A wonderful French comedy-drama film based on a true story. Terrific acting, lovely music, great scenes from Paris, and all deeply touching. The official website is here. Check it out if you have not done so–KSH (Hat tip: Abigail Harmon).

We wish Kendall a very Happy Birthday today.

Part of the Christ St Paul’s Lent Series: Into the Wilderness
Listen here if you wish.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

In the season of Lent 2013, the Titusonenine blog needs to shift in terms of its focus and character.
There are a number of reasons for this, but let me cite several.

First, I have had a significant change in my personal circumstances. My father, as a number of you know, came down to South Carolina suddenly in 2012, in need of skilled nursing care. Since getting him an original place to be looked after, we wanted to move him closer to ourselves here in Summerville if possible, and recently a spot has opened up at the Presbyterian Home here (they now call themselves “The Village at Summerville”).

Dad has just moved to this new facility in early 2013. He is 80, and neither of us is getting any younger. My wife and I would like to see him more often, and this is a wonderful opportunity.

Also, my right knee has been a continuing and worsening problem. A number of years back I had surgery for a torn meniscus. Then a couple of years ago the pain began to inch up to the point of being more and more of a distraction and obstacle. It was time to go to the doctor (yuck). I have now been to two specialists, both of whom say I need a knee replacement. When this was first proposed, I nearly screamed (by the way I am not getting older and not in denial either [g]). Now that both of them and my wife and my co-worker at the parish where I serve have said it is time, the jig is up. It looks like the procedure will be in the late spring. I need to get ready.

Second, the situation in the diocese is demanding. The conflict with the national Episcopal Church is a real mess and it is not only personally and emotionally draining, it is spiritually challenging. True, is also an opportunity, but I need to retool the engines so to speak in order to live into that possibility.

Thirdly, the parish where I serve is headed into a new Lenten series entitled “into the wilderness.” The more I wrestled and prayed with the theme the more appropriate I sensed it would be for me to be more in the wilderness also in terms of a blog break.

Finally, although I can scarcely believe it, this blog has been in operation for ten years as of next month. Somehow that timing, also, makes this choice appropriate.

In any event, with the exception of some Anglican and South Carolina news and developments, blog posts will focus on theological and devotional topics as well as open threads on edifying discussion topics, and I will be posting occasionally with help from others.

I wish all of you a blessed lent 2013, and ask your prayers for myself, my family and the diocese of South Carolina. Thank you for your readership, participation, and support””KSH.

Are human beings born good or born with a volcanic anti-God allergy in their hearts? Answering this theological question is one of THE great challenges for Christians as we stand on the brink of a new millennium.
On one side of the divide stands Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Men and women “are born free,” he famously said in his Social Contract, yet “everywhere” they are “in chains.” Rousseau believed that we are born good. His explanation for the deep problems in the world? They came to us from outside us. Error and prejudice, murder and treason, were the products of corrupt environments: educational, familial, societal, political, and, yes, ecclesiastical.

Note carefully that the FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM is located outside men and women, and the MEANS of evil developing comes from the outside in. The NATURE of the problem is one of environment and knowledge.
Augustine (354-430) saw things very differently. Describing the decision by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Augustine writes in The City of God: “Our parents fell into open disobedience because they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it.” The motive for this evil will was pride. “This is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself ”¦ By craving to be more” we “became less;” and “by aspiring to be self-sufficing,” we “fell away from him who truly suffices” us.
For Augustine, men and women as we find them today are creatures curved in on themselves. We are rebels who, rather than curving up and out in worship to God, instead curved in and down into what Malcolm Muggeridge once termed “the dark little dungeon of our own” egos.

In this view the FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM is located inside men and women, and the means of evil developing comes from the inside out (note Jesus’ reasoning in Mark 7:18-23). The NATURE of the problem is one of the will.

The difference between Augustine and Rousseau could not be more stark. In a Western world permeated by Rousseau, we need the courage to return to the challenge and depth of Augustine’s insight.
To do so makes the good news of the gospel even better. Think of Easter. What is the image which Paul uses to describe what occurs when a man or woman turns to Christ? New Creation (2 Corinthians 5:17)! Jesus rose to transform the entire created order from the inside out, beginning with our evil wills which he replaces with “a new heart”¦and a new spirit” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Glory Hallelujah!

–Kendall S. Harmon from a piece in 2007

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Burkina Faso played wonderfully well with a great deal of heart.

My thanks to ESPN 3 for making it possible for me to watch my first ever Africa Cup of Nations final–KSH.

Update: There is a lot more there.

Elizabeth and I finally got to this and it was simply lovely in every sense. Touching, moving, well acted and produced–it has all the hallmarks of a true story, based as it is on the diaries of one who worked as a midwife as it is–KSH.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

I believe the hardest job in America today is that of being a Roman Catholic parish priest.

Perhaps the most challenging single job this year is that of Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The spiritual leader of 500,000 people in one of the most heavily Roman Catholic regions in the United States, Hughes, according to the New York Times, had to put together a diocese “in exile.” The task was to reorganize the Archdiocese, including a charitable network and 104 parochial schools, inBaton Rouge. Can you imagine?

“I never thought the Lord was going to ask me to take this on at 72,” said the Archbishop. Indeed.
And here is where faith in the child in the manger comes in. Looking out at all the flooding, devastation, looting and loss, the reporter asked Alfred Hughes whether he still had hope.

He declared: “Absolutely. Absolutely. That is the root of our faith.”

“The most important thing is to not doubt God’s presence and God’s saving and transforming grace,” he continued. “I’m convinced that God is going to purify us through this.”

What a bracing affirmation in the midst of so many who are tempted to soften Christmas into a Hallmark Card these days. “In the bleak midwinter,” Christine Rossetti reminds us, “frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

Talk about bleak ”” how about New Orleans after Katrina? Yet the good Archbishop says “I am convinced.” If there can be light in the bleakness of Bethlehem, in the miry initial despair of New Orleans after such a fury of nature, there can ALWAYS be hope. For the light shines in the darkness at Christmas, and the darkness has not and never will overcome it.

–The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall S. Harmon from 2005

WELCOME TO TITUS ONE NINE

The sixth part of an Introduction to Acts from Christ St Paul’s added on January 4, 2013

Acts Lesson 6 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.
Earlier videos are below

Acts Lesson 5 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

Acts Lesson 4 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

Acts – Lesson 3 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

Acts Lesson 2 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

Acts Lesson 1 from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

Christina Rossetti’s words pierce my heart at Christmas, year after year:

“Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas, Star and angels gave the sign.”
It is worth pausing and pondering the answer to the question: how deep and how broad was that love?

To move with me toward an answer, journey to a small chapel in Cartmell Fell, a little known holy place in the North of England. If you know where to look when you arrive there ”“ the stone is half hidden in the chancel ”” you can find a 1771 inscription with elegant lettering:

“Underneath this stone a mouldering Virgin lies,
Who was the pleasure once of Human Eyes.
Her Blaze of Charms Virtue once approved
The Gay admired her, much the parents loved.
Transitory life! Death untimely came.
Adieu, farewell, lonely leave my name.”

The words describe Betty Poole; she was a little girl who died at age three.

Christina Rossetti also wrote:

“In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone”¦”

It is only when the bleakness of this world and its iron hardness is fully felt, that the miracle of melting which began at Christmas can penetrate and shock us into appropriate awe. God’s love enveloped the whole moaning, stony, sin-sick world. It is broad enough to embrace it all, in this world and the next.

I imagine being with Betty Poole in Heaven and hearing her say with a smile, “God’s love was bigger than I thought!”

–The Rev. Dr. Kendall S. Harmon

Does Advent in your parish serve as a season of anticipation for the second coming of Christ? It is to focus on preparing us for both comings, the first in Bethlehem and the second in glory, but Christmas preparation has gained huge precedence in the last century.

It wasn’t always thus. Advent was once a time for hearing about the last four things, death, judgment, heaven and hell. A word about heaven is apt here.

The Scriptures teach that we were made by the God of heaven, in Jesus Christ heaven begins now on earth, and we are ultimately destined for the fullness of that heaven. And what is heaven? A place of rejoicing in and seeing God’s glory reflected in creation, a place of family reunion, of ultimate worship, of the final homecoming, and of the joyful face to face encounter with God himself who loves us more than we could ever imagine.

Why focus on our ultimate destiny? Because one of the most profound ways in which to think of the church is as a little glimpse of heaven on earth. So who are we called to be? A place where people are stewards over and delighters in God’s creation, a place of rich fellowship, where the stranger is welcomed and given refuge, a place of deep worship, where God is encountered in his full glory, a place of real homecoming, where people are safe to love and be loved and to develop their gifts for ministry in a context where they are free to
fail, and, finally, a place where God’s face is truly seen. Wow.

There is a vision for every church in the twenty-first century. I pray that God might grant us the grace to embrace this vision and to move forward into it together as the new millennium begins.

–The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall S. Harmon (From 2002)

While the tragedy…[at Columbine High School] continues to grip the nation, real answers for the reason behind it have so far proved elusive.

You have heard the voices. Youth culture is the problem, Hollywood is to blame. Where were the parents? What about the school officials who could have, should have, known sooner? Maybe gun availability is the culprit.

Others point the finger at the devastating impact of peer pressure, and on and on it goes.

But amidst this din of stories, analysis and commentary, there is one thing which is not being said. Its silence has become deafening, yet it begs to be heard because it points the way to a more painful, yet more hopeful answer.

Can you think of what is not being said? What is nearly always blurted out in other situations but has not been articulated in this one?

Judge not. You remember this one, don’t you? Jesus said it, right? What is fine for you is fine for you, but I have a different take on it. You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to, you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to.

But suddenly the cat is out of the bag, because the one thing everyone is doing is judging.
. To say Hollywood is showing too much violence implies there is a standard of decency which Hollywood has violated. If people are upset that the parents did not know, that implies an idea of an effective parent (involved) and a bad parent (uninvolved).

Strange word, that, BAD. Opposite of GOOD (not effective, as misused above – did you notice?)

We do not hear these words, good and bad, very much anymore, do we? What happened to the so-called “post-modern” world? I thought we were to speak of values and preferences. I thought we were not supposed to judge.

Our reaction to Littleton says volumes more than even the tragedy of Littleton itself, because it exposes our hypocrisy about judgment. We claim to live in a world of taste and lifestyle, but the moment anything of real import occurs the game shifts to be played on another field. On this field, words like God and goodness, the satanic and evil, beg to be used, because they are the only way in which to begin to wrestle with the magnitude of it all. “Anger management” classes just are not enough.

But then the guns went off, and not only our judgments poured forth, but God’s did as well. If Littleton means anything, it means God’s judgment upon an America which is losing its moral and spiritual vocabulary and imagination.

When Jesus said “judge not” in Matthew 7:1, he did not mean what he is often alleged to have meant, that we are not to judge. He calls for his followers to judge “with right judgment” (John 7:24) which is how we, like him, are able to distinguish between true and false prophets (Matt. 7:15-20).

What is at issue is what is being judged and how. The human heart and a person’s ultimate spiritual condition is something God alone can judge, but we can judge people’s behavior and words – “you will know them by their fruits” – and render partial verdicts when appropriate.

The full verse, the second half of which is frequently left off, is, “judge not, that you be not judged,” by which Jesus means we are to judge with the awareness that the standard we use on others is one which we will also be judged by.

So we are called by the judgments about Littleton [the community in Colorado where Columbine High School is located] to hear the judgment we are bringing on ourselves, and the far more important judgment God is making and will render upon us. We are indeed one nation under God.

As applicable today as when I first wrote it–KSH.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

I listened to NPR yesterday for over an hour back and forth from a doctors appointment.

The entire time they talked about President Obama’s proposal to implement the middle class tax cut now.
Everywhere I turn its middle class tax cut, middle class tax cut…

Except it isn’t but no one thinks about these things.

What is being proposed is not letting the current tax code STAY THE SAME.
So 98% of Americans WON”T HAVE A TAX INCREASE.

Since when is not having an increase a cut?

Anyone you know say I am getting the same number of days vacation this year as last year I am angry I get a benefits cut!

Listen to it all if you so desire.

People in the early twenty-first century seem to struggle to be thankful. One moving story on this topic concerns a seminary student in Evanston, Illinois, who was part of a life-saving squad. On September 8, 1860, a ship called the Lady Elgin went aground on the shore of Lake Michigan near Evanston, and Edward Spencer waded again and again into the frigid waters to rescue 17 passengers. In the process, his health was permanently damaged. Some years later he died in California at the age of 81. In a newspaper notice of his death, it was said that not one of the people he rescued ever thanked him.
Today is a day in which we are to be reminded of our creatureliness, our frailty, and our dependence. One of the clearest ways we may express this is to seek to give thanks in all circumstances (Philippians 4:6).

I am sure today you can find much for which to give thanks: the gift of life, the gift of faith, the joy of friends and family, all those serving in the mission field extending the reach of the gospel around the world, and so much else. I also invite you to consider taking a moment at some point today to write a note of thanksgiving to someone who really made a difference in your life: possibly a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a minister or a parent. You might even write to the parish secretary, the sexton, or the music minister in the parish where you worship; they work very hard behind the scenes.

”“The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall S. Harmon is the convenor of this blog and takes this opportunity to give thanks for all blog readers and participants and to wish everyone a blessed Thanksgiving

WELCOME TO TITUS ONE NINE

Spiritual Disciplines Study from Christ St Pauls on Vimeo.

I always felt this election was between a weak incumbent and a weak campaign, and that view has not changed. I knew it was going to be very close at the popular level, and said to several friends that the only way Mitt Romney stood a chance electorally was to win Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. He lost all three.

So why did we have this outcome? There are a lot of reasons, but in my view the main ones are these:

The incumbency is a powerful thing–always has been, but all the more so today when the (office and position of the) Presidency has gained more power (too much power?) than before.

Let us remember that governing is MUCH harder than campaigning, and the two are not the same. And let us continue to pray that God has mercy on America–KSH.

Update: I found it interesting to go back and reread what I wrote about the 2008 campaign–Why What Happened Happened in Election 2008.

There is a lot of gobbledook floating around on this election so it is important to cut to the bottom line:

(3) This is a weird year. I absolutely, positively am skeptical of many polls and much of the analysis–KSH.