Tag Archives: Episcopal

Re Daily Office Readings 4/8/2020

Leave a reply

The Readings: Lamentations 2:1-9; 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11; Mark 12:1-11

I wonder when and why we started reading Lamentations during Holy Week. The Jews used Lamentations on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple; Jesus had spoken of himself as temple (e.g, John 2:19): perhaps that was the route. But once in place, reading Lamentations invites further reflection. Here’s Gregory of Nazianzus on a somewhat different theme: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved” (Critique of Apollinarius and Apollinarianism). ““For that which He has not assumed He has not healed…” So yes, Jesus’ death under Pontius Pilate is one thing, and our current desolation (COVID-19) and brutal politics another thing, but has Jesus not assumed these too? “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Ps 139:8b).

When we read the Passion during Holy Week we say/shout “Crucify him!” Today’s Gospel can help us chew on that. Jesus’ parable is a rereading of Isaiah’s vineyard parable (5:1-7), where our sympathies lie with the vineyard owner. Times change, and in Jesus’ time absentee landlords are usually part of the brutal politics “grinding the face of the poor” (also Isaiah: 3:15). So we, heirs of the revolution some 200 years ago against this sort of thing, where do our sympathies lie? What claim does this vineyard owner have on us, really?

April 2020: in what ways are we experiencing this G-d as absent from us, present with us, distant, near?

Re Daily Office Readings 4/6/2020

Leave a reply

The Readings: Lamentations 1:1-2, 6-12; 2 Corinthians 1:1-7; Mark 11:12-25

vehicles beside buildings
Photo by Anas Hinde on Pexels.com

Then there are the mornings when engaging with the readings is like trying to drink from a fire fighter’s hose…

“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!” This coronavirus disaster, in the USA both natural and human in origin (google comparative national infection and unemployment rates)… Some mornings we may not get past the first reading.

When, and only when, we’re ready to do something other than lament, the other readings offer two paths. Paul: solidarity, in the form of consolation (or encouragement). How might I console, encourage, show solidarity? Which groups particularly need our solidarity?

Mark sandwiches one sign-act (the cursing of the fig tree) around another (the cleansing of the temple). Both seem to point to the temple’s destruction (cue Lamentations?). G-d also is in the game; G-d bats last. And Jesus points to our second path: prayer. Prayer, unlimited in power (vv.23-24), but with a demanding requirement: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” I wonder: the demand to forgive does not immobilize Jesus (see the two sign-acts); how does the demand affect how he carries these out?

Between lamentation, solidarity, prayer and forgiveness my hands need not be idle.

Palm Sunday

Leave a reply

The Readings: Morning Prayer: Zechariah 9:9-12; 1 Timothy 6:12-16;
Evening Prayer: Zechariah 12:9-11; 13:1, 7-9; Luke 19:41-48

We are entering Holy Week, filled with liturgies that can move us to tears. Luke’s telling of the Triumphal Entry provides a sort of counterpoint: in the middle of the Entry Luke narrates Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” We weep for Jesus; Jesus weeps for us.

Peace is implicit in the staging of the Entry, which takes Zechariah 9:9-10 as its script: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations…” But Jesus weeps for Jerusalem: the process will be more complicated, bloodier, than this text might suggest.

Of course it will be. Jerusalem was no more willing to open its gates to Jesus than Washington was to Martin Luther King Jr., whose feast we celebrated yesterday.

Peace. Later in the week the crowd will choose Barabbas, leader of an insurrection, over Jesus, further sealing the trajectory that will end in Jerusalem’s destruction a few decades later. “If you had only recognized the things that make for peace!”

April 2020. What are the things that make for peace?

Re Daily Office Readings 4/4/2020

Leave a reply

The Readings: Exodus 10:21-11:8; 2 Corinthians 4:13-18; Mark 10:46-52.

Pharaoh’s hard heart is a recurrent motif in the plague cycle, a source of understandable anxiety to readers. Sometimes it’s simply noted (e.g., 7:13), sometimes attributed to Pharaoh (e.g., 8:15), sometimes to G-d (e.g., 4:21). The motif resists bowdlerization, but mirrors an old Greek proverb: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” (Longfellow’s paraphrase). Perhaps in this story Pharaoh prayed to his own gods for strength to deal with the uppity Hebrews; G-d granted the request. So file under (1) “Be careful what you pray for” and (2) “Don’t tempt G-d to use this weapon”?

Paul’s “But even if our bodies are breaking down on the outside…” resonates. I’m in the fortunate part of the spectrum, but every year my performance on the road bike’s a little less impressive, and prostate cancer did a number on last year’s calendar. Two things keep “bodies… breaking down” from dominating Paul’s story: “the person that we are on the inside is being renewed every day” (cf. the General Thanksgiving’s “means of grace”) and Paul’s participation in a project larger than himself: “As grace increases to benefit more and more people, it will cause gratitude to increase, which results in God’s glory” (v.15; translations in this paragraph from CEB). So if I find myself not looking forward to what today will bring, it doesn’t have to be that way. With Bartimaeus, “My teacher, let me see again.”

We celebrate the saints also because they show us how to enact our Scriptures, and today, Martin Luther King, Jr. Confronting the modern pharaohs, he got it right: racism, poverty, militarism: profoundly interconnected. And he sought effective ways to challenge them. And he dreamed.

Re the Daily Office Readings 4/3/2020

Leave a reply

Throughout 2nd Corinthians Paul’s in an impossible situation, trying—from a distance, without FaceTime or Zoom—to warn a congregation he’s invested heavily in against “money-grubbing ‘preachers’” (11:12; Peterson’s translation) without sounding like it’s simply Paul’s ego at stake. Readers differ on the degree to which Paul succeeds. What does seem to be at stake: what leadership’s about.

That’s a very old question. Well before king David, there’s Jotham’s biting parable. And Jesus sums up the answer we’re too familiar with: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” (Here’s where Pharaoh comes into this reflection, with his self-exaltation (v.17) bringing repeated disasters on his people.) And Jesus sets out for the Twelve a different model, ending with “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (10:45).

We could go many directions with that; here are two not related to being in an election year. Jesus regularly claims that he’s just doing what his Father does (e.g., Jn 5:19). So is Jesus’ description of his own work a fair description of the Father’s, of what we encounter from Genesis to Malachi? It’s not the description of God we usually start with; perhaps it should be (Isa 46:3-4)?

Meanwhile, us, the clay jars. Sometimes we have more scope for leadership than others; how are we using whatever scope we have? Dan Schutte has a good song about that; I’ll let him have the last word.

Re the Daily Office Readings 4/2/2020

Leave a reply

The Daily Office Readings of the Episcopal Church (USA) are available at a number of websites including Mission St Clare (https://www.missionstclare.com/english/) as part of Morning Prayer.


The good news: the glory of the Lord repeatedly enters the world that Pharaoh/Caesar/The Powers That Be presume to control. To those shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem: “Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified” (Lk. 2:9). The glory of the LORD, like being in the middle of those thunder and lightning storms that shake the earth—but present to Elijah in that “sound of sheer silence” (1 Ki. 19:12). And this glorious G-d desires our freedom.

So veils—and the synagogue has no monopoly on veils—can only be provisional. Ditto anything—like the man’s possessions in Mark—to which we attach for freedom. Can we detach? Jesus: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mk. 10:27). So Paul speaks of a life-long process: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). There’s always fresh work to be done each Lent.

And prudence also suggests attention to the process:

“All things (e.g., a camel’s journey through
A needle’s eye) are possible, it’s true.
But picture how the camel feels, squeezed out
In one long bloody thread from tail to snout.”
C. S. Lewis Poems p.134

Re the Daily Office Readings 3/31/2020

Leave a reply

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me…” A sharp warning, with no guarantee that it’s not also applicable to us hearers. So let’s chew on it a bit.

Today’s reading is part of a unit that perhaps starts in v.30 with Jesus warning the disciples “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands” (v.31). And we think “the hands of the priests, Romans, etc.” But then Mark tells us about the disciples arguing over who’s the greatest, John rebuking an unaffiliated exorcist, and (later) the disciples rebuking the folk bringing little children to Jesus—so maybe Jesus’ “human hands” isn’t about them.

Stumbling blocks look like one of the ongoing topics in Jesus’ arguments with the Pharisees and scribes, e.g., hand-washing, where Jesus cites Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, / but their hearts are far from me; / in vain do they worship me, / teaching human precepts as doctrines” and concludes “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” (7:6b-8).

And there’s the challenge, because from the inside it can be really hard to distinguish between the commandment of God and human tradition. It’s easy to assume that our human traditions faithfully reflect God’s commandment.

So Jesus’ warning isn’t superfluous. Ironically, tragically, we have an example in today’s epistle: “women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (vv.34-35). Our Lectionary omits these verses, for on text-critical grounds they’re “almost certainly an early gloss” (Hays), not to mention flatly contradicting Paul’s earlier words (11:2-16). It’s those stumbling blocks we put in place with the best (?!) of motives…

The psalmist got it right: after eloquently praising the Law, “But who can detect their errors? / Clear me from hidden faults” (19:12).

Re the Daily Office Readings 3/30/2020

1 Reply

The Daily Office Readings of the Episcopal Church (USA) are available at a number of websites including Mission St Clare (https://www.missionstclare.com/english/) as part of Morning Prayer.

What’s the Church for, anyway? I ask because Paul introduces a new word, “building up” into his argument (vv. 3, 5, 12, 26). And “building up” is usually for something. In our first reading it’s the Exodus; in the New Testament it’s… Well, Presiding Bp. Curry talks about the Jesus Movement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcipDDJoiIs); a sort of Exodus 2.0.

If something on that scale is the project, it’s important that Moses and Aaron work well together, that the folk in Corinth use their gifts in ways that build the church up, that the disciples stop arguing about who’s the greatest.

Paul’s argument about tongues and prophecy is, I think, more broadly about the difference between gifts that primarily benefit me (tongues) and those that primarily benefit those around me (prophecy). So Paul wants me to pay attention. Yes, I enjoy using my gifts. But am I using them in ways that best equip my community for its work?

BTW, Exod. 4:24-26 has long been a puzzle to interpreters. Propp in his Anchor Bible commentary (1999) may have made some progress. Here’s his summary: “Although Yahweh commands Moses to return to Egypt (4:19), he still holds him accountable for the death of the Egyptian. Zipporah sheds the blood of their son and dabs Moses’ penis with it, thereby expiating her husband’s sin.” Why’s that important? It’s easy to misread Exodus in a nationalistic way (Hebrews good, Egyptians bad). Here, on the eve of the exodus, that murdered Egyptian’s blood (2:11-12) is so important to God that God jeopardizes the whole project—until Zipporah finds a resolution.

Re the Daily Office Readings 3/29/2020

Leave a reply

The Daily Office Readings of the Episcopal Church (USA) are available at a number of websites including Mission St Clare (https://www.missionstclare.com/english/) as part of Morning Prayer.

So on this 5th Sunday in Lent when many of us would really like to be coming together at St. Dunstan’s, 6205 University Avenue, Madison WI, we get this from Paul:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom 12:1-2)

All of life is worship. That’s Paul’s, and, I think, Scripture’s vision of our human vocation, expressed universally at the beginning of Genesis and in psalms like 8, 103, and 104, expressed for Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai: “you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). Commentators generally agree that these first two verses introduce a major chunk of Romans running through chapter 15, so all the questions addressed there—living together in the parish, relating to the government, building bridges across ethnic divides—are questions of worship. And, in this season of too many dislocations, it’s worth remembering that the worship is equally honorable whether we come with full or empty hands. (It’s the poor widow’s two small copper coins that Jesus notices—and praises (Mark 12:41ff).)

Translators struggle with the end of v.1 (NRSV’s “spiritual worship”; Greek logikēn latreian). ‘Spiritual’ suggests interior or immaterial, but Paul’s talking about presenting our bodies. Perhaps KJV’s ‘reasonable’ is better, in the sense of a worship that matches / mirrors / corresponds to the mercies of God with which Paul has started the appeal.

We’d prefer to be gathered with Rev. Miranda at the altar. Paul reminds us that it’s at least equally important to God what we do at our own altars (worlds!), presenting all of our interactions as living, holy, acceptable sacrifices. Which makes me wonder: what transformation(s) (v.2) in my life might bring the biggest smile to G-d’s face?

Living when off the map

Leave a reply

This year St Dunstan’s (Madison WI) developed its Vacation Bible School around the Book of Tobit and the two Sundays after VBS bumped the normal Old Testament readings to continue the focus. I was invited to preach on the second of these two Sundays.

Readings: Tobit 14:3-4a, 5-8; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

How do you live when you’re off the map? Moses had provided a pretty clear map: live righteously and you’ll prosper in the land; live unrighteously and you’ll lose the land. But when you’re off the land through no particular fault of your own, what then? So it’s not surprising that we encounter a number of stories about that in the Old Testament: Joseph (minus his technicolor dreamcoat) in Egypt, Esther in Persia, Tobit in Assyria. The Joseph and Esther stories have a certain fairy-tale quality to them: Joseph becomes the #2 man in Egypt; Esther wins the beauty contest and marries the king. Tobit, after achieving some success in exile, gets bird poop in his eyes and goes blind, the loss which kicks off the main story in the book that eventually results in Tobit regaining his sight.

How do you live when you’re off the map? In addition to telling us a rollicking good story, complete with a carnivorous fish, a damsel in distress, and an angel in disguise, the book gives serious attention to that question. This morning we’ll look at two elements in its answer: bless God and give alms.

Bless God

God blessing us: we’re used to that idea. In the catholic (small c) tradition we believe that priestly ordination authorizes the priest to convey God’s blessing to us, and so we leave each Mass with “the blessing of God Almighty” ringing in our ears and working its way into our very selves. Scripture takes blessing as a given and so doesn’t define it. An approximate definition might include God’s presence, God’s generosity, health, fertility, success in ways designed to benefit us and those around us.

That’s important in Tobit. But Tobit focuses on our blessing God. We heard it in our first reading: “to be mindful of God and to bless his name at all times with sincerity and with all their strength.” It shows up at the beginning of some well-known psalms (Ps 103, 104). What’s that about? It’s like praise, but more oriented to the future: God’s reign really is beautiful; may it grow and expand! It’s like thanksgiving, but not tied to something specific I’ve or we’ve received.

We Christians haven’t done much with this, but our Jewish brothers and sisters have, and their practice might enrich ours. A Jewish prayer book puts it this way: “A berachah acknowledges God as the “Source” of whatever we eat or enjoy, or whatever natural marvels excite our awe.… The blessing makes us conscious that nothing in nature is to be taken for granted…” [1]

So there’s a blessing before drinking wine or grape juice:

Blessed are You, the Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.

One for seeing beautiful trees or animals:

Blessed are You, the Lord our God, King of the universe, who has such as these in His world.

One for hearing good news:

Blessed are You, the Lord our God, King of the universe, who is good and beneficent.

One for hearing bad news:

Blessed are You, the Lord our God, King of the universe, the true judge.

You get the idea. For the vision behind the practice we might look to Psalm 19. It starts:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament shows his handiwork.

It continues in this vein for a number of lines. The heavens clearly their act together. What about us? Notice how the psalm ends:

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Blessing God is one of the quite lovely ways this can play out.

One more thing about this before I move on. Part of most people’s consciousness is this running series of responses that plays as a sort of sound track throughout the day, approving of this, disapproving of that, being anxious about this, being relieved about that. The practice of blessing God can be part of that running series, helping our responses to be more mindful, more realistic, perhaps less anxious.

Give alms

We heard that in our first reading too: “Your children are also to be commanded to do what is right and to give alms…”

What’s that about? In the last month or so our first reading has been from the prophets, Amos and Hosea. In coming weeks we’ll get a good dose of Jeremiah. And one of the primary prophetic themes is God’s passionate concern for the poor, God’s anger at how the poor are getting crushed. That anger explains why Tobit is in exile in Nineveh rather than home in the Upper Galilee. And the prophets were speaking directly to the folk in power, the folk who could do something about it:

Cease to do evil, learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isa 1:16b-17 NRS)

But in exile, or in the bowels of some foreign empire the possibilities for doing something about it are severely limited, so God’s passionate concern for the poor translates into the repeated exhortation to give alms. Give, that is, to those at the bottom, to those who have no realistic prospect of paying you back or returning the favor.

The language for this practice is important: that “give alms” that we heard could be translated more literally as “do mercy.” “Doing mercy” is, of course, broader than giving alms, and in Tobit includes Tobit’s dangerous practice of burying discarded bodies. But “doing mercy” often, from context, means “giving alms” and that’s important because it connects the mercy we hope to receive from God with the mercy we’re exhorted to show to those who need it.

Being in exile makes it difficult to follow the Law’s commands regarding gifts for the sanctuary. And in exile the faithful connect those commands with almsgiving. So earlier in Tobit we hear Tobit tell his son Tobias:

Indeed, almsgiving, for all who practice it, is an excellent offering in the presence of the Most High. (4:11)

This shows up in other writings of this period (Sirach), and lies behind some of Jesus’ teaching on almsgiving:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. (Mat 6:19-20)

We, probably, are at a point somewhere between the prophets’ audience and Tobit’s audience. We have some power to “do something about it” with regard to the condition of the poor, and to that degree we need to listen to the prophets. But we often don’t have the power to do much, and to that degree we need to listen to Tobit, and pay attention to whether some of our resources are going into mercy, helping those in no position to return the favor. So Tobit is, alas, not particularly helpful for a capital gifts campaign, but very relevant when we pass the plate for the Middleton Outreach Ministry.

Bless God & Give alms

How do you live when you’re off the map? Bless God and give alms.

Looking at these two themes we might think of them as pointing to the twin virtues of gratitude and generosity. I could go on about this for a good stretch, but I’ll leave that for you in the coming week. Notice how many elements in our culture work against any sense of gratitude. Notice how nurturing gratitude, also through the practice of blessing God, helps us see our world more clearly. Notice how gratitude, in turn, frees us for generosity. The world is not zero-sum. God continually drenches the world with gifts. All of us have the privilege of blessing God for it, and mirroring God’s generosity in our own.

The privilege, that is, of doing so with Tobit and Anna, Raguel and Edna, Tobias and Sarah. And that’s not bad company.

[1] The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth (1998) 742.