A day of Refreshment in a week of Discouragement

The last couple of days have been magical.  Daughter Ashley brought the children for an overnighter at Briarwood, also known as "Grammy's House."  It was a time filled with horses and play and pizza and movie night, and more horses, and all of the wonderful fantasies two happy little girls could muster. (Little George at this point is more interested in eating dog food and playing with electrical cords than in experiencing wonder of any kind!) Rebecca and Ashley managed to get the spinning wheel working and started on the first crop of Scottish Blackface wool from Dayspring Farm. Here are a few pictures of the event.



playing horses

the real thing

and more!

Momma with Little Princess, her retired hunter jumper

Spinning the first wool from the Canter's flock of Scottish Blackface Sheep

Lunch!

Playing St. Michael in the Briarwood Chapel

I thank God for times like this.  The last couple of weeks have been very stressful.  Diocesan Convention, interactions with several colleagues, and the recent political infightings in our country have conspired to remind me of how much of the old order has passed, and of how little I like that which currently holds sway in this great and wide world of ours.  Added to some very difficult administrative decisions of late, it has all made me very tired emotionally and spiritually.  But when I look into the eyes of my grandchildren, and when I survey the wonder that is all around me, I feel refreshed and renewed...ready to face the morrow.  And so I close with a snapshot of Little Princess and Oscar, whose presence reminds me that all is not concrete and asphalt, and that there is still beauty defined by function and nature; beauty which participates in and grows from that which we have all known instinctively from the beginning; that which is unchanging and in which we see the very face of God.

As God shows forth his character and person in the wonder and purpose of creation, so he shows us the fullness of his glory in the Revelation of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, of whom the Holy Bible is the sure and verified record.
To Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

My Dream World: A Disjointed and Irrational Reverie on What Never Was and Never Will Be (and that is probably a good thing!)

"My Sweet Rose" by John William Waterhouse (English 1849-1917)
Everyone needs a place to dream.

This morning I picked the first of the garden peas.  Rebecca served them for supper in a medley with new potatoes, turnips, and onions, all from our garden.  But life is not all blessing.  In the last week I've had at least three hens killed by predators, probably raccoons.  I suppose life at best is always a mixed bag.  Happy is that man who can learn to take it all in stride, the good as well as the bad.  I appreciate the opportunity to live on a farm, because it is hard to be insulated from things like death and cutworms and late frosts when you grow much of your own food.  But there are always compensations like a trilling beagle or the joyous galumphing of a spaniel puppy.  There are the beautiful and clever things we use everyday: shotguns and tillers and spades and those wonderful trimmer/saw combinations mounted on the end of an ever so long pole.  And then there is the quiet.  It gives one time to think, and just to be.  I'm sure some folks find a way to do those things very well in towns and cities, but I've never been able to manage such things when there are too many people around.  I imagine my inability stems from flaws in my own attitudes and outlooks.  But about a week ago, I walked Oscar, the spaniel pup, from the church down to the post office, about two blocks away.  He was a nervous wreck- so much noise, so many harsh distractions.  We've not done that again, and probably won't.  Better to lose the collar and lead and take our constitutionals in the fields and woods at Briarwood.

entertainment in my dream world: pastoral and gracious

The flowers this year have been beautiful.  Yesterday, a single white tea rose bloomed on faithful Pat's grave.  It made me smile, and brought a tear to my eyes.  Were Pat still on duty, there is a good chance that those hens wouldn't have been killed.  But he was more than just a worker here, he was a friend and a member of the family.  This was his place as it is mine, and both of us would rather be here than anyplace else on earth.  It is a good thing to belong, and to have a sense of place.  There is comfort to be had in a place such as this.  So much in modern society seems so impermanent and alone and transient.  Certainty seems to have vanished with the old ways (which were often far from perfect.)  But here at Briarwood, so much of what might once have been seems so close and real.  If only for a moment, it is good to escape the harsh realities which abound in a disintegrating culture and imagine a more humane and gracious world. 

Religion in my dream world: All the tribes willingly united under King Jesus
Where "Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Jesus Christ as Lord"
of course with Orthodox Anglican Bishops! And enough Benedictine monks to keep us balanced and in good humor.

Chesterton has our Lady say that in days to come the seas will run higher and higher, but we who eat the flesh of God will never be without hope, because our knowledge of Christ's ultimate victory makes us willing to face the defeats which seem to dog our days- face them with a more profound knowledge of a deeper truth and a certainty of eventual triumph.  It is so easy to believe that here.  Here I can close my eyes and for just a moment live the delusion that baseball and horse racing still define our national character, and that steward kings like Arthur and Alfred still represent Christ on his earthly thrones, and that a gentle, rational, and orthodox Anglicanism is the established faith of the realm.  If it all sounds a bit like Tolkien's Shire or Narnia after the defeat of the witch, I suppose it is.  But we are all entitled to our dreams, however fanciful or silly they may be, and it is easy to have dreams in a place like this.


Alfredus Magnus: Ever King in my dream world until Jesus Claims his Crown

May we all find a place to dream, and a place to escape the unpleasant realities which surround us for just a little while.  May God give us the grace to see enough of the good that we are not overwhelmed by the bad.  And might our outlooks be so transformed by the grace of our baptism that we can always see through the present darkness to experience the brightness of Christ's return.

Rector's Rambling: Easter MMXIII

 Fresco of Christ risen from the tomb
 by Piero Della Francesca

Christ is Risen!

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” (I Peter 3:18)

Jesus lives, and because of that fact our lives can be characterized by a lively hope:

Hope that our sins are forgiven.
Hope that we will live forever in heaven.
Hope that we are never alone.
Hope that Christ will strengthen us as needed.
Hope that we can overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Hope that we will always have a place to belong-the Church.

This month is a month of hope for me. I am surrounded by signs of new life. The seed propagator and greenhouse are both full of young plants, and the first of the spring cold frames is filled with broccoli, cabbage, chard, radishes, and lettuce. My new puppy is born, and the equipment needed to train him to be a first rate bird dog is ordered and shipped. Last week I watched films of New York Yankees great world series games (a sure sign that yet another season of baseball is just around the corner!)

And best of all, George is born, and he along with his sisters Margaret and Helen, is growing and learning to love Jesus.

As winter fades into spring, and as Lent flows into Eastertide, I pray that your life and outlook might be characterized by hope and joy. Imagine what it might look like in your life:

If you fully understood that your sins are put away and overcome.
If you saw the good instead of the bad around you.
If you looked forward to the opportunities of each new day.
If you expected Jesus to surprise you every morning with some good thing.
If you truly saw death as the door to heaven and eternity.
May God bless us all with hope, and with a spirit of hopefulness as we experience yet again the feast of the Resurrection of the living Lord, Jesus Christ. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN!

The Marks of True Christian Faith

The Rev'd John R.W. Stott, M.A., D.D.

Our Wednesday morning Bible study at St. John's is currently focusing on the Epistles of St. John.  Many volumes have been written on these well organized and practical books, but I am regularly drawn back to the writings of the late John Stott in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries and in Men With A Message, his brief introduction to the New Testament.  I have always found his "tests of assurance" to be particularly helpful as I evaluate my own faithfulness to Christ.

1. First is the "christological test" - "This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every Spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. (I John 4:2)"
2. Second is the "moral test"  - "This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God. (I John 3:10)"
3. Third is the "spiritual test" - "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. (I John 3:14)" "This is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (I John 3:24)"

By applying these tests to my life, I can pretty readily determine whether or not Christ is making a difference in my life.  And from the evidence, I can gain a rather high level of assurance of the reality of my walk with the Father through the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

But the Rev'd. Mr. Stott also points out that St. John reversed these same affirmations to name and define the spiritual liars such as the Cerinthians who sought to lead the faithful and unsuspecting astray.

1. "Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. (I John 2:22)"
2. "If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie. (I John 1:6)"
3. "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. (I John 4:20)"

"These are the three proofs of genuine Christianity. John brings them all together at the beginning of his fifth chapter: 'Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.  this is how we know that we love the chldren of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands' (5:1f.).  Unless Christians are marked by right belief, godly obedience, and brotherly love, they are counterfeit. They cannot have been born again, for those who are 'born of God' are those who believe (5:1) and obey (3:9) and love (4:7)."

Well said Brother Stott.  You leave little space or time for some of the stark denials of the faith received that are in the world today (No more than did St. John the Beloved for those same stark denials which abounded in Asia Minor in the first century.)  Might we all apply the truths revealed by God to Blessed John the Evangelist to our lives this day.  If we find in that application vindication and proof of our faith, might we give thanks with humility and purpose to continue in the faith received.  If we find ourselves wanting in the application, might we humbly submit to God's Word written and ammend our doctrine, and our behaviour, and our lack of love.

all quotations and paraphrases are drawn from Men With A Message by John Stott as revised by Stephen Motyer in 1994.  Published in the US by Eerdmans Publishing Co. in Grand Rapids 

An Example of True Faith

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Proper 18B
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster- 9 September, 2012

Jesus and the SyroPhenecian Woman

                                    Mark 7:24-30 / Matthew 15:21-28

“It was, indeed, a pitiful spectacle, a woman crying aloud in so great affliction, that woman a mother, entreating for a daughter, and for a daughter in such evil case.” So spake blessed John of the Golden Tongue (Homilies in Matthew lxx) of today’s Gospel lesson. Any of us who have stood by the hospital bed of our child, waiting for the doctor to arrive, can certainly begin to appreciate the pathos of the situation. It happens somewhere every day, and it is never less compelling, less heart rending, than the time before. Some things we just never quite get used to, and the suffering of a child, especially our own child, perhaps leads that list of things we can never quite bring ourselves to understand or accept.

But if we can empathize with this woman whose daughter suffered this unspeakable evil, most of us have a very difficult time understanding the initial response of our Lord to her calamity. Why would Jesus, the life giver, the health bringer, the Messiah, say something so seemingly heartless to this woman when she first approached him? “…she besought him, that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter. But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it unto the dogs.” (Mark 7:26b-27) What an awful thing to say. Such a statement would surely garner low marks regarding bedside manner in Seminary or Medical School.

Allow me a digression here, because it is very important. Article XX of the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, found in the back of the Prayer Book on page 871, says clearly that the Church has no authority to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” This means that if I read a passage of the Bible, this one or any other, and it seems to say something about Jesus which would confound or deny what the rest of the Bible says about him, I must be misinterpreting the passage, and I need to give it another look. We know that God is love, and that Messiah is the perfect reflection of the Father, for He and the Father are One. We know that Jesus was sinless, and that he came to bring the offer of God’s mercy and forgiveness to everyone. Therefore, we know that he would never just dismiss a person for any reason. And so we look deeper into the passage to understand these seemingly harsh words of Jesus.

The woman in today’s lesson was a Greek, that is, a non-Jew. More specifically, she was a syrophenician- a dweller in that land which had been pronounced by prophets to be cursed by God in an earlier age for their rejection and persecution of the Jews, those people who had been specially selected by God to bear the Gospel of Salvation to all the nations of the world. Blessed Origen, writing in Alexandria early in the third century, posited that this woman was chosen for this great miracle of God because her nationality was a spiritual sign to all of us. “Think of it this way: Each of us when he sins is living on the borders of Tyre or Sidon or of Pharaoh and Egypt. They are on the borders of those who are outside the inheritance of God.” (Commentary on Matthew 11:16) He says in the same passage: “The Gentiles, those who dwell on the borders, can be saved if they believe…”

There were among the people of Jesus’ time those who saw a stark distinction between the Jews, who had inherited the promises and duties of God, and everyone else, who had not. Surely they must have believed their outlook vindicated when Jesus indicated to this outsider that it would be wrong to take the provisions of God’s elect and make them available to “the dogs”, sic, those outside the Kingdom of God. Indeed, there was plenty for the Messiah to do within Israel as he attempted to gather “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” back into the safety of the sheepfold. Jesus maintained an ongoing disputation with people who believed this way, and in fact he had condemned their actions and beliefs roundly just before this encounter with this woman of whom Calvin said “Ceste femme, profane de nation,” -”that woman, a heathen as to her nation.” (Commentary On A Harmony of the Evangelists. I:269)

You see, God the Father in his infinite providential wisdom brought this woman to Jesus this day so that she might become for all the ages an example of what enduring faith looks like. Her example not only shamed those who held themselves to be the true followers of God, but it taught Christ’s disciples, then and now, a deep truth about the nature of God’s love and what an appropriate response to that love ought to look like.

We should first notice that this woman was not a trained theologian who had the answers before she started. She was from a heathen and cursed land. That, together with the fact that she was a woman, would indicate that she was unlikely to understand Jewish theology in its fulness. She was no scholar of the law. But she did know something of Jesus. According to St. Matthew’s account of this event, she “cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David…” (Matthew 15:22) Even in those times when God’s special provision was given to make Israel a nation which would bear salvation to the world, He had not forgotten the rest of humanity. Even as the rain fell on the just and the unjust, and the benefits of creation and the earth’s beauty and bounty were there for all, so snippets of understanding, imperfect and partial as they may have been, were bestowed upon all people. It was for her much as it was for each of us. We came to Jesus not in our widsom, or knowledge, or intelligence, or ability. We came to him in our need, with some instinctive but incomplete understanding that He was the one who could help us. We did not know where it might lead, but we came in hope, drawn by the Holy Spirit before we knew who the Holy
Spirit was, into the arms of the Christ (who we did not understand or fully appreciate,) and we were reconciled to God, the Father of us all. We do not get ready to approach God by preparing ourselves via some program of study or behaviour. Rather we respond to his effusive grace because he draws us. We come as we are.

Secondly, we should note the yearning persistence of this woman, a persistence born of love. Even though she was not a Jewess, she was a human being, made in the image of God. In that image, she loved deeply. She loved her daughter who suffered so greatly from the demonic forces of hell itself. With people made in God’s image through the ages, she longed for that day “when justice would roll forth like a mighty river,” and plenty and blessing would cover the earth “as waters cover the sea.” God is the God of History, and he has chosen to work within it. He took about 1400 years to prepare Israel for that “fullness of time” that St. Paul speaks of in Galatians. But throughout human history, he led people to see through a glass darkly via those yearnings which are common to us all. It should come as no surprise to us that Aztec warriors heard the prophesies of one who would come to bring salvation, or that even the cruel Vikings were not surprised to hear of a god who died for the people. I remember when I worked in the prison seeing the hardest inmates, who seemingly had no respect for God or men, brought to tears at the mention of a mother or grandmother who was kind to them. Love, you see, is a universal human language, given us as a part of God’s image at creation. As this poor woman illustrates for us today, love enables us to be persistent in persuit of good for those we love. It enables us to wait through the years, to never give up on those we love, and to believe that “all things work together for good to those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose,” even when our prayers seem to go unanswered and our situations seem unchanged. Even when she received the apparent rebuff of being compared to a dog, she did not walk away in anger or disgust or dejection, but persevered.  In the face of this characterization of the special place of the Jews in relation to humanity at large, she patiently and humbly acknowledged that even though Israel held a special place in salvation history, she knew that God’s love went forth to all people. Surely, the persistence born of love displayed by this woman put to shame those Pharisees and scribes with whom Jesus had tangled earlier in the seventh chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel. And I must admit that sometimes her persistence to see deliverance come to one she loved puts my own faith and prayer life to shame as well. Is it any wonder that Jesus said to her in St. Matthew chapter fifteen, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

Finally, we should note that when Jesus applauds this woman’s faith, faith which grew from just a spark of understanding and belief, faith that refused to be turned away by disappointment, faith that was the outgrowth of love for her daughter, he also condemns the lack of faith, or the aberration of faith which was displayed by so many of the learned doctors of Israel. Unlike them, she continued to hope for that salvation promised in Messiah, even when his immediate answer to her entreaty seemed to be a resounding “No.” The Reformer John Calvin speaks well when he says, “…faith will obtain anything from the Lord: for so highly does he value it, that he is always prepared to comply with our wishes, so far as it may be for our advantage.” (Commentary of a Harmony of the Evangelists I:269)

How stands your faith today? Is it more like that of those Pharisees and scribes with whom Jesus clashed, or is it more like that of this woman who came to Jesus to beg for the healing of her daughter?  Is it more about being right or about being in love? Does it demand that God do your will now and as you imagine would be best, or is it willing to play a part in his larger providential plan for all people? Does it walk with excessive confidence in your own opinions, and pride, or does it keep company with humility, and expectation, and hope in the promises of God? True faith, which issues in real godly persistence, is a gift born of love, a gift which flourishes when accompanied by that prayer of our Lord “Not my will but thine.” True faith is a gift which flows from the experience of knowing the love of God, and believing that his wish is deliverance, and healing, and salvation for all people. It is a gift born of love, issuing in love, and living in love. Might we all come to this holy altar today seeking more of this sacred gift, illuminated by this woman who came to Jesus in faith. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

Facing the Darkness

Sermon for August 5th
Preached at St. John's Lancaster

The Lion of the Tribe of Judah

And Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites, and the Pelethites, went down, and caused Solomon to ride upon King David’s mule, and brought him to Gihon. And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save king Solomon. (I Kings 1: 38-39)

It was an auspicious day, for a new king had been anointed in Zion. It was the latest verification of that promise which had been given by God through the patriarch Joseph, “Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be…” (Genesis 49:8-10) The prophet Zechariah understood the prophetic nature of these utterances about the house of Judah and of David when he proclaimed “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, o daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” (Zechariah 9:9) His understanding was vindicated and the prophecy fulfilled on that day “when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, And brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.” (St. Matthew 21:1-9)

The Jewish people suffered much in the thirteen or fourteen centuries which contained these prophetic events. There were wars and rumors of wars, slavery and deportations, famines and earthquakes and fire and flood. Invasion and economic ruin were never far over the horizon. For much of that time we might apply Churchill’s description of life in Iron Age Britain that “Life is brutal and short, and then you die.” But God’s promise prevailed, and among the people, even in the darkest of hours, that hope flickered that God would remember his chosen, and that the “scepter would not depart from Judah until Shiloh come.”

And now, by virtue of our response to God, we too are numbered among His chosen people. Because ‘we have confessed our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ (I John 1:9 sic) Because ‘we have confessed with our mouth the Lord Jesus, and believed in our heart that God hath raised him from the dead, we shall be saved.’ (Romans 10:9 sic) Because ‘we have been born of the water and of the Spirit, we can enter into the kingdom of God.’ (John 3:5 sic) Because we ‘eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, we have life in us…and we dwell in him and he in us, and he shall raise us up at the last day.’ (St. John 6:53-56 sic)

Like patriarchs and prophets and kings before us, like those who are ‘unremembered…who were men of loyalty and good deeds…, whose lives led their children to stay within the covenant of God.’ (cf Ecclesiasticus 44:9-12) we find in our lives those times of dryness and disappointment, those times of difficulty and unexpected disorder, those times of darkness. But the promises of God are true. During the years when Jerusalem was in ruins and God’s faithful people wept by the waters of Babylon, they remembered the promises (cf. Psalm 137). In the most difficult of times, when they cried “Out of the depths” (Psalm 130:1), the people of God affirmed their faith that “he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” (Psalm 130:8) Blessed Job in the midst of his infirmities and misfortunes cried out in faith “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” (Job 19:25-26)

And so should we, when life’s vicissitudes and uncertainties and unpleasantries confront us, place our hope in God, who is “our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake at the swelling thereof. Selah. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.” (Psalm 46:1)

As war descended across Europe in the closing years of 1939, King George VI addressed the people of the Empire and of the world. He quoted from a poem by Minnie Louise Harkins and said “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown, and he replied. Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way! So I went forth and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.”

Whatever darkness my threaten you this day. Whatever sorrow you have known or whatever difficulties you face. I bid you this day to put your hand into the hand of God in the knowledge that Shiloh is come into the world and that the prophesies are fulfilled. Jesus Christ, who bid his disciples “be not afraid” on so many occasions, gives to us the same admonition today. Praised be God, who has not allowed the scepter to depart from the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and who in his mercy and grace has named you and me to be the heirs of the Kingdom of God. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

Dealing with Disappointment

Proper 6B, Third Sunday After Pentecost, Second Sunday After Trinity
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 17 June, 2012

I Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 92
II Corinthians 5:6-17
Mark 4:26-34

Disappointment, and the grief it produces, can be a terrible thing. Samuel was not the only one to experience that reality. Saul had been everything anyone could want in a king, and Samuel had been especially blessed to have had a role in his call and in his training. The young monarch was good looking, strong, well spoken, and brave. And in the end those things made him trust in himself more than he trusted in God. The results were predictable: pride, followed by arrogation of power both spiritually and personally, followed by jealousy, followed by paranoia, followed by violence, followed by rejection from office by God, followed by death. Along the way, Samuel remembered the good days before all of those things started to happen, and he grieved for Saul, and he grieved, and he grieved. Have you been there? Are you there? The loss of a loved one, bad health, or difficult relationships all have the potential to rob us of joy and preoccupy us with grief over our loss and our changed situation.

I believe today’s lessons provide us with some important guidelines for dealing with the kind of grief that consumes us when we experience some great loss, and I hope you will walk through the Bible Propers with me today with an open heart, that we all might begin to receive that healing God wishes for his people.

First- we must all remember that grief is a normal response to loss. Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. It is also an appropriate response to the immanence of a changing situation, one of those things which will change the way we have lived. Jesus, you remember, sweat great drops of blood as he prayed in the garden on that night before he was crucified. You may remember that Jesus also cried out over the city of Jerusalem, and expressed his grief over the coming destruction of the inhabitants of that city. There is nothing wrong with expressing those dreadful feelings that sometimes assail us all. Certainly we are allowed to address our emotions, and sometimes the intensity of our emotions prevents us from healing in a short period of time. I’m not a psychologist, but in one of the dark periods of my life, one told me that human emotional pain can take up to a couple of years to heal, and sometimes our lives can be dominated by grief and sorrow for weeks or even months before we begin to heal and return to some semblance of balance and joy.
With that said, how do we begin the process of returning to some semblance of normalcy after a great loss in our lives? Samuel got a good start when God reminded him that the new reality was here to stay. Saul was rejected- and that was not going to change. Sometimes I really wish I could talk with my dad again, but he is dead and I will not see him until we rise together to meet Jesus in the air. All of the wishing and crying in the world will not bring him back. I did both of those things for a while, and that was normal and ok, but in due time I had to let him go. It is the way of nature- it is the way of God. Sometimes Mom asks me why he had to die. My answer is simple. He was ninety years old and he had cancer and he died. There are many things in this sinful world that I might like to change, but I am not God. (Some of you are probably thinking that that is a good thing- I agree with you.) Reality is something that we can’t really change, and it behooves us to come to terms with it.
After calling the Prophet to a reality check, God gave him a mission. Samuel had several questions about it. He was afraid, and rightly so, because Saul was still the king and would probably see the mission as an act of treason. And Samuel really didn’t know what he was looking for in this brave new world. But God gave him something to do. There comes a time in our grieving process that we must get up and get active. It is not easy, not for Samuel and not for us. But if we sit and mope we become morbid and the willingness to live goes out of us. In the old days, there were set times for mourning where family members wore black and limited their social contacts. At the end of the period of mourning, they changed their clothes and resumed their customary activities. It was not such a bad custom, because it provided a known framework for re-entering regular human activity after setting aside time for seriously mourning the loss of a loved one. Today, we do not have formal guidelines for when we should be getting back in the saddle after a time of grief, but I am told by my friends who claim to know about such things that by the end of three of four months we should be out and active again, even though we realize that things will not be as they were.

And so lets review:
It is normal to grieve when there is a big change in our lives.
After an appropriate time of grieving, we need to come to terms with the reality that our reality has changed. That takes a bit of time, several weeks at the least.
In order to experience a return to wholeness, we should get busy in some purposeful way after an appropriate time of sorrow. While everything will not be back to business as usual, by month four, we should be beginning to return to some sense of productive purpose in our new reality.

But, grieving and facing reality and being purposely busy are not nearly enough to overcome the hurt that accompanies the significant changes in our lives. You know that and so do I. Our second lesson, the one from Second Corinthians, gives us the real secret to moving on with our new reality. It calls us to a renewed faith that God is in control and that he has a plan for each and every one of us. “We are always confident…for we walk by faith, and not by sight…for the love of Christ urges us on…he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” It is not after all about just bucking up and staying busy. That is a very shallow way to deal with grief. Those things had their place in Samuel’s life, and they have a place in ours, but the reason that methodology worked is because Samuel, like Paul, believed that God holds us all in the palm of his hand. He believed that God “keeps us as the apple of his eye and hides us under the shadow of his wing.” His faith and his experience worked together to convince him that God does love us, and that because of his love we are new creatures. In God’s love, we are able to view life with a sense of forward looking optimism which enables us to keep the events of our lives in perspective. We value the past, and we treasure much about it, but because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, we know that the death and sorrow and hurt of our past is redeemed as is his own death and sorrow and hurt. He bore our sorrows on the cross, and brought to us healing and forgiveness and hope, and therefore we live for him. We no longer see people and events in the same light. We see them in a new and blessed light, because “the old has passed away- everything has become new.”

It sounds good, but on a bad day it still hurts so bad. And that is why Jesus said in today’s Gospel that it only takes a tiny amount of faith to begin to walk into this new creation of God. Even faith as small as a single mustard seed is capable of growing into a much larger and more peace giving faith. Jesus loves you, and he wants you to be healthy and functioning, not bound by never-ending grief or morbid inactivity. He does not demand that you get your house in order to receive his gift. He merely says to believe a little, like the mustard seed. Don’t worry about what you don’t have, rather bring what you do have. You believe that Jesus died for you and was raised from the dead. And so now you can live above that human point of view that perhaps has characterized your life. You can accept his gift of new creation. There will still be days when you remember the past with fondness and some sense of sadness, because your disappointment and loss, like that of Samuel, was great. But by God’s gift and grace, you will find a spiritual peace which will enable you to experience that new creation where purpose, and future focus, and peace are the norm. And as you experience this new creation which comes from believing in Jesus, you will sing with the Psalmist our Psalm appointed for today:

It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto thy Name, O most High:

To show forth thy loving-kindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night,

Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound.

For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands.

O Lord, how great are thy works!

Might God do a work in our hearts today that will make each of us abundantly aware that we are a part of his new creation in Jesus Christ. And might each of us heed the practical examples of today’s lessons and respond to his grace
By honestly experiencing our grief
By acknowledging our reality
And by living lives of purposeful activity.

In the Name of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost, AD MMXII

The Descent of the Holy Spirit, by Anthony Van Dyck

Pentecost Year B
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster, 27 May 2012

Acts2:1-21
Psalm 104
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-16:15

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. AMEN.

The Logo of Shriners International

Friday night Danny Meenach, Pete Martin, David Mowrey, and I donned our rhinestone encrusted red fezzes and descended on the main entrance of Wal-Mart to solicit donations for the Shriner’s Orthopedic and Burn Hospitals for Children. It is a worthy charity, and the “people of Wal-Mart” gave generously. Many of them did not appear to have a lot of extra cash, and their donations of one or two or five dollars reminded me of that widow whom Jesus commended for giving her two mites. “Because she has given all that she has, she has given more than all of them.” There was a time when I used to watch people a lot. And then time and circumstance limited that past-time, and so my three and a half hours at Wal-Mart provided a welcome opportunity to watch people again. I was a bit disturbed by what I saw. There were more people in the general population who seemed to be burned out on drugs than I had remembered. In the same way, there was a higher concentration of people who seemed to suffer from the ill affects of poverty than I had remembered from the days when I did most of my people watching in Lexington, Kentucky back in the 70’s. If the eye is the window of the soul, and I believe it is for most of us, I think it is safe to say that many of the people I saw were living in that shadowy land between faith and hope, where uncertainty and hurt can so easily lead to distrust and despair.

Perhaps you have visited that land at some point in your life. You believe that there is a God, a God who loves you. Your faith has led you to respond by giving your life to Him and calling out for his deliverance, but as hours blend into days and days into weeks, your prayers seem to go unanswered, and your soul wavers. The hope you had entertained seems so far away, and your loved one still suffers from cancer, and that person you love so dearly seems as unresponsive as ever, and you watch your balances dwindle as markets fluxuate and you are forced to draw down more and more capital to meet your regular expenses. Your faith is intact, but hope seems an unrealized dream.

Whitsunday, more commonly called the Feast of Pentecost, is the festival of our Holy Mother the Church which addresses the discouragement of that in-between land perhaps better than any other. It relates the historic fulfillment of the outpouring of the Blessed Holy Spirit in the lives of the early Christians. Jesus had ascended into heaven, and had told the disciples to go into the city and wait for the fulfillment of that which had been foretold by the prophets, the coming of the Spirit upon the people of God. He had said, “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it unto you. All that the Father has in mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:13-15)

And now, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, is come into the world to guide the Ecclesia, the Church of God, into all truth. He fell upon them in power that day, and the world has never been the same. Common lives were filled with a confidence beyond what they had ever known. In many ways their situations did not change, but they were now aware of the infilling of God, and their transformed perceptions led to new outlooks, new callings, and new realities of faith and experience. They bore witness to the fact that Jesus Christ had defeated death and the grave, and had changed their lives forever. The boldness of their insistence led to persecution and radical transformation of culture, of institutions, and of lives. All of this because the Gift of the Holy Ghost had come upon them just as the prophets foretold. “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I shall be your God.” (Ezekiel 36:24-28) Because the gift of the Holy Spirit was theirs, their outlooks and their realities were transformed. The grayness of that in-between land gave way to the Technicolor certainty of the realized hope of the kingdom of God in their lives.

Have you experienced this ushering in of the Kingdom of God? Certainly it is a reality in the history of the Church, but have you known it in your own heart? Has His Spirit borne witness with your own spirit that indeed you are a child of God, and a joint heir with Jesus Christ? Has the grayness and uncertainty of life’s reality been reinterpreted and understood in that new light, that fuller truth and understanding which is the gift of God to all who believe?

On this feast of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church, I urge you to receive those gifts that God has prepared for you, and which Jesus promised were ours if we would wait for the fulfillment. By coming today to this holy place to receive the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, you have in a very real way gone into the city to await the coming of the gift. You have believed that Jesus is the Christ, the one who did what the Bible says he did, and is who the Bible says he is. You have come to this place in faith, believing in the promise. Now I urge you to cast yourself upon his grace and mercy, praying earnestly that on this day, you might know that truth which He has promised. On this day, pray earnestly to him that the faith of the Church might be your own, and that the experience of the Church my be known in your life with power, and intimacy, and transforming reality.

God may change your immediate situation. It is much more likely that your situation will stay the same, but that he will transform your mind and your outlook. The miracle, you see, may not be in the physical healing, or the changed reality. It may be in that spiritual understanding which comes from what Wesley and others have called “the heart strangely warmed.” When we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that we have been with God, and that He loves us, we are guided into that deeper truth which only comes from knowing Him, for the Spirit of God speaks to us that which the Father has delivered to the Son. Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his lord does. But I call you friends, for all things that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” Friends of Jesus, receive today that truth, that understanding, that knowledge that our Lord and our Saviour, our brother and our friend offers us through the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world. As it transformed the Empire of Rome, so will it transform our outlooks and our reality, and men and women everywhere will know the reality of the power of God’s love. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

Palm Sunday 2012

Our Lord Enters Jerusalem

Our Lord Bears the Cross

 

James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose

Palm Sunday Sermon
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 1 April 2012
Mark 11:1-11 and Mark 15:1-39

What are we to make of today’s Gospel lessons? The first is so full of hope and anticipation. The King has come into his own! As he rode into Jerusalem in fulfillment of the prophesies, the people ran to acclaim him as King David’s long awaited heir. Surely the Kingdom of God was among men, and it was just a matter of time until “justice rolled down like a mighty river.” But then there is that second reading which recounts the Passion and Death of our Lord. Pain and suffering, alienation and loss, disappointment and fear are everywhere. The contrast is absolute. I for one would rather just talk about Jesus coming into our lives today, but that is not what the Scriptures or our Holy Mother the Church call me to do this day.

A wise man has said that some of the most wonderful things which happen in our lives often occur “in the shadow of a cross.” The architecture of our Church echoes that statement. At the very apex of our beautiful east window, the mythical pelican gives life to her chicks by shedding her own blood willingly. Just below her is the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world- by himself becoming the sacrifice for our sins. On the font where so many of us were baptized is carved the cross and crown, an ever present reminder that only the person who lays down his life will receive it again. Only the one who goes to the cross with Jesus will reign with him in glory. And perhaps most poignant of all is the cruciform nature of the path we walk as we gather at the Lord’s Table to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as Chesterton says, “to eat the flesh of our God and to drink his blood.” And then we arise and walk again in the way of the cross as we go forth into the world to bear his love to everyone we meet.

The fact is that death and hardship and sin and evil are ever present realities in our world. I may by good fortune, sound investing, and skilled medical practice be able to avoid most of those things for a while, but eventually even the most protected and privileged of us run afoul of the evils of this world. Death comes to one we love at an early age. Divorce strikes in what seems like the most secure and loving relationship. Disease stalks in the food we eat and in the lifestyles we adopt, even when we try to do our best. War claims our sons and daughters in the prime of their lives, and even those who survive are never quite the same.

I would submit to you today that these realities which are all around us are the reason today’s odd combination of Gospel lessons is so very, very important. You see, we are not as those who hope based on what seems right, or on some philosophy we pray might be true. God has come among us and carried the cross. He has laid down his life willingly to demonstrate for us that he has the power to take it up again and claim the crown that is rightfully his. This is not some mere fantasy or novella of a good man’s life. The Bible names the names of eyewitnesses as if to say, “ask them if you don’t believe me.” The New Testament accounts were circulating widely during the lives of so many who were there, and the authors, guided and inspired by the Holy Spirit, invited their hearers and readers to check the facts before they believed. People are pretty much the same in every historical era. Since the fall, our world has been plagued by sin and people have lived with its consequences. We have yearned for the happy times, and for a while, at least occasionally, they come to us. But there is always that shadow of the cross, that harbinger of the place of suffering. When Jesus Christ came among us and took up the cross and died for us, he entered into our world that we might know we are not alone in the midst of our sufferings. When he died for us, he became our great high priest and our sacrifice and our king. And because of what he accomplished in the midst of his suffering, we, like him, will live forever. Through his cross, we shall gain the crown of life which is offered to all who believe in him. Because he embraced the cross, we all might wear the crown.

One of my heroes has long been the gallant Montrose. Condemned by a perjured king to fight a battle that could not be won, he was defeated by his foes and betrayed by his friends. The poet Aytoun, late professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh, translated this good man’s words into verse in “The Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.”

“There is a chamber far away
Where sleep the good and brave,
But a better place ye have named for me
Than by my father’s grave.
For truth and right, ‘gainst treason’s might,
This hand hath always striven,
And ye raise it up for a witness still
In the eye of earth and heaven.
Then nail my head on yonder tower-
Give every town a limb-
And God who made shall gather them:
I go from you to Him!"


My hero understood the nature of the cross, and the promise and reality of the crown. Jesus made it clear to all who will believe, and that includes you and me. The darkness of pain and tragedy will come to us in this life, but we are not like those who are without hope. For with St. Paul we can say, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” Pain is a reality in this world, as are death and loss and suffering and injustice. But our God is greater, and as he has come among us to bear the cross, so has he opened the way for us to reign with him in glory. May this be the reality of our lives in this world, and in the next. AMEN.

Do You Believe God's Promise?

Sermon for II Lent, Year B Revised Common Lectionary

Romans 4:9-25

Preached at St. John’s Lancaster 4 March 2012

Circumcision was very important in the Jewish community in the time of Jesus and Paul. It was, like Baptism for us, the mark of entry into the community of faith. It physically identified every Jewish boy eight days old or older as a member of Israel, the people of God. I suppose that many Jews of that day, like many Christians today, came to rely on the rite of the sacrament, instead of that which it represented and accomplished and fulfilled, as the primary indicator of their relationship with God. As long as the ceremony was done in a proper manner, they were of Israel and In God. When St. Paul, missionary Archbishop to the Gentiles, wrote to the believers in Rome in the first century, he did not seek to downplay or minimize the importance of the ceremonies of the people of God, but he worked hard and logically to demonstrate that the importance of any ceremony, might we say any sacrament, is in the true reality it proclaims rather than the outward forms of the ceremony.

Paul’s legal mind was well suited to make such an argument. God’s promises to Abraham took place before he was circumcised, indeed before he even knew what the law was. It could not have been that Abraham’s participation in the ceremony, or even his righteousness in keeping the law, were the causes of God’s promise and blessing to him, because at the time of the promise, the rite of Circumcision had not been introduced and the law had not been revealed in its fullness. Abraham was blessed by God because when God looked at his heart, he saw that Abraham was “fully convinced that God Was able to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:21).

None of this is to say that the sacrament (circumcision) or the law (obedience to God) are unimportant. They are means of instruction and grace that God has ordained. But it is to say that God looks upon our hearts in his dealings with us. He looks for people who are on the adventure of growing into that state of heart, mind, and life whereby our reality can include a willingness to see beyond the realities and limitations of this life and embrace what the writer to the Hebrews called “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). That is precisely what Abraham did when he believed the promise that he, an old man with a wife well past menopause, would be the father of many nations. He was willing to see beyond scientific probabilities and human expectations to believe that “what God had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:21)

Because of this belief, Paul continues, God “reckoned this faith unto him as righteousness” (Romans 4:22). An older translation says “imputed to him for righteousness.” You see, God proclaimed Abraham righteous not because of ceremonies and obedience, as important as those things are. He proclaimed him righteous, because of the attitude of his heart and the nature of his expectations. As F.F. Bruce from the University of Manchester wrote, “Abraham’s justification and attendant blessings were based on his faith in God; they were not earned by effort or merit on his part…but conferred on him by God’s grace” (TNTC Romans 109).

In its simplest form, to be righteous means to fulfill the claims of right. Thus when Penelope mourns for Ulysses, Homer says that she fulfills the sacred obligations of a wife. When Antigone buries her brother and incurs the wrath of the state, she embodies that higher unwritten law against barbarism. The translators of the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Old Testament into Greek, often translated the word “Righteousness” as “Mercy,” or “Kindness.” As Professor Vincent of Union Theological Seminary and so many other scholars have pointed out over the years, “Righteousness is union with God in character” (Vincent’s Word Studies in the NT iii12).

And all of this takes us back to circumcision. Blessed Paul was writing to Romans, Gentiles who had not been circumcised. He wrote with the good news that their ability to participate in the blessings of God, their ability to be “unified with God in character,” was based not on their participation in the rites and ceremonies of Judaism, or in the moral uprightness of their past life, but in their decision to “believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Romans 4:24-25).

Have you made that decision today? Are you willing to consider those things, or that thing in your own life which seems insurmountable? Are you willing to believe that God will help you to forgive that ex-spouse or that parent who hurt you so badly so many years ago? Are you willing to believe that God will give you strength , presence of mind, and persistence to take something as persistent as clinical depression or alcoholism to God on a daily basis and work a program of recovery and healing? Are you willing to believe that God will help you to push away from the buffet table or the internet console which has been the source of so many failures and so much sin in your life. Are you willing believe that God will give you the strength to walk away from a relationship or lifestyle choice which the Bible says is contrary to God’s will for his sons and daughters?  Are you willing to believe that God will give you the perseverence and strength to make restitution to that person you have wronged, and to fulfill those responsibilities you have failed to live up to?   Are you willing to believe that God is able to do what he has promised?

If you are willing to take that step today, God will meet you just as he met Abraham. He will impute to you union with his own character and give you a strength beyond what you have ever known. It will be a struggle, a war in fact. Satan will marshal all of the forces of hell to block your success. But our God is greater than Satan. And he has sent the Blessed Holy Spirit to accomplish in our lives that victory which Christ Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

If you have been living your life in a sort of low grade discouragement which seeks to serve Christ but seems to fail with disturbing regularity, I invite you to come to him in faith today. If you have been relying on the ceremony of baptism or communion, or on church attendance or being a good person to get you into heaven, but have never been quite sure that you will make it, I invite you to come to him in faith today. The Bible says with absolute clarity that if you believe on him who raised up Jesus from the dead, if you are willing to commit yourself to the life changing conviction that God is able and willing to do what he has promised, the very character of God will be imputed to you and your life will be changed forever.

Now Father, in this holy season of Lent, help us to believe as Abraham believed, that you are able to keep your promises to transform us and give us strength to fight the temptations we face every day. Make us victorious Lord. Assure us of your presence with us every day. And help us to know in our hearts that we will live with you forever. Through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and forever. AMEN.

Remembering Milt Senior

On Saturday, we buried Milton Taylor Senior, 86, a faithful Christian and generous philanthropist.  He will be well remembered and deeply missed by all of us at St. John's and here in Lancaster.  With his family's permission, I post my homily on the day.  May God receive him into the arms of his mercy and comfort those he has left behind.

Milt Taylor Funeral

I first came to Lancaster in the mid 1970’s to visit my then girlfriend and now wife. It was snowing heavily, and as we came into town on route 33, My heart was thrilled to see a huge American flag flying at the local Chevrolet dealership. In those days, very few people flew the flag, but Milt Taylor did. Later, when I moved to Lancaster, I learned more about this man who flew the flag when so few others did. I learned about how he supported local charities and projects for the betterment of our community. As a Scout leader and later as a priest, I saw his extensive charity in action, and the people I served benefited directly from his generosity, which was always accompanied by instructions that he didn’t need his name all over everything. And Milt Taylor did another thing or two that I always respected immensely. He was a hard driving, “Type A” man of business, and at the end of the day he provided employment for a lot of my neighbors; and in one of the toughest and most competitive businesses around, He and his sons and their employees always made sure that I was treated fairly and honestly, even before I was a priest.

But it would be wrong to stand here and paint my friend Milt Taylor Senior as some sort of a plaster saint. He was tenaciously “type A”, and my guess is that he like most of us could be exasperating and frustrating to live with or work with on occasion, perhaps even more so from time to time. Milt was a human being, subject to the tempers and temptations that all of us know throughout our lives.

But I saw another side of Milt Taylor, one that few other people were privileged to see, because I was the one who served him Communion when he was here in Lancaster. I looked into his eyes and saw him as he came face to face with the living God on Wednesdays, just about two thirds of the way back on the inside aisle on this pulpit side of the church. You can tell a lot about a man when you serve him Holy Communion on a regular basis. His demeanor, the depth of his soulfulness, the temper of his eyes fill volumes about his view of the world and perception of his relationship to God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son, and in the Power of the Holy Spirit. And I tell you today that Milton John Taylor had a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ. It informed who he was and what he did. He was no more perfect than you or I, but he acknowledged Jesus Christ and accepted him as Saviour and Lord. His personality, so aptly suited for the highly competitive business which was his life, was informed and moulded to a great degree by his faith. Where he succeeded in life, he gave God the glory and gave back to his community, and when he stumbled or fell, he sought the forgiveness and grace of his Lord.

And that is why on this day, as we gather to remember the life of Milt Senior and commend his soul to God, we can rest in the words of Jesus, who said, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” You see, Isaiah knew whereof he spoke when he said, “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.” You see, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble…The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Indeed, “The tabernacle of God is with men.” For Milton John Taylor “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” And Jesus Christ, “he that sat upon the throne” says, “Behold, I make all things new…It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.”

Thank you Father, for receiving your son Milton into the arms of your mercy, for guiding him throughout life, for forgiving him, and for offering that same forgiveness to us all. Now send your Blessed Holy Spirit upon all those who mourn his passing. Grant unto them consolation and an abiding sense of your presence, and accomplish in all who seek to know you the saving and transforming work of God, through your Son Jesus Christ our Saviour and Lord, in whose Name we pray. AMEN.

More Wisdom from Margaret

Three year old Margaret's catechesis at the hands of her mother is coming along very well. Like her Mother and Uncle Tristan, she is growing up with the solemn understanding that the great men and women of the past were near associates of her family. My children really did believe for a time that Scipio Africanus, Cincinnatus, Horatius, Our Lady, and St. Paul were not that far removed from their grandparents in time and space, and that most of them had probably helped Little Grandpa and Uncle Jake defeat the combined armies and navies of Imperial Japan. And so it is really no surprize that with her mother's help, she is developing a view of the immanence of our Lord's humanity which is most refreshing. Here are her recent comments on what Christmas will be like in "The California."

"...and then we will have a party and have cake and ice cream and we will go to the playground and Jesus will go down the slide with me at the playground and we will have decorations and go to church and have a party and it will be fun and we will have presents for Jesus for his birthday and it will be in December and Mama and Papa will be there and I will play with Jesus on the playground..."

As daughter Ashley wrote, "A clearer version of heaven I have never heard."

Personal Reflections to those I love

Today, we experienced the first real snow of the year. The horses were skittish as I led them to pasture in the semi-darkness of a mid-December day. The terriers literally tumbled down the front steps in wild anticipation of what they might find. Cleo, the barn cat, observed their idiocy with an icy glare from her safe perch. Real winter is arguably my favorite time of the year. As it limits my activities, it gives me more time for real contemplation of what is truly important. Some wag once said that with age comes wisdom. I don’t know about that, but with it certainly comes stiffer knees and a changed outlook. Most of the cause’s célèbre which occupied my energy and activity in earlier days have been abandoned or repudiated by most of the people I know, and certainly by society at large. But I continue to mull them over in my mind, and am convinced that a goodly portion of them, some with minor modifications, are as true as ever. The Old Republic has passed, and the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin are as unknown as those of Scipio, Cicero, and Tacitus. The stately commitment of the Old Empire to responsibility and order is reinterpreted as nothing but greed and oppression by a younger generation of scholars and students, if they know of it at all. Even those Churches that God used to form my spiritual habit and outlook have developed into things that Fr. Maier and the Venerable Bede would not recognize.

In spite of the painful realization that the values which have shaped my life are at best repudiated and at worst forgotten, I remain an optimist for the most part. I remember as an undergraduate, and later as a graduate student, studying in detail the fall of Roman Britain. It was a slow and gradual passing from that day in the Year of Our Lord 486 when the Emperor wrote that there were no troops available, and that “the cantons must take steps to defend themselves.” Within a few years, the great villas were no more. People who could not or would not return to Italy clustered in the walled towns, or were slowly driven back into the mountains of the west. These were the days of Arthur and Gildas and Patrick, days of great deeds in desperate times. And then one day it became evident that the children no longer spoke Latin, and that the stonecutters had lost their art, and the flowing lines of Latin verse had been largely replaced by the throbbing and guttural chant of the Saxon warrior. But in spite of it all, the faith survived, and many of the old manuscripts were preserved, and stories were told of great days and great men. Lives and generations passed, but the ideas were passed down faithfully from Father to Son, from Mother to daughter, from Abbot to Monk, from Bishop to Priest, and from Priest to People. And then, many years later, by God’s good grace, there was a Renaissance of piety and learning. The barbarian was converted, civilized, and gentled. The ideas bore fruit, and God rebuilt that which had been lost through the excess of human sinfulness. Then, He was as always faithful to those who were called by his Name, those who followed Him in faith and in obedience.

And so, at the beginning of 2010, I remain an optimist, and I pledge myself to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love. I pledge to pass on those ideas and things which are good and true and beautiful. I pledge to study and pray, to teach and preach, to faithfully administer the sacraments, and to maintain the values I have received from apostles and prophets, from liberators and defenders, from my fathers physical and spiritual. I will “work with my hands and study to be quiet,” that I might be a godly example among those to whom I am called. I will gently resist that which is contrary to God’s Word written, and love all those for whom Christ died. And that will, I think, be enough for one year.

May God bless us all in this coming New Year. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN+

To Christ, The True King,

Bill+