Listen to it all (about 29 1/4 minutes).

Today we follow Jesus on a journey. We walk with him what has been called the Via Dolorosa, the way of grief. In doing so, we join with pilgrims from all over the world who go to Jerusalem, to take that ancient walk through the Old City following in his steps.

It’s still called the Via Dolorosa, the way of grief. But paradoxically Jesus always claimed that the Cross would not only be his moment of grief. It would also be his moment of glory. To the eyes of faith it would be that moment when people would see once and for all that God does not stand aloof from human pain. God accepts the pain ”“ even the pain of our sin — and turns the moment of grief into a moment of glory.

My grandparents had a painting of Christ on their bedroom wall that always fascinated me. It depicted the gray, dead body of Jesus hanging on the cross. But when you looked closely, you could see ”“ emerging from behind that gray corpse ”“ a glorious Christ, radiant and triumphant. The artist understood that the Cross was both Jesus’ moment of defeat, and also his moment of triumph.

Read it all (audio also available).

Listen to it all from the parish in which I serve, Christ Saint Paul’s Yonges Island, South Carolina, this past Sunday.

Listen to it all.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

1. In the Gospel of this radiant night of the Easter Vigil, we first meet the women who go the tomb of Jesus with spices to anoint his body (cf. Lk 24:1-3). They go to perform an act of compassion, a traditional act of affection and love for a dear departed person, just as we would. They had followed Jesus, they had listened to his words, they had felt understood by him in their dignity and they had accompanied him to the very end, to Calvary and to the moment when he was taken down from the cross. We can imagine their feelings as they make their way to the tomb: a certain sadness, sorrow that Jesus had left them, he had died, his life had come to an end. Life would now go on as before. Yet the women continued to feel love, the love for Jesus which now led them to his tomb. But at this point, something completely new and unexpected happens, something which upsets their hearts and their plans, something which will upset their whole life: they see the stone removed from before the tomb, they draw near and they do not find the Lord’s body. It is an event which leaves them perplexed, hesitant, full of questions: “What happened?”, “What is the meaning of all this?” (cf. Lk 24:4). Doesn’t the same thing also happen to us when something completely new occurs in our everyday life? We stop short, we don’t understand, we don’t know what to do. Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness which God brings us, the newness which God asks of us. We are like the Apostles in the Gospel: often we would prefer to hold on to our own security, to stand in front of a tomb, to think about someone who has died, someone who ultimately lives on only as a memory, like the great historical figures from the past. We are afraid of God’s surprises; we are afraid of God’s surprises! He always surprises us!
Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives! Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if only we open ourselves to him.

2. But let us return to the Gospel, to the women, and take one step further. They find the tomb empty, the body of Jesus is not there, something new has happened, but all this still doesn’t tell them anything certain: it raises questions; it leaves them confused, without offering an answer. And suddenly there are two men in dazzling clothes who say: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; but has risen” (Lk 24:5-6). What was a simple act, done surely out of love ”“ going to the tomb ”“ has now turned into an event, a truly life-changing event. Nothing remains as it was before, not only in the lives of those women, but also in our own lives and in the history of mankind. Jesus is not dead, he has risen, he is alive! He does not simply return to life; rather, he is life itself, because he is the Son of God, the living God (cf. Num 14:21-28; Deut 5:26; Josh 3:10). Jesus no longer belongs to the past, but lives in the present and is projected towards the future; he is the everlasting “today” of God. This is how the newness of God appears to the women, the disciples and all of us: as victory over sin, evil and death, over everything that crushes life and makes it seem less human. And this is a message meant for me and for you, dear sister, dear brother. How often does Love have to tell us: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness”¦ and that is where death is. That is not the place to look for the One who is alive!

Let the risen Jesus enter your life, welcome him as a friend, with trust: he is life! If up till now you have kept him at a distance, step forward. He will receive you with open arms. If you have been indifferent, take a risk: you won’t be disappointed. If following him seems difficult, don’t be afraid, trust him, be confident that he is close to you, he is with you and he will give you the peace you are looking for and the strength to live as he would have you do.

3. There is one last little element that I would like to emphasize in the Gospel for this Easter Vigil. The women encounter the newness of God. Jesus has risen, he is alive! But faced with empty tomb and the two men in brilliant clothes, their first reaction is one of fear: “they were terrified and bowed their faced to the ground”, Saint Luke tells us ”“ they didn’t even have courage to look. But when they hear the message of the Resurrection, they accept it in faith. And the two men in dazzling clothes tell them something of crucial importance: “Remember what he told you when he was still in Galilee”¦ And they remembered his words” (Lk 24:6,8). They are asked to remember their encounter with Jesus, to remember his words, his actions, his life; and it is precisely this loving remembrance of their experience with the Master that enables the women to master their fear and to bring the message of the Resurrection to the Apostles and all the others (cf. Lk 24:9). To remember what God has done and continues to do for me, for us, to remember the road we have travelled; this is what opens our hearts to hope for the future. May we learn to remember everything that God has done in our lives.

On this radiant night, let us invoke the intercession of the Virgin Mary, who treasured all these events in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19,51) and ask the Lord to give us a share in his Resurrection. May he open us to the newness that transforms. May he make us men and women capable of remembering all that he has done in our own lives and in the history of our world. May he help us to feel his presence as the one who is alive and at work in our midst. And may he teach us each day not to look among the dead for the Living One. Amen.

But we ask ourselves ”“ here we approach to the second word ”“ Why does Jesus come to Jerusalem? Or perhaps better: How does Jesus enter into Jerusalem? The crowd acclaims him King. And he does not oppose this, he does not silence them (cf. Luke 19:39-40). But what kind of King is Jesus? Let us see: he rides a colt, he does not have a court that follows him, he is not surrounded by an army that would symbolize power. Those who welcome him are humble, simple people, who have the sense to see in Jesus something more; they have that sense of faith, which says: this is the Savior. Jesus does not enter the Holy City to receive the honors reserved for earthly kings, to those who have power, to those who dominate; he enters to be beaten, insulted and reviled, as Isaiah foretold in the first reading (cf. Isaiah 50:6); he enters to receive a crown of thorns, a reed, a purple cloak, his royalty will be an object of scorn; he enters to climb Calvary, carrying a tree. And this is the second word: cross. Jesus enters Jerusalem to die on the cross. And it is exactly here that his being a king, as God, is manifested: the royal throne is the wood of the cross!

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On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 (the Feast of Saint Joseph) over 85 clergy and guests from the Diocese of South Carolina gathered for the annual Clergy Renewal of Vows service. Bishop Lawrence, in his sermon, drew a parallel between Saint Joseph and the clergy illustrating how Joseph, though often overlooked and discounted in the eyes of the world, remained faithful to Jesus Christ and the call of God on his life. Lawrence said that “the priest’s life is a sign of God’s covenant love for the church.”

Read it all and please note the audio link to Bishop Lawrence’s sermon.

Nearly 400 people attended the 222nd Convention of the Diocese of South Carolina at the Francis Marion Performing Arts Center in Florence, South Carolina, March 8-9, 2013.

“Wasn’t the worship incredible last night?” said Patricia Smith, remarking on the Convention’s Friday evening service of Holy Eucharist. Smith is a member of St. Paul’s, Summerville, and attended with her husband who is a delegate. “I felt like I was coming in to the gates of heaven. It had that triumphant sound. I guess, now that we’ve made a stand there was a unity, a lack of confusion. We were uniting in worship. It felt like God’s favor was there.”

For the second time the Convention voted unanimously to remove all references to The Episcopal Church from the Diocese’s constitution–the final step in severing their ties to the denomination they helped to found in 1789, five years after the South Carolina Convention first met in 1785.

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What a Bishop we have today!

+A scholar
+A pastor to his clergy and la
ity
+Supported by most of his Diocese
+Not supported by members of the National leadership
+Biblically and Theologically orthodox but in uninformed opinions of some canonically disobedient
+Maligned by a small group
+Censure by fellow bishops
+Caring and loving and yet tenacious
+Believes that Anglicanism is a continuation of the Church founded by Christ Himself, that made its way to the British Isles long before St. Augustine was sent from Rome
+More concerned with pleasing God than pleasing man

That is the Bishop we remember today, the Rt. Revd Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, born on the Feast of St. Thomas a Becket 1829 and dying on March 8, 1910, 102 years ago today. What a remarkable servant of God he was, and if his contemporaries, whose names are long forgotten, had any idea that he would be remembered in the Church Calendar, they would have been astounded. After all he was found guilty by the cclesiastical Court of the Church of England for simply believing that the Church must be true to Her roots.

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At our convention last March I stressed two dimensions of our diocesan calling: Our vocation to make Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age working in relationship with Anglican Provinces and dioceses around the world; and secondly our calling to make disciples by planting new congregations as well as growing and strengthening our existing parishes and missions in an era of sweeping institutional decline among almost all of the mainline denominations. These remain two constants for us today even while so much around us is in flux. You will be relieved to hear that it is not my intention in this address to retrace the road we have traveled in these intervening months since our Special Convention on November 17th. Suffice it to say that since these two dimensions of our common life and vocation remained unshaken when the tectonic plates of the diocese shifted, I remain convinced that they were God’s mandate for us then and they are God’s mandate for us now. The reason for this is two-fold: What is at stake in this theological and moral crisis that has swallowed up the Anglican Communion since the latter years of the 20th Century is first and foremost, “What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ as this Church has received it?” We did not create it and we cannot change what we have received. So what is the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Anglicans have received it? There is nothing in Anglicanism that cannot be found elsewhere among the churches of Christendom. What is unique is how we have blended certain aspects of what other churches hold together. But we have received a Gospel. What is it?

The second thing is “What will Anglicanism in the 21st Century look like?” While the former is the more important, the latter is the more complex. Put another way, proclaiming the Good News, “the whole counsel of God” as St. Paul declared in his parting address to the presbyters of Ephesus in Acts 20:27, that should be our first concern. Proclaiming the good news ”“ the whole counsel of God. But the charge to “care for the Church of God, which he obtained with his blood” (Acts 20:28) or as our text last evening put it, “which he obtained with the blood of his son.” was also part of St. Paul’s charge to the bishop-presbyters. If we apply this second charge to take care of the church of God, which he obtained, with the blood of his son, if we apply this charge to ourselves ”“ those of us whose leadership is in this vineyard where the Lord has placed us ”“ I believe this means caring for emerging Anglicanism in the 21st Century. Frankly, this caring for Anglicanism in the 21st century gets wearisome at times, painful almost daily, exhausting, but it is a charge we cannot relinquish without abandoning our vocation. What does this mean specifically for us here in this Diocese of South Carolina? Let me take up three aspects of this charge as it I believe it applies to us.

Read it all and a pdf version is available top right of the page.

More than 350 people are expected to attend the 222nd Annual Convention of the Diocese of South Carolina at the Francis Marion Performing Arts Center in Florence, March 8-9. The last time the Convention was held in Florence was 1976.

This year the Rt. Rev. Mark J. Lawrence, the 14th Bishop of South Carolina, is focusing on the future. “We cannot afford to focus on the backward glance,” said Lawrence “Christ calls us to look forward and carry out the Great Commission to make disciples and to proclaim the Gospel to a hurting world.”

This year’s convention workshops are designed to equip the Diocese’s lay members and clergy for the work of ministry. Bishop Lawrence promised that such workshops would be key parts of future annual Diocesan Conventions….

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Listen to it all if you so desire.

Read it all.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin a new Lenten journey, a journey that extends over forty days and leads us towards the joy of Easter, to victory of Life over death. Following the ancient Roman tradition of Lenten stations, we are gathered for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. The tradition says that the first statio took place in the Basilica of Saint Sabina on the Aventine Hill. Circumstances suggested we gather in St. Peter’s Basilica. Tonight there are many of us gathered around the tomb of the Apostle Peter, to also ask him to pray for the path of the Church going forward at this particular moment in time, to renew our faith in the Supreme Pastor, Christ the Lord. For me it is also a good opportunity to thank everyone, especially the faithful of the Diocese of Rome, as I prepare to conclude the Petrine ministry, and I ask you for a special remembrance in your prayer.

The readings that have just been proclaimed offer us ideas which, by the grace of God, we are called to transform into a concrete attitude and behaviour during Lent. First of all the Church proposes the powerful appeal which the prophet Joel addresses to the people of Israel, “Thus says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning” (2.12). Please note the phrase “with all your heart,” which means from the very core of our thoughts and feelings, from the roots of our decisions, choices and actions, with a gesture of total and radical freedom. But is this return to God possible? Yes, because there is a force that does not reside in our hearts, but that emanates from the heart of God and the power of His mercy. The prophet says: “return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting in punishment” (v. 13). It is possible to return to the Lord, it is a ‘grace’, because it is the work of God and the fruit of faith that we entrust to His mercy. But this return to God becomes a reality in our lives only when the grace of God penetrates and moves our innermost core, gifting us the power that “rends the heart”.

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Listen to it all if you so desire.

In a sermon she preached to Episcopalians in Charleston on Jan. 26, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori chose a regrettable tone in her characterization of people who were, until only recently, fellow Episcopalians….

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How has constant connection and endless distraction changed the church’s task? How are we to advance our ministries without compounding the problem? How do we shepherd overwhelmed sheep?

Possibly the biggest transition since the onslaught of media-saturated culture is that the church’s trajectory is being shaped less by where church leaders are trying to direct it and more by the responses of their followers. A leader’s course matters less when those being led won’t or can’t follow due to an avalanche of distraction, competing messages, and overly stressed lives.

Most of the training we receive focuses on the ways of a leader. Allow me to suggest a more pertinent question: How do digital-age believers follow?

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From a letter to the editor in the local paper:

While not in The Post and Courier’s coverage of the activities on Jan. 26, it has been reported in other sources that Katharine [Jefferts] Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, made several pronouncements in her sermon during Saturday’s “convention” which I find to be highly inflammatory and quite offensive.
First, she has labeled my bishop, who was duly elected to the office and removed from same by a trumped-up ploy, a “tyrant.” I have heard this man preach, watched recorded interviews with him and followed his actions. If I may be audacious and paraphrase Piiate’s words – I find him to have done no wrong.
Second, as an Episcopalian who has spent his entire life in the faith – choirboy, acolyte, vestryman, member of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and an elected delegate to a diocesan convention, I feel I am not only well-grounded in the faith, but have grown through the years in my faith which remains relevant in today’s world. I am highly offended that because I do not view the world through her skewed vision, nor accept her warped goals for the future, I am to be labeled a member of the ovine species.
Following her nefarious actions of October 2012, I have moved on and have found a far greener and acceptable meadow for grazing and growing my spiritual well-being.

James Ueberroth, Charleston

My admiration is unbounded for clergy who persist in proclaiming the gospel in the face of the resistance that the world throws at them. But I found too many clergy who allowed congregational caregiving and maintenance to trump more important acts of ministry, like truth telling and mission leadership. These tired pastors dash about offering parishioners undisciplined compassion rather than sharp biblical truth. One pastor led a self-study of her congregation and found that 80 percent of them thought the minister’s primary job was to “care for me and my family.” Debilitation is predictable for a kleros with no higher purpose for ministry than servitude to the voracious personal needs of the laos.

Most people in mainline churches meet biblically legitimate needs (food, clothing, housing) with their checkbooks. In the free time they have for religion, they seek a purpose-driven life, deeper spirituality, reason to get out of bed in the morning or inner well-being””matters of unconcern to Jesus. In this environment, the gospel is presented as a technique, a vaguely spiritual response to free-floating, ill-defined omnivorous human desire.

–Christian Century, the February 4, 2013 edition (emphasis mine)

The Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma recently gathered for the installation of the new leader of a prominent downtown Oklahoma City church.

The Rev. Justin Lindstrom was installed as the dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Jan. 26 in a ceremony that highlighted the diversity of the diocese, among other things.

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See what you think.

From a letter to the editor in the local paper:

I was saddened and appalled, but not surprised, by the vindictive and mean-spirited language Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori used in her sermon on Saturday.

Alluding to Bishop Mark Lawrence as a “tyrant” and comparing him to “citizens’ militias deciding to patrol … the Mexican border for unwelcome visitors” was unconscionable.

And to say, “It’s not terribly far from the state of mind evidenced in school shootings, or in those who want to arm school children, or the terrorism that takes oil workers hostage,” was despicable.
That any Christian, much less a presiding bishop, would use such invective and incendiary words says more about the speaker than the person she is attempting to vilify.

However, she is the same person who has spent over $22 million to sue churches over their property, who refused to sell a church back to its congregation and instead sold it to a Muslim organization, and who sued beloved, retired bishops because they challenged her authority.

It is not surprising that the fruits of Bishop Jefferts Schori’s leadership of TEC are a significant decline in members, controversy and confrontation with the majority of the Anglican Communion, and financial problems resulting in the need to sell prized land in Manhattan.

“They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love” has been a favorite hymn of mine for over 50 years.

It is also a good barometer of a person’s Christian character. The language used by Jefferts Schori from the pulpit is as unloving and un-Christian as it gets.

Still, as one who believes in a forgiving God and in spiritual transformation, I will continue to pray that TEC and Jefferts Schori may be inspired and imbued with the Holy Spirit and in the process may rise above petty name-calling and invective and embrace the love of Christ in what they say and do.

Dr. Peter T. Mitchell

Broad Street

Georgetown

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

In a move unprecedented in the American Catholic Church, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez announced Thursday that he had relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, of all public duties over his mishandling of clergy sex abuse of children decades ago.

Gomez also said that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who worked with Mahony to conceal abusers from police in the 1980s, had resigned his post as a regional bishop in Santa Barbara.

The announcement came as the church posted on its website tens of thousands of pages of previously secret personnel files for 122 priests accused of molesting children.

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Our bible reading in Church today is a letter from St Paul’s to the church in Corinth, in which he is trying to encourage church-members to work together for the glory of God. Everyone has different gifts and talents, Paul tells them. Each one of you is a body-part of the whole. Don’t all think you have to be the one who leads the prayers, or the one who preaches, the one who does the flowers, or the one who plays the music. He reminds them that our bodies are a marvellous piece of collaborative and co-ordinated working. We may think our eyes are our best feature. But if we decided we just wanted to be all eye, we wouldn’t be able to hear or speak. Similarly, though our football teams need to score goals to win games, if all our players were strikers, where would the defence be!

At the end of this week of prayer for Christian Unity, we need to remember that God has given us all wonderful gifts, but he’s given them to us not just for our own pleasure, and certainly not for our personal pride, but so that we can work together to do more wonderful things than we can do alone. Saint Teresa of Avila’s poem describes the miracle of how the world is changed by each one of us using our gifts and bringing them together to serve others.

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The bottom line for many pastors, said Bales, is that they are afraid to level with their people ”” person to person.

“Let’s face it. Your people can run you crazy. But that’s really not where ministers get into deep trouble,” he said. “Through the years, I have been especially interested in all the ways that ministers struggle with their own humanity. You see, they expect so much out of themselves, which can be hard since their people keep trying to hold them to standards higher than the saints and the angels.”

Try to imagine, he said, a pastor speaking these words to the faithful: “Dear friends, I am undone. My marriage is in shambles and things aren’t going great with my kids, either. My emotions are wracked. I’m stressed out. … You see, I’m prepared to minister to you, but who is going to minister to me?”

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The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was “pure in heart.” To readers all over the world, he became renowned as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice was popular almost from the moment it was published, in 1865, and it has remained in print ever since, influencing such disparate artists as Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, just released in movie theaters nationwide, is only the latest of at least 20 films and TV shows to be made from the book. But if Alice has endured unscathed, its author has taken a pummeling….
In 1999, Karoline Leach published yet another Dodgson biography, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, in which she quoted the summary of the missing diary information and argued that her predecessors, misunderstanding the society in which Dodgson lived, had created a “Carroll myth” around his sexuality. She concluded that he was attracted to adult women (including Mrs. Liddell) after all.

The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. “Improbable, feebly documented…tendentious,” thundered Donald Rackin in Victorian Studies. Geoffrey Heptonstall, in Contemporary Review, responded that the book provided “the whole truth.”

Which is where Dodgson’s image currently stands””in contention””among scholars if not yet in popular culture. His image as a man of suspect sexuality “says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself,” Will Brooker says.

Read it all (in honor of his birthday this past weekend, and, yes, the emphasis is mine).

Critics say the show takes reality TV one step too far, exposing personal, intimate and sometimes unflattering details about pastors’ wives. But Domonique Scott, former first lady of The Good Life Ministry church, tells NPR’s David Greene that The Sisterhood was somewhat of a calling for her. “We definitely believe that God told us to do it,” Scott says. “Individually, and together as a group.”

“I think for us, the assignment was to step out,” adds Christina Murray, the first lady of Oasis Family Life Church. “We knew it would probably be a little controversial, but we don’t do anything just for people to understand and give us our approval; we do everything for what God is trying to lead us to do.” But, Murray says, appearing on The Sisterhood was not a decision any of the women made lightly. “Basically, you’re putting your life out there with the control of somebody else.”

Read or listen to it all.

MARRIAGE: Pastors in conservative Protestant churches are much more likely to be in their first marriage””85% of all conservative congregations. Fewer, but still a majority, of mainline Protestant pastors (62%) are also in their first marriage. Twenty percent of mainline Protestant pastors are divorced or separated, compared to 10% of Catholic priests.

Marital status differs for men and women among ordained Protestant ministers: While 71% of all men are in their first marriage, 37% of women are in theirs. Women clergy are more likely to have never married (about 12%), compared to men (1%). About one in four women clergy are divorced or separated, compared with 3% of men.

AGE: The median age of all pastors is 55. In 2001, the median age was 51….

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Read it all.