The First Sunday of Lent: Prayerful paths and slowing down

Lo, we descend into the valley of Lent…

This is supposed to be a time of simplicity, introspection, fasting and penitence. But it gets complicated quickly at St. Paul’s.

This morning we will chant the Great Litany, as complex an opening to worship as ever there was. We will be commissioning our new pastoral care Stephen Ministers at 10 am, and Pastor Ann Willms will be preaching today.

Later in the day, I will be offering the first in a seven-week course leading to adult baptism, confirmation or reception into the Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile, Pastor Heather Warren will be offering an introduction to the work of author-speaker Brian McLaren who will be joining us next Saturday and Sunday.

Lent is supposed to be a time of slowing down, but it does not yet feel that way for me. So I feel somewhat hypocritical in urging you to slow down and have a Holy Lent (as my mother used to put it, “Do as I say, not as I do”). So please let me offer a few brief ideas about what Lent should really be about, and I offer this to you much as a reminder for myself:

Lent is a gift to the heart. Lent can be a time not of obligation but of careful and prayerful discernment about our life path, and how God is calling us to live our life of faith in the world. It is a time of confession, of looking honestly at where we have fallen short. It is also a time to feel reconnected in our deepest self to God our creator and celebrate the gifts God gives us. This can be a time a feeling affirmed on our path, or feeling called to new directions, or maybe a combination of both.

Traditionally the Church asks that we “give up” something for Lent as a way of focusing on what is truly important. Fasting can nudge us into being less self-indulgent and more aware of the needs around us and the places God is calling us to go. Fasting that is falsely pious is no fast at all.

My suggestion is to make your fast something important and hard. Maybe instead of giving up chocolate, give up fear. Or instead of giving up meat, give up gossip. Or instead of giving up ice cream, give up petty complaining.

Lent is a time for renewal of prayer. There are many ways to pray, but all require practice. Find a regular time in your day to pray that works for you and stick to it. Get up earlier if you need to, or turn off the television or computer earlier in the evening. Use the prayer book or pray spontaneously from your heart. Reading the Bible daily in small doses can enrich your prayers and your life. Rather than getting hung up on the factoids of the Bible, let you imagination find the Holy inspiration between the lines.

You can get instant help on this: We’ve provided a series of reflections for each day of Lent written by members of St. Paul’s, and each reflection is connected to the Scripture readings for the day. All of this can be found on a special blog by clicking HERE, and the blog has links to each day’s biblical passages.

Sometimes the biblical passages fall flat with me, and that is perfectly OK. But sometimes they touch my deepest core. Today’s Epistle from 1 Peter 3:18-22 is written in coded first century language, but decoded it is a declaration of hope, that no one is beyond grace and redemption, that Christ went to the grave to find people in the grave:

“He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.”

Finally, let me leave you with a poem for Lent that I rather like, by Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007), whose writing reflects her deep faith and her interest in science.

For Lent, 1966
By Madeleine L’Engle

It is my Lent to break my Lent,
To eat when I would fast,
To know when slender strength is spent,
Take shelter from the blast
When I would run with wind and rain,
To sleep when I would watch.
It is my Lent to smile at pain
But not ignore its touch.
It is my Lent to listen well
When I would be alone,
To talk when I would rather dwell
In silence, turn from none
Who call on me, to try to see
That what is truly meant
Is not my choice. If Christ’s I’d be
It’s thus I’ll keep my Lent.

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May your Lent be filled with holiness and hope.

All True Christians: Bishop Dan Edwards

I am off on the Vestry retreat today, so I am featuring a "guest" blogger: Dan Edwards, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Nevada. I met him in an elevator last summer in Anaheim at General Convention. He was the only bishop wearing a baseball cap on the floor of the House of Bishops so I had to like him.

He wrote this the other day on his blog (you can read his blog by clicking HERE). I am reprinting this in full; it is thought-provoking:

All True Christians

By Dan Edwards

“All True Christians Are Pro-Life,” thus said a bumper sticker in Carson City.

I am indebted to this bumper sticker for keeping me entertained for days, spinning out lines of inquiry and wonder at such a curiously arrogant assertion of dogma. These are a few of the things I wonder about.

Who decides what opinions you have to hold in order to be a “true Christian?” For centuries, we worked out our definitions of orthodoxy in ecumenical councils. Bishops from all over the Christian world met in prayerful deliberation, guided by theologians, mystics, and people of noted sanctity. They came to a consensus definition of the faith. In those days, the statements of the ecumenical councils set the limits on Christian belief. There was a lot going on in the Protestant Reformation, but the theological heart of it was the claim that the definitions articulated by the councils had become too precise. Each person, the reformers insisted, should be given a copy of the sacred text, written in his or her own language, and allowed to find their own understanding of the truth guided by the indwelling Holy Spirit -- not an ecclesiastical hierarchy. That opened up the possibilities of “true Christianity” to a radically wider array of opinions. What may be new in our time is the extension of this individuality to the right of each individual not only to discern his or her own interpretation but to declare that interpretation to be orthodoxy itself and pronounce anathema on anyone who has reached a different interpretation.

So who defines a “true Christian” today? Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition took most of the pending legislation of the 1990’s, prescribed a right position on that legislation, and claimed that any legislator who voted wrong on any issue was not a “true Christian.” But how did Ralph get that authority? He couldn’t even get himself elected Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Yet he claimed a greater authority than the Council of Nicaea.

It used to be so simple. For Paul, if you could say “Jesus is Lord,” you were a true Christian even if you had some harebrained ideas. Eventually that 3-word affirmation grew into the Apostle’s Creed, and finally the Nicene Creed. In the 4th Century, being baptized and saying the Nicene Creed were enough to call yourself a true Christian even if you could not have passed Ralph Reed’s gauntlet of legislative issues test. Who decides whether someone is a “true Christian?” Maybe we could go back to objective standards like the Bible and the Ancient Creeds. Otherwise, we are in the hands of the manufacturers of bumper stickers.

But what about the substance of the claim itself? Are all true Christians “pro-life?” The threshold issue is: what do we mean by “pro-life?” If it means a basic orientation toward life and engagement with the world as opposed to life-denying asceticism, then I have to agree that a true Christian is pro-life. We are an Easter people, a people of the Resurrection. So we are for life – no doubt about it. I would think being pro-life compels one to be an ardent advocate of the Millenium Development Goals, to eradicate death-dealing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, and malnutrition. A pro-life person sends Nets For Life to Kenya. Since life depends on health, surely one who is pro-life must oppose toxic waste dumping, nuclear proliferation, global warming, and smoking. Are all of these positions essential to being a true Christian? Is that what the bumper sticker means?

Of course, that is not at all what “pro-life” means in American politics. It means support for government regulation of a women’s choice to carry a pregnancy to term as opposed to abort. I have no doubt whatsoever that a true Christian can be “pro-life” in that sense. I know many of them. But is that moral stance so indisputable as to be the core of Christian faith? It is probably not in Scripture (one verse is possibly – but it’s a stretch – arguable). It is definitely not in the Creeds. It is not an ancient dogma of the Church. It was never addressed by an ecumenical council. The Episcopal Church’s Resolution on abortion is “pro-life” in that it regards all life as sacred, it holds any abortion to be a “tragic choice,” and says abortion should never be done for trivial reasons – but it finally affirms that this is an intimate moral decision to be made by a woman with pastoral guidance and moral counseling – not something to be regulated by the government. So, if being “pro-life” means I have to support legislation, I would have to defy the teachings of my church in order to be a “true Christian.” Yet, so many of the Epistles and the writings of Church Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome say that a true Christian respects the teachings of the Church. The bumper sticker does put many of us on the horns of dilemma.

How do we define a “true Christian?” What are the standards? My son-in-law, an ordained presbyter of the Methodist Church, recently “became a fan” of a Face Book page supporting gay marriage. A friend wrote him a lengthy exposition explaining that homosexuality is a sin, so she could not understand how a Christian could support such a thing. She was making a host of major assumptions which many of us who think of ourselves as Christians do not share – for example the basic function of the Bible as a rule book, the interpretation of ritual purity violations as “sins” even though both Testaments clearly treat them differently, the idea that forbidding one specific sexual practice implies the prohibition of others, the idea that rules explicitly directed against men can be extended to women, the notion that most ritual purity rules were superseded by the gospel but a select few were not, that the whole of moral revelation was complete in the Scripture, etc.

Again, there are clearly thousands of people on both sides of this issue –thousands who have been baptized, who receive the sacraments regularly, who recite the Ancient Creeds, and revere the Holy Scriptures, all saying “Jesus is Lord” and meaning it – yet who disagree about the morality of homosexuality. Is it possible for these people to disagree and yet recognize each other as “true Christians?” Yes, if . . . .

And here I gulp at what I feel compelled to say. In this post-modern age of devout subjectivism, I know this sounds hopelessly conservative. We can do what our forebears did. We can disagree and have high-charged energetic provocative conversations about the implications of the faith, but only if we embrace a strong orthodoxy and a vigorous orthopraxy.

The orthodoxy consists of a commitment to the sacred text, our holy Scriptures, as the starting point of discussion; a commitment to the ancient creeds as the framework, the language structure for our image of God; and a willingness to listen respectfully to the teachers, saints, poets, and sages of our tradition more than the pundits of today. The orthopraxy consists of a commitment to the Summary of the Law. To love God with all our hearts is to love a mystery, to revere a mystery, and so to be humble in the presence of that mystery. To love my neighbor as myself is to give him what is his due and what I expect in return, a decent respect for my integrity and my conscience. It occurs to me that adherence to the Summary of the Law might imply a certain reticence in what I paste to my bumper.

Update on my whereabouts, and a gem for your day

Friends,

I am not quite ready to re-enter the blogosphere (though obviously I am right now). To update you on my whereabouts: I am in Northern California and I've been with my mother, sister and nephew, and I've seen a handful of friends. My family continues to work through health issues, and I feel good to be here. I will be here are a few more days, and will be back regularly in this space next week.

In the meantime, I came across this the other day from Barbara Crafton, based on one of the Daily Office readings. I think this is good and thought-provoking, and so I reprint it here:

EMBARRASSING MOMENTS IN SCRIPTURE

At morning prayer, a fragment of the gospel according to Matthew that we don't encounter on Sundays: the hardly-ever-read story of how Jesus, apparently in arrears on his temple tax, sends Peter to the sea to catch a fish with a coin in just the right denomination in its mouth.

A perfectly charming tale, but we don't read it. Why? I suppose it's because it's a little embarrassing -- too folkloric, too magical, too much like encouraging people not to pay their taxes, or even to play the lottery as a means of making ends meet.

There are other stories like that, stories from the BIble we usually don't read in church. Back in the day, a child could count on a smirk or two during the annual reading of the one about Baalam's ass, gone forever from our Sunday mornings since the 1979 prayer book took them over. I, for one, miss it, although it's not like there aren't still plenty of talking asses.

And then there's the one in which Jesus, peeved because a fig tree does not bear figs out of season -- duh -- curses it, causing the tree to wither and die. We do still read that one on a Sunday here and there, and it's challenging to preach on -- it's always hard to preach on Jesus when he doesn't make much sense. Times like that are when we must all remember that these ancient books were written and copied by ordinary people, and that the transmission of the ancient words has made some interesting detours along the way from them to us. We can't hold Jesus responsible for everything we read about him. Reading the Bible can be an immediate and soul-satisfying comfort, just the face value of the old words at this very moment speaking to the heart in need of them at this very moment. But it is also a more considered thing, a subtle and demanding art, which is why it's so good to do it in company with others and to learn as much as possible about it, including how it came to be the way it is.

There is a spirit abroad among us these days which demands that everything be simple. It is a spirit suspicious of learning and of serious thought, a spirit that equates the pursuit of excellence with elitism and snobbery. It asserts that leadership is nothing more than representation of the majorit opinion, that our leaders need to be just like us, nothing more, when the truth is that leaders need to lead, and leadership often requires something extraordinary. This spirit maintains that the equality that exists among human beings in the sight of a loving God means that nobody really needs to learn anything. It contents itself with superficiality. It confuses the God who really does accept me just as I am with one who doesn't want me to grow and change. Yes, God loves me as I am. But God also wants me to be all I can be. Which is more than I am right now.

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Here are the three Bible stories I mention above.

Jesus and the fish with the coin in its mouth

After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, "Doesn't your teacher pay the temple tax?" "Yes, he does," he replied. When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. "What do you think, Simon?" he asked. "From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own sons or from others?" "From others," Peter answered. "Then the sons are exempt," Jesus said to him. "But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours."
-- Matthew 17:24-27

Balaam and his talking ass

And the angel of the LORD took his stand in the way as his adversary. Now he was riding on the donkey, and his two servants were with him. And the donkey saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road, with a drawn sword in his hand. And the donkey turned aside out of the road and went into the field. And Balaam struck the donkey, to turn her into the road. Then the angel of the LORD stood in a narrow path between the vineyards, with a wall on either side. And when the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, she pushed against the wall and pressed Balaam’s foot against the wall. So he struck her again. Then the angel of the LORD went ahead and stood in a narrow place, where there was no way to turn either to the right or to the left. When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, she lay down under Balaam. And Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he struck the donkey with his staff. Then the LORD opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, "What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?" And Balaam said to the donkey, "Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you." And the donkey said to Balaam, "Am I not your donkey, on which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Is it my habit to treat you this way?" And he said, "No." Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. And he bowed down and fell on his face. And the angel of the LORD said to him, "Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out to oppose you because your way is perverse before me. The donkey saw me and turned aside before me these three times. If she had not turned aside from me, surely just now I would have killed you and let her live."
--- Numbers 22:22-33


Jesus and the fig tree

Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered. When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. "How did the fig tree wither so quickly?" they asked. Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."
--Matthew 21:18-22 (a slightly longer version of the story appears
in Mark 11)

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