A Debt We Could Not Pay

Let he without sin cast the first stone if you will.
To say that my bride isn't worth half the blood that I've spilled.
Point your finger and laugh if you choose
to say my beloved is borrowed and used
She is strong enough to stand in my love.
I can hear her say..

"I am weak.
I am poor,
I'm broken, Lord,
but I'm yours.
Hold me Now.
Hold me Now."

--Jennifer Knapp, "Hold Me Now" from Kansas (1997)

I've been thinking a lot this past week about the woman with the alabaster flask and the Pharisee named Simon (and that was even before Miriam's sermon on Sunday!). I ran across the story again in my own reading the previous week, and it has stuck with me. In a brief Google search I found that there are some that link "Simon the Pharisee" with "Simon the Leper" and try to argue that this anointing and the account of an anointing at the end of Jesus' ministry (by Mary of Bethany, in John's version) are the same event, both occurring in the home of someone named Simon. Although I doubt that is the case historically, there is the argument that Jesus said "wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her" (Matt. 26:13), and Luke records no other anointing. It is also fascinating for me as a dramatist to think about the various connections that would arise if the two stories were versions of the same event--just the idea of a Pharisee (upholder of the rules of ritual purity) becoming a leper (one of the people most ostracized by such laws) provides a ton of material to wrestle with dramatically in itself! But I digress...

The point which caught my attention at first was the parable that Jesus told Simon about the two debtors. One owed 500 denarii (a days' wage) and the other owed 50, and both debts were forgiven by the moneylender. Jesus asked which would love the person who forgave their debts more, and Simon answered (correctly, according to Jesus) that the one forgiven more would love more. Jesus then made the connection between the "sinful woman" and the debtor who owed the larger sum, and used that to explain her actions (which the Pharisee thought wildly inappropriate). Simon was left to see himself as unable of experiencing a love of that level, because he'd only been forgiven a little.

NOW, the question is, "Is that true?" Did the upright (uptight) Pharisee just not sin enough? Should he have loosened up, lived it up, and become an extravagant sinner so that God could forgive him much more, and consequently he could love God that much more? Does God weigh our sins in the scales like a moneylender? Were the woman's sins REALLY ten times as much as the Pharisee's?

OF COURSE NOT! ALL sin is abominable in God's sight! Jesus died for the sins of the world, but he wouldn't have had to die any less to fully forgive one person's one sin. Death is death and sin is sin. It's ridiculous to attempt to measure either, let alone compare measurements.

So why did Jesus tell this parable? If sins cannot really be measured, then why tell a story in which God is depicted as a moneylender managing debts and parceling out pardons? Probably because that is the only way Simon could think of God. If one wants to be able to distance oneself from other sinners, if one wants to justify himself in God's sight by saying, "I thank thee, O God, that I am not like other people--they sin TEN TIMES more than I do!" then one has to imagine that God is keeping track of these things with at least as much scrutiny as we are.

BUT, if we would realize the seriousness of our own sin--of each and every "small" sin we do--and of what it cost our God to forgive it, then we could ALL love as lavishly as the woman with the alabaster flask.

Pope Benedict's Christmas Eve Sermon

Christmas Day has come and gone, and the Priest family Christmas (this year celebrated on New Year's Day but always delayed by our travels to visit other family members on the actual holiday) has also come and gone. But while we are still within the 12 Days of Christmas, I wanted to write again (as promised) and comment on the Pope's Christmas sermon.

I dimly recall watching some of the ceremonies when Pope Benedict was installed, and I suppose I heard thim then, but I don't recall being deeply affected by anything he may have said at the time. Then again, it was a service and a ceremony I was unfamiliar with. Christmas is another story, and this was the first time I'd watched the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass with "the new pope." There was also a new commentator--my wife and I joked that US Cardinal John P. Foley, who did the broadcast voiceover for 25 years, always sounded like he was covering a tennis match--and the poor guy had to try to make sense of the "shoving" incident early in the broadcast. Although Pope Benedict chose to do the ceremony two hours earlier, it was still broadcast the usual time, which was too late for my wife this year, so I ended up watching alone (which brought things back to the first times I'd watched it).

I've always enjoyed the international flavor of the service, and the camera work and editing (for someone who grew up watching Billy Graham Crusades as the ultimate experience in religious broadcasting, where all the cameramen could do was pan across the crowd or focus on the stadium flags flapping in the breeze, the Vatican offers a real treat to the eyes!) The Protestant part of me sometimes gets squeamish thinking of the oppulence and wondering how much of the lovely art and architecture of St. Peter's was purchased by misguided people purchasing indulgences, but for the most part I can buy the idea of trying to make a worship space look like heaven by using large dimensions, the best artists and the finest materials available. Heck, wasn't that what Solomon's temple was all about?

But I digress... As inspiring a person as John Paul II was, I don't recall ever being impressed by him as a speaker, or remembering any of his sermons I listened to. And it was the sermon that struck me the most this year.

The main point for me was the contrast Pope Benedict made between the shepherds and the wise men. While the shepherds lived close to Jesus, the wise men had to make "a long and arduous journey" to see and worship the Christ child. This physical distance he likened to spiritual distance; "there are simply and lowly souls who live very close to the Lord," but most of us "live our lives by our philosophies, amid wordly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger." God has already made a great journey from heaven to be born amongst us, but he still must push and prod most of us to get us to "go over to Bethlehem" and meet him where he has chose to reveal himself.

God wishes for us to come to him, but we must be receptive to his call. The shepherds were "watching"--they were awake and cognizant of the world around them. The wise men came from a pagan culture, and citing Origen (who evidently was citing John the Baptist "out of these stones God can raise children of Abraham" and the author of Psalm 135, who comments that those who make and worship gods of lifeless materials "shall become like them") he says "lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood." But God desires to give us hearts of flesh. He became like us in order to make us become like him. This was the "sign" given to the shepherds--God's humility expressed in the incarnation and seen in a "babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger."

So, we must be alive, we must be awake, and we must be attentive to the presence and calling of God. And repeatedly, Pope Benedict the liturgy (or "Liturgy") as being of prime importance, as "the work of God" and as a time when "the Lord himself is present in our midst," if only we had the grace to see.

Liturgy is something I need to explore this year--for some very practical reasons (at home I am preparing my daughter to begin receiving communion and at the church I am pulling together a Confirmation program for our yout)--but also for my own spiritual well being. So this sermon seemed especially appropriate for me as I kick off the new year.

One Holy Catholic Church at Christmas

Christmas 1984 I was surprised with a large Christmas bonus the last day of work before the holiday, which allowed me to greatly expand my Christmas shopping the last day or so before Christmas. That left me wrapping presents late on Christmas Eve, and, searching for something Christmasy on have on TV as I worked, I first ran across the Midnight Mass broadcast "live" from the Vatican ("Live" because midnight hit the Vatican quite a few hours earlier than it did Eastern Standard Time). I'd been raised largely ignorant of Roman Catholicism and Church History in general--judging from my Sunday school lessons there simply were no "real Christians" between John the Revelator and Martin Luther--and had only recently begun attending an Episcopal Church and getting comfortable with the idea of liturgy not being all "vain repetition" condemned by Jesus. So, I was surprised and intrigued to realize how much of the service sounded familiar (once translated) to what I was hearing and saying Sunday mornings.

Looking back on that now I think of my earlier self as laughably naive. Shortly afterwards one of my best friends (and the only one I can claim in any way to have had an influence on his conversion to Christianity) decided to return to the Catholic Church he'd been raised in (and had pretty fully rejected when I'd first met him in high school), and that--along with my own rediscovery of liturgy--caused me to begin a serious investigation of Catholicism. Some time later I was prompted to do some reading on the Orthodox church, and eventually at seminary I had to take a few courses in Church History (which my wife now teaches). Despite various frustrations with the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism in general, and despite seeing many of my friends from seminary depart for either Rome or Constantinople, I've never felt the need to move any further up the ecclesial family tree (or down towards the roots?) than Anglicanism, but I appreciate what I have and can learn from other traditions and their followers. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said (in a quote I read a couple days ago):

From the deeds of Jesus in the flesh, there springs a society which is one in its continuous life. Many kinds of fellowship in diverse places and manners are created by the Spirit of Jesus, but they all depend upon the one life. Thus each group of Christians will learn its utter dependence upon the whole Body. It will indeed be aware of its own immediate union with Christ, but it will see this experience as a part of the one life of the one family in every age and place.

--quoted from The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock (1936/1990), 43-44.

All of that to say, I watched the Pope's sermon on Christmas Eve, and found it quite moving. Though, with an introduction this long, I now will have to wait for a future post to comment on what he had to say.

"And There Was Evening, And There Was Morning..."

"There were a lot of times I had to turn my light out when I was acting out Bible stories," my daughter informed me the other day. "First there was the plague of darkness in Egypt, then there was Daniel in the lion's den, then when I did Jonah in the whale, cuz of course it was dark in there, and then when Jesus was in the tomb before he rose again. Then I had the light off just now because I was doing Revelation and John was in prison."

"And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night." And so it has been from the beginning.

I'm glad that my daughter appreciates the difference between light and darkness. I'm delighted that she enjoys acting out Bible stories during her play time, and I'm impressed at her memory and sense of the flow of the sacred story. I'm glad she didn't trip and hurt herself playing in the dark, and I'm glad I wasn't the one who walked in to find her lying still on the ground with her head under the bed.

"Honey, are you all right?" my wife asked.

"I'm PRETENDING to be dead."

"Why are you doing that?"

"I was acting out Bible stories and I was being Goliath!"

December Home Visits

When I first heard about the seminary here in Ambridge, one of the things I was told was that they used to require all of their students to participate in door-to-door visiting in the neighborhood, and I told myself, "If that is still the case, I'm not going!" The church I grew up in was heavily involved in this kind of "witnessing" and some of my deepest feelings of spiritual inadequacy as a teenager grew out of the fact that I simply did not have the kind of extroverted personality that caused me to strike up conversations with total strangers on the street corner and lead them to pray "the sinner's prayer."

Well, such visiting was no longer a requirement for the school, so we moved to Ambridge. And for most of the first decade, no one at my church ever brought up the possibility of me needing to go knocking on doors of people I didn't know. But then we started KidzLife, and somehow it made sense to take some time on a Saturday and try to visit the kids' homes, either to give out invitations for upcoming events, deliver Easter baskets or Christmas presents to kids who didn't make it to one of our parties, or just to get an opportunity to meet the families of the kids. And I've been doing it at various times, for various reasons, with varying degrees of regularity now for about three years. Except for a survey last summer there has been no "cold calling"--we've stuck to families who've had some contact with our church or children's program--and there have been no dramatic conversions (of the type I heard so much of as a teen) to report. But every time I do it, though I feel anxious, disgruntled, or unqualified going into the experience, I always come away from it feeling positive, energized, and thankful for the opportunity.

This past Saturday was no exception. We had a ton of things planned for the family (our regular Saturday chores plus a few holiday events), so it was really inconvenient to take this break in the middle of the day and head down to church to meet with the team and spend an hour or two visiting. On top of that, the main reason for this week's visits was to invite people to our church's Christmas services, which I felt a little funny doing since our family always travels to Virginia for the holidays, and we've only been home to attend our church's Christmas service once. With us not doing KidzLife this semester (which has generally been my main connection to the families of these visits), I was feeling even more cut off and unqualified than usual. And it was snowing, for the first time this year--nothing particularly beautiful or nasty, but just COLD!

But I went. I was teamed with someone I didn't know well (but who fortunately was more of an extrovert than I), and several of the houses we were assigned to were people I didn't know, people others had made contact with through the summer survey. On the other hand, I had a good time getting to know my partner (who DID have some connections to the neighborhood, both because he lived there and because he'd covered some of these same houses in the summer survey), we had an incredible number of people we actually got to talk to (on a typical visiting day it seems there have been far fewer people at home or who answer the door when we knock; I didn't know, but my partner informed me that there was a "Big Game" on that day, so it was a good time to catch folks at home). Best of all, I happened to encounter a lot of the kids that I had met either through my drama class this fall or through Arts Camp last summer, including a case where several were together playing at the one house we visited, another case where the two sisters were the ones to answer the door (giving us the opportunity to wish one of them a Happy Birthday), and one case where we just happening to run into a girl with her mother walking down the street! Everyone we talked to was appreciative of the invitation and many said they would plan to come to one of the services or the Christmas dinner listed on the invitation.

Definitely God was blessing us, the folks praying for us back at the church were doing a great job, and God wanted ME in particular to be out there in order to encounter those kids and give them a face they recognized to go with the invitation. And once again, I was glad I did it!

"I ain't no Moses but I ain't no clown"

I thought I should provide a bit of commentary on the song I posted last night. Though it made for a great title for my first blog entry in several months, I DO enjoy stories of the sort described, and I tend to follow the "Esther S. Cape School of Conflict Management" (as I spoofed in a skit for the Young Peacemaker's curriculum a couple years ago), the verse that really caught my attention was the one involving Joshua. I don't typically see myself as a Joshua-type figure (partly due to the lack of Moseses in my life), but I find myself in leadership roles and I feel I need someone telling me, "Be strong and courageous" (Josh. 1:6-9). I don't feel like a leader, I don't want to be a leader, I've not always had good relationships with leaders. Part of it, I'm sure, has to do with growing up in the anti-authoritarian 60's, when everyone in leadership roles was thought to be evil or corrupt, part of it has to do with failed father-figures. Whatever contributes to it, I have this dislike/distrust/dishonoring attitude towards authority. And yet--as Pogo observed all those years ago--"we have met the enemy and it is us!" I can't say older white men in positions of leadership are all bad because I am one (unless I just want to be bad and make an excuse for it). Whatever my father or step-father did to me, I AM a father now, and it's up to me to be the best father I can be. I've been appointed as the Director of Christian Formation at my church, and people are counting on me to be a disciple of Jesus and a discipler of others (which I should be anyways, just be virtue of being a Christian, but having that title really clinches the deal!). I ain't no Moses, but that's no excuse to be a clown. There's work to be done and "Christ is counting on me."

"I'm Still Here"

I heard a song the other day on last.fm from the group Waterdeep. I haven't been able to track down sufficiently the credits for words or music (so apologies to those responsible), but the lyrics really spoke to me, and I thought I'd share them with you here:

"I'm Still Here"


I went flying in a dream last night
Whenever I was scared, I took flight
It didn't seem brave and it didn't seem right
but it always seemed easier than puttin up a fight

CHORUS
And I'm almost gone
But I'm still here

Tell me a story that'll make me feel
Something far flung but something real
Something that's human but not depraved
Somebody endangered, but somebody still saved

When Joshua sat them children down
He said I ain't no Moses but I ain't no clown
And I know how that river's wide
But if you follow me we'll make it to the other side

CHORUS
And I'm almost there
But I'm still here