Listen it all.

He looks very suspicious to me (g)–KSH.

(What follows–which I decided may be of interest to blog readers–is the email I sent late last week in answers to a reporter’s questions; none of the wording has been changed–KSH).

1. Could you provide me with some background on the process of accusation and acquittal?

Some parishioners in the Diocese of South Carolina believed a threshold had been crossed whereby Bishop Lawrence had abandoned the communion of The Episcopal Church. They submitted evidence to support this, alleging multiple violations. Under relatively recently instituted new procedures the allegations went to the Disciplinary Board of Bishops. They met over conference call and decided the charges were sufficiently serious to merit further consideration. Bishop Lawrence was informed of this fact by the chair of the committee and the Diocese made public the allegations against the Bishop on its website. There were numerous complications in the process along the way, but eventually the committee met and “the Board” as a whole “was unable to make the conclusions essential” to certifying merit in the charges.

2. What is your opinion of the Church’s decision?

We are relieved at the decision and thankful for the hard work of the people involved. We are, however, deeply troubled by the process, a process which the diocese itself has believed is unholy and unhelpful (and most especially that it was passed unconstitutionally).A careful reading of the statement of the committee on their decision reveals a troubling underlying tone of institutional pressure to conform which is sadly lacking in grace. Even more upsetting, it reflects a larger pattern of those in The Episcopal Church’s leadership of the use the external push of canons to achieve desired ends which only the Holy Spirit and genuinely Christian relationships can produce.

3. What is Bishop Lawrence’s opinion of homosexuality? Has the Episcopal Church taken the wrong position?

The position of the diocese is the position of the ecumenical consensus of Christians East and West through the church’s history: there are only two states of human beings, singleness and marriage, and the only proper context for the expression of sexual intimacy is between a man and a woman who are married to each other. This remains the current standard of the Anglican Communion, the third largest Christian body in the world.This standard must be maintained with pastoral sensitivity by the church in local practice where we seek to balance truth and love.

As the Thirty-Nine Articles make clear, church councils can do and make errors and we believe there have been multiple erroneous decisions made by TEC senior leaders on this matter in the last decade or more. We are also more and more troubled that such wrongful decisions are increasingly allowed to be promoted in local practice, while senior leadership claims that other standards are being upheld. This has led to increasing chaos in our own province as well as sowed disunity through the Anglican Communion.

4. Many Episcopalians left the Church over its progressive theology and started their own denominations, yet lest I am mistaken Bishop Lawrence has remained with the Episcopal Church. What keeps him from leaving?

No one can decide to leave the church, the church is the body of Christ. Such a notion is a bizarre American anomaly which needs to be challenged at every opportunity.

Bishop Lawrence is seeking to be a faithful upholder of both evangelical truth and catholic unity. He is disturbed by the disorder involved in numerous decisions of those who through conscience have sought to worship God as Anglicans outside TEC because they felt they had no choice. At the same time he is deeply troubled by the continued movement of the Episcopal Church away from the gospel of Jesus Christ died and risen. The further TEC moves from Holy Scripture as the church has received it, the further the diocese will need to distance itself from the falsehoods being embraced. But the diocese is the main unit of the Anglican Church and the unity of the diocese needs to be protected as much as possible as this process is being lived out.

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

The global church (and Anglicans) lost a titan not long ago, when John R. W. Stott (1921-2011) passed from this world to the next. One is only now getting a sense of the stone God dropped into the pond of history through this remarkable man, as ever more ripples move through the waters of those who lives and ministries he touched.

John Stott was above all a preacher, and as such he modeled a craft that is increasingly weak in the West.

My mother taught English, and we had a life long conversation about writer-based versus reader-based prose. Good articles and books do the work for the reader, she insisted–they reach out and draw you in.

Dr. Stott was a listener-based preacher. I do not mean by this that he allowed his potential audience to set the topic; nothing could be further from the truth. He was someone who sought to expound Holy Scripture throughout his life.

But he did it though making an argument that one who heard him could follow. As you listened you had the sense that John had wrestled mightily with the text so that you would not need to. More than one person has quipped that John Stott made St. Paul more understandable than Paul himself did!

I will always remember him speaking on the Acts of the Apostles chapter 17 about the mission to Thessalonica. He observed with great care the verbs used in the passage to describe what Paul was trying to do””argue, explain, prove. Then he noted with real force that in response some were “persuaded” by what had been presented. How many times, he asked, do we hear that response to contemporary sermons?

I pray that we might learn to follow in the footsteps of this persuasive preacher. Let us wrestle hard with the text, but let us also present a coherent narrative which is easy to follow. So easy to follow, in fact, that many who did not even wish to hear it will find themselves grabbed and drawn in.

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

Listen to it all if you so desire.

On Sun., Oct. 16, 2011, age 89, of Wilmerding. Irene was born in Mt. Lebanon on July 17,1922. Beloved wife of 63 years of Edward J. Deenihan, Sr.; dear mother of John (Mary Lynn) of Chatsworth, CA, Edward J. (Kathleen) of Pleasanton, CA, Patrick (Janice) of Reno, NV, Rosemary (Orval) Choate of Nevada City, CA, Elizabeth (Kendall) Harmon of Summerville, SC, Margaret (Mark) Caruso of Winter Springs, FL, and Timothy (Jennifer) of Bridgeport, CT; sister of Leo Shaffer of Lithopolis, OH; also 14 grandchildren; daughter of the late Florenz and Mary Lageman Shaffer Lackner; also preceded in death by two sisters and one brother. Friends received at the JAMES F. FILIA FUNERAL HOME AND CREMATION SERVICE, 354 Marguerite Ave., Wilmerding on Mon. 6-8 p.m. and Tues. 2-4 and 6-8 p.m. Mass of Christian burial at St. Jude the Apostle Church on Wed. at 11 a.m. Irene was a member of St. Jude the Apostle Rosary Society for 50 years, Tuesday morning bible study group for 18 years, and delivered Meals on Wheels for over 25 years. In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial to Meals on Wheels at Linway Church, Rt. 30., East McKeesport, PA 15135 or St. Vincent DePaul Society of Pittsburgh.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Faithful mother of 7, married 63 years to Ed her husband who survives her, she was 89. We shall definitely miss her but her place in the world to come is secure.

The Rays come back from being down 7-0. One of the best base runners in the National League comes off the bag at third after successfully making it there, Jason Bourn, and is correctly called out. The Orioles have a rain delay and improbably win at the end of the ninth inning against the Red Sox. The Cardinals win and wait until the 13th inning to watch the Phillies incredibly beat the Braves.

So many things come to mind to say, but the biggest is it is not over until it is over, and you always play until the last out–KSH.

An AP story is here–read it all.

What can I say? like almost all clergy, I married up.

Watch it all.

The spirit blows where he wills, Jesus said, which means you cannot box God in.

We Anglicans have a particularly hard time with this since we are told to expect worship to be “decent and in order.” But””have you noticed–things don’t always work like that. Life is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be lived. When God is in charge patterns can be broken, expectations can be shifted, and all heaven can break loose.

One biblical story which speaks to this is the tale of Eldad and Medad in Numbers 11. Moses and the people of God are in a dispute about misfortune and food and Moses is getting blamed and feeling burdened. God asks Moses to gather seventy men among Israel’s elders who would be enabled to share the burdens of the people. It had to be done, however, outside the camp at the tent of meeting.

Moses did his part, and God came through also: “the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to ”¦[Moses], and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied (Numbers 11:25).” So far, so good.

But there was a problem. Two other men named Eldad and Medad who were not chosen by Moses and not at the tent of meeting also prophesied. Wrong people, wrong place. Uh oh.

Joshua the son of Nun objected. This isn’t according to Hoyle! It isn’t in the Vestry handbook! Moses, put a stop to it, he says.

But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!” (Numbers 11:29)

Moses is commendably open to letting God be God in a surprising way. Please note, too, that it is the younger Joshua who is unduly limited by the script and the older Moses who is willing to ad lib and go with the flow of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that all of us will learn to be less like Joshua and more like Moses in the days and years ahead, if our Lord doesn’t return first.

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

Listen to it all if you so desire.

You may find the website here.

Elizabeth and I both thought it was very good–KSH.

Standing under a funnel here–you know the feeling; KSH.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

I know you understand. Posts will be catch as catch can. I am seriously considering one open thread a day on an edifying subject so if you have suggestions for such threads please post in the comments below. Many thanks–KSH.

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.

As someone privileged to live in Canada for two years, let me take a moment to wish a happy Canada Day to all our friends north of the border–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.

Selimah Marie Harmon was born in Oxford, England, in 1993–how could she be done with secondary school already? Where does the time go?–KSH.

For one picture of her [singing] you can go here and look at photo #1 (she is in the middle, closest to the front).

You may also find the schedule here and, if interested, you may read about the school there.

Yesterday was a travel day but the news of his passing at age 65 really served as a shock. He certainly recently hadn’t looked well to me.

As one of the morning television fixtures of the past decade and a half, there were a lot of things which rushed to mind in terms of images and memories about him, but one stood out above the others. Mark was the anchor on my TV on 9/11. I remember it so well because it was a Tuesday, my day off, which is the only reason I had the TV on and was watching. He shifted in the midst of an interview and said there was a hole in the World Trade Center. He handled the rest of the morning with poise and grace.

The Lord be with his family and friends especially in the days ahead–KSH.