Margaret Makes The Newspaper!

While Rebecca and I were in "The California," we went with Ashley and the girls to visit the old Fransciscan coastal mission in Oceanside for the annual Ladybug Release in the Rose Garden.  A Photographer from the local paper, "The North County Times," took this picture and it ran on last Sunday's local happenings page.  Ashley and Matthew do a wonderful job of making the children aware of the heritage of their faith, and teaching them that every event of every day is a part of their Christian walk and witness.  We are blessed that they are such thoughtful and loving Christian parents.

"Brother Chris Best hands out ladybugs to Margaret Canter, 3, and her mother, Ashley Canter, from Carlsbad, in the rose garden of the Old Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside on Saturday. The ladybugs were blessed and released as part of the Founders Day celebration, marking the mission's 214th year. DEB HELLMAN | dhellman@nctimes.com"

Rector's Summer Book Picks- 2012

Rector’s Rambling- July 2012

Today it was 98 degrees Fahrenheit in Lancaster, and the humidity was stifling. It reminded me of why summer is my least favorite time of the year. But the garden is growing wonderfully, as long as it is watered heavily every day. Even the heat has its compensations in fresh vegetables and long lazy evenings. With the coming of summer, I thought it might be a good time to recommend a few books for summer perusal, and here they are:
Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall. IVP Academic,1998. “…Hall points out, the fathers hear music in Scripture where we remain tone-deaf…like true masters they challenge and correct our modern assumptions as they invite us to tune our ears to hear the divine melodies.”
Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness ed. Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams. Oxford University Press, 2001. “The writings of the early fathers of Anglicanism have been supplemented over nearly five centuries by the thoughts of each succeeding generation. Love’s Redeeming Work brings together the central writers from each era into an outstanding collection that will introduce today’s readers to this incredibly rich and varied heritage.”
Celebrating the Saints: Daily Spiritual Readings to Accompany the Calendars of The Church of England, The Church of Ireland, The Scottish Episcopal Church, and The Church in Wales edited and compiled by Robert Atwell. SCM Press, 1998, 2004. “This selection of readings of ancient, medieval, and reformed (and occasionally, contemporary) spirituality reflects the author’s scholarly background and many years of prayerful reflection on the Christian tradition.”
The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth ed. R.A. Torrey, et. al. Baker Books: reprint 2008 of the 1917 edition. “In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday School superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world.”
The Divine Hours: A Manuel for Prayer by Phyllis Tickle. Doubleday, 2000. “…a contemporary Book of Hours to guide Christians gently yet authoritatively through the daily offices.”
Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World by HRH The Prince of Wales. Harper, 2010. “Harmony exposes how the patterns of the natural world, which for centuries were woven into the fabric of human life, have been lost in the modern age. That loss has come with a price…”
The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton. Ignatius, 1993 reprint of the 1928 illustrated edition. “…it is a timeless allegory about the ongoing battle between Christianity and the forces of nihilistic heathenism.”
England’s Cathedrals in Watercolour by Peter Hume. Scala Publishers, 1999. “Hume’s paintings reveal the genius of design, quality and craftsmanship of buildings that were originally built, not as works of art but as an homage to the glory of God.”
The Literary Gardener by Walter Chandoha. Willow Creek Press, 1997. “ …a loving marriage of the written word with beautiful vignettes of flowers, fruits, vegetables, and grasses- that captures the nurturing quality in nature that has inspired poets and writers and just plain folks for hundreds of years.”
Summer of ‘49 by David Halberstam. Perennial Classics, 2002. “…classic chronicle of baseball’s most magnificent season, as seen through the battle royale between Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees and Ted William’s Red Sox for the heart of a nation.”
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
 by Laura Hillenbrand. Random House, 2001. “The true story of how three men and a great racehorse captivated the world.”

I hope that the dog days of summer might afford us all an opportunity to consider challenging new ideas and comforting old ones, all within the framework of a story told well.

Faithfully,

Bill+

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.

Building Bridges Through Honest Scholarship, Well Reasoned Faith, and Love

The Rt. Rev'd Michael Nazir-Ali

Today, twelve of us from St. John's travelled to Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania to hear Bishop Nazir-Ali speak about who Jesus is.  As always, I was deeply impressed by the humility and scholarship of this man of God.  His willingness to seriously consider the beliefs of others very different from himself as he develops and shares his own faith always impresses me, and calls me to learn from others.  As he reviewed the beliefs of devout and serious scholars from Islamic, Hindu, and secularist traditions about our Lord, I could not but remember the admonition in Proverbs 27:17 that "Iron sharpeneth iron."  His review of the scholarly debate between the Cappodocian Fathers and early Islamic scholars was balanced, respectful, and profound, and at the end of the day he called us all to reaffirm the creedal faith of our Holy Mother the Church that God is One: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 

I was particularly moved by his admonition that we all be willing to move from our traditional methodologies of living the Christian Faith into a new era wherein we would allow the light of Christ to shine forth through our lives by knowing when to give thanks for light in the professions of others, even when that light is incomplete or misunderstood.  He modeled for us a methodology of true dialogue.  In an age in which dialogue is seen by so many as merely an exchange of ideas, he defined dialogue is its historic sense as careful scholarly debate designed to find truth- the truth of God for all people.  He exhibited a rare ability to find the good and the true in others, and to call them to develop a deeper understanding of that truth in a way which would lead us all to God together.

Thank you Bishop, for helping me to see opportunities where so many see only difficulty and division.  thank you for giving me a concrete model whereby people of good will might seek truth together.  Thank you for acknowledging honestly the very real differences between the great belief systems of the world, and for preserving the unique proclamation of the Church that Jesus is indeed our Saviour and our Lord.