Seeking Sabbath Rest

(A sabbath chant played on a lyre, similar to what would have been used in the Biblical Temple in Jerusalem)

I'll be offline for a couple of weeks. On vacation, yes, but even more so, seeking Sabbath rest and peace.

Sabbath is such a difficult concept for hard-working North Americans. To just stop everything and worship God and rest and restore doesn't fit into our ideas of time or valuable uses of time.

In this fabulous little article from Calvin College, it is observed that while Christians happily can sit around on Saturday night talking about all the chores or work they have to do the next day, no one sits around and says, "Well, I'm going to commit adultery tomorrow." Or "I think I'm going to go shoplift at Macy's tomorrow." Why do we hold this Sabbath commandment so lightly among all the "Big Ten"?

I hope in the intervening weeks, you might follow the link above and spend some time exploring its resources on Sabbath and Sabbath-keeping. Rest and refreshment in the arms of a living, loving God is surely the remedy for most of humanity's ills ... if we could only see it.

Back in August!

+ Kit

A Night for Singing!

Last night, about 50 people gathered around the piano in the Undercroft for an hour of hearty hymn singing. The selections (all requests) ranged from "For All the Saints" to "Precious Lord," from "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus," to "Marching in the Light of God."

There were sweet harmonies and powerful fortissimos. There were a few false starts, and boldly confident descants. There were a host of regular choir members, and some very welcome visitors who are not regular members of All Saints.

At the end of all that singing, we deserved those ice cream sundaes! Thanks to Steve Findley and his crew for wonderful fellowship and food. Thanks to Michael Crouch (still post-surgery and not feeling at all the thing ...) for playing for a solid hour. Thanks to all who came and lent their voices in joyful, prayerful singing.

+ Kit

A Pew With A View

Back in the day, a hundred years ago or so, many churches made their incomes by renting pews. You purchased the right to a pew and your family sat there -- sometimes for generations. You can see this especially in colonial churches, with the box-style pews, some even with little gates. Your family name would go on the gate, and that was your pew.

Now we have annual pledge campaigns to raise funds, and people no longer rent their pews. But there is something peculiarly place-oriented in the Episcopal mind. A seat, even at a two-day conference, becomes "My Seat," a little home away from home.

When I was in seminary, I liked to play around with this penchant for sitting in the same place. We had all our classes in one enormous lecture hall. And every day, sometimes even at each class period throughout the morning, I would change my seat, just to get a new perspective.

One morning, one of the more irritable members of my class came in and found me in "her seat." "You are in MY SEAT," she said. "I ALWAYS sit here. I want to sit here NOW."

What is it that makes any old seat My Seat? Or any old pew My Pew? What creates that sense of ownership? What is it in our psyches that longs for a single vista, a single unchanging viewpoint?

What would you see if you looked at things from a different angle?

+ Kit

Church Words -- Orthodox

After several recent discussions that involved the words "orthodox" or "orthodoxy" (used in the sense of "I'm right and you're wrong"), I started wondering a) what people mean when they use this word and b) what the word meant and might still mean.

Orthodoxy is becoming a word of indeterminate meaning, standing for all sorts of things, including fundamental evangelicalism, conservative Catholicism, and the Right Way to Be an Anglican. It seems to mean, as Humpty Dumpty said in "Alice in Wonderland," what the speaker wants it to mean.

So I went to The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology and found this definition: "The word 'orthodoxy' is ambiguous. It can mean 'right worship' (ortho means straight and doxa means praise) or 'right belief.' The Athanasian Creed affirms that, 'We worship one God in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity.' Orthodoxy is not a matter of purely intellectual assent to propositions, it involves giving glory to God. This emphasis on worship shows clearly that right belief, assent or opinion, correct dogma, was not understood in abstraction from practice." (p. 422)

In my mind, orthodoxy comes down to holding the basic tenets of faith ... One God in Trinity of Persons, God as creator of all that is, Christ as fully human and fully divine, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the single redemptive action that reconciles humanity to God, the gift of the Holy Spirit as the ongoing presence, guide and power of God in the world.

That is the God I praise and worship. All the rest, I think, is details, discussion and disputations.

+ Kit

Saint of the Week -- Bishop William White

We have William White to thank for so much. For the survival of the Anglican faith in the United States following the Revolutionary War. For the democratic structure of The Episcopal Church. For the insistence on democratic election of bishops by clergy and lay people combined. I suppose we might even thank him for Gene Robinson. Or the existence of the Anglican Communion.

Rev. William White, an Anglican clergyman, was one of the very few clerics in the Church of England to support the Revolutionary War. He was chaplain to the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1789, and then served as chaplain to the U.S. Senate. Anglicanism in America almost died out after the Revolution -- after all, if England was no longer in charge, what place was there for the Church of England? The number of Anglicans in the U.S. dwindled after the war to only about 10,000 members as clergy and Loyalists fled to Canada or England. Churches sat empty across the colonies. It looked like Anglicanism would perish in the new nation.

There had been no Anglican bishops in the colonies because church leaders did not want to give the colonial church that much independence and power. So the first order of business to preserve Anglicanism was to get some bishops. Samuel Seabury was the first U.S. bishop, and he was ordained in Scotland, where he would not have to take an oath swearing allegiance to the King. In 1787, William White of Pennsylvania and Samuel Provoost of New York traveled to England and were consecrated there under a new British law providing for Anglian churches in countries not ruled by England.

It then remained to create an American Anglican church. The church was named The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (to get anything even sounding like British authority out of the title). Episcopal comes from the Greek word for bishop, which showed that this would be a hierarchical church under the authority of diocesan bishops. This was the first church outside the United Kingdom to be in relationship and communion with the Church of England. It was, you might say, the beginning of the Anglican Communion.

William White established the governance of our church ... including election of bishops by clergy and lay people in a diocese. "The power of electing a superior order of ministers ought to be in the clergy and laity together, they being both interested in the choice," White wrote. (In most of the Communion, bishops are not elected, but appointed. This causes much confusion as the U.S. church tries to explain how it is that New Hampshire ended up with a gay bishop. Because the church in New Hampshire -- clergy and lay delegates -- VOTED for him!) He made sure the voices and opinions of lay people would be heard on vestries, in diocesan conventions and at the triennial General Convention of the church.

In this month when we celebrate our nation's independence from Great Britain, and when bishops from all over the Anglican Communion are gathering in England for the Lambeth Conference, it is appropriate for us to honor and celebrate dear Bishop William White, who made it possible for us to have a church that is representative of all its people, while still maintaining the ancient orders and authority of bishops, priests and deacons.

Reading Ahead -- Pentecost 10

This week's parable is about the weeds and the wheat ... how an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat, the servants want to pull up the weeds, but the Master says no, leave them all alone till the harvest, for fear of pulling up the good wheat along with the weeds.

One of the hardest struggles people have is how a good God allows evil and suffering in the world. The parable helps with that in one sense ... that we do not know how rooting out evil might also root out the good you desire along with it. But why the evil in the first place?

This is a long-standing theological question. It is called theodicy -- the question of why God allows evil in the world. We all do our time in the fields of theodicy, trying to distinguish weeds from wheat, wondering why the weeds at all, why not bring in the divine Roundup and spray them all?

The parable says the question is not that easy. I find it very hard to let go of the question and let that be the answer. In fact, the most irritating person I learned about in college literature courses was Alexander Pope, who wrote "Know thyself, presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man."

I never bought that argument. Do you?

+ Kit

Playfulness and Healthy Responses

In Ed Friedman's posthumous book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, he describes how families and organizations become more and more anxious and reactive as they lose their sense of playfulness.

Playfulness, he says, is part of our mammalian make-up, and is necessary both for developing intimacy and for maintaining healthy boundaries. "You can, after all, play with your pet cat, horse, or dog, but it is absolutely impossible to develop a playful relationship with a reptile, whether it is your pet salamander, no matter how cute, or your pet turtle, snake or alligator. They are deadly serious (that is purposive) creatures," he writes.

Summer is a good time to develop the ability to be playful, while the sun is shining and the weather is warm and you can relax a bit. Then when winter sets in and the world is dark and the weight of work and responsibility and family presses in upon you, perhaps we might remember the lightness and humor, the joy and silliness of the sunnier season. Then perhaps we can react less like purposive reptiles and more like the playful mammals we are.

Bring a little light-heartedness into your next anxious moment... as Indigo Girls sang, "the best thing you've ever done for me. Is to help me take my life less seriously ... it's only life, after all."