ben | 
08 28th, 2009| 
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Aug
28
The Friday Letters
28 August 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Can you believe that this is the last Friday Letter of August already? Our extra hot summer is coming to a close. By this time next week it will be September and we’ll all be getting ready for the three day weekend that finishes up the summer season officially. I’m taking a week off starting Wednesday afternoon so you’ll not receive a letter from me next week, and I’ll miss you on Sunday of Labor Day Weekend. Fr. Joseph Hickey-Tiernan will be here to handle all your sacramental requirements that morning.
I’m not going anywhere exciting, or at least not anywhere very far away that’s exciting. My youngest brother and his wife are traveling here from Colorado to visit with us for the week. We plan to show them around Puyallup for a day, then we’re all staying in downtown Seattle while attending the biggest nerd convention on the planet. After three days of festival craziness we’ll take a ferry and visit my Dad at Port Townsend. My other brother and his ginormous family will join us, making it a total of eleven people. Dad’s planned a whale watching cruise for entertainment, but frankly, feeding and sleeping eleven people (plus one furry white dog) in my dad’s house ought to be excitement enough.
When I return it’ll be time for Sunday School to start up, the Band and Choir will be back in action, and the Puyallup Fair will perform its annual traffic miracle. I’m very much looking forward to the Fall season, and all of the activities that entails. Here’s hoping that your end-of-summer plans are made and happily anticipated, and that you too are looking forward to another season of our church community.
Peace,
Ben.
Aug
23
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the 12th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16)
1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
Last October I traveled to Canon Beach, Oregon, to celebrate the wedding of my youngest brother Isaac to his long time girlfriend, Mitzi. It was, of course, a joyous occasion, but like all weddings there was a fair bit of anxiety to go along with the excitement. For the bride, the greatest source of anxiety came from the fact that this weekend would be the first meeting of her family with my family. Isaac had met her family, and she had met ours, but most of us outside of the happy couple were new to each other. As many of you no doubt know first hand, two people who decide to marry one another can come from families that have absolutely nothing in common.
Most of the anxiety was misplaced and I was confident that everything would turn out just fine. What’s the worst that could happen, I thought? Even if Mitzi’s family were a bunch of Neanderthal cretins I’d probably never have to see them again, given that they live in Western Kansas. There was one moment of real tension however, when Mitzi’s niece and Isaac’s nephew first came into contact with each other. Jonas, Isaac and my other brother Nick’s third born child, is something of a little wild man. Their first child is so well behaved he’s basically been an adult since he was two years old. Hannah, the second, is the sweetest little girl you could ask for. Thus, when my brother and his wife went for number three anyone could have told them that the odds were not good for getting another obedient child. Well, statistics are merciless, and Jonas arrived, and he pretty much hasn’t stopped railing against his fate ever since.
Word on the street was that Mitzi’s niece was pretty much the same. There was, therefore, some trepidation about what would happen when the two inevitably came together as the only kids their age at the reception. Because this trepidation wasn’t enough excitement, Mitzi’s niece’s parents had purchased for her earlier that day a set of toys called “the armor of God”. This literal interpretation of Ephesians 6:10-20 included plastic breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation which could be worn, along with the also plastic shield of faith and sword of the spirit. The religious theme was a nice touch, but when you came right down to it what you had was a plastic armed and armored child who was going to come face to face with a two year old boy who was very much accustomed to his older siblings letting him have his way and who was definitely going to want that plastic sword for himself.
The Apostle to the Gentiles would probably have been appalled at the situation. Paul was by all accounts a fairly amazing human being, gender politics aside, yet there is nothing in his writings to indicate he would have been equipped to handle a two year old temper tantrum in the middle of a wedding reception.
He meant the whole thing as a metaphor, of course. In writing to the Christians of Ephesus Paul encourages them the take on their new lives as Christians and in so doing to resist those forces that would pull them down. While he uses the then common imagery of the arms and armor of a Roman Legionnaire, his call is not one of literal physical resistance. Despite the fact that those Christians he is addressing would certainly have known both violent persecution and casual oppression, Paul insists that their enemies are not of blood and flesh, but of a spiritual nature.
The metaphor is made all the more powerful by the fact that while Paul insists their ultimate enemies are spiritual in nature, it cannot be denied that there are temporal enemies with real swords and shields, as well as chains and dungeons, and lions and gladiators. By using a military metaphor, Paul draws attention to the fact that he is aware of the real danger of violence, but will still insist that it is in the spiritual realm where the ultimate battle will be fought.
This situation of real physical danger and a call to resist in spiritual terms rather than physical ones has been repeated throughout the ages. It seems to me that all religions, indeed all human philosophies whether religious or not, must address this question of how to respond to unjust suffering. The modern example that jumps to my mind is the one described in the book by Elie Wiesel, “Night”. The experience of those imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II, while not the same as the experience of early Christians, has many parallels. The victory discovered by Wiesel and a few others was a spiritual victory, a triumph of meaning over meaningless violence. It is this triumph that Paul calls the Ephesians towards.
There is a deep connection between this text in Ephesians and the language that the early church developed around baptism. Before Christianity became legal, and in fact obligatory, in the Roman Empire, it took a long time to become a Christian. You could expect to spend a couple of years studying Christianity before committing to the precepts of the faith and being baptized. While we’ve backed off on the entrance requirements since then, we still hold to the meaning of that baptismal experience.
In baptism, you ‘put on’ a new self. This gets talked about in a number of ways: dying and rising again; new birth; being clothed with the likeness of Christ. Paul’s talk about putting on the armor of God has much in common with the baptismal concept of taking on the nature of Jesus.
I imagine that as soon as Paul’s words to the Ephesians were read aloud in a congregation including young boys they were immediately removed from their metaphorical realm and placed squarely in the land of make-believe. I know this is true for me. When I was young, any long slender object got tape wrapped around one end and became a sword. I have some particularly fond memories of battling sagebrush in the desert of the Tri-Cities armed with only my wits and a four foot long piece of window siding.
The family tradition continued last October as my Nephew Jonas did indeed talk his new cousin-by-marriage out of her plastic sword. The confrontation that the adults had been fearing never materialized however. Faced with a stranger instead of a sibling, Jonas gave up his policy of making demands and engaged in negotiation. They took turns with the sword and shield, politely hitting the other one in the breastplate of righteousness or occasionally on the helmet of salvation (which isn’t as well padded as a regular helmet, apparently), until it was time to trade roles. In a show of great gender equality they also took turns being the knight and the princess, though why one of those was supposed to be attacking the other we never did figure out.
Paul’s metaphor about the Roman Legionnaire’s equipment will probably always lend itself first to willful and literal misinterpretation. Paul must have known that. Surely there were two year old boys in Paul’s time too. Nevertheless, the metaphor continues remind us (once we have grown out of plastic swords and armor) that the real battles to which Christians are called are not battles fought with arms and armor but with the tools of faith given to us by the Spirit. AMEN.
Aug
21
The Friday Letters
21 August 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The past two Friday Letters have been long and full of information. This week I’ll just write a short note to let you know I’m thinking about you.
I’ll actually be in the Tri-Cities when this letter arrives in your mailbox. Jieun and I are traveling to meet Nigella Paige O’Callaghan, now two months old, and to welcome her into the family of God through baptism. I imagine there will be time to visit at least one of Eastern Washington’s famous wineries while we’re there.
Summer moves sedately on here in Puyallup. We’re now more than halfway through August and coming up on that point where people start thinking about the Fall, and back-to-school, and plans for the remainder of our fine weather. Christ Episcopal Church of Puyallup too is making those plans and having those thoughts. I’ve enjoyed sharing the quiet summer weeks with you all and look forward to a busier Fall season. Thank you for sharing with me those Sunday mornings where we gather to celebrate the central mysteries of our faith.
Peace,
Ben.
Aug
16
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the 11th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15)
Once again Jesus is talking about bread. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” This is the third week in a row that we have read from the Gospel of John, and the third week in a row that Jesus has said something about bread, and something more about his being bread. We are not simply reading the same passage over and over again either. These are separate sayings of Jesus to his disciples, one delivered after another, all basically the same message.
The Gospel of John is unique. It stands apart from the other three Gospels which are quite similar to one another. Thus most people will have an opinion on the Gospel of John, either liking it the best or not liking it as much. This is easy to do with John since it’s the only one that really stands out. Hardly anyone ever says how much they prefer the Gospel of Matthew to the Gospel of Luke, mostly because you have to be paying really close attention to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in order to discern any significant differences.
So John’s Gospel is often liked or disliked and separated out from the collection of Gospels. The reasons we like or dislike tend to be the same reasons and say more about us than about the Gospel itself. The Gospel of John is poetic and imprecise, it is highly Christological (which is to say very concerned with the divinity of Christ), it is richly metaphorical, and it is often redundant. It’s almost as if the author of the Gospel of John had a personal writing philosophy that said, why say something once, when you can say it five times in a row?
So why all the repeating? Why spend so much time on this metaphor of bread? Why three weeks in a row with essentially the same Gospel message? For two reasons. First, because it’s important. Second, because it’s difficult.
If the Gospel of John had been written on a computer it would have been much shorter. However, it would have been full of underlined words, italicized phrases, and bolded sentences. Lacking simple word processing or desktop publishing software, the Gospeller chose to emphasize his most important points by repeating them again and again, using slightly different words, but hammering the same point home. This bit about the bread is serious, people, he says; there is a truth here about the nature of God that it is very important for you to embrace.
So it’s important, but it’s also difficult. Bread we get, it’s for eating, you need it (or other food) pretty much every day, and without it things get bad fast. The Bread of Life is a different thing. It takes some more thinking to plumb the depths of meaning that Jesus clearly wants us to explore.
And he’s not making it very easy today. “I am the bread of life” sounds beautiful. It’s fun to read that out loud in church. “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” doesn’t roll of the tongue quite so poetically. It is no wonder the Roman Empire figured the Christians were cannibals if they had ever gotten ahold of this book. Again and again, in sentence after sentence, Jesus keeps repeating these words: flesh and blood, eat and drink, until the incarnation of God becomes not just vivid but almost repugnant.
Some part of what we’re talking about is Eucharist, clearly. Flesh and Blood are for us present in Bread and Wine. The incarnation of God that was made manifest in Jesus is also made manifest in a smaller way inside of each of us through the feast of the Eucharist. The insistence on flesh and blood and the literal, worldly existence of these symbols serves to make it clear that this is not simply a spiritual matter, but a matter of all life. Jesus wishes to claim not just our spiritual natures, but all of us and everything else besides.
Yet for all the awkward talk of flesh and blood there is another world that I actually find harder to swallow. Both at the beginning and the end of this passage Jesus promises that those who eat of the bread of life will live forever. That’s the word that haunts me, because I don’t think I know what it means. Forever? What is forever? We are not, certainly. No matter how many times we take communion, you and I in the forms we now exist in will not live forever. And even if you ignore death, still we are not forever. There is hardly anything about us that lasts even the term of our own life. I am not now the same person I was twenty years ago, and will be another person again in another twenty years. Creepily, this is true not just mentally but physically, as our bodies replace worn out cells with new ones, turning over the whole biological mess every so often.
Even outside of ourselves, things that seem to be permanent are not. Nothing lasts forever. Rocks are worn away by rivers that change their courses; even continents and oceans change over the truly long haul. We begin to suspect that even the universe we live in may not last forever.
What then, does Jesus mean, by forever? If nothing really lasts forever, why do we even have that word? What can it mean if we have no experience for it to relate to? Or does the word forever apply, not to reality, but to a longing within us for permanence, and place, and, in the end, the Holy? Maybe that’s it; maybe forever isn’t a word that applies to the physical world at all, but to the world in which we yearn to live. In that case, Jesus is giving us a rather big hint these past few weeks. Here is how to find that world, he says, take me into yourself, and live forever. AMEN.
Aug
14
14 August 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Last weekend I spent several hours Friday evening, and all day Saturday at a Godly Play training workshop at St. James & St. John’s Episcopal Church over in Lakewood. Kris O’Brien and Terrie Prescott were with me. Kris and Terrie will be our anchor storytellers for the Preschool and K through 2nd grade classrooms this Fall; I was just there to learn more about the curriculum so I’d know what was going on and how to help.
Normally, I am loath to give myself up to all day Saturday training sessions. In this case though, I am actually looking forward to the next Friday evening/all-day Saturday session that we’ll attend early in October to complete the training. There is no such thing as a perfect curriculum of course, and you can’t make Children or their Parents come to church just because you have a groovy Sunday School. That said, Godly Play is the most excellent system I have seen, ever. I’ll give you three reasons I like it.
One, it is based on story telling. The heart of each Godly Play lesson is a story from the Bible. Sometimes parables of Jesus, sometime summaries of long sequences of the Old Testament, other times based on liturgical actions (like Baptism) or feast days (like Pentecost). The way these stories are told, and the radical idea behind giving them to our children, are my favorite thing about Godly Play.
Two, the toys are awesome! Each story is accompanied by “manipulatives” (their word) which make the story come alive and provide touch learning. These manipulatives are expensive when purchased, but are of very high quality and need never be replaced or repurchased for the next curriculum year. They can also be made by crafty type people within the congregation. The story I practiced on during training was called “Exile and Return”, and to tell it I used a wooden box filled with sand (the Desert Box), small wooden figures (the People of God), and a great big metal chain, which symbolized their being locked in exile. Awesome toys, even for adults to play with.
Three, Godly Play takes very seriously the idea that Children have their own relationship with God. Without trivializing a child-like understanding of God, nor putting that innocent belief on a pedestal, Godly Play finds that a child’s relationship with God is neither inherently better nor worse than an adult relationship, but that it is profoundly different, and that difference is potentially a great gift to us and to the children we are given to teach. One of our concerns in adopting the Godly Play curriculum was that it seemed fairly childish and that older kids would not want to do it. When I posed that problem to our trainer last weekend she said that the really difficult part about using Godly Play with older kids would come four or five years down the road when it would be a real challenge to find adult teachers that were spiritually competent to teach the kids who had had such an education over those years. Over time, in other words, Godly Play tended to produce kids who were more theologically sophisticated than the adults in their congregations. I’m excited about a curriculum that is so bold as to teach kids not just the basics of Christian knowledge, but to strive to give them the gift of serious religious thought.
Over the next few weeks you will be hearing a bit more about Godly Play as we seek to set up our classrooms and furnish them with the manipulatives we’ll need to get started. A few folks have already offered to help with purchasing and building items we’ll need. If you’d like to be on that list too just let me know. Also, while we have two Story Tellers to get started with, others who are interested are welcome, and each classroom will also need a second adult, called the Door Person, who assists in the classroom. If that sounds like something you would like to explore, please let me know that as well.
Finally, and on a completely different topic, just a reminder that this Sunday is Naomi Shiga’s first worship service with us as our new organist. Please make her feel welcome as you so often do with the many newcomers who cross our threshold. I’m looking forward to this Sunday, and to this Fall, as we continue to build up our little corner of the Kingdom of God.
Peace,
Ben.
Aug
9
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14)
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
I learned early in my preaching career that there is something of an order of precedence behind selecting texts to preach on. Mostly this is a joke, but there is some truth to it. Upon reading the lessons, you first consider the Gospel. If the Gospel lesson is good, preach on that. If the Gospel lesson is confusing or otherwise unsuitable, look next to the Old Testament lesson. If the Old Testament lesson is about annihilating your enemies, either before or after circumcising them (as it so often seems to be), then as a last resort you can try the Epistle. If you’re lucky it’ll be one of the letters actually by Paul and there will be something useable there. Now, if all else fails, and if you cannot think of a single thing to say about the three main readings, you can always fall all the way back to the very bottom of the order of precedence and preach on the Psalm. Guess what I’m preaching on today?
It’s not that I couldn’t think of anything at all to say about our lessons today, but that I feel like I’ve already said enough. King David’s son by Bathsheba dies in this morning’s reading from second Samuel, ending the story that I have already dwelt on extensively these past two Sundays. The Gospel lesson actually overlaps with last weeks lesson and the key phrase is the same: “I am the bread of life”. We talked about that last week. The Ephesians lessons for the past two weeks have actually been packed with recognizable phrases; phrases that we have lifted nearly verbatim from the letter and placed into our prayerbook. The last verse from today’s portion is the prayer I say nearly every Sunday as we transition from exchanging the Peace into the liturgy of the Eucharist. These are all fine lessons, but somehow, the Psalm steals the show.
Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice; *
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.
Psalm 130 is probably my favorite Psalm. There are many fine Psalms, along with the many depressing ones, and all of them are worth thinking about, but I think 130 might be my personal favorite. Everyone always says Psalm 23 is the best, and that’s a hard choice to argue with, but Psalm 130 has something of the same poignant perspective to it. In Psalm 23 we walk through the valley of the shadow of death yet still find our faith in God. In the first verse of Psalm 130 we call to God out of the depths. This is the hallmark of the greatest Psalms, that they acknowledge the reality of evil, and suffering, and loss, and yet insist that it is exactly from those places where God is most beautifully addressed.
If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss, *
O Lord, who could stand?
The second verse of this poem brings forth our lessons from the past two weeks and redeems them. The story of David and Bathsheba is an unrelentingly bleak story of the power of sin over our lives. The Psalmist will not negate this, but insist that God transcends our human tendency to bring about our own suffering. If God were to truly count our sins against us—if God was in fact looking down from on high and recording our each and every failure in a great book of debts—none of us could stand. Whether we had sinned in a spectacular fashion as David had, or only in little matters of bitterness and anger as Ephesians cites, none of us can measure up in the end.
For there is forgiveness with you; *
therefore you shall be feared.
And here is the conclusion of that thought: the indescribable nature of God’s forgiveness of us. A forgiveness that does not excuse our failures, but continually calls us to repentance and renewal. And what a counter-intuitive couplet verse three is. There is forgiveness with God, therefore God shall be feared? Did the poet forget to put the word ‘not’ in there somewhere? If God is so forgiving, is that not cause to trust in God rather than fear?
It takes a little effort to wrap our minds around the Biblical notion of fearing God. For us fear is almost exclusively a negative word. For the Psalmist fear is tied up with notions of respect, and awe, and sheer, unimaginable goodness. To fear God is to admit that our human understanding of God will never be enough—that our grasp of God’s motives and desires will ever be imperfect. In the face of God’s grace in forgiving us, how can we respond with anything other than a profound humility?
I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for him; *
in his word is my hope.
My soul waits for the LORD,
more than watchmen for the morning, *
more than watchmen for the morning.
If Psalm 130 is my favorite Psalm, then verse five of said Psalm is my favorite verse in all the Psalter. I love the image of it, for starters. I can’t read this verse without imagining an ancient walled city in the Middle East. It is night time, and while dawn has not yet broken the sky is just that tiny bit more grey in the East. Solitary figures stand spaced around the wall and look out, ready to warn those who rest within of any danger. And while this is a necessary task, it is a hard one, and these watchers must long for morning so that they may give up their vigil, and return to their homes, and rest. Even though I have never once in my life stood watch over a city or a camp, this image is visceral for me. I can imagine those watchmen longing for morning, and imagine how waiting for God is something like that.
Yet for all the power of that image, I think it’s the repeat that I love best. If you read this Psalm antiphonally (back and forth breaking at the asterisk) you get this beautiful echo of that last line where it seems like the congregation is talking to itself in a dream. Of course everyone stumbles over this part, which I also like. You wonder if maybe there was a misprint. You feel self-conscious reading this bit out loud, wondering how much space to put between the two lines. That repeat forces us to deal with the Psalm as a poem, and not just a set of disembodied lyrics that we can recite in an off-hand manner. How wonderful that a liturgical poet thousands of years dead can reach into the future and cause us to trip over our own tongues.
O Israel, wait for the LORD, *
for with the LORD there is mercy;
With him there is plenteous redemption, *
and he shall redeem Israel from all their sins.
At the end our Psalmist comes back to his theme of waiting, and mercy, and redemption. For this verse—for the Psalm—to be meaningful for us ‘Israel’ must have its original meaning. Not Israel the nation, nor Israel the ethnic subgroup, but Israel: the one who struggles with God. At dawn, after a long night of wrestling with an angel, Jacob is given this name by God, and Jacob hands it down to his descendents and to us. We are the ones who struggle with God, for it is that struggle to which Jesus calls us. Here, therefore, is a message for all of us: wait for the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy. With God there is not just redemption, but plenteous redemption.
It isn’t often that I resort to the Psalm for a text on which to base a sermon. Perhaps that’s a mistake. There comes a point when analyzing a text, when applying the disciplines of literary criticism and cultural contextualization, when the techniques of scholarship reach the end of their usefulness and the best way to seek after God might just be in poetry.
Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice; *
