BLOGGING-THOMAS
St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle
We live in the middle
Sep 8th
I must admit that I’ve been quite taken aback by the conservative, indeed reactionary uproar over Barack Obama’s “Back to School Event” remarks scheduled for later today in Arlington, VA. What’s happened when we have public school parents who are indignant over the very prospects of their children’s President advising them to “get to work at school – it’s for you and America”?
Is there now nothing that anyone tending to the right or to the left can say that isn’t perceived by the other as partisan, toxic, noxious? Eugene Robinson in today’s Washington Post reflects on the same loss in the debate about health, “A Middle Ground Gone Missing“.
It’s hard to remember that as recent as five years ago Time magazine could still plausibly editorialize that supposed deep divisions in American society were mere myths.
I had come to expect that when Episcopalians, and then Lutherans, took actions that were actually inclusive of GLBT clergy candidates for ordination, there would be an outcry. Or that when Sarah Palin tweeted the liberals would hoot.
But when the President can’t speak to school children without ‘the opposition’ (i.e. those who didn’t vote for him) refusing to let them listen lest they be corrupted by his contrary points of view, I have to admit there’s a likely prospect that our divisions are not only deeper than we imagined, but deepening at a rate that should concern us all.
Yet we don’t live ‘on the fringe’ but ‘in the middle’ — we expect people to drive on the right side of the road, and shop in the same grocery stores, and work in the same offices, no matter what their political views. This week, however, we’ve been given an ugly glimpse of a society where monotone politics determines everything.
Let’s choose not to go there.
A General Convention Report
Jul 13th
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Prepared by Eric Scharf
As you should know by now the Triennial General Convention is meeting this week in Anaheim, CA. This is the primary legislative body of the church setting forth the policy and program on a national level for the next three years.
Of particular interest to St. Thomas’ members are two issues; consecration of GLBT priests living opening in committed relationships and same gender unions/marriage.
The first issue addressed the consequences of a resolution adopted at the previous General Convention (titled B033) that called for a moratorium on “the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.” This issue has been the cause of wide ranging debate and discussion throughout the worldwide communion over the past three years.
A number of resolutions were proposed to further address the issue, which were considered by the General Convention World Mission Committee. They developed one combined resolution D025 to bring to the convention floor for consideration. The key clause reads “That the 76th General Convention affirm that God has called and may call such individuals, to any ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church, which call is tested through our discernment processes acting in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church.” Other sections of the resolution address our continuing commitment to the Anglican Communion. The full text as finally completed will be available later this week.
Sunday evening the House of Deputies passed D025 by a vote of 77-31 in the lay order and 74-35 in the clerical order. The resolution now goes to the House of Bishops for their concurrence.
Jim Naughton, Communications Director for the Diocese offered this assessment of the D025:
“My sense is that the resolution doesn’t repeal or rescind B033, which in any event urged but did not compel. Rather it expresses the fact that we live now in a new reality. It does not so much pave the way for the election of another bishop in a same-sex partnership as it does remove an artificial impediment to our ongoing discernment on this issue that may, resume diocese by diocese and case by case. I think the resolution will face a much tougher climb in the House of Bishops.”
While for many this resolution will not represent a strong enough action, however it probably represents the best compromise that is possible at this time. It has not been announced when the House of Bishops will consider D025.
As for the second issue, again a number of resolutions to both amend the Canons to allow the performance of same-gender blessings or marriage rites and others to develop rites for these.
The collective resolutions were the subject of a legislative hearing on July 9th which heard from more than 50 speakers. On July 13 a major resolution (c056) on same sex blessings cleared the Prayer Book Committee by a huge margin (6-0 among bishops, 26-1 in deputies.) The key clause states: That all bishops, noting particularly those in dioceses within civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships’ are legal, may provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of members of this Church. Bishop Henry Parsley supported the resolution, but in a minority report will argue that the “generosity” in the resolve noted above be limited to states where same sex marriage is legal. Further action in the House of Bishops has not yet been scheduled.
For more information on these issues and following further developments the following resources are suggested: Integrity General Convention Presence — http://sites.google.com/site/allthesacraments/Home
Hellooooooooooooo Epis-pickle-palians!
Jul 13th
VirtuallyFaithful here! Are you following General Convention? You should. But not too closely.
It’s like watching a waterfall — powerful and inspiring, but get too close and it’ll knock you over. You also don’t want to pay too much attention to all the droplets slashing out on the rocks. Go downstream a bit. Watch the water flow. Sometimes the stream itself will shift a little. Most times it doesn’t, because the total force of the stream is far bigger and more important than any few hundred or even thousand gallons that get dumped in all at once.
When light shines on all those exquisite drops, rainbows appear, as is right. But the rainbows aren’t to be confused with the waterfall, or the stream that drives it. No stream, no waterfall. No waterfall, no rainbows. So don’t just look at the rainbows alone. But do notice them. They are, after all, one of God’s favorite signs of unbreakable covenant with us all.
Listen to the water. God speaks through the mystery of that sound. It’s a different voice than you hear in Washington Weekly or on talk-radio, or even online in blog posts like this. It’s more subtle. Less in your face and pugnacious (there’s a word for you!). God’s like that. Really faithful to us. While we’re virtually faithful, at best, in return. That’s what it is to be the church. So watch and listen, but more to God than to General Convention. But since we’re the Episcopal Church, watch and listen to what’s going on there, too. God may even choose to speak from the maelstrom, again.
A quiet week in DC Northeast
Jun 23rd
It was a quiet week in Washington Northeast . . . . At least until the Metro crash. I had just arrived home from teaching French at Catholic University of America when vehicle after emergency vehicle went wailing off towards where I had just come from, and auto theft alarms and the hundred-thirty-pound Rottweiler next door (incongruously named Flossie) raised up their voices in orgasmic worship of the siren gods. Great fun until I turned on the news and learned what it was all about; it will be some time before I hear another really really loud fire engine and say, “Cool.”
It was a less quiet week for the fellow doctoral students whom I’m coaching through their language qualification exams in French and German. It’s easy enough for me to concoct a quiz question like, Circle the correct completion: Elles sont (a) allé (b) allés (c) allées. Not so easy for George, laboriously mastering his first foreign language at thirty, or Dave, trying to memorize conjugations while his wife is weeks away from delivering their second child and he is entertaining The House Guests from Hell – old college friends with a four-year-old, the three of them fighting like cats and dogs. Being a doctoral student at Catholic U is not a stress-free occupation.
And, curiously, especially not so for my fellow students who are Catholic.
I’m free to float past the authority claims, the arguments against permitting use of condoms in any circumstance (though shouldn’t we take care to protect lives now, so we can attend to souls later?), and the posters for pro-life novenas and campus chastity drives. My Catholic colleagues are not. Sally, an historical theologian in my German class, understands what was lost at Vatican I (1870), when the teaching authority of the church was taken away from university theologians and given to an ordained hierarchy lumbered with its own claim of infallibility. As a committed Catholic, she is stuck with living in an institution that now will not, because it cannot, ever overrule itself; there will be no Brown vs. Little Rock-equivalent doctrinal declaration in her lifetime.
By historical accident, not by superior wisdom, we Anglicans arrived at a different understanding of authority. Queen Elizabeth, knowing she faced the possibility of religious civil war in sixteenth-century England, created a Church of England that demanded uniformity of worship but knew better than to seek uniformity in how that worship was understood; “I desire not,” quoth she, “windows into men’s souls.” We were left free, individually but in community, to decide for ourselves what Scripture is really saying to us and what God demands of and for us in the major decisions of our lives. This has its own risks; where a Roman Catholic polity can be as centripetal as a black hole, ours can be as centrifugal as a dandelion gone to seed.
It also calls us to a different kind of responsibility, both in individual discernment and in balancing individual discernment with the demands of living in a communion that functions by consent and consensus. For some of us, the question is how to balance the conviction that in-church blessings of same-sex unions are not merely lawful but demanded by God’s justice, with the regrettable but deeply felt reluctance of African bishops to countenance any such thing. For others, the question is how to live with being answerable for so many choices. One of my German students is a cradle Episcopalian who became a Catholic in search of greater certainty. The infallibility of Pope in Council is for him the foundation of all spiritual security, and he scraps about it continually with Sally. Their most recent blow-up (not, thank heavens, in my class room) was about, of all things, the validity of Anglican ordinations. She, arguing for, thought the matter was still open for theological discussion. He, against, was quoting canons of Vatican I. Verbatim. In Latin.
Desmond Tutu has asked for a sense of proportion in the Anglican Communion’s debate about sexuality and authority; why is this one sin, if it be a sin, so much more important than any other? Yesterday’s Metro crash, also, is a call to perspective; are we really going to enquire into firefighters’ personal sexual orientations before letting them go into the wrecked cars to pull out passengers? Action is as important as purity of doctrine; our faith doesn’t count for much if it doesn’t take us outside ourselves and outside our immediate faith communities to serve Christ in the world. And our discernment isn’t on the right track if it makes us less, not more, charitable towards those who disagree with us. My gut reaction to Bishop Akinola is to reject him as vitriolically as he rejects me. But then I remember what living in Nigeria was like, how the culture operated, and I can see – just – how many of the authoritarian certainties that represent safety to him are threatened if two men are free to kiss. Anger and fear are joined at the hip; it is his fear that makes him angry, and we can insist that it is time for the church to endorse the blessing of same-sex unions, not later but now, and still pray for his fear. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
It’s Summer Now, Forget Easter
Jun 7th
Reading the headlines of today’s newspaper, sitting here on my front porch after church, I’m struck that page one shows no evidence at all that the hope and promise of Easter — when God makes all things new — has had even a ripple of effect on headline-worthy news.
“Ambivalence,” “frenetic,” “desperate,” are the most visible words above the fold. These definitely are not Easter words. These are not words of faith, but fear. And the words of the Risen Christ began with “Fear Not.”
A closer read past A1 doesn’t fare much better. For example, the vice-chairman of GM is quoted as staking the future of the now-bankrupt automaker on the belief that “a car is not a washing machine — the proof of which is that people do not lust after their washing machines.” According to Michael Leavey’s article about GM’s Bob Lutz, “A gorgeous car, he says, is an expression of power and yearning, especially for owners who hope the vehicles will inject excitement and romance into their otherwise mundane lives.”
If this car exec is right, how does the Good News of Easter compete with the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS with a V-8 engine that greets passengers arriving in the terminal of Detroit Metropolitan Airport these days? I find it appalling that when workers and consumers alike are struggling to buy any car at all, to get to jobs that may or may not be there, GM is still being run on a desire for power, yearning, excitement, and romance for our “mundane lives”. And it’s one thing that GM thinks this is the way it should be; it’s even more distressing that we allow the Easter message to appear to be so impotent in the face of such empty promises.
Or what are we to make of Dana Milbank’s column about a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter whose “family didn’t hold his memorial service in a church,” but in “the Newseum. It was a perfect choice to honor a man for whom newspapering was a civic religion”? O.k. The deceased obviously wasn’t very religious. What caught my attention, however, was that this was the son and brother of mainline Protestant ministers — and that so many of us live as if the Good News itself is just around the corner from being installed into the Newseum. If so, forget building new churches.
I believe, however that Christians are not supposed to read the headlines as if Easter really doesn’t matter. And if so, then now most of all is the time we need to overcome our own frenetic, desperate, ambivalence and do whatever is in our power to make sure there is a place big enough and inviting enough for the Good News of Easter to be preached and experienced and lived out tomorrow for all who would draw near to hear.
Out of all those people who got all gussied-up for Easter, at least some of us ought to be deeply troubled that we so easily forget Easter, and read over the news of the day as if Easter not only doesn’t but actually shouldn’t make any difference in the way we talk about our lives, much less live them out in the ‘real world’, God forbid.
Otherwise, we should just forget Easter. It’s summer now. Head on out to the beach and start saving for that Camaro SS V-8.
Sunday Salon – Gospel for Advent Three
Dec 8th
The Sunday Salon (each week at 10 a.m. between the two main worship services) focuses on the Gospel Lesson being read and preached-about that day.
To help you get ready for Sunday, here’s the Gospel Lesson for Advent Three, also known as The Third Sunday in Advent. It’s followed by the Rector’s notes on the lesson from the current issue of The Phoenix, plus some suggestions for your prayer and reflection time during the following week.
Gospel Lesson for Advent Three – December 14
John 1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. 14And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
15(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
19This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” 20He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” 21And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” 22Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. 24Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” 26John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, 27the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” 28This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.
Surprisingly we find ourselves in the first chapter of John’s gospel this week, the first 28 verses. John is assuring us that a significant moment has arrived in all of history, bringing change and change’s companion – challenge. How do we prepare the way for his coming? Prayer is an essential part of our Christian vocation.
During next week, December 15-20, pray daily that God would come in the midst of our most menial tasks of love and the costliest struggles of survival. Expectant prayer is an attitude of life, a focus on God’s presence in the here & now. It’s our collective crying out in the face of human need and a position of trust that shouts hope. (The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Rector – from The Phoenix, December 1, 2008)
Selling Advent
Dec 3rd
There are almost as few things for sale with an Advent-theme as there are Lenten-collectibles. Lent, of course, is focused on the events leading up to the end of Jesus’ life at the age of thirty-three. Lent is a hard sell, and few people try to make a living off of Lenten trinkets.
But it comes as a surprise to many of us that one of the central themes of Advent is the final judgment. Advent, we are jolted to learn, isn’t just about waiting for the baby Jesus in the manger, but also our anticipation of the end of all things at the last judgment when Christ comes back on ‘the last day’ as the Lord of all of creation for all time .
No wonder that both seasons – Lent and Advent – are ‘hard sells’. They are, after all, periods for introspection about “the time of this mortal life” (BCP, 211), and thus have a certain ‘penitential’ quality to them – a tone of giving-up or turning-loose of our attachment to ‘things’. So ‘selling Advent’ sounds like an oxymoron, if not just in bad taste.
As a result, we are left with Advent Wreaths and Advent Calendars for the most part, although personally I can never find where I put the four-candle-styrofoam-form last year for my wreath, and I always get to about December 15th before I realize that I’m ten days behind with my calendar already, and give in to sloth.
So it’s been interesting to think about whether there are actually any ‘consumer goods’ out there with Advent themes that are worth considering even in an age of recession. The trick, of course, is how not to fast-forward to Christmas, even when trying to celebrate Advent — like this Nativity Advent Wreath I found for sale online this week.
In protest you could wear an “It’s Only Advent” button while you’re out doing your Christmas 
shopping. Or you you could be less self-righteous than I tend to be and look at a wonderful website and blog by the artist Jan Richardson to see some of her fabulous Advent art and to buy one of her Advent books – Nancy and I own Night Visions and have just ordered The Advent Door.
Here’s someone who’s been captivated by Advent, and her art can unleash a whole new set of associations about this special season.
Spend some time looking at her Advent Hours Series of Greeting Cards, or one of her fantastic prints, like “Wise Women Also Came.”
Advent is such a curious season for so many Christians because it invites us to entertain the possibility that God chose to be in our midst precisely because creation is one of God’s favorite places to be. God took flesh, became incarnate, because our flesh was worthy of bearing God … then … and still is now.
It’s hard to sell Advent because we’ve been so thoroughly taught that our bodies are bad that we can no longer even imagine they are good enough to be God’s place to dwell. So we wait in Advent for this miracle to become ours again … althought it is already, if we were only awake enough to see it.
“Ike” Eisenhower and the Advent Calendar
Dec 2nd
Leave it to the BBC for trivia you can count on:
“The first advent calendars appeared in 19th-Century Germany, when various methods of counting the days between the start of Advent and Christmas Day were used. Starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, or simply on 1 December, the Protestant Christians would keep track of the days by making marks on their doors with a piece of chalk, which would then be rubbed off one by one as Christmas approached. Other practices then developed, including burning a candle or putting up a small religious picture to mark each day.
There is some disagreement as to when the first printed advent calendars appeared, although it is clear that they were first produced at some time in the 1900s. There are claims that a Christian bookshop in Hamburg produced a ‘Christmas Clock’ in 1902, and a newspaper in Stuttgart is known to have included an advent caldendar in its pages in 1904. However, the first mass producer of advent calendars is thought to have been Gerhard Lang, who worked at the Reichhold & Lang printing office in Munich. He released his first advent calendar in 1908 and had a steady business going which produced over thirty patterns of calendar until some time in the 1930s. The calendars would usually have 24 doors, but tended to be better-decorated than modern versions.
Soon enough, calendars were being designed with little doors or pouches which contained small religious pictures or bible extracts. Better still, some of the calendars also contained sweeties in order to keep the attention of young children. The practice escalated up until the Second World War, when paper and cardboard were rationed and advent-calendar production ground to a halt. Once the war ended, though, the production began again, pioneered by Richard Sellmer in 1946.
The introduction of the advent calendar to the USA was aided by ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, whose grandchildren took a shine to the idea. The calendar was soon adopted in other countries too, and in the UK chocolates began to appear behind the little doors as soon as rationing would allow. By the end of the 1950s, chocolate advent calendars had appeared, and by the following decade they had become widespread. They still exist today, with hundreds of different varieties appearing across the globe.”
Three of the best online are the Full Homely Divinity Advent Calendar — the Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s fifth annual 2008 Advent Calendar — and the BBC’s wonderful, musical Bach Christmas Calendar. Bookmark each of them (or just your favorite) and check each day for a new surprise.
Advent anticipation
Nov 30th
There are two seasons in the church year that ask us to wait.
During Lent we wait for the pivotal stories of Holy Week, and Good Friday, Holy Saturday …. and Easter. Forty days we wait, with a growing sense of the immensity of what lies ahead, and our own insufficiency in the face of God’s time of need.
During Advent, the season beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas, we are also asked to wait. But now the waiting has an entirely different flavor. It is the waiting, to use Shakespeare’s phrase from the Merchant of Venice, “With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness.” It is the waiting for God’s entrance into our home, this place earth.
It is long enough for us to be admonished to “keep awake” — for it will come as a surprise, “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.” We are admonished, too, to “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Yet there is no doubt that the point is for us to be ready “to greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer” (BCP, Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent).
Our waiting for the child in Bethlehem is “Advent anticipation” – the expectation of the unexpected. We cannot imagine what form God is already waiting for us to experience, as we, too, discover our own flesh as capable of bearing Christ into the world. We wait in anticipation that this year again, God will make our flesh God’s own “proper habitation” (Richard Hooker).
Obama?
Nov 6th
I blew it. I was so sleepy Wednesday morning that it never occurred to me to go invest in history and plunk down 50 cents for a Washington Post. I’m told I could have found one until about 10 a.m., had I looked hard enough. The problem was that I didn’t think about it until 7 p.m. last night.
I needed to go out to walk for exercise anyway (as my spouse reminded me!), so with audacity I put on my navy HOPE hooded sweatshirt and pants (from the college, not the campaign), and loped on over to Georgia Avenue NW, which angles through my neighborhood.
It’s a sort of liminal zone between two economic, although not racial, worlds — on both sides live mostly “people of color” (predominantly and historically African American), although the colors represented now are salted with caucasians here and there. Economically, however, the divide is more stark.
The neighborhoods on the side of Georgia Ave where I live manifest different levels of hope … and fulfillment. But for everyone, hope is a plausible proposition. When you look at the dc.gov website’s crime statistics, though, the little circles marking crime sites in the past year litter Georgia Avenue itself. Even lots of NE (Northeast) DC is now “on the way up” — but Georgia Ave has blocks and blocks of tiny neighborhood stores notable for their bullet proof plexiglass cages for the cashiers and burglar bar coverings on every inch of explosed glass.
Last night, these were the establishments that called my name. I went out cruising about twenty 
blocks of Georgia Avenue looking for the most elusive commodity in Washington, DC: an “Obama Makes History” edition of the Washington Post!
Which led me to the only establishments that were open (besides a couple of drug stores, a smattering of fast food restaurants, and two tiny, sad liquor stores) — those little markets that usually don’t look all that inviting even when the chain-link is off the windows and the lights are on and the doors are open.
Last night, however, I was a man with a purpose. Four quarters in my sweat pants pocket, I tried the first one I came two. Two Hispanic men looked up as I asked, “any newspapers left?” Then seeing a rack with El Tiempo Latino and La Nacion, I added, “Washington Posts”? At which point both men smiled, saying almost in unison, “Obama?” “Si, Obama” I squeezed out. “No, no, no,” they replied, and then an avalanche of Spanish I didn’t understand. I smiled back, waved goodbye and went on my way.
My whole walk went like that. I’d walk in a store, point at the empty newspaper rack and say “Obama?” and almost before I could get out “Do you have anymore Washington Posts?” either the clerk or other customers would smile and say, “Obama!” followed by sad “No, no, no’s” about the newspaper and then cascades of laughter and banter in several languages I honestly couldn’t identify — maybe Korean in one store, and finally English in at least two or three — but always happy, sometimes boastful, othertimes self-congratulatory, never inhospitable words about the miracle of their new President: “Obama!”
I know it won’t last. Just remember the shift from 9/11 to the anniversary of “Shock and Awe” and it’s clear that this honeymoon won’t last forever. Things will happen that will dim the memory and tarnish the glow a bit and re-insert suspicion into our exchanges with even our neighbors.
For a few days, now, though, I can walk down the sidewalk in 16th Street Heights, or stand at the 14th Street bus stop, or get off the Fairfax Connector in Herndon, VA, and my neighbors, fellow commuters, and even Ziggy, the middle-aged Coptic Orthodox Ethiopian engineer who I often visit with as we walk from the bus to our respective places of employment — all of us, with the utterance of just one word, smile, and are joined together: “Obama!” And there’s a story to tell.
And there’s hope! Hope that change really is on the way. Hope that we’re all up to it. Hope for what we share, not what in many cases still obviously divides us.
No. I never found a Post. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I just read online that the Post is printing 350,000 more commemorative-edition copies that will go on sale in the morning. I’m headed to Georgia Avenue first thing tomorrow morning, this time to the CVS Pharmacy, which is listed as a Post distributor for these treasures. And … this is hard to admit … just in case, I just bought a copy from Cafe Press for $9.95 + postage and shipping. “Obama Makes History.” And I admit I want a piece of it while it lasts.
