Listen to it all if you so desire.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Check it out if you are so inclined.

Listen to it all if you so desire. Please note that in the second section of the sermon I give a description of the eruption of Mount Saint Helen’s in 1980 in Washington State but I slip up and described it as something else.

I am up at Lake George visiting my Father for the 4th of July weekend. Worshipped this morning at Church of the Cross in Ticonderoga, New York. The vicar began the service by reading the previously posted pastoral letter by Bishop William Love–KSH.

(The original blog post on this from August, 2009 is there.)

Budde: I’m not disagreeing with that, either, except that I think it is very dangerous to take our understanding of marriage and fidelity in relationships and try to imagine that even what Jesus was saying when he spoke the words that you quoted earlier because understandings of marriage in that time and that eras is very different from how people may experience marriage today. And to imagine that Jesus was speaking to the kind of realities that we are addressing now in same-gender, lifelong, committed relationships is just a huge distortion of the Palestinian world view that he was addressing.

He was addressing property issues. He was addressing men treating women like property and disposing of them at will and calling for a more egalitarian and respectful way that — and loving way — that men and women were to deal with one another. This is a time when women were treated like chattel and to have that idea of marriage held up to the standard that God calls us to now is, I think, is trying to take any view of order which was true in the Biblical era and make that standard for us now. It flies in the face of everything we know about now about how the Holy Spirit moves and works with us over time.

Harmon: This is exactly the kind of argument I think we need to have, by the way. The difficult here is the context that becomes the trump card, notice in her remarks, is the modern context. And so the Biblical context in the ancient world gets derated and we somehow suddenly know better how the Holy Spirit works in this modern era.

What’s so crucial to point out is there is such a thing as the history of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit works through the church, especially the church globally and the church historically through time. And the church historically through time that has always understood that this kind of behavior is out of bounds and marriage is the context and what’s the height of the arrogance is that you impose this new understanding on the shoulders of the all the Christians we now understand, all the Christians around the world who haven’t been persuaded by these arguments.

Read it all or better yet listen to the whole program.

You may find the audio link here if you wish to suffer through it.

Since my area of specialization in research is eschatology, I have gotten a lot of questions about a certain individual (and his entourage of followers) getting a lot of press this past little while for stating the time of the end of the world (he thinks it is soon). I refuse to post stories on this because I am not going to give him/his group any more publicity.

So if Jesus says he doesn’t know, and if history is littered with examples of people who have confidently predicted the day with certainty and later were shown to be wrong, why should we presume to say we know? That it is coming and that it is coming “soon” we can be sure, the New Testament is quite clear on that. But as for when exactly, we don’t know. I do not know. Part of being a dependent creature is to admit there are things we simply do not know–that isn’t a bad thing, it is actually a key part of Christian witness–KSH.

The link for this was typed incorrectly yesterday, alas–KSH.

This is my Lenten talk from this past Wednesday at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Sumter, South Carolina, as part of their series on the cross. It is an mp3 file,it lasts a little more than 30 minutes and you may find the link here.

You may also be interested in the brochure for the whole series there (pdf).

One of the few voices willing to defend a more traditional form of Christianity in the twentieth century is that of C.S. Lewis. Though primarily a scholar specialising in medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis’ remarkable combination of imaginative and logical skills gave him a unique ability to portray the Christian worldview to contemporary readers. So pervasive has his influence been that Ralph Wood could write in 1991: “Lewis must be regarded as the chief Christian apologist for Christian faith in our century….[He is] our culture’s main Christian teacher.”

Heaven and hell play a vital role in C.S. Lewis’ thought in a manner highly unusual for a modern apologist….

–Kendall Harmon, Finally excluded from God? Some twentieth century theological explorations of the problem of hell and universalism with reference to the historical development of these doctrines (Oxford: Oxford University D. Phil., 1993), p.282

We hear a lot of talk about being “prophetic” in the Episcopal Church these days, but should we?

On many occasions in the last several years I have heard an Episcopal Church leader say, “we are a prophetic church; we speak truth to power.” As I write this, there is an essay in circulation with the headline “Now is the time for prophetic action.”

We need to think carefully about such words.

In the Bible, a prophet was someone who brought God’s word into a situation. God spoke to them, they listened, and sought accurately to convey what they heard to God’s people. Hence we hear such Old Testament language as “Thus says the Lord,” or, in the ministry of Jesus, when we read “it was said”¦but I say to you.”

There are no prophets in the full biblical sense any more. As far as we know, the canon of Holy Scripture is closed. But it is possible, although rare, to see in a ministry a “prophetic” element. How can we discern such a thing?

For starters, prophets are not usually self-referential and are never self-authenticating. You do not find them saying, “Hi, I am a prophet.” Indeed, quite the opposite is the case. Amos answered Amazi’ah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees”¦” (Amos 7:14).

Prophets also swim upstream in the time in which they minister. WAY upstream. If people are zigging, there may be an occasional zagger, but prophets are zuggers. They come from surprising backgrounds, speak in often shocking ways, and are most of the time greeted with disdain, opposition, hostility, or even worse. As Hebrews puts it:

“They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated — of whom the world was not worthy — wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth” (11:37-38)

Perhaps most importantly, prophets are almost always only seen fully in retrospect. When Jeremiah was ministering, many thought him crazy, and most believed him wrong. People from his home area plotted to kill him, and those in authority lowered him at one point into a pit of miry clay. They believed the temple of the Lord was impregnable and the Babylonians were never coming; it was only much later that they could see Jeremiah’s words about both were accurate.

If we use these three measuring points, are there many today who may have prophetic elements in their ministry? Perhaps; but I would venture to say that if so none of us know or recognize them as such right now, and we will be very surprised in heaven when we see the truth of how God is using them.

In the meantime, let us be cautious about such language, remembering well Jesus’ warning: “”Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15)

–The Rev. Dr. Kendall S. Harmon is Canon Theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina and the convenor of this blog

Being in the Episcopal Church these days means entering a vertiginous journey into the corruption of language. You see language which used to mean x, and in one Episcopal Church setting it is used to mean y, and then in another the same words mean z. One thinks immediately of the scene in Alice Wonderland (written as I hope you know by an Anglican deacon):

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

For a recent example of this manipulation of language to mean what it does not mean consider a piece on chastity by Richard Helmer .

Chastity, technically, is the refraining from sexual activity outside its proper context. For Christians, this has meant abstinence for those who are single and faithfulness for a wife or a husband who is married. This has been the standard for Christians throughout church history and still is for Christians worldwide today. None of this is to suggest that Christians have not struggled with sexuality, or that the understanding of sexuality and its proper use has not gone through interesting developments in the church’s life. It is also not to suggest that a very small minority of contemporary mostly Western Christians have not sought to challenge this standard. The leadership of TEC of course is part of this very small minority.

Richard Helmer is certainly correct to observe that “chastity deserves a thorough study by everyone presently involved in the tired crisis of the Anglican Communion.” It is just my hope that in doing so words are allowed to mean what the words mean and not what we want them to mean, whether in fact they mean what we say they mean or not.

One of the things you will hear in some circles of TEC is “sexuality is a sacrament.” This was actually explicitly said in a national church resource a while back.

It isn’t true, but like a lot of TEC leadership assertions these days, it contains partial truth. You may know that heresy is part of the truth masquerading as the whole truth–which is therefore actually an untruth. This statement about sexuality being “a sacrament” is an example of such a definition of heresy.

The truth is sexuality is like a sacrament and has sacramental dimensions, and it is from this vantage point that an important response to Richard Helmer can emerge.

You may know that in sacramental theology there is sometimes a distinction made between sacramental matter and sacramental form. The matter is the “stuff” or physical material involved in the sacrament, and the form is the words said and (sometimes) the sayer of such words, etc. Thus in baptism the matter is water, and the form is God’s threefold name (it can be by an authorized minister, but it actually doesn’t have to be).

We do not need to veer way off into sacramental theology at this time, the point is that in sacramental theology there is involved a what, as well as a who and how. This is not dissimilar to Thomistic ethical considerations, which tell us that any act’s moral determination comes from considering the act, the intention and the circumstance.

When these kinds of dimensions are considered, and one realizes that sexuality has many sacrament-like qualities, one can argue that sexuality is best understood by considering all its aspects, the what and the who and the how.

Now consider Father Helmer’s essay. Already one grows uneasy when one watches the essay begin without entering into the long stream of christian history in this area. What, one wants to ask, have all the Christians who have gone before us on whose shoulders we now stand, understood by this term chastity? One might have liked some Scriptural study and work as well. Instead we get a reference to chastity which has to do with “fidelity” and then a working definition as follows:

Chastity means setting aside dominance and control and seeking instead a new way to relate to the world and to God. He then goes on, quite revealingly, to say he is concerned about “a failure of chastity” which he then clarifies this way: “…I don’t mean sex outside the marriage. By chastity in marriage I mean the challenge of setting aside the stubborn drive to control or change person we most cherish.”

Now please understand that there is much in this discussion with which I would wholeheartedly agree. My concern here, though, is what this definition of chastity represents. It typifies the gnosticism present is all too much Episcopal Church thinking these days, where the how takes all precedence over the what, where form triumphs over substance. We hear talk of mutuality and faithfulness and encouragement and life enhancement and on and on and on. These are good things. But we cannot allow the how to bypass the what. We cannot allow intention and circumstance to dominate, and not ask about the act itself.

Alas, we are in a church which claims to be sacramental, but which is too often reductionistic.

Look at this paragraph from Father Helmer and see how it is all about the adjectives, is is all a world where how triumphs over what:

Chaste behavior has been in the quiet but transformative story-telling and building up of authentic relationships across the divides of gender, class, race, culture, sexuality, and ideology all across the Communion recently. Chastity allows us to be ourselves by allowing others to be themselves. Chastity makes it known when we are encountering oppression and articulates our needs as they arise. Chastity seeks honest accountability. Chastity sets aside the weapons and metaphors of war for an honest, authentic justice. Chastity endeavors to shed the harbored resentments and unmet wants of our brief lives and move forward in renewed relationship.

And what is the Alice in Wonderland outcome of such reductionism? Helmer asserts:

“Chastity has long been in evidence by those courageous, oft-threatened “firsts” of our faith who inhabit dangerous positions not for power or the quixotic pursuit of perfection, but simply by being who they are and following God’s call as best they can. The consecrations in the Diocese of Los Angeles are some of the most recent examples of this form of chastity.”

The problem here is that a woman in a same sex partnership by definition cannot be chaste, and would never have been considered chaste by our forbears. It flunks the test based on the what, no matter how much Father Helmer wants us to focus on the how. It is not just about the “form” of chastity, to have chastity one needs both form and substance.

In the world where words mean what they were given to mean, this isn’t chaste at all.

One more observation, as a kind of final irony. Even if I were to grant that it is all about form (and I don’t), this flunks the chastity test. Chastity is about “setting aside dominance and control” says Father Helmer. So many see in TEC’s actions exactly those two things, they see American unilateralism writ large.

Lord, have mercy on us.