Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Sexagesima) year C
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
Today’s propers are obviously about conversion. I find it singularly instructive that all of the objects of today’s Scripture lessons are people who had been initiated into the people of God by appropriate sacramental observances carried out at the appropriate times of their lives. Isaiah was a good and observant Jew. Certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day and participated regularly in the Passover and the other feasts of God’s people. At Corinth, Paul was addressing Christians who had been baptized and were presumably regular in their attendance upon the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Luke spoke of Jesus coming to Peter, James, and John, all good and observant Jews, like Isaiah. Even King David in today’s Psalm speaks of experiential meetings with God subsequent to his Circumcision as a child.
So, what do today’s lessons say about the sacraments of the Church? Are they of no use? Are they merely forms that we go through in order to mark the turning points of our lives in the hope that there is a God who cares for us? Heaven forbid and perish such thoughts from our minds! The sacramental ceremonies of Circumcision and Passover, which are fulfilled prophetically in the Christian Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, are means of imputed grace instituted of God and commanded us as outward signs of that inward and spiritual grace given us by a loving heavenly father. When you receive a sacrament, it is as if God plunges a syringe filled with grace into your arm, and you are given a bracing dose of that spiritually enabling favor which only comes from Him who has made you and named you as His own. If you receive it well, in obedience and with love towards God and man, your soul is refreshed and strengthened. If however you receive it poorly, without thought or consideration and with no intention of living a well examined and obedient Christian life, you receive the life giving sacrament to your damnation. So saith the Apostle.
To us Christians, Baptism and Holy Communion are life giving sureties of our membership in Christ, and of God’s favour usward. And so what is this “conversion” demanded of and experienced by the players in today’s Scripture lessons? It is in short a turning, a going the other way, a transformation so radical that we can never again be the same. I find it interesting that those whose transformations are chronicled in the lessons all came face to face with the living God in a way which revealed His glory and underlined their own inadequacy. Isaiah’s vision of the very throne of God, David’s realization of God’s mighty deliverance, Paul’s recounting of the power of the eyewitness accounts to the resurrection of the Christ, and the Apostles’ personal experience of what they knew to be an absolutely inexplicable miracle- all of these events led to an humble acknowledgement of the individual’s need for God in the immediate present.
There is a pattern here which is replicated so many times in the Bible:
1. God reveals himself to a human being.
2. That human being recognized that he, or she, has come into the presence of God.
3. The mystery of God’s holiness overwhelms the vision’s or experience’s recipient and leads to an immediate acknowledgement of personal human insufficiency, or what we generally name humility.
4. The recipient gains an immediately increased appreciation of their need to be closer to God, of His overall plan for human history, and of their own place in it.
5. The recipient is changed forever, as are their habits and their passions, and they come to see themselves as the very ministers of God on Earth.
And now we come to the question. Everyone here has been baptized. Everyone here is at least moderately regular in attendance upon the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. But, have you come face to face with the living God? Have you met Him in a way which is unmistakable and life altering? Granted, not everyone is called to be an Isaiah or a Peter, but there is ample evidence in the Bible, and in the history of our Holy Mother the Church that God calls all who will receive Him to a life of continual conversion, transformation, and setting apart for His particular use. It should be the desire of us all to seek such an experience of the living God that the comfort which leads to complacency shall never be known among us who bear the sign of the cross. The evidence of the Scriptures tells us that God chooses the time and place and manner of his appearance to each of us. It also teaches us that like Hannah, who went every year before the shrine of God to seek His face, we are called to yearn for this transforming experience, this overwhelming revelation of His glory.
And so this day, as you come faithfully to receive that sacrament which gives us strength and assurance that we are God’s own, I bid you to pray that the heavens might be opened, and that God would grant you such an experience as Isaiah had that day; an experience which will change your life forever and send you forth to do the work of the kingdom with a fervor and an intensity that you have not known. Pray that he will allow you to see your own needs, your own sins, and that He will forgive you, wash your conscience, and give you the grace to walk in obedience to His commands. Pray that he will imbue you with a sense of gratitude which will make humility and godly sobriety the characteristics of your life. Pray that he will grant you a glimpse of His purpose being fulfilled in human history, in the events all around us, and that He would help you to see your purpose and mission in the same. Today, as you come in faithfulness to receive the blessed sacrament which is His gift to all Christians, God calls you to be so much more. Seek Him now, while he may be found, and claim the inheritance and the mission prepared for you before the foundations of the world were laid. AMEN.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Sermon preached at St. John's IV Epiphany
Sermon: Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, 2010
Luke 4 : 21-30
Jean Jacques Rosseau was no friend of the church. As a young man, he was disgusted by the actions of some members of the clergy incumbent in cures around his family estates. By his account, they cast aside their vows of poverty and chastity and invoked the ancient feudal rite of “prima nocte,” by which the Lord of a manor was entitled to any woman who lived on his lands on her honeymoon night. These early memories helped to form his famed cynicism toward the Christian Religion. In his comments on the idea that man is made in the image of God, he is reputed to have said that “men love God so much that they regularly insist on remaking him in their own image.” In short, that is a major theme of today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had returned to his home synagogue. With good reason, many of the people there were excited and looked expectantly forward to what the hometown rabbi might say or do. His words were not what they had hoped to hear. He castigated them bluntly, and indicated that he would not do great miracles there. Many in the crowd were outraged, and sought to do him harm. I would suggest to you today that Jesus was addressing the same human propensity that day in Nazareth that Rosseau would address so many hundreds of years later. The people in Nazareth were more than willing to acknowledge God, as long as he turned out to be the god they wished to acknowledge. Like those early enlightenment French clerics who so disgusted young Rosseau, they reserved the right to design their own god, according to their own wants. It is so easy for us to do the same thing today. I am always ready to quote God and the Bible when I perceive them to support my particular political or personal ideal. Let me give you an example. The Bible says, and we believe the Bible to be the word of God written, that we are to respect all human life. As a matter of fact, it says clearly that if we even think ill of our neighbors and call them fools, much less kill them, we are in danger of hell fire. I am glad to run out all of the verses about the sanctity of life in my opposition to abortion, but when someone points out to me that these same verses have something to say about the relatively indiscriminate use of high explosive munitions in the global war on terror, or that they also would seem to apply to the debate over the death penalty in Ohio, I am not so willing to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. You see, I am much more ready to apply the Scriptures logically to what I perceive to be shortcomings in others, than I am to apply them to what they perceive to be shortcomings in me. In effect, I redefine who God is to satisfy my own druthers. And generally speaking in modern American political debate, folks on the other side of any given issue do the same. But we have all missed the point. God says that all life is sacred because all people are created in the Image of the one true and living God. There may be a time in this sinful world when a soldier or a government is forced to take life in war, and some of that life may be collateral damage, or innocent life. There may be times when the state must use the death penalty as a punishment or deterrent in this fallen world. And there may be a time in this fallen world when parents and their medical team must choose between the life of a child and the life of a mother. But even in this fallen world, where choices are sometimes between the lesser of evils rather than between good and bad, God’s clear admonition is that we respect every human life. True Christianity does not give us the option of defining his will in any other way.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever prayed for something good and true with all of your heart, only to have your heart’s desire crushed? Perhaps you prayed for the healing of a loved one, and they died. Or perhaps you prayed for a job that you did not get. The possibilities of such negative answers to prayer are endless. Did you become angry and walk away from God, saying to yourself, “If there is a god and he would allow that, he is no god of mine!” By imagining your situation to be the most important thing in the world, and by placing yourself at the center of the universe, you have just refused to accept God’s self revelation, and demanded a God of your own making. The Israelites did such a thing in the wilderness when Moses did not immediately come down from the mountain, and it led to a total breakdown of lawful moral authority in the camp, and ultimately to the deaths of thousands.
And this brings us back to the example of today’s Gospel. People were glad to have Jesus back home, if he would do the kinds of miracles he did elsewhere in Israel. But they were unwilling to acknowledge him as anything but the carpenter’s boy. That he would see himself as the fulfillment of the prophesies was unthinkable to them. They were willing to accept him on their own terms, but not on his. It is not uncommon for us to do so. It is a human propensity. We demand that God fit within our box, and we are willing to accept only those parts of his self-revelation which fit with our presuppositions. The problem is that when we do this, we break the first two commandments as we create a false god, one that has the ability to make us feel good for a little while, but one which effectively separates and isolates us from the true God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins and to prove the power of his love by taking up his life again on the third day; the one who will come to be our judge, and our vindicator.
It is so easy to design our own God to meet our own perceived needs. But to do so is to make ourselves into false gods. It is to imagine that we stand at the very center of the universe, that we are the single most significant being in the entire cosmos. We have all done it from time to time, regardless of whether we are on the right or the left, whether we are formally educated or educated in the school of hard knocks, and whatever groups we may identify ourselves as being a part of, or not being a part of. You see, whatever else he may have been, Rosseau was a keen judge of human nature.
And now the question remains: to what God do I give my allegiance today? Is it to a god of my own making, one who justifies my attitudes, positions, and actions? Or is it to the living and true God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to whose nature the Holy Bible, inspired and preserved by the agency of the Holy Ghost, bears witness? For us Christians, God calls us to accept and acknowledge his character, his love, and his person even if it does not make sense to us, and even if we wish it were different. He allows us to ask questions, and I dare say even encourages us to the same, but at the end of the day, the people of God are those who submit to him as he is, casting ourselves on his mercy and receiving his grace. In just a few moments, we will say together the Nicene Creed, the great Eucharistic confession of the Church. In it we find the true Scriptural definition of who God is, and of what his character means for each of us. Let it never be said that we crossed our fingers as we affirmed our faith. Rather let it be said that we came to the foot of the cross, with our questions and our issues, but that at the end of the struggle, we accepted by faith the living and true God, who is our judge and our saviour, our brother and our friend. AMEN!
Luke 4 : 21-30
Jean Jacques Rosseau was no friend of the church. As a young man, he was disgusted by the actions of some members of the clergy incumbent in cures around his family estates. By his account, they cast aside their vows of poverty and chastity and invoked the ancient feudal rite of “prima nocte,” by which the Lord of a manor was entitled to any woman who lived on his lands on her honeymoon night. These early memories helped to form his famed cynicism toward the Christian Religion. In his comments on the idea that man is made in the image of God, he is reputed to have said that “men love God so much that they regularly insist on remaking him in their own image.” In short, that is a major theme of today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had returned to his home synagogue. With good reason, many of the people there were excited and looked expectantly forward to what the hometown rabbi might say or do. His words were not what they had hoped to hear. He castigated them bluntly, and indicated that he would not do great miracles there. Many in the crowd were outraged, and sought to do him harm. I would suggest to you today that Jesus was addressing the same human propensity that day in Nazareth that Rosseau would address so many hundreds of years later. The people in Nazareth were more than willing to acknowledge God, as long as he turned out to be the god they wished to acknowledge. Like those early enlightenment French clerics who so disgusted young Rosseau, they reserved the right to design their own god, according to their own wants. It is so easy for us to do the same thing today. I am always ready to quote God and the Bible when I perceive them to support my particular political or personal ideal. Let me give you an example. The Bible says, and we believe the Bible to be the word of God written, that we are to respect all human life. As a matter of fact, it says clearly that if we even think ill of our neighbors and call them fools, much less kill them, we are in danger of hell fire. I am glad to run out all of the verses about the sanctity of life in my opposition to abortion, but when someone points out to me that these same verses have something to say about the relatively indiscriminate use of high explosive munitions in the global war on terror, or that they also would seem to apply to the debate over the death penalty in Ohio, I am not so willing to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. You see, I am much more ready to apply the Scriptures logically to what I perceive to be shortcomings in others, than I am to apply them to what they perceive to be shortcomings in me. In effect, I redefine who God is to satisfy my own druthers. And generally speaking in modern American political debate, folks on the other side of any given issue do the same. But we have all missed the point. God says that all life is sacred because all people are created in the Image of the one true and living God. There may be a time in this sinful world when a soldier or a government is forced to take life in war, and some of that life may be collateral damage, or innocent life. There may be times when the state must use the death penalty as a punishment or deterrent in this fallen world. And there may be a time in this fallen world when parents and their medical team must choose between the life of a child and the life of a mother. But even in this fallen world, where choices are sometimes between the lesser of evils rather than between good and bad, God’s clear admonition is that we respect every human life. True Christianity does not give us the option of defining his will in any other way.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever prayed for something good and true with all of your heart, only to have your heart’s desire crushed? Perhaps you prayed for the healing of a loved one, and they died. Or perhaps you prayed for a job that you did not get. The possibilities of such negative answers to prayer are endless. Did you become angry and walk away from God, saying to yourself, “If there is a god and he would allow that, he is no god of mine!” By imagining your situation to be the most important thing in the world, and by placing yourself at the center of the universe, you have just refused to accept God’s self revelation, and demanded a God of your own making. The Israelites did such a thing in the wilderness when Moses did not immediately come down from the mountain, and it led to a total breakdown of lawful moral authority in the camp, and ultimately to the deaths of thousands.
And this brings us back to the example of today’s Gospel. People were glad to have Jesus back home, if he would do the kinds of miracles he did elsewhere in Israel. But they were unwilling to acknowledge him as anything but the carpenter’s boy. That he would see himself as the fulfillment of the prophesies was unthinkable to them. They were willing to accept him on their own terms, but not on his. It is not uncommon for us to do so. It is a human propensity. We demand that God fit within our box, and we are willing to accept only those parts of his self-revelation which fit with our presuppositions. The problem is that when we do this, we break the first two commandments as we create a false god, one that has the ability to make us feel good for a little while, but one which effectively separates and isolates us from the true God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins and to prove the power of his love by taking up his life again on the third day; the one who will come to be our judge, and our vindicator.
It is so easy to design our own God to meet our own perceived needs. But to do so is to make ourselves into false gods. It is to imagine that we stand at the very center of the universe, that we are the single most significant being in the entire cosmos. We have all done it from time to time, regardless of whether we are on the right or the left, whether we are formally educated or educated in the school of hard knocks, and whatever groups we may identify ourselves as being a part of, or not being a part of. You see, whatever else he may have been, Rosseau was a keen judge of human nature.
And now the question remains: to what God do I give my allegiance today? Is it to a god of my own making, one who justifies my attitudes, positions, and actions? Or is it to the living and true God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to whose nature the Holy Bible, inspired and preserved by the agency of the Holy Ghost, bears witness? For us Christians, God calls us to accept and acknowledge his character, his love, and his person even if it does not make sense to us, and even if we wish it were different. He allows us to ask questions, and I dare say even encourages us to the same, but at the end of the day, the people of God are those who submit to him as he is, casting ourselves on his mercy and receiving his grace. In just a few moments, we will say together the Nicene Creed, the great Eucharistic confession of the Church. In it we find the true Scriptural definition of who God is, and of what his character means for each of us. Let it never be said that we crossed our fingers as we affirmed our faith. Rather let it be said that we came to the foot of the cross, with our questions and our issues, but that at the end of the struggle, we accepted by faith the living and true God, who is our judge and our saviour, our brother and our friend. AMEN!
Monday, January 18, 2010
Preached at the Installation of My Friend
Installation of the Rev’d Mr. David Halt as Rector of St.Matthew’s Church, Springfield
Joshua 1:7-9
Psalm 43
Romans 12:1-18
John 15:9-16
The Scripture Lessons appointed for today are most instructive, and they are echoed and affirmed by Saints throughout the ages. Be humble. Love one another. Be faithful and obedient to the Word of God written. Acknowledge and appreciate and enable one another’s gifts. Stand with courage and steadfastness for that which is right, whatever the cost may be; and together you will model for this city and this diocese the very nature of God.
Dave, we go back a long way. I remember taking our hummer deep into the woods at Camp Grayling to find a quiet place to read Morning Prayer, and running the ridge line at the east end of Camp Atterbury to the old settlers graveyard to do the same. I remember when we broke away from the convoy on the way to Fort Knox so that you could meet Bishop Thompson. He stood us up, but treated us to a wonderful meal at his club in downtown Cincinnati. I think it was on that trip that we had the tire blow out somewhere around Louisville. We were young then, and you were Methodist, and I used to be. We both loved God and our families. Our hearts burned with a desire to serve him and the Republic, and we shared so many things, tears and joys and fine and gentlemanly things, and dreams of what the future held.
Now I am on the downhill side of my active life as a Priest of our Lord, and you, you are at a grand new beginning. The people to whom God has called you come to this place faithfully every week after they have toiled in the workplace and sought to build their families and relationships in times which are often so very, very difficult. Honour them, and the vast majority of them will honour you virtually all of the time. After all, you are God’s gift to each other. Forget most of what you learned in school about being a good pastor. Go back and re-read Gregory’s Pastoral Care, and Herbert’s Country Parson, and Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, and throw in a bit of Bishop Grafton for Good measure. Don’t forget Archbishop Ramsay’s Christian Priest Today, and remember the godly examples of Mr. Harding and Father Tim. Buy a little farm and mabey even burial plots, and write your name in the soil of this place. Become one with this people. Share their dreams and visions. Baptize their children and bury their honoured dead. Weep with them and laugh with them. Rejoice with them when their children win the state championship, and be by their side when those same children go off to war, or college, or to a new love. Serve them faithfully in Word and Sacrament, and guide them in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith; for that is your primary task here. Programs are fine, and sometimes are even helpful, but your primary purpose is to preside in Word and Sacrament, that the people of God at this place might come to know themselves, and God and each other, with an ever deepening intimacy…an intimacy which ravishes their souls and leads them to that peace which passes all understanding. It will never do for you to be a professional priest or sacramentarian. You must be one with this people, “wallowing in the midst of their daily affairs.”.. loving them and thereby proving your amateur status, remembering that amo, amare- is the latin root for love, which ought to motivate everything you do here. Bind yourself to them with an holy co-dependence, and thus demonstrate to this entire county the true nature of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. As we cannot imagine the Father without the Son and the Spirit; or the Son without the Father and the Spirit; or the Spirit without the Father and the Son—So may the people of saint Matthew’s be bound so closely in love that none of you can imagine what your church would be like if any one of you were absent.
This will not be an easy task. There will be times when your own humanity and that of others here will show its ugly possibilities, and you will think the worst of each other’s motives. You will disagree with vigor over agendas and programs and prerogatives. You will release arrows you wish could be recalled, and perhaps for a time even think their release fully justified. And this is where the admonition of today’s Scriptures becomes so important. Always conduct yourself with humility, preferring others before yourself. Be willing to listen, and covenant with your people to hear one another. Teach them that the Word of God written is the rule and guide of our faith, that it contains all things necessary to salvation, and that no Christian man ought to be required to do or believe anything that is not clearly taught therein; and that we ought to submit to the clear teachings of the Bible, even when we do not agree with them. Questions are good things, but at the end of the day, obedience must be our goal. Such obedience grows not out of coercion or slavish worship of laws or precepts, but out of an absolute confidence in the character of Him who loves us, and who gave himself for us. Because he has always been so constant in seeking our best, we can follow with confidence where He leads the way, even when we do not understand His grand strategy.
Dave, my friend, you will make many mistakes, as will every member of your vestry, and of every committee, and as do all of us here. There will be those who will hold onto the mistakes of others with a seemingly eternal memory. But if your life is holy; If you live according to the ways of God taught in the Bible; if your attitudes and demeanour give evidence that the love of God is spread abroad in your life; if you are a man of good will; the people here will gain such confidence in your character that they will work with you in spite of your shortcomings. And if you seek to see that same holiness and evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, your love and acceptance and understanding will be mutual- an empirical evidence of the efficacy of Holy Baptism in the lives of all here.
And so in closing, I would say to you, my friend, and to all here:” Be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” AMEN and AMEN
Joshua 1:7-9
Psalm 43
Romans 12:1-18
John 15:9-16
The Scripture Lessons appointed for today are most instructive, and they are echoed and affirmed by Saints throughout the ages. Be humble. Love one another. Be faithful and obedient to the Word of God written. Acknowledge and appreciate and enable one another’s gifts. Stand with courage and steadfastness for that which is right, whatever the cost may be; and together you will model for this city and this diocese the very nature of God.
Dave, we go back a long way. I remember taking our hummer deep into the woods at Camp Grayling to find a quiet place to read Morning Prayer, and running the ridge line at the east end of Camp Atterbury to the old settlers graveyard to do the same. I remember when we broke away from the convoy on the way to Fort Knox so that you could meet Bishop Thompson. He stood us up, but treated us to a wonderful meal at his club in downtown Cincinnati. I think it was on that trip that we had the tire blow out somewhere around Louisville. We were young then, and you were Methodist, and I used to be. We both loved God and our families. Our hearts burned with a desire to serve him and the Republic, and we shared so many things, tears and joys and fine and gentlemanly things, and dreams of what the future held.
Now I am on the downhill side of my active life as a Priest of our Lord, and you, you are at a grand new beginning. The people to whom God has called you come to this place faithfully every week after they have toiled in the workplace and sought to build their families and relationships in times which are often so very, very difficult. Honour them, and the vast majority of them will honour you virtually all of the time. After all, you are God’s gift to each other. Forget most of what you learned in school about being a good pastor. Go back and re-read Gregory’s Pastoral Care, and Herbert’s Country Parson, and Baxter’s Reformed Pastor, and throw in a bit of Bishop Grafton for Good measure. Don’t forget Archbishop Ramsay’s Christian Priest Today, and remember the godly examples of Mr. Harding and Father Tim. Buy a little farm and mabey even burial plots, and write your name in the soil of this place. Become one with this people. Share their dreams and visions. Baptize their children and bury their honoured dead. Weep with them and laugh with them. Rejoice with them when their children win the state championship, and be by their side when those same children go off to war, or college, or to a new love. Serve them faithfully in Word and Sacrament, and guide them in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith; for that is your primary task here. Programs are fine, and sometimes are even helpful, but your primary purpose is to preside in Word and Sacrament, that the people of God at this place might come to know themselves, and God and each other, with an ever deepening intimacy…an intimacy which ravishes their souls and leads them to that peace which passes all understanding. It will never do for you to be a professional priest or sacramentarian. You must be one with this people, “wallowing in the midst of their daily affairs.”.. loving them and thereby proving your amateur status, remembering that amo, amare- is the latin root for love, which ought to motivate everything you do here. Bind yourself to them with an holy co-dependence, and thus demonstrate to this entire county the true nature of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. As we cannot imagine the Father without the Son and the Spirit; or the Son without the Father and the Spirit; or the Spirit without the Father and the Son—So may the people of saint Matthew’s be bound so closely in love that none of you can imagine what your church would be like if any one of you were absent.
This will not be an easy task. There will be times when your own humanity and that of others here will show its ugly possibilities, and you will think the worst of each other’s motives. You will disagree with vigor over agendas and programs and prerogatives. You will release arrows you wish could be recalled, and perhaps for a time even think their release fully justified. And this is where the admonition of today’s Scriptures becomes so important. Always conduct yourself with humility, preferring others before yourself. Be willing to listen, and covenant with your people to hear one another. Teach them that the Word of God written is the rule and guide of our faith, that it contains all things necessary to salvation, and that no Christian man ought to be required to do or believe anything that is not clearly taught therein; and that we ought to submit to the clear teachings of the Bible, even when we do not agree with them. Questions are good things, but at the end of the day, obedience must be our goal. Such obedience grows not out of coercion or slavish worship of laws or precepts, but out of an absolute confidence in the character of Him who loves us, and who gave himself for us. Because he has always been so constant in seeking our best, we can follow with confidence where He leads the way, even when we do not understand His grand strategy.
Dave, my friend, you will make many mistakes, as will every member of your vestry, and of every committee, and as do all of us here. There will be those who will hold onto the mistakes of others with a seemingly eternal memory. But if your life is holy; If you live according to the ways of God taught in the Bible; if your attitudes and demeanour give evidence that the love of God is spread abroad in your life; if you are a man of good will; the people here will gain such confidence in your character that they will work with you in spite of your shortcomings. And if you seek to see that same holiness and evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, your love and acceptance and understanding will be mutual- an empirical evidence of the efficacy of Holy Baptism in the lives of all here.
And so in closing, I would say to you, my friend, and to all here:” Be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” AMEN and AMEN
Thursday, December 10, 2009
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+
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+
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