Overt and Covert Danger

We have been in some dangerous places, North Ireland during the troubles in the early 1970s, crossing from Jordan to Israel on the Allenby bridge as a rifle shot echoed off the rocks, and in the dark side of several American cities. Some of the members of our Body of Christ are suffering severe overt danger today, perhaps even martyrdom, but what is the danger that you and I face? St. Paul tells us that, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” [Ephesians 6:12]. 

There is overt and covert danger. Facing overt danger you may lose your life. If that happens, as a Christian, you will be with Him forever. But in facing covert danger you may lose your soul; that danger is eternal. Morality is a matter of life and death. That is why God gave us commandments, and why Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount. God wants to keep us out of the greater danger.

Blessed be the LORD, my rock,

      who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;

He is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer,

      my shield and he in whom I take refuge,

      who subdues peoples under me” [Psalm 144:1-2].

O Lord, from whom all good things do come: Grant to us Thy humble servants, that by Thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by Thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. [BCP 1662].

She Said She Was an Atheist: The Impossibility of Atheism

What is atheism? The Online Merriam Webster Dictionary says that Atheism is a:  “a disbelief in the existence of deity; b:  the doctrine that there is no deity.” The American Atheist website says that, “Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.” There is not much meat in either definition for the obvious reason that there is not much meat in Atheism.  Atheism is like the Down East story of the woman who serves her husband sausages for breakfast for the first time one morning and then asks, “What do you think of them, Marvin.” He labours away at skinning the sausages then eats the skins, and says, “Not bad, Martha, but after you clean ‘em, there’s not much to ‘em.”

All of three of these “definitions” suffer from the same philosophical problem; it is impossible to get rid of the concept of a god, without reference to a god of some sort, and still retain any basis for developing any moral or any philosophical system. In the 1960s Altizer and Hamilton published “Radical Theology and the Death of God,” a bread and butter basic in my seminary. The book followed Friedrich Nietzsche in proclaiming the death of God and the human freedom to determine value and meaning. The problem with the book was that in the end there was no way to get rid of God without bringing in a fundamental idea of god in the back door.

There is an alternative; that is to say there is no meaning, and even the word random must be emptied of any hint of its opposite. Humankind is so desperate for meaning that they make of themselves the god who directs their lives. It’s like having music without rhythm and scales; you end up with cacophony, but you can’t even call it cacophony because you have nothing to compare it with. The moment you impose order to make melody, you have already referenced something greater than yourself that others will also recognize. Saying that there is no meaning is  rather like going to the Coffee Shop and ordering a Decaf Coffee with Skim Milk and two Equal, “One Why Bother please.” 

GLORIA                   

Gloria!

Birth moans

in strawed stable.

The King has come,

his lusty wailing

rends dark night.

Gloria!

Birth bloody

as his death,

the King has come.

His reality

mouth and mother's breast.

Gloria!

Birth starlit in musked air,

The King has come,

God swaddled in human need.

Gloria!

Jesus Son of God Most High.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

Gloria!

LADY LAUD YOUR SON

Lady laud your son.

Cast down your golden crown and worship him,

born a babe in stable laid,

who walked the hills of Galilee

with fisher folk and tax collectors

made of them a warrior band,

shocked the scribe and Pharisee

not less than priest and Sadducee.

No simple man, nor plain was he.

He has the power to call forth you and me.

Lady laud your son

whose death pierced your own soul

with grief too sharp to bear

fulfilling prophet's words in temple court

so long ago.  Proud mother of a little babe

with head bowed down,

you contemplate the way

he cast down the mighty from their thrones.

Lady laud your son.

You have given once again

as you have given many times before.

Resurrection joy, ascension parting mingled in your breast.

The old ways of holding him can never be again.

Lady laud your son.

Cast down your golden crown and worship him

in the circle of the saints, his sisters, brothers,

all your children now, all crowned like you

God-bearer, now for ever blessed

held in warm embrace by glad hearts everywhere.

Lady laud your son.

The Winding Centuries Have Come and Gone

The winding centuries have come and gone

Still the Christmas song goes on and on.

Some have loved the Babe, some still hate him;

Christmas joy is for hearts that welcome him.

Peace on earth, the thronging angels sing,

Throughout the heavens hear the merry chorus ring.

Simple shepherds on the hill rejoice to hear

The news that Almighty God has drawn near.

But Herod on his throne feels a deadly chill;

Any who threaten his power he will kill,

Wife, or son, or even little baby child.

There is no safety for child or mother mild.

Now Herod is dead; the years have come and gone;

Only Christ will come with the breaking of the dawn.

When I was Nine Christmas was a Fizzle

The week before Christmas, my Norwegian stepmother Haldis’s sister Lucy arrived from Chicago with her formidable mother. Lucy and Haldis were Valkyrie blonds, tall, slender and haughty. With Lucy came Bestemor, the name means “Grandmother.” Bestemor was a large frightening woman, a savage Brunhilde who ran a fortune telling tea shop in Chicago. She was a dilettante in horoscopes, phrenology, and other skullduggery.

Several things happened that were to cast a pall over my childhood appreciation of Christmas. An occasion for jeering arrived in the mail. My natural mother Ruth had been divorced by my father when I was an infant, but now an unusual thing happened; she had sent me two gifts in the mail. The first was a very large glossy Audubon book of The Birds of North America, and the second gift was a silver cigarette case with her family crest embossed on the lid. The book was beyond the reach of a nine year old. I was too young and accordingly the book disappeared on the family bookshelves. The silver cigarette case provided an occasion for merry mockery for the two Valkyrie sisters. It was immediately taken from me and given to my father who for years used it as a box for cufflinks. What was a nine year old boy to do with a silver box? Besides, memories of Ruth were bad memories and Haldis always referred to Ruth as “The Flood” because all that Ruth left behind, after her divorce from my father, was like the debris left over by a receding tide.

The other thing that happened was that awkward thing about gifts. Like all children I had my own Christmas list, but at the age of nine I already had no expectation that there was a Santa Claus to grant the desires of my heart. Gift giving in our household was to be governed by the Valkyrie sisters; even I sensed that. That year, few days before Christmas, I wandered into the basement and discovered all my brother’s gifts stored away in the empty coal cellar. To my childish eyes the hoard looked like all the things that I would have wanted when I was their age. I hope you understand that it wasn’t envy of my brothers. I was already too big for a little tricycle. Rather than that it was a sharp perception that I was not valued. Christmas morning was humbling. I received a pale pastel shirt and a narrow knit tie with pale pastel stripes that I can still see in my mind’s eye. I was encouraged by the Valkyrie sisters to be a little man; an acceptable little man, and I was yet a little child.

The final blow to Childhood Christmas came a couple of years later when Haldis announced that she was tired of getting up on Christmas morning with excited children. From there on she informed us that we would follow the Norwegian custom of opening gifts on Christmas Eve. That of course made it difficult to attend Christmas Eve services, which from the viewpoint of Haldis was an added bonus. She may have had a point. We were Scottish Presbyterians and I do remember our dour Glasgow Scot’s minister William Black opening the Christmas Sunday service by proclaiming “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise;” which also misses the point of Christmas. Not that Mr. Black didn’t also have a point. After all it was a very difficult congregation and must have given him good cause for a broken and contrite heart on more than one occasion.

What is the point? All of those childhood Christmases spinning down through my childhood years were focused on family and gift giving. The often painful family dynamics always overshadowed the transient joy of gift giving. A favorite Christmas record in our household was Yogi Yorgesson singing “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas.” The last line sticks in my mind, “In the corner the radio was playing, and over the racket as Gabriel Heater was saying, Peace on Earth, Good will to men, and yust then someone slugged Uncle Ben.” In a way, it was funny, and not so funny. Not so funny, because the whole point of Christmas was missing.

            Christmas is for little children. Love and bless the little children you know, and do your best to add to their joy. Too soon they will be adults and look back, with either with longing or sadness, on the business of Christmas. And what about you this Christmas?  Christmas will be a lot easier, and ultimately more joyful, if you keep it in historical perspective. It is all about the birth of the Christ Child.

“And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, "Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased" [Luke 2:8-14]!

The Swarming of Bees

The Book of Psalms was the prayer book of the Early Church and the prayer book of Jesus. One of the Early Church fathers introduced a verse from Psalms saying, “In the Psalms, where the Holy Spirit speaks to us, it is written . . .”

Most mornings when I rise I prayerfully sing a few Psalms as a way of listening to the Holy Spirit. So very often the words of the Psalter speak out of the conflicts and joys of the human heart. I usually prayerfully sing three to five Psalms, depending on their length, and systematically work through the Psalter. This morning as I picked up The Book of Common Prayer Psalter I felt battered about by a number of pressures that I am faced with this day; not the least of these pressures are the alarming news events which press upon us, that and a thousand other things that beat on the doors of my mind seeking admittance. What I found was this.

“In the Psalms, where the Holy Spirit speaks to us it is written,

8    It is better to rely on the Lord *

            than to put any trust in the flesh.

9    It is better to rely on the Lord

            than to put any trust in rulers.

10  All the ungodly encompass me; *

            in the Name of the LORD I will repel them.

11  They hem me in, they hem me in on every side; *

             in the name of the LORD I will repel them.

13  They swarm about me like bees;

      they blaze like a fire of thorns; *

            in the name of the LORD I will repel them.

14  I was pressed so hard that I almost fell, *

            but the LORD came to my help.

15  The Lord is my strength and my song, *

            and he has become my salvation.

All of those thousand anxious thoughts were swarming about me as bees. Most of us have that experience from time to time. In Psalm 71 verse 21 I find myself praying “You strengthen me more and more; you enfold and comfort me.”

When I was a little boy I had an alarming experience:

Little Robin Redbreast

Was running through the meadow

Looking for adventure

That would please him best.

Near a woody dell

Down a deep dark hole he fell,

Where buzzing bees, all black and yellow

Angry swarmed, and made him yell.

His summer camp was just a torture

And not a time for fun adventure.

In times of stress decide to rest in the Lord. It takes a decision. The Lord is our strength and our song, and He is our salvation. There is an old song that says, “Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin, The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.”

As I begin to rest in the Lord, I pray in the words of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease;

take from our souls the strain and stress,

and let our ordered lives confess

the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire

thy coolness and thy balm;

let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,

O still, small voice of calm.

With the pending destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah observes that the Old Covenant did not work. He says, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant” [Jeremiah 31:31].

Both the Old and New Covenants are based on blood sacrifice. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” [Hebrews 9:22]. Nothing less than an atoning death can wash away the stains on the human conscience that says, “I feel so guilty I could die.”

The Old Covenant was only skin deep. The author of Hebrews says, “For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God” [Hebrews 9:13-14]. The promise of the New Covenant in the Blood of Christ comes with the promise of a new grace that reaches deep within the rebellious human heart, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” [Jeremiah 31:33].

That is why we can pray, “For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we delight in your will, and walk in your ways” [BCP p.360]. It is by faith that we are able to seize the promise and trust that He will do as He has said.

Here is a hidden danger. There are spiritual sociopaths who are so dead that they do not know that they are guilty. Jesus didn’t come to call the self-righteous sociopath; but only the sinners who knew their guilt. But know this; even dead sociopaths can be awakened by the proclamation of the Gospel. 

A Prayer: Heavenly Father over the years I have often said, “I am an Anglican first, and an Episcopalian second.”  That declaration and awareness has comforted me in the past, but what if the Anglican Communion itself is torn asunder?  I am saddened, but not shaken by the prospect, because the fact is that my roots are sunk even deeper than the few centuries of our specific Anglican history.

I am on the Canterbury Trail to the defaced shrine of the Holy Martyr Thomas á Becket.  Well he understood the problems of royal privilege and its potential for contaminating the Church in England.  As an old colonial boy I find it frustrating that the royals and parliament have so much say in the life of the Church, but you know I love the pomp and ceremony, the skirl of pipes and the rumble of drums

My roots reach back through the long history of the English Church, through Milton, and through Blake who prayed, “And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills?  And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills?”  Through John Jewel and “ the Coming Down of the Holy Ghost and the Manifold Gifts Thereof,”  through Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer, through Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, through Walter Hilton and Richard Rolle, through blesséd Anselm who teaches me that the strength of my salvation is the strength of Christ.

My roots reach further back through Augustine of Canterbury, through Saint Benedict and the ancient Monks of Nursia, through Antony of the Desert and the wild-eyed desert hermits.  My roots reach back through Canterbury, past Roman paving stones to ancient Celts and Britons by their smoky fires smouldering in the damp of an English spring.

My roots reach even further back through wandering missionaries, Christian tradesmen, and Roman soldiers who bearing the cross on their hearts first tread upon the soil of the land of my forefathers. 

My roots reach even further back through the long and dreadful glorious history of the martyrs of the early church, through the letters and missions of Paul and Peter, Jude and James and John and all the Gospellers now radiant in glory.  “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:19-20).

It is actually that last declaration that binds together the whole of this tumultuous history of the Church catholic and militant that I have loved, and still love with every fibre of my being.  My Father it is immersion in your Spirit, poured out upon the Church through the hands of Jesus our Head that makes sense of the whole.  It is one of your miracles that the Church in all its brokenness over the centuries still survives. 

Time and time and time again you gather the broken shards together and craft again a golden vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the Master of the house, ready for every good work (2 Timothy 2:21).  I find that instead of grieving or despairing, I am excited by the shaking of the foundations of our beloved Anglican Communion.  When “the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the well” (Ecclesiastes 12:6), nothing less than your holy hands are at work.  My Lord, let me see!  Show me the new golden vessel as it rises like the Phoenix from the ashes.  Break us, mold us, make us, fill us again most glorious Lord and Father.  We are yours, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.