in the personto whom John the Baptist points and because we trust in His promise that theseactivities are the core realities of the Kingdom to which He calls us.

To paraphrase the late Peter Gomes: The activity of Christian hope is tocontend with the world as it is in light of the world as it is to be. Wedo not despair over the suffering and struggles that confront us because wehave some idea of where we are going. We are headed into the fullness andpresence of God’s time. The hope of Advent rests upon the assurance thatthe God who formed us out of his love, and lived among us, will not abandon usin that future into which he calls us.

It warms my heart to report that since we returned from Haiti in February, thestudents, teachers, and families of my old school, St. Andrew’s, have raisednearly $50,000, with which our friends in the tiny village of Civol arebuilding a new school. They hope to break ground next month, and St.Andrew’s students will visit for the first time in February. This smallstep toward a better future for the children of Civol is not primarily atestament to the goodness of St. Andrew’s students and families, although theycertainly are good people. Nor is it primarily a testament to ourwonderful Haitian friends, whose spirit-filled lives provided the catalyst forthis generosity. Rather, this transformative moment in the life of Civolis primarily a testament to the reality of the Christ to whom John points andto the power of His coming.

My prayer for us all during this season of Advent is thatwe may rekindle in our own hearts a true hopefulness in the future, not acomplacent hopefulness that merely gives us comfort, but a vital hopefulnessthat propels us forward in struggling for justice, seeking peace, anddiscovering Christ’s presence in everyone we meet. Come, Lord Jesus, openour eyes to your Light, overcome the darkness that sometimes befalls us, andbrighten our lives with the Hope that only you can bring. Amen.

Religious Pluralism 3: Thoughts of the Eminent Philosophers

2011-12-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

This post continues our series on religious pluralism by linking to two longer pieces from the thought of two philosophers. One, John Hick, is a noted philosopher of religion often connected with religious inclusivism: that all religions have, in some sense, the same end. He has taught at Claremont, Cambridge, the University of Birmingham, and many other places. He is well-known for his books The Metaphor of God Incarnate and The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.

The other, Alvin Plantinga, is frequently regarded (even by Hick) as the most eloquent philosophical defender of exclusivism (that only one faith is correct and others are incorrect) and, indeed, of the rationality of faith in general. He is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Notre Dame University. His books include Warranted Christian Belief and Science and Religion (w/Daniel Dennett), among many others.

I'll warn you that Hick's talk "Religious Pluralism and Islam" is really quite long, so you may want to break it up. Unfortunately, though many analytic philosophers are capable of stating their case briefly (i.e. 5 propositions or less), they tend not to.

Similarly, Plantinga's "Pluralism: a Defense of Religious Exclusivism" will take a bit of reading as well (note: there's a bio before the main piece; just scroll down). I really recommend both pieces, however, especially because they each account for the position opposite to their own rather interestingly.

Here's a taste of Plantinga:

...in recent years probably more of us western Christians have become aware of the world's religious diversity; we have probably learned more about people of other religious persuasions, and we have to come see more clearly that they display what looks like real piety, devoutness, and spirituality. What is new, perhaps, is a more widespread sympathy for other religions, a tendency to see them as more valuable, as containing more by way of truth, and a new feeling of solidarity with their practitioners.

One is to continue to believe what you have all alongbelieved; you learn about this diversity, but continue to believe, i. e., taketo be true, such propositions as (1) and (2) above, consequently taking to befalse any beliefs, religious or otherwise, that are incompatible with (1) and(2). Following current practice, I shallcall this exclusivism; the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of thetenets of one religion—Christianity, let's say—are in fact true; he adds,naturally enough, that any propositions, including other religious beliefs,that are incompatible with those tenets are false. Now there is a fairly widespread belief thatthere is something seriously wrong with exclusivism. It is irrational, or egotistical andunjustified (4) or intellectually arrogant, (5) or elitist, (6) or amanifestation of harmful pride, (7) or even oppressive and imperialistic.(8) The claim is that exclusivism assuch is or involves a vice of some sort: it is wrong or deplorable; and it isthis claim I want to examine. I proposeto argue that exclusivism need not involve either epistemic or moral failure,and that furthermore something like it is wholly unavoidable, given our humancondition.

And here's one of Hick:

The historical fact is that we inherit, and always haveinherited, our religion together with our language and our culture. And the religion which has formed us fromchildhood naturally seems to us to be obviously true; it fits us and we fit itas usually none other can. It is truethat there are individual conversions from one faith to another, but these arestatistically insignificant in comparison with the massive transmission offaith from generation to generation within the same tradition.

How then are we tounderstand this global situation in which, due to the accident of birth, we allstart from within what we have traditionally regarded as the one truefaith? To enquire into the relationshipbetween the religions is clearly to ask a difficult but unavoidable question

Have fun!

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Science & Religion: What truth looks like when it hits the ground

2011-12-03T23:47:00.001-08:00

Twosummers ago, I read a ratherrough review of a book called: Never Pure: Historical Studies of Scienceas if It Was Produced by People With Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture,and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. It was written by Prof. Steven Shapin, andapparently does precisely what its title says it will do. (The reviewer wasdisappointed, though, about the lack of info on Hooke’s sex life.) This reviewand book prodded a portion of my brain and made a connection I hadn’tconsidered before.

Whenpeople find out that I'm "religious" and that I enjoy talking aboutreligion, they say lots of interesting things. Many of these are phrased asquestions, accusations, or accusations-posing-as-questions. One of my favoritesis, "So how does it feel to be part of a church that started just becauseHenry VIII wanted to screw a different woman than his wife?" Now, ofcourse this is a gross simplification of the origins of the Church of England (andthe Anglican Communion, of which Episcopalians are a part). My quick answer tothis question is: "Henry VIII'sdivorce was simply the political event which allowed for a structural change tooccur; Thomas Cranmer and others had already been working towards and effectingtheological, liturgical, and ecclesiological reform; they simply took advantageof this opportunity." So the quick (oversimplified!) answer is that thebreak with the Roman Catholics had more nuance and depth to it than a lustfulmonarch.

And what’s my longer answer?

Well,for those who are religious and not interested in history, or for those who arehistory-lovers but not interested in religion (or even"spirituality"), the discovery that such gritty contexts are thecradle for universe-encompassing beliefs can be upsetting. It can even colorthe world of "Religion" as a corrupt and fully earth-bound (andtherefore worthless) endeavor. I think this is often the feeling of the folkswho challenge me about the origins of the Church of England.

Ofcourse, this question—How can you be a part of something that pretends attranscendent truth when it is rooted in the dirty earth?—can be asked of any ofthe world's major religions, as well as most of its minor ones. And you can askit of not only specific institutions, but even that amorphous"spirituality" which many claim (e.g. "I'm not really intoorganized religion, but I'm spiritual"), since the way this spiritualitywalks and talks is inevitably influenced by the way all the"organized" kinds walk and talk.

Thereason I don't find this troubling—in Anglicanism, Protestantism, RomanCatholicism, all the sorts of Islam, all the sorts of Judaism, and all the sortsof Hinduism and of Buddhism—is maybe similar to the reason that scientistsdon't find Prof. Shapin's book troubling. I don't find this"creatureliness" upsetting because I believe it to be inevitable—agiven when it comes to human life and humanity's encounters with transcendenttruth.

Truthdoes not (praise God!) require a perfect human in order to be seen. And simplyencountering truth does not (alas!) perfect us to the level of truth'sperfection. That is, meeting God does not necessarily make me God-like throughand through. Even if truth exists independently of us, when it manifests itselfit must do so in our world: our physical surroundings, our embodied beings, ourinsufficient minds. But the brilliance of these truths (often, occasionally,sometimes) shines past the creatureliness of their embodiment.

Asa proverb (taped to the wall in St. John’sAbbey, Minnesota)says: "After enlightenment, the laundry".

Now,the nature of what Science calls “truth” is a bit different from what St. John of the Cross mightcall “truth.” But the similarity is that there can be value in the things whichflawed, skewed, strange, normal, weak or powerful people discover—and thatthese contexts do not necessarily negate what was discovered.

Figures on the roof of the cathedral in Milan.

Note: A version of this post was originallypublished on the blog “Discuss inany manner which you see fit.”

Religious Pluralism 2: the ABC on Christ's Finality

2011-11-30T14:10:00.001-08:00

After last week's post, I thought that we might appreciate a slightly different point of view from our own Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. We're liking to a copy of a lecture he gave, titled "The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World." You'll see that he attempts to strike a slightly different ground than simple exclusivism (one faith is correct) and inclusivism (all faiths are correct). We'll leave it to all of you to decide how successful he is. Here's a taste:

And so out of these two powerful and heavily-charged texts comes the classic Christian conviction: what we encounter in Jesus Christ is simply the truth. It is the truth about God and the truth about humanity. Not living into that truth and accepting it, has consequences because this is the last word about God and God's creation. So we speak of the finality of Christ. There's nothing more to know. Or we speak of the uniqueness of Christ. No one apart from Jesus of Nazareth expresses the truth like this.

That is what is so problematic for so many people in our world today. It's not just a question about people of other faiths (though it's partly that). It's also a question about how we in general communicate what we believe, and about what we believe God is doing in the world. And in the last forty years or so, the problems around the classical interpretation of these texts have been more and more highlighted. They fall into three broad groups, and in the first part of what I'm going to say I just want to look at the kinds of objection that have been raised to those classical interpretations of the texts.

The first difficulty is moral. What kind of God is it who makes salvation or eternal life dependent on what's always going to be a rather chancy matter? What about all those people who never had a chance of hearing about Jesus? What about all those who have heard about Jesus but have not understood or waited to find out?

A Note on Thanksgiving

2011-11-26T09:43:00.000-08:00

Moses said to allIsrael: For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land withflowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys andhills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, aland of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity,where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hillsyou may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God forthe good land that he has given you. ---Deut 8:7-10

As the holidays approach, it is increasingly common to hear twonotes begin to sound in our culture. One urges us towards expense and enjoymentof all the good things we tend to look forward to at this time of year, as ifwe deserve some indulgence at the end of another difficult year. The other soundsa note of caution regarding consumerism and materialism, a tendency to focus onworldly goods to the detriment of the spiritual nature of the season, and what sometimesseems to be a kind of selfishness inherent to our festivities, as if the seasonis about getting what each one of us desires.

Of course, we are probably more likely to hear the latternote in most churches at this time, particularly as we move through theobservances of Advent, which seems increasingly countercultural. But I am gladthat Thanksgiving precedes Advent and, indeed, that Advent is “bookended” by bothThanksgiving and Christmas, both times of great celebration in our country. ForI cannot help but think that we must learn to strike a balance between feastand fast, or gain some better understanding about the celebration of all things.At the very least, even to attempt to balance these two things will teach usmuch about ourselves and about the proper way to relate to the “goods” of life.

As we enter Advent, in the wake of Thanksgiving, I hope thatwe may hold in our hearts the vision which we see in the reading above fromDeuteronomy 8. God brought his people Israel into a good land, brimmingfull of food and drink and resources, where they lacked nothing. And, if weread the next section of the chapter, it seems that the problem of which God’speople are warned ahead of time, is not always about over indulgence in thegood things set before them, though this is surely true. Rather, it is inreceiving these good things and suddenly failing to keep God’s commands,lacking gratitude for the good received, and imagining these goods stem fromour own strength. As the passage then reads:

Take care that you donot forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances,and his statutes... When you have eaten your fill and have built fine housesand live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and yoursilver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do notexalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the landof Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great andterrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. Hemade water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness withmanna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and inthe end to do you good. Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might ofmy own hand have gotten me this wealth." Deut 8:11-17.

Let us, then, remember the commandments of God and his graceas we enter our observance of Advent. Let us remember that we have received allgood from God’s hand, and let us turn our hands to bringing that good toothers, to those who have nothing and who are alone as much as to those whom weknow and love. And let us give thanks to God for all things.

New Series on Religion Pluralism

2011-11-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

Every few weeks, we feature a series of posts from other blogs and websites that either focus on one topic or on one group. Given a few conversations and events at the Chaplaincy recently (like the talk given by Miroslav Volf on Christian-Muslim relations), I thought that it might be useful to link to short articles from various Christian standpoints on the different types of pluralism, along with some from other faiths.

This first post is from Relevant Magazine, an evangelical magazine from a theologically conservative, but somewhat progressive standpoint (their motto is God, Life, Progressive Culture). The article is called "It's OK to Say Jesus is the Only Way." Here's a taste:

The claim that all paths lead to the same God actually minimizes other religions by asserting a new religious claim. When someone says all paths lead to the same God, they blunt the distinctives between religions, throwing them all in one pot, saying: “See, they all get us to God so the differences don’t really matter.” This isn’t tolerance; it’s a power play. When asserting all religions lead to God, the distinctive and very different views of God and how to reach Him in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam are brushed aside in one powerful swoop. The Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism, the 5 Pillars of Islam and the Gospel of Christ are not tolerated but told they must submit to a new religious claim—all ways lead to God—despite the fact that this isn’t what those religions teach.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Why do Bad Things Happen to Okay People?

2011-11-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

This question comes up a lot in cultures that embrace the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful benificent force underpinning the universe. From what we know of human love and relationships, we assume that a loving deity will deal kindly with us: giving us everything we need; and will at the very worst simply subject us to justice: rewarding our good deeds and punishing our evil. The idea that such a deity would allow unwarranted evil to befall us, depriving us of those things that we most want in life, is abhorrent and causes we who have adopted this religious world-view a great deal of cognitive dissonance. Whatever we did, we think, was surely not bad enough to justify what is happening to us now.

The Book of Job grapples with this question. Possibly one of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, Job is reportedly one of the hardest to translate, as though it itself is a translation from an older language. Similar stories can be found throughout the Semitic world, indicating either that the story has an ancient distribution across many peoples. In the story, Satan challenges God to a bet over the righteousness of God's servant, Job. Job is a good man who honors God regularly, and has acquired all of the good things of life for his faith. God gives Satan the power to destroy his life, and Job loses his flocks, his possessions, and his children. In the main section of the book, Chapters 3-33, Job has an argument with three of his friends, maintaining his innocence against their insistence that Job must have done something wrong to deserve his fate. Job maintains his innocence, and laments that he cannot call God to account: "He is not a mere mortal that I might answer him, that we might confront one another in court" (Job 9:32, New International Version).

This is a remarkable statement. Job has not "cursed God," as his wife insists, but is calling into suspicion God's justice. This is something that Job would never have done in his old life. When God returned good for good, it was easy enough for Job to conflate piety and morality: whatever God commanded must have been good, for God was good. In this framework, Job had no need for an independent moral sense; he could outsource this moral independence to God, and simply follow God's will.

Imagine that we lived in a world of perfect justice: where evil always met with evil and good always met with good. In such a world, everyone would be perfect, for moral perfection would be pleasurable. Evil would immediately cause pain, and good works would be like drugs. In such a world, we would all be "good addicts." There would be no need for morality. There would be no need for free will. We would learn to follow the commands of our divine leader whatever they were, all in the hope that we could score some of that "good juice."

Our own world is rather more like Job's. In our world, many saints are born into dire poverty, and many sinners are given every privilege and the opportunity to lead armies on missions of oppression and genocide. We live in a world of injustice: one that stimulates our moral judgment and demands that we walk a difficult path if we are to live in accordance with it. Without this injustice, we would have no chance to choose whether we ourselves were to be just or unjust beings.

At the end of the book of Job, God speaks to Job, saying "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?" (NIV Job 38:4-5). The traditional interpretation of this line and those following it is that God has decided to over-awe Job, and thereby discourage his moral questioning of God's action.

There is another interpretation, however; one which I prefer. What if God's fantastic descriptions of the Earth and its creatures are meant to illustrate his role in creation, not simply his overwhelming power? This would mean that, by describing Creation to Job, God would somehow be bringing Job into the act of creation. Job's suffering itself would have been a creative act. Before, Job was little better than an animal: blindly following the commands of his master. Now, Job is an entity with free will and an independent moral sense like God. By communicating with Job after his ordeal, God is asking for more than Job's faith: He is asking for Job's trust, something that Job had no power to bestow previously. It is fitting that God's direct communication comes only at the end of the story, only after Job becomes worthy of it.

The Movement

2011-11-11T12:06:00.001-08:00

As part of our final post from the SSJE preaching series, I have here a message from Br. Kevin Hackett, titled "The Movement." This post will close our sample from SSJE, and we'll be looking for some more content to highlight in the coming weeks. If there's anything our readers have found particularly interesting, please send it our way.

Here's a sample of the post:

I do not know if you claim a denominational identity, but I think we would do well to ask ourselves a couple of questions at this point. How different is it to say, “I am a member of the Episcopal Church (or use your own denomination of choice),” than to say, “I am a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.” I do not think the two claims are necessarily mutually exclusive, and while the Episcopal Church, as well many other denominations, have stressed Christian faith and practice as a way of life, I cannot get past the differences of connotation between being a member of an institution (which suggests a kind of stasis and status quo to me) and being a follower of a movement, especially the one which was inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth (which, from my own experience, suggests some pretty rugged engagement with the unknown).

The Message

2011-11-04T16:13:00.001-07:00

As mentioned last week, we will periodically re-post from blogs here and there on the good old Inter-webs. This post continues our coverage of the preaching series at the monastery of SSJE last month: Conversations on the Way. This one is written by Br. Mark Brown, whose picture is below, and is called "The Message".

Here's a sample:

When we say we believe in the Resurrection we usually are thinking of what we might call the Great Resurrection: our entrance into life beyond the gateway of death, our eternal life. I want to state unambiguously that I believe in that Great Resurrection. But I don’t know much about it and have little to say, just that I’m sure it will be wonderful beyond our imagining.

But resurrection is woven into the texture of life in the world we live in now.

Numbers 31: a Preface

2011-11-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

Numbers 31:7 "And the Israelites killed every male among the Midianites."

Well, dear friends, we only have had one question for the past few weeks, and it is a doozy.

Q: "How should we read and understand Numbers 31?"

A: Often described as the "Massacre of the Midianites," Numbers 31 tends to rank high on anyone's list of difficult Scriptural passages. Due to the complexity of this question, then, we are going to break up the response to it over several weeks. One could practically write a whole book about this passage, which raises all sorts of questions. In this first post, I simply want to note some of the necessary details to consider and note some of the groundwork which must be done before answering anything about this passage. In the next week or so, after we have had some more time to reflect on this passage, we'll roll out a few more posts on the topic.

First off, we want to recommend that anyone reading this post considers the full text of Numbers 31 first, along with Numbers 25 (and, indeed, most of the second half of the book is relevant). The important backstory is this: the Israelites are on the way to the Promised Land, where they will drive out the inhabitants of the land, with God as the warrior leading the charge. Along the way, however, they are beset by a whole range of different peoples and situations which complicate that task, ranging from tribes that attack them first to the Israelites' rebellion against their own cause and against God. From ch. 22 onwards, the Israelites are beset by attacks from the Moabites and Midianites. The attacks by these two groups differ, however, from Israel's battles with other people along the path to the Promised Land. Rather than attack them in direct, hand-to-hand combat, the Moabites and Midianites first hire Balaam, a local seer and (it appears) sorcerer, to try and curse Israel. However, the conflict between Israel, Moab, and Midian arguably culminates in Numbers 25, with the involvement of the Israelites in worshipping (with the Midianites) another God beside the Lord at a place called Peor, in violation of the first commandment. They worship Baal with both ritual feasting and, it appears, ritual sex, a combination not uncommon in Ancient Near Eastern religions. This is the backstory to Numbers 31, in miniature.

Second, though, we want to note something else about this passage as well: it is not difficult to interpret simply because of the moral issues we've briefly mentioned (e.g. the "massacre"). It also offers some confusing textual details which are difficult to understand on any level. For instance, after the battle, we might note that the spoils of war which the Israelites capture are outrageously large (32:31-47). They seem to seize over half a million sheep, among other massive captures. Now, while we don't have statistics on what was "normal" for animal husbandry in the Ancient Near East, particularly among small, nomadic tribes like the Midianites, this number seems a little overblown. It is only since the population boom and the advent of new farming techniques in the modern period that we have seen such a huge amount of sheep in one place. In other words, it is hard to believe that it was even possible for the Israelites to have captured such a high level of spoils from another tiny nation. We bring up these details only to note some features of the text which must be puzzled over, when we come to answer what's going on in the portrayal of this incident and when we decide "what to do" with this passage. There are several other, similar questions this text raises.

The reason we are puzzling over these features, though, is rather important and leads to the point I want to bring up. Several times in the past few weeks, while chatting with a few of you about this topic, I have mentioned why I think it's fruitful for us to dwell on this for a while. One thing I have tried to note in those conversations is how this passage doesn't do much for most interpreters. For conservatives, it is often viewed as an untroubling example of God's wrath on human sin. The various textual difficulties and moral quandaries generate no commentary. On the other hand, for more liberal interpreters, this passage is often brought up as an example of what we believe we have transcended. It, again, serves little theological purpose. The book of Numbers also doesn't feature largely in the ancient, medieval, and Reformation commentary traditions prior to the modern period. For us then, this passage can be a site for tremendous new theological reflection, if we can but wrap our minds around it. It is, in many ways, largely untrod ground.

So, that is what we will try to do. We're going to have a few different posts, outlining some relevant information and questions related to this passage. Emily, first of all, is going to note some of the relevant moral quandaries this passage raises. I will likely, then, note some ancient and contemporary responses to these quandaries. We'll have a post on the historical-critical approach to the passage. And, hopefully, we plan to cap off our little series on Numbers 31 with a post which synthesizes all the details, questions, and issues, before sketching a theological exploration and response to the whole passage.

Another Feast Day: Richard Hooker

2011-11-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

Todayis the feast day of Richard Hooker, Anglican priest and theologian. The readings forhis day include one of my most favorite Psalms, which says the law of theLord is more desirable than gold and sweeter than honey. We hear, too, from 1Corinthians, where Paul says they speak wisdom—“not a wisdom of this age or ofthe rulers of this age”, but rather “God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which Goddecreed before the ages for our glory.”

Bothof these readings speak of a love of truth and rightness as revealed to us byGod in the law and in our hearts—a perfect fit for Richard Hooker.

Hewas born in 1553. In 1594-7 he wrote what LesserFeasts and Fasts calls “a comprehensive defense of the Reformationsettlement under Queen Elizabeth the First. This work, his masterpiece, wasentitled Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.”This included one of the earliest defenses of The Book of Common Prayer. Theprayer for Hooker says he defended Anglicanism “with sound reasoning and greatcharity,” and asks that we maintain this “middle way” of our church—which isboth catholic and reformed—“not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as acomprehension for the sake of truth.”

I’veloved Hooker since I first heard of him during my freshman year at Princeton. I was in the (speedy) process of falling inlove with the Anglican tradition, and so was bombarding our Episcopal chaplain,Steve White, with every question I could think of. (E.g., What is the purposeof living? Why do you wear robes? Why do people suffer?)

Inone of his responses, Steve explained to me the idea of the three-legged stool,an image taken from part of Hooker’s Laws.He said that the three legs upon which we stand are Scripture, reason, andtradition (in particular, the traditions of the Christian church). ArchbishopRowan Williams, ina 2005 speech, explains Hooker’s overall argument thus:

“Putvery plainly, the Bible does not give us an alibi for the use of common sense,ordinary discretion, imagination, willingness to learn from experience andwhatever else belongs to mature human reflection on behaviour. The'sufficiency' or perfection of Scripture, argues Hooker, is a matter of itsperfect capacity to do what it is meant to do. . . . [I]f we suggest, forexample, that nothing except what is commanded in the Bible can be other thansinful, we paralyse a great deal of ordinary human life.”

What appealed to me most was that Hooker (as Williamssays) was “opposing . . . any picture of these things [law and revelation] thatrefuses the work of interpretation or that pretends that history has come to ahalt.” What an idea!

In my freshman year, I was stunned that there were notonly scholars but also priests and parishioners who held this view—and whostill prayed before meals, sang hymns, and meant it when they said “Amen”!Raised in fairly conservative Evangelical churches and schools, I had beentaught that there was one obvious way to interpret the Scriptures—i.e. in amostly literal manner—and that this had always been the way of interpretingthem. Furthermore, any alternative was not wholly Christian, but a versionwatered down by extraneous thinking and weak character. (Perhaps it’s better tosay that even if my pastors hadn’t meant to teach me this, it’s certainly whatI learned.) As I grew older, I had more and more questions, but those who readthe Bible in this way couldn’t answer them; this was the beginning of a longerstory which finds its end in the Anglican tradition.

I’vediscovered that there have always been many ways of interpreting the texts andtraditions of Christianity. I’ve learned that there are many human fingerprintsall over the words and ideas of the Christian churches, and that any way wechoose to interact with them is an interpretive choice.

Andlo and behold, I am still a Christian! I still lean on the grace of God, andstill praise his statutes, his law, and his judgments, which are “sweeter farthan honey” and dearer to me than gold. There are many reasons to celebrateRichard Hooker; I celebrate especially his ideas which came across the yearsand showed me a new way of thinking.

The second image is of agold coin with Queen Elizabeth’s profile, minted in Englandbetween 1597 and 1600; you can find more info on theBritish Museum’s page.

Brief Q/A Announcement and a Link

2011-10-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-25T22:21:00.001-07:00

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

Theseare 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 andwork of the chosen person.

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

“Awakein us also a keen desire to increase our understanding while we are in thisworld, and an eager longing to reach that endless life where all will be madeclear . . . Amen.”

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

As a committed nerd—a lover of words, ideas, and strangenew things—I found myself to be an immediate fan of Alfred. It seems intuitiveto 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 fullyknown only when we will be able to fully know him. This is to say—wanting tounderstand how our hearts pump blood or why a sentences works is a natural pathto wanting to understand God.

However! I was also struck by the readingsselected for Alfred’s day, because they take this love of understanding arounda more complicated turn. Reading them, I thought about how “understanding” is notjust a movement outward fromourselves—a curiosity, a desire—but it is also something we gather up withinourselves.

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

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

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

The first image is asilver penny with Alfred the Great’s noble face; hereis the British Museum’s page on it. The second image isof theBowleaze Cove Jewel, also found at the BM. (You could also read theexcellent kids’ page about it, if you’re too tired for academese.) And theBritish Monarchy has evenmore information about Alfred.

Sermon for Proper 24A : "Give to God"

2011-10-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. Luke has beenremembered, since the earliest Christian centuries, as “the beloved physician”mentioned by Paul in Colossians 4:14 and is said to have practiced medicinebefore following Paul in his missionary journeys. Luke’s gospel was beloved bythe early church for its countless retellings of miracles by Jesus, who washimself 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 thatthey put forth two rather distinct understandings of a physician. To callChrist “the great physician” is to acknowledge the frequency of healings in hisministry. 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. Areading from Ecclesiastes was often read on Luke’s feast day, which we stillread 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 greatthey are admired.

The Lord created medicines out of the earth,

and the sensible will not despisethem.

And he gave skill to human beings

that he might be glorified in hismarvelous works.

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

God is certainly glorified in the miraculous. But hismarvelous 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 ourGod-given intellect and talents, are a revelation of God’s glory. So, as we prayedin our collect this past Sunday, that we might see the glory of God displayedin Christ, so also my hope is simply that we might see the glory of God as itis revealed in our own lives and abilities as well. For such is our faith.

The Year Begins!

2011-08-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

In this week's lesson, Jesus tells us that when two or three gather in his name, he will be among us (Matt. 18:20). Come see what he means. Our Opening service of the academic year is Sunday, Sep. 4 at 5:30pm at Christ Church (Zero Garden Street).

Dinner and conversation follow in the Parish Library.

New Episcopal Chaplain Appointed

2011-05-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

After a fruitful process of discernment, the Board of the Episcopal Chaplaincy is pleased to announce the end of the search process and the appointment of the Reverend Luther Zeigler as the new Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard University! We are all very glad to welcome Luther, and we look forward to the beginning of his ministry at Harvard.

Luther comes to this position from the Diocese of Washington, where he is currently the senior chaplain at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, and where he is Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department. Luther is also an associate priest at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in College Park, which maintains ties with the Episcopal/Anglican Campus Ministry at the University of Maryland.

Luther graduated with Highest Honors in Religion from Oberlin College, holds a master’s degree in Religious Studies from Stanford University and is also a cum laude graduate of the Stanford Law School, where he served as an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. Luther completed his theological training at Virginia Theological Seminary, from which he received his Master of Divinity degree with honors.

For many years prior to his ordination, Luther practiced law at a major Washington law firm, where he was a partner and member of the firm’s Management Board. At the firm, he had an active public service practice, particularly in the areas of civil rights and advocacy for the homeless.
Luther and his wife, Pat, have two adult daughters, one of whom lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of whom lives in Boston and works for the Red Sox. Luther and Pat bring with them to Cambridge a Labradoodle named Grace, who was born six years ago on Easter morning.

Please click here or on the menu above for more information about Luther.

First 'Summer' Outing

2011-05-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Hi, all!

We will have our first summer outing this coming Wednesday, May 25th at 7pm. Trinity Church in Copley Square has invited pastor and speaker Rob Bell to talk about his new book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Has Ever Lived. Depending on numbers and interest, we will be having dinner beforehand as well to talk about fire and brimstone (!) and the place of Hell in Christian theology. Please write to our Kellogg Fellow, Zack Guiliano, if you're interested in coming and if you would like to receive further information about ECH summer activities.

Perceiving the Pierced One: a Good Friday Homily

2011-04-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Christ Church Cambridge/ The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard
Good Friday: Isaiah 52:13-53:12;
Psalm 22; John 18:1-19:42
Friday, April 22, 2011

See, my servant shall prosper;
he shall be exalted and lifted up,
and shall be very high.

…. he shall startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him;

for that which had not been told them they shall see,
and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. (Isaiah 52: 13, 15)

On Wednesday of this week in New Orleans, one year after the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that set off an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, family members of the eleven people who were killed boarded a helicopter. Their destination was the graves of their loved ones. After several minutes, the pilot announced that they were flying over the site where the rig had sunk. Slowly, they circled so people on both sides of the aircraft could see site: a vast, unbroken ocean flowing beneath them. As the Associated Press reported, “the only indication that they were at the site was an announcement from the pilot." After they returned to shore, one family member, Arleen Weise, commented, “It was just a little emotional, seeing where they were,” she said. When “asked what went through her mind when she saw where the rig went down, Weise said, ‘Just rise up. I wanted them to come up, but it didn’t happen.’’’ This site of incalculable loss is like a lacuna, an open space that can only barely make visible the loss of their loved ones. They can only look upon its enormity, as if, as Paul reflects in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, they have been “swallowed up by life.” How can one take in such a scene?

And yet that is precisely what we are called upon to do—or to try to do—on this day. Vast as the ocean, our readings yet bring into startling, unsettling relief the loss that draws us into the central mystery of our faith, lifting before our eyes a spectacle from which we may well want to turn away. For the one on whom we are invited to gaze this day is our beloved Jesus Christ, the one who poured himself out into our midst, becoming subject to appalling injustice and oppression, even unto death. Emptied out like water, he lived as one us and died an excruciating death high upon a cross. To ancient Christians, this most difficult day was paradoxically and quite literally one of up-lift. Thus the words of the prophet Isaiah—“see, my servant shall prosper, shall be exalted and lifted up, and be very high”—could be read incongruously to refer to none other than the crucified One. Our eyes turn to the One whose crucifixion, alone in the Gospel of John, is expressed as a kind of ascension, of being “lifted up” as a strange spectacle and source of healing (John 3: 14, 12:32). Behold the sheer incongruity at the heart of a day that Christians have dared to call “good.”

But there is a reason for this pronouncement. For by crossing the border between Creator and Creation, eternity and time, walking in our midst even to the point of becoming ensnared by the evils of empire, pierced by a Roman soldier’s spear (as only the Passion according to John describes it), Christ broke open what Letter to the Hebrews calls a “new and living way,” a new passage into God’s own heart (Heb. 10:20). The crucified One stands in solidarity with us in struggle and strife, has the ability to, as Hebrews puts it, “sympathize with” — συμ-παθῆσαι, literally to feel together with—“our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). Christ has engraved our deepest experiences of grief, rage, abandonment, horror upon the very heart of the divine. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) would wonder at this marvel, asking, “why should I not look through these fissures into the heart of the rock? The nails announce to me, the wounds proclaim to me that ‘God is indeed in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’”(61st Sermon on the Song of Songs). What Bernard saw in that heart above all was infinite compassion. Two centuries later Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) would also meditate upon these wounds, perceiving in the side-wound a safe refuge (Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, ch. 24) and a passage from which human beings were born anew (Revelations, Long Text, ch. 60).

There is something almost unbearably peculiar – or peculiarly unbearable – about this day. It isn’t simply that we are invited to look up at the suffering and death of one whom we love, and who loves us so deeply. It is more even than that. What is beyond the pale is the matrix of meaning we are invited to contemplate, the multiple, layered lenses through which we are invited to view this story. Indeed, we are invited to read it, to perceive the pierced one, in intersection with our own lives and communities, our own pain, our own losses. We are invited to open our deepest struggles to the blinding transformation at the heart of the paschal mystery, knowing that all that we are, all that we have been, all that we will be, “is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Senior Sermon: "But Now I See"

2011-04-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Kenzie Bok is a Harvard College History Concentrator, President of the Harvard College Episcopal Chaplaincy, and a graduating Senior. Traditionally, Seniors in the chaplaincy have preached a sermon the spring semester of their final year, and Kenzie did so last evening. Her texts were:

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

“As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither.’” With that “neither,” Christ decouples the realm of worldly good fortune and misfortune from the realm of righteousness and sinfulness before God. The world, we learn here and elsewhere in the Gospel, is not set up to be an earthly system of reward and punishment; the blind man is not blind because he was bad, nor because of the misdeeds of his parents. This assertion is potent because it eliminates one of the easiest ways for people, in Jesus’ day and in our own, to make peace with the injustice of the world: by simply assuming that those who do well really are better, and those who suffer are lacking in some way. Using that calculus, we could take things at face value, praising those who are fortunate and turning our eyes away from those who are not. But our reading in Samuel today could not have said it more clearly:

"But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature (…); for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’"

This idea is picked up again and again in the Gospels, as Jesus uses parable after parable to praise those who society barely recognizes. In a sense, this point is meant to be reassuring: when human life is difficult or seems unfair, God is there to comfort the sufferer, not to add to the pain by piling divine condemnation on top of misfortune. How cruel if challenging life circumstances indicated estrangement from God!

But of course this message is also unsettling, especially for a particular group of people: those who are fortunate in the eyes of the world. Those for whom it would be just as well if accomplishments, talents, possessions were the things that God focused on. Most likely many of you are familiar with the Beatitudes, Jesus’ famous sayings from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful.’ Well we’re here at Harvard, and if there were one place in the world that could rest easier if the Beatitudes read: ‘Blessed are the powerful, the wealthy, the successful, the privileged, the intelligent,’ surely it would be here. Nothing about the decoupling of the realm of worldly fortune from the realm of righteousness says that a fortunate person is not in right relationship with God; one could certainly be both. But for those of us who ordinarily feel ourselves so secure about our position in the world, this decoupling unsettles us, leaving us anxious and unsure about how to know whether we are living rightly.

So what do we do? Well, we turn to rules and authority, we seek systems that will allow us to feel secure, to feel that we have it all figured out again. And then, if something disrupts our new system—threatens to shift the rules beneath our feet—we resist with all our might. You see a textbook case of this in the Gospel today. The blind man is healed, and no one wants to believe it. They see the man and they ask ‘Is this the same man?’ Even when the man bears witness to the miracle himself, they continue to doubt. They call in his parents, who reluctantly confirm that he is their son and was born blind, but refuse to speculate on the cause of his healing.

These people are not us, 2000 years later, doubting the veracity of a miracle we didn’t witness. It has happened before their eyes. So why are they so resistant? Why, in the face of a wondrous work, do they respond with fear? Because it upends authority. Jesus is not authorized to do this sort of work: as the Pharisees say, “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” And he is breaking a very established rule to do it: he heals the blind man on the Sabbath, when one isn’t supposed to do any work. So the temple authorities are ready to label him a sinner, but they’re dogged by the question “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” This situation seems to upset their settled categories. The parents of the blind man, ordinary practicing Jews, are afraid of stepping into the midst of this controversy: they believe in the miracle, but the power of the sign is not enough to overcome the power of the authorities, who will exile them from the Temple for saying the wrong thing. The formerly blind man has no such qualms: he feels the reality of his own healing too strongly to disavow it. He tells the authorities: “I do not know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

There’s an implicit rebuke in this exchange: the authorities have gotten so caught up in the rules that they’ve lost perspective. Keeping the Sabbath is important, but healing the blind is more so. Jesus’ action follows the logic of the two commandments he laid down in Mark’s gospel; asked what commandment is first of all, Jesus answered that the first is to “‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and the second is ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ As he says, “there is no other commandment greater than these.” So in this story, Jesus is carrying out an action of love for his neighbor, the blind man, which supersedes the restriction against work on the Sabbath. This order of precedence resonates with everything we feel about how we ought to prioritize the alleviation of human suffering. But as this story shows, such self-evident truths can be missed when we try to distill God into a rulebook.

Now let us be clear: this criticism is not meant to be left at the feet of the ancient Hebrews. As always in the Gospels, we are intended to meditate on how the failings of its characters reflect in our own lives, to ask “Would we too do this?” Karl Barth, a twentieth-century neo-orthodox theologian, often criticized Christian churches on precisely this point, arguing that when the Church tries to reduce and master the divine by “transforming the service of God into ‘pious practices’ and righteousness into a law of righteousness,” it pursues the human activity of religion but loses sight of God. We end up with an ossified structure, one that concerns itself with correct and incorrect behavior but not with justice and injustice and not with the transcendent power of the Holy Spirit. Today, in our churches and in broader secular society, we continue to draw up such limiting scorecards. We are eager for something straightforward: we like rules we can follow, games we can play. I for one am extremely fond of games, as a number of people here today can attest. But the problem is that God doesn’t want us to live life like a game we can win or lose according to a rulebook.

So what does God want for us? If we become suspicious of our efforts to take refuge in authority, what is the answer to how we should act in the world? Must we just stand paralyzed, or decide that there is no such thing as a right or wrong way to live? I think today’s readings answer that question with the language of sight and perception. God is not trying to give us a rulebook by which to assess the world but instead a light by which to see the world illuminated. God wants to strip away our blindness, to renew our sight. What would seeing the world with renewed sight look like? Well, it would mean seeing a world in which our fellow human beings—those neighbors we are meant to serve—show up more brightly than anything else. Picture it this way: you stare at a room full of dazzling treasure—something like those mountains of gold in Disney’s Aladdin, for example—with a few people sitting and standing amongst the piles. The treasure is likely what you focus on: it’s astonishingly beautiful, and you begin to plan how you might snag some. But then imagine seeing the same scene with infrared goggles on. The treasure would fade into the background, turning various shades of grey, while the living people would stand out in the red of the thermal imaging. You’d see a world in which the most important things are not treasure of various types—power, fame, wealth, recognition—but the living, breathing people who surround you. Based on the Gospel, this is how God means for us to see the world. Indeed, I’d go even further and say it is how we see the world, deep down. But we fear disrupting the authorities we’ve established for ourselves, and we want to think that the treasures we cling to are as shiny as they appear. So we wear blinders, often made for us by our society but held to our eyes by our own volition, since we fear the responsibility that would come with stripping them off and fully recognizing God and other people.

This is a pity, because when we open our eyes as God calls us to, we see something far more dazzling than the Aladdin treasure piles: we see the image of God. That image is inscribed in our hearts and our persons as human beings. But often the easiest place for us to see it is not in ourselves but in the face of another. It’s when we feel connections that transcend our differences that we start to recognize the common image that we human beings really share. And tracing the outline of the image of God in each other is what inspires us to live into that image by doing God’s work in the world. When we see things as they really are, when we perceive the world illuminated by God’s light, we are inevitably drawn into participation in God’s work, drawn into service and love for one another. This is what our Ephesians reading for the day means when it says: “Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” When our world is bathed in light, we become able to live as we could not when we were submerged in darkness. So we must not be afraid of light, we must not be afraid of seeing. We must step out from behind the security of superficial measures of success that assure us we are doing well, step out from behind the security of rulebooks and authorities that tell us exactly what to do. We can each think of times that we have taken refuge in such things—I for one certainly do so multiple times a day. Abandoning this security is scary, but it’s also the only way to live honestly and courageously, in our full stature as human beings. God calls us to step out and open our eyes.

Lent Class

2011-03-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

All the info is one the poster, the website, and on an e-mail we're sending out. Anyone who's interested is free to come! It's an excellent opportunity for a form of Lenten meditation, coming to terms with the Christian faith.

In-gathering Memoriam

2011-03-02T17:46:00.000-08:00

As you no doubt have heard by now, the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, a veritable institution at Harvard's Memorial Church, the Divinity School, and the broader University, died Monday evening from complications of a stroke he suffered last December. As tributes have poured in, story after story written, the sheer magnitude of his life and legacy overwhelms.

In this seismic moment for the University more broadly, and for religious life on campus in particular, the loss is keen for members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy because of our longstanding connection with both Memorial Church and with Reverend Gomes. A statement from Bishop Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in this morning's Boston Globe says it well: “I always liked to call Peter the bishop of Harvard...I’m so grateful for his ministry, particularly to the Episcopal Church, and the way he encouraged so many in their vocations. He was a singular man, and I’ll miss the example of his deep commitment to the Gospel, his keen mind, and his outrageous sense of humor.’’

Meanwhile, as we wrestle with this loss, I am mindful that the Harvard community also recently lost senior Ilya Chalik, a History and Science concentrator and leader in the Hillel community who was also known to and mourned by members of the Episcopal Chaplaincy. It has only been two weeks since Ilya's death, and now this.

If you are wondering how to make sense of it all, you are certainly not alone. And at times like this, one of the most important things we can do is to bring our grief, our bewilderment, our numbness-- whatever it may be-- into community, particularly into spaces of worship, where it can be gathered together with that of others, collected and offered up. There is a moment in Thomas Cranmer's Eucharistic prayer that reads, "and here we offer and present unto you, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice." That self-offering is an invitation to bring forward and lift up to God all of ourselves, all of the burdens we bring, our sorrows, our anxieties well as our triumphs and joys. All the complexities of who we are in the intensity of moments like this.

That kind of self-offering is certainly a major part of Peter Gomes's legacy. Article after article stresses not only his learning and articulateness, his courage and integrity-- particularly at coming out as a gay man in 1991 as the Harvard community grappled with a spate of homophobic harassment-- but especially his complexity, his uniqueness as a human being. As Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. put it on the New Yorker blog, "Gomes was a large, warm, and mischievous soul, who contained a multitude of identities, each worn with a certain roguish sense of irony....In an era of sometimes confining identity politics, Gomes continued to insist on his own freedom. Cape Verdean and Jewish; Virginia and Massachusetts; gay and Baptist; slave and free; a counselor to the powerful and to the powerless: Peter Gomes smoothly navigated his own Mayflower through this sea of identities, because he anchored himself to none." Or as Reverend Gomes himself put it, as quoted by the New York Times, , "“The oddest thing about being an oddity is that there are very few oddities like you.’’

So bring yourself-- all of yourself, however you feel-- forward, take your place alongside one another as we grapple and grieve together.

Tomorrow the Memorial Church gives us that opportunity with a vigil in memory of Reverend Gomes. After morning prayers at 8:45 a.m., the vigil will take place from 9am to 10pm. Throughout the day, the University Chaplains of all faith traditions will take turns keeping watch, carrying out this ancient tradition of presence. My turn will be at noon. The day will end at 10pm with a service of Compline: a peaceful night, and a perfect end.

Mid-Week Prayer: Compline

2011-02-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

We'll be holding our first mid-week prayer service this evening at 7pm in Christ Church. We will be using the traditional form of Compline, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.

For any of you who have never taken part in a Compline service, it is one of the oldest forms of prayer in the Christian Church. It was originally an adaptation of one of the monastic offices (times of prayer) and has always consisted mainly of Psalms and readings from Scripture, with some short written prayers and opportunity for silent reflection. You can find a short little description in this article from Wikipedia.

We will have a very simple format; no experience required! One of the main points of the service is to become familiar with this style of prayer, to get it in your heart and mind and under your tongue. As the semester goes on, we may add to the service some simple music or chant and different liturgical actions (using icons and prayer candles, for instance, or different forms of prayer). But our first several meetings will be very simple.

We'll look forward to seeing you there.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

On Vocation—Jesus Was a Carpenter First

2011-02-07T12:16:00.000-08:00

During this season of Epiphany we celebrate the manifestation of Christ on Earth, and in particular the visit of the foreign Magi with their three—mostly impractical—gifts to the infant Jesus. Also during this time, Eastern churches celebrate Jesus’ baptism. Both of these moments mark the manifestation, or “epiphany,” of the second person of the Trinity as a human being in Jesus Christ.

But together, these two moments also mark a significant gap in what the Gospels tell us about the life of Jesus. John and Mark both entirely leave out any mention of a young Jesus, beginning their narrative just prior to his adult baptism. Matthew describes King Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and the family’s flight to Egypt, but says nothing specifically about Jesus between the Magi and the River Jordan. Only Luke offers us any glimpse into the post-infant Jesus, relating how as a twelve-year-old he spent three days at a temple in in Jerusalem, listening and questioning the teachers, who were very impressed with his grasp of the material (Luke 2:41-50).

Also according to Luke, “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work” (Luke 3:23). That means that for thirty years of his life on Earth, the Word made flesh was doing something other than “his work,” or as the English Standard Version translates it, “his ministry.” So what the heck was he doing?

Mark 6:3 tells us that Jesus was a carpenter: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary…?” (The Greek, “τέκτων,” can mean a craftsman of many different sorts, but whatever his craft, it doesn’t seem to have been, at that point, the saving of souls.) This explains the bumper sticker I saw the other day in a church parking lot, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” It doesn’t explain, though, why Jesus waited thirty years before beginning his ministry—his true vocation.

Last summer I conducted a number of interviews with political, business, and community leaders, asking them about the role faith played in their leadership and their lives. Many of the people I interviewed, and especially the people that seemed the most comfortable and the most “at home” in their jobs, hadn’t started out in their current profession. Instead, they pursued their first career on the basis of social pressure and a sense of what they felt they ought to do. In contrast, their second career fulfilled an inner spiritual obligation, and provided a sense of fulfillment missing from the first career—even though, in many cases, the sacrifices were far greater and the material rewards far smaller.

In my own life, I spent roughly ten years working in politics, mostly on campaigns. I found the work challenging and interesting—and it certainly paid well—but it sucked the soul right out of me. I ended up working as a hired gun for candidates I had little interest in and, occasionally, didn’t even think should win. Now, here at age 30, I find myself at divinity school, looking to find my own true vocation.

Ultimately, why Jesus waited until age 30 to begin his ministry may simply be one in a series of unanswerable questions. Of course, when compared with the many other great mysteries of God, this particular question seems somewhat insignificant. But as we consider our own lives, and the ways in we manifest our faith through how we live, it may help to remember that even our Lord didn’t get started right away.

If we find ourselves lost in a career that doesn’t fulfill us, one that doesn’t answer the voice of God calling us to be and do something more, we may still have time to answer that call. After all, even Jesus had a career before his calling.

Jeff Bridges worked for ten years in Democratic politics and is currently a graduate student at Harvard University's School of Divinity, where he also serves on the leadership team for Hope in Action Cambridge, a project of the Massachusetts Episcopal Diocese. Check out his website at jeffbridges.net

The Words of Our Teacher

2011-02-03T08:27:00.000-08:00

Living as a Christian can be a difficult task. Our calling to live as “the light of the world” offers a number of challenges which often seem insurmountable. Just look again at a few of the Beatitudes which we considered this past Sunday:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the pure in spirit, for they shall see God.

In a recent sermon, I tried to gesture towards the difficulty and tension that we can feel anytime we try to “live up” to the Beatitudes. We are immediately faced with questions for ourselves (Am I meek? Hungry for righteousness? Pure?). I also suggested that some of these tensions can be overcome when we accept our initial vocation, which is to become students of Jesus Christ, our Teacher. We must take our first steps on the road before we can “run the race” which is the Christian spiritual life.

Yet what promise do we have of finishing that race? Is it all difficulty, or do we have some relief?

One of the readings our Church offers today for meditation and prayer is Isaiah 55:1-13. It’s really quite a remarkable passage, and I would suggest reading it, slowly and carefully, if you find yourself in need of encouragement and refreshment today. But let me break off a few pieces of it here, pieces of spiritual bread which I think pertain to our concerns about the spiritual life.

What this passage can remind us is that our teacher, the Lord himself, does not give us words or direction which are powerless. What we learn from our Teacher has an effect. As the passage says,

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

bring forth life and giving growth, seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:10-11

You see, God wishes us to live our Christian lives as much (indeed, far more) than we do. When we face the struggle, we should remember that we are not alone. The words which we hear from the mouth of our Teacher have great effect, and we are promised that they will bring about their purpose in us. The newly formed life we are trying to lead will come because God is the one bringing about the new creation in us. And God cannot fail. The word shall bring forth new life, no matter how tentative, and the new life will remain.

To end with the words of Scripture, which vividly portray this promise:

You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;

instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;

and it shall a sign of the Lord,

an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

Isaiah 55:12-13

The Face of God

2011-01-27T12:06:00.000-08:00

Two things we have begun to talk about in the Chaplaincy during this season of Epiphany are the ideas of revelation and vocation. On the one hand, we are asking what God has revealed to us and is continuing to reveal to us in Jesus Christ. On the other, we are asking the question, "To what is God calling us?"

In one sense, it's very clear why these things go together. Jesus often reveals himself to his disciples as a teacher, as in our Gospel reading last Sunday and the one coming this Sunday. But there's another way in which these things go together, as Cameron spoke of in his sermon this past week. Sometimes, the call to be a follower of Jesus means to proclaim the Good News. Our vocation is to continue the revelation, particularly in the shape of our lives.

I've always found this image of the Christian life compelling, and one of the passages which has most informed my thinking on this idea comes from 2 Corinthians 3. The passage contains a number of mysterious sayings, but one image which comes through is the idea of the individual Christian as "a letter of Christ...written by the Spirit of the Living God." Through the impact which the Good News announced in Jesus has on us, our own lives can be a message to those around us. The revelation of Jesus transforms us, and we are able to demonstrate that transformation and continue the revelation to others.

Paul also speaks of "seeing the glory of the Lord as if reflected in a mirror." This seeing is clearly a form of revelation. But how does one see? What is the mirror in this passage which we can look on? The idea I believe Paul is drawing on recurs in a variety of ancient writings, but had been made fairly well-known after the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, in which Socrates speaks of seeing the glory and face of God reflected in the face of one you love and with whom you are pursuing the ultimate Good and ultimate Beauty, God. The mirror through which one sees God is found in the face of the beloved companion.

The twist here, of course, is that Paul is applying this image to the Christian community. Each one of us is (or is called to be) a letter of Christ, written by the Spirit. Each one of us is and can be the mirror through which another might see the glory of the Lord. As I said, this calling, or vocation, to become a revelation ourselves is one of the most compelling images of the Christian life which I have ever encountered. Our calling is quite high; we are able to image God to others and are to look at others also to see that image. By being transformed through the Gospel message, we may also reveal that message, for the transformation of those around us.

The key passage I'd like to close with from 2 Cor. 3 has this idea in mind, which might best be translated as:

"All of us, with faces revealed, looking to one another and seeing the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image of God, passing from glory to glory, just as if it is from the Lord, the Spirit."

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Service This Sunday!

2011-01-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

The Episcopal Chaplaincy will be resuming services on January 23rd at 5:30pm (that's this Sunday!). Please join us for worship, followed by dinner and discussion.

---Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Advent 2: Of Locusts and Stumps

2010-12-05T17:17:00.000-08:00

At dinner this evening, we all seemed to be sitting before the precipice that is reading period here at Harvard. Classes ended on Thursday, folks slid into this weekend with a sigh of relief, and now preparations are beginning for a week of paper writing, or for final exams that begin the following week. Some are writing three or even four papers. Suffice it to say, a lot of work looms. And the very idea that this is unfolding during Advent, a season that calls us to simplify and slow down, seems, as someone put it at dinner, somewhat cruel.

In a sense, I suppose the end of lectures last week marks a simplification of sorts (and with my lecturer hat on, I can definitely attest to the truth of that!), but finals more than takes up that slack. If anything, the other side of Advent that I dwelt upon last Sunday, its strange spacio-temporality of endings and beginnings, its newness erupting into the humdrum of everyday life, seems a more accurate reflection of what life is like this time of the semester. And while those who don't live by the academic calendar may not have final papers and exams in the next two weeks, they have plenty of other equivalent or worse deadlines and crunches-- 'tis the season.

In the midst of this crush, two images stand out for me from today's readings: John the Baptist's abrupt appearance on the scene, and the strangely hopeful image of the shoot growing out of the stump of Jesse.

First John the Baptist (courtesy of Matthew 3:1-12). In a way, his clothing and diet say it all: he wears "camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey." I think about this garb and what immediately comes to mind is a) it can't have smelled very good and b) it must have itched something terrible. And the food? Three words: locusts are bugs. Grasshoppers, basically. Sometimes they swarm (and this Discovery Channel article explains why, amazingly-- the image at top is from it), which makes me think of Indiana Jones saying, "Snakes... why did it have to be snakes?" And while I do realize that bugs are consumed in various places around the world, I have to say, no amount of wild honey could get me to eat them. But if bugs and itchy, smelly clothing are part of John the Baptist's prophetic demeanor, his message is this: prepare the way for the one coming after me. You think I'm startling? The one following after me "will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."

Second, the shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. We got this image twice-- once from the second reading, Paul's letter to the Romans, and once from the first reading, the prophet Isaiah (the whole passage is Isaiah 11:1-10):

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD."

This shoot is the messianic prophecy-- this image suggests this messiah emerging from a previous generation, the tree of Jesse the father of King David. But more specifically, this emergence opens out just when all seems lost-- hence the stump. The passage goes on to say that this bursting forth of hope will unfold in ways that confound expectation and change rules both social and natural: wolves lying down with lambs without temptation to eat them (not, needless to say, equivalent to me and locusts), a little child leading a band of erstwhile enemy animals, a nursing child safely playing over the den of a poisonous snake. And further, as our Kellogg Fellow Zack Guiliano emphasized in his sermon at the divinity school on Friday, this same messianic figure balances the scales in favor of the "poor" and the "meek," judging and deciding "with equity," even "strik[ing] the earth with the rod of his mouth," and finally "kill[ing] the wicked" with "the breath of his lips." Isaiah envisions a series of harsh judgments, a righting of injustices that create a world in which enmity and danger are subject to radical reconciliation.

When Paul takes up this image (Romans 15:4-13), he goes right to the bottom line: hope. The shoot improbably growing out of the stump of Jesse is to him a sign of "the one who rises to rule the Gentiles," in whom "the Gentiles shall hope." Hope on the heels of chaos, hope that brings with it "all joy and peace in believing." This is the hope that gathers momentum, growing from a mere spark in the night to the full glow candle, that it may yet grow to full firey stature.

This is the hope that accompanies us this week, as we all dig in, making our way into the final stage of the semester, and into the rest and joy coming to us at Christmas.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Advent I: Alert in the Threshold

2010-11-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

After returning from a family Thanksgiving weekend away, I offered this sermon last evening at the chaplaincy:

Advent 1: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 28, 2010
Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Welcome to the threshold that is Advent. Today, the first Sunday in this season of watchfulness, falls for us here in the United States at the end of Thanksgiving weekend: a time of plenty and need, of origins and colonizations, of mythologies and counter-mythologies. Since at least the end of the Great Depression, this weekend has also been a threshold of its own, framed as the gateway to holiday consumer spending, and an economic barometer of the season to come. And now, as the highest volume travel weekend of the year amid the increase of counter-terror measures, Thanksgiving has intensified the liminal—or in-between—space of airports with such innovations as body scanners and “enhanced pat-downs.” Having now passed through the threshold of TSA screening twice in the last few days, I resist the urge to render today’s Advent message as a liturgical code orange or red and, rather, wonder what it might mean in my various contexts, with their distinctive pressures, to practice watchfulness. How indeed do our various contexts—from our families to our friends, colleagues and church communities – call us to practice watchfulness in the threshold of Advent?

At least one answer to that question, I suspect, is that we are being challenged to watch the watchfulness of our various contexts. In other words we are called to check pernicious and unjust forms of watchfulness that our worlds may take up out of fear of the thresholds in which we stand. Particularly in a cultural matrix that experiences border territories as dangerous, as vulnerable spaces to shore up against intrusion, I wonder how we can learn to practice a watchfulness grounded in the certainty that thresholds can be spaces of holiness, places of peace, even vehicles of grace? I wonder, how can we unmask the anxieties that plague the border territories of our lives, and help reveal and cultivate thresholds as spaces of strength and of growth.

In fact, we stand today at one of the great hinges of the liturgical year, the top of the liturgical clock, if you will, when we begin our sweep once more through the great cycle of readings, prayers, and music. The liturgical year is a narrative of narratives—a cohesive sequence of stories laden with productive incoherences and narrative gaps, calculated to catch our lives up into its cosmic sweep. Advent launches us into this cycle with a message that we – or at least the muzak at CVS — might presume to be straightforward hope and expectation, of looking forward to Christmas. But what Advent actually launches us into—and with which it frames the entire liturgical year—is much more strange and jarring. For starters, the theme of cosmic endings is still with us. And since Episcopalians are not known for exuberant exclamations of eschatology, you may well be sick to death of it and perplexed that here at the beginning of Advent, a term that literally means “coming” or “arrival,” this theme of endings has not gone away. From the macro view of the liturgical year, today is indeed the alpha to last week’s omega (the Sunday of Christ the King), but alpha and omega turn out to be co-present. Ending and beginning strangely bleed into one another at the onset of Advent.

On this peculiarly liminal day, we receive a series of readings that urge us to celebrate and to pay attention to our location. Now is the time, proclaims the prophet Isaiah, the Psalmist, Paul and the gospel of Matthew. The Psalmist calls all the tribes of Israel to go up to Jerusalem to celebrate a day of gladness, of peace and of prosperity. Isaiah envisions a day when all the nations will stream to God’s holy mountain, to a height higher than any other, to learn the ways of the holy one. In this sacred time and place God will become the great arbiter, fashioning harmony in place of strife, reforging weapons of warfare into implements of peace. In the fourth century of the Common Era, the Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria interpreted this prophecy through the lens of the Incarnation, transforming it from a future vision to an accomplished reality and a sign of judgment against those who continue to wage war. “By His own love,” Athanasius proclaimed in On the Incarnation, Christ “underwent all things for our salvation” in order to usher in peace. Athanasius found it incredible, in light of the Isaiah vision, how various nations can continue to be “mad against one another, and cannot endure to be a single hour without weapons.” Against this impulse, he argued, the “teaching of Christ” is meant to transform such impulses from warfare to husbandry, from arms raised against one another to hands lifted up in prayer. But what requires watchfulness and elicits legitimate warfare is evil itself, the evil that works upon the very psyches of human beings, intensifying anxieties, inciting inter-personal conflicts and inflaming inter-national strife (On the Incarnation, Ch. 52).

The Apostle Paul issues a similar warning when he declares in our reading from Romans, “you know what time it is, how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.” Having just summed up all the commandments with the call for love in the verses just prior to ours, Paul is calling out, “the night is far gone and the day is near.” In Paul’s mind, we stand in a cosmic perch akin to those early morning moments when the moon has set, the stars are fading and the sun is preparing to rise. His call to “put on Christ” evokes the foundation of our baptism, the moment of our full incorporation into the body, when our humanity is clothed anew with the one who, as Athanasius put it, “became humanized that we might be deified” (On the Incarnation, ch. 54). In this threshold moment, Paul calls upon us to activate that clothing, to be strengthened by it, as if by armor. But while Paul’s watchfulness grounds us in the threshold in which, he assures us, we know that we stand, Matthew reminds us how much we don’t know, how suddenly and unexpectedly the reign of God will break in to the order of the world as we know it. Nothing we can do can truly prepare us for this in-breaking. The parousia or great arrival—the Advent of the Son of Humanity—is unexpected because it is, by definition, unexpectable. And so the awareness we must cultivate is grounded in both expectation and humility. This threshold is not one that can be mastered, controlled or even, ultimately, known. It is an awareness in the face of profound uncertainty and ambiguity that must be lived, or better, practiced.

One of the moments of our fall semester that suddenly erupted upon us was an awareness rash of suicides across the country among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people. For those of us who have long been aware of the increased risks in this community, what was surprising about this moment was not so much that it happened but that it happened in the full glare of the spotlight, and how national awareness seems to have been increased because of that attention. As you know, the Chaplaincy was one of several groups that co-sponsored a rally and a vigil in support of the LGBT community on October 12th. And Harvard was one of a number—probably hundreds—of university campuses across the nation that held events that week. As I stood on the steps of Memorial Church with a large group of faculty, staff, and students at that vigil, wearing both my hats as Chaplain and a Lecturer, I felt as though we were all standing on a threshold, a simultaneously terrifying and holy place, a space in which people had come together to offer one another reassurance and support, determination that what was happening had to stop. When we stand together in this way, and particularly when Christians witness our support for the LGBT community, we begin to transform the legacy of judgment, condemnation and conflict to one of support, hope and growth.

And so here at Advent I, at the beginning of the liturgical year, and even at the top of the three-year rotation of readings we begin in the Revised Common Lectionary that we share with most major Christian denominations, we are invited to be alert in the threshold. Amid whatever ambiguities and intersections we may carry with us, whatever strange permeabilities may pervade the borders on which we stand, and particularly in the face of whatever anxiety or even terror such thresholds may generate in ourselves and in others, the message of Advent is to be alert and to cultivate peace, indeed, to be watchful for the sake of peace. And so may we be alert to, and prepared to combat, the ways in which the anxieties generated by borders can cause people to dehumanize one another, and indeed to cultivate widespread injustices. May we watch for reversals of pruning hooks and plowshares into spears and swords. May we be ready to be an agent of the in-breaking of God’s reign in the here and now, not simply the bye and bye. May we open ourselves to participation in what Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, and Verna Dosier alternately termed the Dream of God. And even as we prepare the way for this justice-making, may we watch our assumptions, expecting God to invite us into a world we can only begin to imagine. But most of all may we stand together today in awe and expectation, understanding that this threshold on which we stand is holy ground. Amen.

If necessary, use words...

2010-11-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in Memorial Church a few Sundays ago, listening to the Reverend Dr. Dorothy A. Austin deliver her sermon, my mind drifting in and out, when she began telling an anecdote that grabbed my attention. She related a story told at by the Dean of Harvard College, Evelynn Hammonds. In September, the Dean hosted a discussion with a group of freshmen. There, she asked them, “What is the one thing that people might not know about you from their first encounters with you during freshman orientation? ...What one thing, perhaps, that’s not so readily discernable, seeable?”

The reason this story caught my interest was because I knew instantly where Dorothy was going with this story. I knew what the answer was to Dean Hammonds’ question because I would given the same answer: Dorothy shared that “more than half of the freshmen in her group told the Dean that the people they had encountered had no idea that their religion or spirituality was one of the most important aspects of their lives… there were Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists in this freshmen group who spoke absolutely eloquently about the power of religion and spirituality in guiding their lives and their choices and in shaping their identities.”

I’m no first week freshman. I’m a sophomore now and have been here for nearly three semesters. I’ve made close friends, joined many groups, and had numerous conversations on a variety of topics. Yet, outside of conversations at the Episcopal Chaplaincy and occasionally with members of Memorial Church’s University Choir, I could probably count on one hand the number of conversations I have had at Harvard regarding my faith.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a reason for this lack of discussion. I suppose that my silence comes in part from an unease that people will equate my beliefs with ignorance or naiveté, but this is no reason to feel uncomfortable talking about religion. First, my peers are smart enough to realize that religious faith does not imply blind devotion. Second, even if I was afraid of the first impressions people might form without knowing me better, my friends know me well enough by now that they would not view me as a different person if I opened up about my religion.

Religion has always held an important place for me. I grew up in an Episcopal family, my dad the Rector at St. Francis Church in Holden, MA, and I’ve always gone to church every week. It’s just what I do. Regardless of where I have felt in terms of my personal faith and belief, service has always there for me on Sunday. At Harvard, singing in the University Choir at Memorial Church in the morning and going to the Episcopal Chaplaincy at night, church has been there for me twice most Sundays. In my encounters with others, I try to be a good Christian. As a student, I am fascinated with issues of development, economics, and social justice in large part because of what I have come to believe from attending church weekly and thinking about God’s path for me.

One of my favorite saints is Francis, the patron saint of my home parish. One of the most famous quotations attributed to him (though Google just informed me that he never actually said or wrote this) is, “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” I’ve always been a fan of the saying. The lesson is that we can live the Gospel without necessarily talking about it. We can show people’s Christ’s love by our actions. This is liberating for one uncomfortable talking about religion. There is, however, another side to this wisdom: “If necessary, use words.” There are times when it is important to talk about God and share our stories of religion.

My challenge for myself is to not hesitate to voice these ideas. I imagine others may have similar experiences to me. Do not be afraid of bringing religious texts or ideas into conversation. If God plays an important role in your life, own that and share it. I hope to become better at doing this and I suspect that by talking more about religion, that will allow my faith to grow and develop.

The Archbishop Speaks

2010-11-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

As you can tell from the poster, Archbishop John Sentamu will delivering the William Belden Noble series of lectures at Memorial Church next week. John Sentamu is the Archbishop of York, the second ranking member of the Church of England. He will be addressing several themes, but they boil down to the following:

What are Jesus' priorities for work in the world (mission)?
How can we be transformed for mission?
How is mission related to Restorative Justice?

We will likely organize a group to go hear at least one of these.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

The William Belden Noble Lectures were established in 1898 by Nannie Yulee Noble in memory of her husband. According to the terms of the bequest: “The object of the Founder of the Lectures is to continue the mission of her husband, whose supreme desire was to extend the influence of Jesus as ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life,’ and to illustrate and enforce the words of Jesus — ‘I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.’ The Founder has in view the presentation of the personality of Jesus as given in the New Testament, or unfolded in the history of the Christian Church, or illustrated in the inward experience of His followers, or as the inspiration to Christian Missions for the conversion of the world. The scope of the Lectures is believed to be as wide as the highest interests of humanity.” The Noble Lectures are free and open to the public.

Refusing to Forget-- Stigma and the LGBT Suicides

2010-10-19T20:47:00.000-07:00

A week ago today I made my way from the Episcopal Chaplaincy building on Garden Street, through the chill evening to Harvard’s Memorial Church. As I rounded the corner by University Hall, the light of over two hundred candles flickered ahead of me on the steps that face Widener Library, the same steps from which the liturgics of commencement are enacted every spring. This was a vigil to mark, cry out against and be galvanized by the recent rash of LGBT suicides across the United States over the last several weeks. This series of events, and the unprecedented public conversation that has circled about them, has been devastating to many in the Harvard community, particularly LGBT and allied students.

I came to this vigil to represent the Episcopal Chaplaincy (as indeed Episcopal Chaplains across the country have been responding to this rash of violence), which was one of several co-sponsors of the event, and to reach out to LGBT students across the University at this difficult time, letting them know that they are not alone. Voices of people of faith too often stoke the broader cultural dynamics of violence at the root of all of this, and it felt important to be visible as an Episcopal priest standing against that violence. I was also present as a Lecturer currently teaching—and having previously taught—a number of LGBT students deeply impacted by the rash of suicides. Though I’m not sure how many other chaplains were present (there was at least one other), I know I was far from the only professor or staff member there, and that sense of institutional solidarity and support moved me.

But it was also personally important to me to be there as someone who has experienced that broader culture of violence as a member of the LGBT community. Following the example of previous speakers, I spoke in the brief open mic period at the end of the vigil of coming out. In my case, I explained, I happen to have come out twice—first, my sophomore year of college as gay, and then in graduate school as a transgender man (I transitioned from female to male in 2002). I spoke of the importance of community, real community based on authentic relationships, and how important it is right now to reach out to one another across the borders—particularly of faith traditions — that too often separate us.

Two days before the vigil, the combination of the Sunday lectionary readings and the rash of suicides already had me thinking about what it was like to be a young person struggling with the intersection of faith and social stigma. The theme of leprosy in the readings inspired me to open my sermon with a story of how, when I was in fifth grade, I stumbled upon a library book, Damien, the Leper Priest about Damien de Veuster, a Roman Catholic priest (recently included in the new collection Holy Women and Holy Men) who had served a community living with what is now called Hansen’s Disease. Damien went to this shunned community, fought bureaucrats to get them basic living supplies, built them a physical infrastructure (water supply, housing, etc), bound up their wounds, worked to de-stigmatize the disease, and ultimately contracted it himself, dying as a “leper among lepers.” This was the one book report I did that year that really meant something to me. There was something about the shape of Damien’s ministry in relation to the dynamics of social stigma that rocked my ten-year-old world. It didn’t hurt that as a gender nonconforming kid, stigma was very familiar to me.

The intersection of stigma and faith emerged in another recent Harvard event, a Divinity School panel entitled “Queer Youth and Religious Debates Over Sexuality." When I arrived, I was struck first of all by the Harvard police who stood guard at the doors to the room where the panel was held. Even in its absence, this visible reminder of potential disruption felt overbearing; I could feel it actually raising my heart rate as I listened. While all the remarks were moving, I was struck particularly by those of Professor Mark Jordan who spoke of how “the fights about [LGBT youth] often try to claim them for one camp or another — either religious or queer, but rarely both.” This is one of the peculiar challenges for those of us who are indeed, and have long been, both.

And so as this moment of grief and anger— here at Harvard and far beyond—begins to fade from media coverage, we must refuse to forget this episode. I don’t want any of us, whatever our age, sexual orientation, or gender identity, to lose sight of the violence—psychic and physical-- that underlies and emerges from the workings of stigma in all its forms. I'm particularly cheered to read the several statements that communities and individuals across the Episcopal Church have made (see Episcopal Cafe for a collection of them)-- reading them makes me grateful for the support I received as a young person, and galvanized to continue extending that support here and now.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
Interim Episcopal Chaplain

Weekly Discussion Group

2010-10-17T10:10:00.001-07:00

In case you hadn't heard at service or by e-mail (I've been sending announcements to the wrong list, apparently!), the Episcopal Chaplaincy and the Harvard Icthus are co-sponsoring a weekly discussion group.

Basic Details

Theology discussion group
Weekly: Thursdays at 8pm
Dunster House
Small Dining Room

The group will be discussing some classic themes in Christian theology, as well as considering how these difficult issues and topics actually relate to the daily practice of our faith and our wider vocation in the world. Our topic for this past week was the Atonement: how does Christ's death save us?

This next week we will be asking what relevance this question really has. Does it matter what view we take of the Atonement, and how does it relate to questions of violence, justice, war/peace, and other similar questions?

Hope to see you there. We'll have another announcement up mid-week.

Zack Guiliano

Kellog Fellow

Season of the Saints

2010-10-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

Starting on Oct. 10th, the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard began an emphasis on the place of saints and community within Anglicanism, asking questions concerning the place of devotion to saints, the place and definition of sanctity or holiness, and our understanding about both the communion of saints and our own community as the Episcopal Chaplaincy.

We will be continuing this emphasis until Nov. 10th, and we hope to see you on Sunday at our 5:30pm Eucharist at Christ Church in Harvard Square.

Stress, South Park, and the Book of Job

2010-10-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have felt a little overcommitted. In the beginning of the semester, I succumbed too easily to the warm fuzzy feeling of productivity that accompanies the filling out of extracurricular and job applications, and now, five weeks on, I have felt these "warm fuzzies" being steadily replaced by stress hormones, the harbringers of an atavistic "fight or flight" response more amenable to the Paleolithic than the Age of Information. In order to get these hormones out of my system without having to clone, fight and kill or be killed by a woolly rhinoceros, I go to the gym, where I often watch TV while exercising. Indeed, I was doing some pull ups the other day, when South Park came on.

The episode dealt with the question: "Why do good things happen to bad people (and vice versa)"; in the irreverent yet intellectually sophisticated way that only South Park can. In one part of the episode, Stan, one of the four main children, laments the good fortune of Cartman, a kid who has recently inherited a million dollars despite the fact that he is widely considered to be a terrible person. In one part of the episode, Stan's parents try to comfort him by telling him the story of Job, which if you aren't familiar with it, is a book in which God and Satan play a game with the life of a righteous man named Job to see if he will hate God if his life's happiness is destroyed. In the first two chapters, God gives Satan the power to kill most of Job's immediate family, most of his servants, to destroy or take away from Job most of Job's property, and to cover Job's body with boils.

Understandably, Stan is shocked by God's actions in this story, allowing Satan to ruin this man's life, and is not comforted by the story. Indeed, he would not have been any more comforted if he had read the next 30 chapters, which consist of Job explaining the utter powerlessness of his position, his inability to call for justice against the master of justice, and the blamelessness of his life, while his friends continually imply that he must have done something wrong to receive this punishment. Throughout this book until the last chapter, Job's only comfort and the only comfort of the readers of his book is his personal knowledge of his holiness, his firmness in faith to a deity who seems to have turned against him.

It is stated in the first chapter that Job would often visit his sons, and make sacrifices to God for each of them that they might be found blameless. Job must have loved his sons, and been deeply invested materially and temporally in their development. Yet one day, despite his effort, they were all swept away from him into death: not even the spiritual fulfillment of a Christian Heaven, but to Sheol, a land where Job is going next: "to the land of deepest night,/of deep shadow and disorder, /where even the light is like darkness" (Job 10:22). In this passage, Chaos seems victorious: the works of man have crumbled to disorder.

Despite his trials and the beratement by his friends, Job refuses to give in, refuses to follow his wife's advise: "are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!" (2:9). To Job, faith is not a pleasing story, a tale he can use to inflate his sense of self worth and sanctify his lifestyle. Faith is an indomitable creative force: not life but the creator of life. Faith is also the last choice that Job can ever make: the scrap of freedom that will never be taken from him. Using this freedom, Job inverts the theology of his nay-sayers. Whereas they would allow themselves to be destroyed by the dissonance between their pain and the alleged mercy of God, Job uses this dissonance as the psychological leverage to keep himself alive and wait for better days to come, as his faith tells him they must.

In the final section of the book, God finally answers Job's prayers directly, employing some of the Hebrew Bible's most vivid imagery to describe the vastness of his powers and the greatness of his works. Part of this section was read last Sunday during services:

4 "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
⁵ Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
⁶ On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-
⁷ while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels ^a]">[a] shouted for joy?
The most obvious interpretation of this section holds that God is putting Job in his place. This description of God's cosmic power does make Job's flocks and family look like meager accomplishments. However, I would interpret it differently: God is high-lighting the tremendous capacity of faith for creation. All acts of creation require faith. Whether faith is a tool that allows God into our lives or whether it is a tool that God also uses, that he is willing to share with us, is immaterial. What matters, is that we make the choice to continue in faith to inspire creation in our lives.

God rewards Job for his integrity and doubles all he has. Stan is comforted by Cartman's eventual loss of the Theme Park he had purchased with his million dollars. And, though my arms are still barely functional, I worked the stress hormones out of my system.

So if you're in a jam, have faith and do something constructive!

Cyrus

Believing in Folly

2010-09-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

There are certain things in Holy Scripture which we find completely confusing. All of us confessed last Sunday that one of our readings (Luke 16:1-13), a parable of Jesus, falls into that category. It seems almost incomprehensible.

An incompetent manager is called to account by his 'lord' for mismanaging funds. To avoid becoming a pauper, the manager brings in his lord's debtors and lowers their debts, so that they will receive him into their homes when he loses his job. Yet, at the end of the story, his original master is pleased at 'the injustice', and the parable is framed by Jesus saying:

Makes friends for yourselves by means of unjust wealth so that, when it fails, they might receive you into the eternal homes. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is unjust in a very little is unjust also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the unjust wealth, who will entrust to you what is true? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Again, this parable offers us a conundrum, and we considered several ways of resolving the question on Sunday, though each brought its own difficulties. I also spent over an hour tonight, reading and re-reading this text, poring over it in several English translations and in the original Greek before writing this post, trying to think through another way of interpreting the text and hoping to deliver some sort of solution. After having thought through that option, I was once again dissatisfied with the way my new interpretation construed some of the details of Jesus' parable.

I hope we can make a larger point regarding this issue, though, and I hope we can continue to talk about these types of questions. Namely, what do we do when we don't understand every part of our Scriptures? What do we do when the meaning of a passage eludes us, frightens us, or even seems improper? How do we wrestle with the text and with the problems we think we see, yet still remain faithful to our tradition and to God? Finally, can we come to the realization that there are some things in our faith we may never fully understand, no matter how hard we try?

Let me give an example which I hope will be comforting to you, rather than depressing. I am working on my second theological degree, I've spent years learning biblical languages, and I've spent hours just looking at this parable alone. I'm still not sure about every detail. Cameron, our chaplain, has spent even more time in theological education and just as much time grappling with this text, and he is also unsure of the parable's meaning. I want to suggest to many of you something that you may or may not find surprising: intense study is never a guarantee for understanding. If you are confused and unsure about aspects of your faith or of the Bible, you should not be surprised nor should you think you're alone.

Now, I want to make it clear (and perhaps, ease some of your worries) that this 'confession' of mystery is no prelude to jettisoning the Christian faith. It's not all mystery, nor is everything unclear. Our faith is not without content or reduced to simple 'sincerity of opinion' as C.S. Lewis's parody of 'the Anglican bishop' puts it in The Great Divorce. I do believe there is a way to live as a Christian which is completely faithful to our tradition and yet honest about its difficulties and challenges. To paraphrase the Psalms, we can love even your rubble, O Jerusalem.

If this idea intrigues you (or offends you or even causes you dismay), you should take an opportunity which the Chaplaincy is offering soon. At the beginning of October, I will be starting a weekly discussion group. This group will grapple with the sorts of questions raised in this post. We will be dealing with some more difficult passages and questions like the one above and like the Jeremiah passage from a couple weeks ago, constantly asking these two questions simultaneously:

How do we make sense of these?
How do faith, challenge, and inquiry all relate to each other and, just as importantly, to my daily life?

I hope that you're intrigued by the idea and that you have questions, problems, and difficulties in mind. We're going to take the time to explore them, and we're not going to settle for all the easy answers. But, we will look for and find answers to our questions, even if they're not the ones we expect.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Let them have dominion...

2010-09-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

After this Sunday’s service at the Episcopal Chaplaincy, we spent a good deal of time talking about what it means to interpret the Bible and particularly in how such interpretation directly impacts our sense of who we are, both as individuals and as human beings. These sorts of questions are nowhere more crucial than when we are engaging the topic of our current series: the world as God’s creation.

As an example, the majority of airtime in American discussions of creation have tended to revolve around debates about evolution and creationism. When forming this series, we were incredibly conscious of this preoccupation, to the point that we almost entitled our series Creation, not Creationism rather than In the Beginning. What I believe is notable about such debates is that they rarely involve a careful interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, often reflecting little serious inquiry about both the original context of the Genesis narrative and other creation accounts in the Bible and how such narratives have been appropriated theologically by Christians before the modern period.

But, as I mentioned before, we are emphatically not addressing these concerns. Rather, we’ve been asking questions about what a robust theology of creation has to do with our spiritual life, our relationships with other human beings and the whole of creation, and (this week) how creation theology informs our understanding of all human action in the world, negative and positive.

Allow me to address in my remaining space this last concern, namely, the question of how human beings are called to act in the world, particularly in positive ways. While there are many entry points for this topic, I am going to relate the question to two passages from the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Psalm 72. I’m utilizing these passages because I think they both demonstrate what human beings are called to do and point out what that ‘doing’ ought to look like.

Genesis 1, perhaps the most famous creation account, reaches its climax with the creation of human beings. God is portrayed as saying, “Let us make the human as our image, in our likeness, and let them have dominion” over all creation. This passage has received a great deal of criticism in the past couple decades, with the rise of environmentalism but also with the rise of various critiques of Christian theology and its historic (and ongoing) influence in Western culture. The idea in Genesis of humans ruling or having dominion over creation is sometimes seen as the ideological source for the destructive exploitation of the resources of the earth and of the labor of other human beings. Other, putatively more harmonious relationships are often envisaged in its place.

However, I think we must allow this idea (have dominion) to be tempered by its context in the passage and in the entirety of the Scriptures. Human beings, after all, are made in the image of God, the one who has structured the earth harmoniously that life might exist and flourish (“be fruitful and multiply”). Genesis 1 itself would militate against the idea of an exploitative dominion. Other biblical accounts of human dominion would as well.

Take Psalm 72. When speaking of the King of Israel this hymnic text envisages a universal dominion but also a supremely beneficial dominion. To rule over the whole earth as a truly human being will result in the flourishing of creation and will bring about justice and prosperity for all humanity, rather than accomplishing the desolation of the earth and the exploitation of the others’ labor.

Of course, what does this tell us? In its most basic form, for interpreting our Scriptures and for understanding Christian theology, it lets us know that we must be careful not to allow some features of one text to overshadow the full ramifications of the whole text and of the whole body of Christian teaching and spirituality. More importantly, though, we can begin to see the practical angle of a robust theology of creation. We are acting most fully, most entirely “as the image of God” not simply by exercising “dominion” over the earth but when doing so in a way that leads to the proper protection and safety of the whole creation. We are most like God when we work for justice and help bring about the flourishing of every other creature. Our life’s work, in the words of Psalm 72, is to:

Come down like rain upon the mown field, like showers that water the earth.

In other words, we exercise dominion and are “as the image of God” by engaging in work that brings benefit to others. This idea has a wide application, and I hope you will think about it throughout this week. I imagine that many of you reading this blog are attempting to engage in such work, whether it is through your studies, through volunteer activities, or through your future careers.

And, I hope, you can begin thinking of your work as this: the very purpose for which God created you.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

In the Beginning...

2010-09-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

Come join us as we spend some time reflecting on the Christian understanding of the world as God's creation and the many ways it intersects with our lives. Our creation series began September 3rd and will stretch to the beginning of October, with the Feast of St. Francis.

Keep your eyes fixed here for blog posts on various topics related to Christian theology and spirituality, and come to Sunday Services at 5:30pm at Christ Church, Zero Garden St.

Change and announcements

2010-08-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Our initial post is simply to let everyone who may have followed us before that we have moved from our previous location Episcopalians! at Harvard to this blog.

Expect this page to undergo many changes in the coming months as we begin plans to better communications, but we will soon start posting announcements, meditations, sermons, and other things we want to pass on to everyone.