I conclude from all this ”“ which could of course be spelled out at much more length ”“ that we can only understand early Christianity as a movement that emerges from within first-century Judaism, but that it is so unlike anything else we know in first-century Judaism (and the unlikenesses bear no resemblance to anything in the pagan world) that we are forced to ask what caused these mutations. The only plausible answer is that they were caused by the actual bodily resurrection, into a transformed physicality, of Jesus himself. Put that in place, and everything is explained. Take it away, and everything remains puzzling and confused. Of course, there is a cost. One cannot simply say, ”˜Well, it looks as though Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead’ and carry on with business as usual. If it happened, it means that a new world has been born. That, ultimately, is the good news of Easter, the good news which the rationalism of the Enlightenment has tried to screen out and which the church, tragically, has often forgotten as well. But to address this we need to move to the next section of this lecture.

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Since 2009, the window maker has shifted from a 40-hour work week to 32 at many of its plants, cut executive pay and 401(k) contributions, but has not laid off any of its 4,300 workers, Ms. Marvin says. Even so, Ms. Marvin isn’t holding out too much hope for 2012.

“We’re not talking about a housing recovery,” she says. “We’re talking about a small pickup.”

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The controversy over President Obama’s order on contraception and religious institutions is not going away as a political issue.

The two sides seem to be hardening their positions. The divide between many American Catholics and their bishops remains. And it’s raising questions over who benefits most in the run-up to the presidential election….

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For most of his 26 years in the military, Maj. Jeff Hackett was a standout Marine. Two tours in Iraq destroyed him.

Home from combat, he drank too much, suffered public breakdowns and was hospitalized for panic attacks. In June 2010, he killed himself.

Hackett’s suicide deeply troubled Gen. James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps. Hackett had been plucked from the enlisted ranks to lead Marines as an officer. He left behind a widow, four sons and more than $460,000 in debts. To Amos, Hackett was a casualty of war ”” surely the family deserved some compensation from the federal government….

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Whitney Houston, the multimillion-selling singer who emerged in the 1980s as one of her generation’s greatest R & B voices, only to deteriorate through years of cocaine use and an abusive marriage, died on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 48.

Her death came as the music industry descended on Los Angeles for the annual celebration of the Grammy Awards, and Ms. Houston was ”” for all her difficulties over the years ”” one of its queens. She was staying at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Saturday to attend a pre-Grammy party being hosted by Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, who had been her pop mentor.

Ms. Houston was found in her room at 3:55 p.m., and paramedics spent close to 20 minutes trying to revive her, the authorities said. There was no immediate word on the cause of her death, but the authorities said there were no signs of foul play.

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This year over 50,000 people in San Francisco gathered to Walk for Life, expressing a love for life and concern for the women affected by abortion. Two days later on Jan. 23 more than 250,000 people attended the March for Life in Washington, D.C. Both events included thousands of young participants.

As president of Anglicans for Life and cofounder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, I attended the events and hosted gatherings on both coasts. People involved with the Silent No More Awareness Campaign who have experienced abortion carry signs that say I Regret My Abortion or I Regret Lost Fatherhood. After the walk and march, 60 women and six men described how abortion affected their lives and the help they found in Christian-based healing programs.

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“Every day is a struggle,” …[J.R. Childress] says in a soft drawl. “The struggle is the unknown. You’ve worked your way up the ladder and you get to a point in life and a position in work where you’re comfortable ”¦ then all of a sudden everything goes away. It’s like being thrown into a hole and you’re climbing to get up, but it’s greased. There’s no way of getting out.”

The frustrations of one 53-year-old North Carolina man are multiplied millions of times over across time zones and generations in a country still gripped by economic anxiety, despite increasing signs of recovery. And they resound in a presidential campaign pitting an incumbent defending his economic record against GOP opponents who are attacking it.

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What is the Anglican position on the issue?

The Anglican position is very clear. We stand on upholding the sanctity of human life. We condemn in totality the terror called Boko Haram. And that we denounce it because it denounces human worth by what it is doing. We are in a democracy where people are free to practice their religion anywhere they are. So we stand on that. That Christians or people of other faith anywhere should be allowed to practice their own faith, provided they do not infringe on other people’s faith, which I know the Christians would not.

Are you satisfied with efforts the Islamic leaders and governors of the north have made to curb the menace of Boko Haram?

well! I don’t know of the efforts they have made so far. But what I do know is that it is there. This people live with them. They know them. They can fish them out, but they are not doing it. By so doing, they are obstructing the course of justice. As such they are not contributing to the well being of Nigeria. This is because people are doing certain things that are evil, and you know them. Like in Ekpoma here, if people are doing certain things we know them. And so, you see arrest being made. But when you shield them, like the man who escaped, is that not a case of protection? That is a case of protection. This thing is happening in the north. There is governance in the north. All of the governments are represented in the north. They cannot say they don’t know them. If they say they don’t know them, it means they are not doing their work.

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Lord, increase our faith; that relying on thee as thy children, we may trust where we cannot see, and hope where all seems doubtful, ever looking unto thee as our Father who ordereth all things well; according to the word of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

–George Dawson

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

–1 Timothy 3:14-16

If you have seen the movie Chariots of Fire you will surely recall the runner Eric Liddle, son of Scottish missionaries to China, deciding out of Christian conviction not to run on the Sabbath ”“ much to the consternation of the Prince of Wales and others rooting for a British victory in the 1924 Olympic Games.

To underscore his decision the film depicts him preaching at the Church of Scotland parish in Paris to a packed house as the Olympics march on without him. The text he reads is the same as ours this morning. I spare you my effort at a Scottish accent but let your imagination supply a brogue:

“He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.”

And not leaving out the verses: the nations are as a drop in the bucket – He brings princes to naught – Rulers are counted as nothing before him.

The clergy of the Presbyterian tribe get to choose their texts for preaching and on that occasion Liddle mounted the pulpit with heavy caliber ordnance.

In Mark’s Gospel, and especially its opening chapter, Jesus goes about his business with a resolve and a steadiness of purpose that makes even an Eric Liddle look weak by comparison. He routs demons. He heals. His teaching and his rapid movements are all executed with authority, greater than the greatest athletic discipline. The trainer Sam Mussabini tells Liddle’s fellow runner Harold Abraham he is over-striding and he can find him several seconds more. By contrast Jesus does not put a foot wrong. Step by precious step Mark chronicles a Jesus whose authority takes the form of magnetic and irresistible victories, without diminishing his compassion or his special concern for the weak, including this morning a mother-in-law with a fever in a one room house in Galilee.

“Have you not known, have you not heard, he gives power to the faint, and lifts up the lowly.”

He lifts her to new life as he lifts us all into a new realm he calls the kingdom of God. Which is wherever he is, speaking his word of life.

There is something ominous then when Mark records that while it was still very dark Jesus withdrew to, as our translation has it, “a lonely place.” “Lonely” is fine, but the word means desert. A deserted place. His withdrawal creates an anxiety on the part of the disciples who then hunt him down. Upon finding him, they offer meekly it is all the others who are asking for him. The desert did not seem the proper next destination for this man showing himself to be unlike other men.

Several things require noting in Mark’s Hemingway-like prose. The desert is often the place of solitary and difficult decision making: for Moses in the wilderness, for Elijah wrapped in his mantle, for John the Baptist. It is a place of testing, a word which in the bible means ”˜road testing’ ”“ seeing what one is made of deep down inside. “Push her ”˜til the bolts rattle.” Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by Satan. The Prophet Isaiah is speaking to people in the desert, “in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.” Apart from table grace at a meal for 5000, only twice does Jesus pray in Mark’s Gospel. Here in the desert place and in Gethsemane.

To the degree that Jesus is so publicly successful in all he does, he knows his cover has been blown. It belongs to the heart of Mark’s depiction that Jesus must command silence or at least””for those he tutors””great care in understanding who he is and where God intends to take him. So after a full day in Capernaum and with little sleep he rises before everyone and goes into the desert place to pray.

The Prophet Isaiah speaks of questioning hearts, of weariness, of desert places. Jesus does not avoid these places as he marches through his own Galilean backyard. He confronts sickness and bondage and need, publicly and with great power. But his greatest display of power is entering the desert place and determining through prayer it will not have the last word. The same prayer we will see in Gethsemane is costly fellowship with his heavenly father, whose will it is he loves to do, in spite of the cost, above all else. “Let us go on, for this is why I have come out.” This is why I am here.
In one of her more penetrating insights, Dorothy Sayers put it this way (adapted):

[blockquote]Jesus of Nazareth was not a demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. Yet he was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”””he was God.[/blockquote]

This is not a pious commonplace. For what it means is this: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is””limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death””God had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought all that just the point.

Such is the character of God, and of God’s love.

Mark’s craft is subtle. He strings three scenes together – A swift healing – A global casting out of demons and all the sick of the town – And then a withdrawal to the desert to pray. The first two are not more dramatic than the third. Jesus has authority. Power to heal and release from bondage. But his power is not allergic to poverty, but is made perfect in poverty.

The soaring rhetoric of Isaiah rings from the pulpit with energy and authority as the defiant Liddle prepares to address the Sabbath crowd. But the film-maker shrewdly lets the backdrop of all that be, not a champion’s podium, or a gold medal ceremony, but instead all the agony of hard work, drudgery, and defeat. We see the kindly Aubrey Montague, covered in mud, exhausted, hands on his knees searching for breath, the hurdles having defeated him – Harold Abraham collapsing in a heap, having been badly beaten in the grueling 200 meters by Americans Shultz and Paddock.

We all want to live a life without pain or sorrow, and properly discipline ourselves for victories, hard won, and rich in their rewards. But inside us and around all of us is sickness, and bondage, and fear; things larger ourselves, and yes seasons of defeat. Desert places.

“Spirituality” is a popular idea today, yet the Bible has no word for it. Still, the psalms and Isaiah know what the word is getting at. ”˜They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.’ To wait upon the Lord in expectation of renewal is the discipline of spirituality. We must wait, must learn to wait on God, because God is doing things in and through our suffering and our fears and our struggles. Jesus goes into the desert place while it is still very dark. That image is crucial, set against all the drama of healing and exorcism, all the authority properly seen to make Jesus who he is; a man unlike any who walked among us; a man whose very word makes men drop their nets; who accepts the anxious searching of those he has chosen, because he will transform it and them.

It is his trip into the desert that is the pledge he will go the distance for you and me. There he will face the sure knowledge that his fame and his victories will lead to the Cross, and there he will pray for the resolve that empowers him to say: I am not returning for a ticker tape parade in Capernaum, but must go on to all the towns in Galilee before the night, and in time the final night, cometh. For that is why I came out.

To follow this Jesus today is not to be handed a GPS device. God will not protect us from what he will perfect us through. We might think that a grand idea were it not for the fact that he has done this very thing himself, in and through his own son.

When he was a man he played the man, and in him every desert place we are asked to go we find him there ahead of us.

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up as eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk on and not faint.”

The Reverend Canon Dr. Christopher Seitz is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Wycliffe College, Toronto and Canon Theologian in the Diocese of Dallas

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But out on the court after the Knicks’ so-called junior varsity won its fourth straight game, a gentleman who has seen it all at the self-proclaimed World’s Most Famous Arena ”” or believed he had ”” shook his head in giddy disbelief.

“I’ve been coming here since high school in 1955,” said Cal Ramsey, leaning on a cane in the runway. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, just out of nowhere.”

—From a New York Times article today on Jeremy Lin’s spectacular performance in last night’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers

Lin received no college scholarship offers, despite leading his Palo Alto High School team to a 32-1 record and the California championship. At Harvard, he was twice named to the all-Ivy League first team and delivered a signature 30-point performance against 12th-ranked Connecticut.

At draft time, in June 2010, Lin was again overlooked. N.B.A. teams had their doubts ”” about his defense, about his jump shot, about his ability to keep up with the league’s elite athletes….

The qualities that make Lin unique, and seemingly held him back, are now the qualities that make him a sensation. Knicks fans were clamoring for Lin before he threw his first pass at the Garden. They roar louder for his shifty layups in traffic than they do for Carmelo Anthony’s….

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In comments in Italian Pope Benedict said: “Jesus prays at the time of ultimate rejection by men, at the time of abandonment; he prays, however, aware of the presence of God the Father in this hour in which he feels the human drama of death. But we wonder: how could a God so powerful not intervene to save his Son from this terrible ordeal? It is important to understand that the prayer of Jesus is not the cry of one who goes to meet death with despair, nor is it the cry of one who knows himself to be abandoned. Jesus then makes his Psalm 22, the Psalm of the people of Israel that suffers, and in this way not only takes upon Himself the punishment of his people, but also that of all men who suffer from the oppression of evil and at the same time, brings all of this to the heart of God himself in the certainty that his cry will be heard in the resurrection”.

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As leader of one of the 110 dioceses in the Episcopal Church, [Bishop Andy] Doyle said he puts an emphasis on “doing things” instead of “telling people to do things.”

His diocese includes more than 1,400 ministries which range in focus from feeding the poor, sick or elderly, building homes for those affected by natural disasters and buying mosquito nets for African families to protect them from malaria.

“The Episcopal church is a church that very much loves Jesus Christ and is interested in people and getting to know them,” he said. “We have a lot of diversity. God made a lot of different kinds of folks.”

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Catholics hope their Episcopal neighbors see the initiative positively, as an unprecedented way of honoring the Anglican tradition and its core liturgy, in the Book of Common Prayer, by officially making a place for it in the Catholic Church.

“We aren’t about trying to break up congregations or sheep-stealing. We respect the integrity of these communities,” [Jeffrey] Steenson said. “We’re not about competing for souls. … There is a desire to work together to build up church unity.”

Joseph Britton, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University, said even from an Anglican perspective, this can be seen as a positive move that opens further opportunities for dialogue.

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This new George Carey has rather abandoned the careful diplomatic language he used as an archbishop to keep different church factions in the same pews, in favour of something more earthy and apocalyptic, reflecting his own evangelical background. “There are deep forces at work in Western society, hollowing out the values of Christianity and driving them to the margins”.

Among these forces, he has the judiciary firmly in his sights following a spate of recent rulings, which, he claims, have allowed equality to “trump” the freedom of the individual in matters of belief. “Judges,” he contends, “say that the law has no obligation to the Christian faith, but I say ‘rubbish’ to that. Historically there has been a great interlocking of Christianity with our laws in this country.”

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I’m about as secular a former vicar and heterodox a Christian as you can get, but there are times when the secularists just make themselves look silly. Yesterday’s crazy judgment against Bideford Council is one such instance.

I mean, how uptight and sanctimonious do you have to be to want to prevent other people from starting the council meeting with prayers just because you’re a humanist?

Yes, if the majority of members want to abolish prayers, then fine, do away with them. And, yes, make it clear that attendance at prayers is not compulsory or even especially desirable. But this distinction between whether the prayers are said before the summoned meeting or as part of it is false.

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A test case bid to outlaw prayers before local council meetings has been won by the National Secular Society and an atheist councillor, Clive Bone.

They challenged the practice of Bideford town council, Devon, of having religious prayers on meeting agendas.

[On Friday February 11th] Mr Justice Ouseley, sitting in London, ruled: ”The saying of prayers as part of the formal meeting of a council is not lawful under section 111 of the Local Government Act 1972, and there is no statutory power permitting the practice to continue.”

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[This new proposed approach] still mandate[s] that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

·It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s policy, not as a separate rider.

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On Saturday afternoon, Broadway’s longest-running show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” will raise the curtain for its 10,000th performance. Behind the scenes, it’ll be just another day at work for the more than two-dozen crew members who have been with the musical since opening night, Jan. 26, 1988.

Jimmy Billings, 78, the head electrician for the Majestic Theatre, began preparing the space””tearing out the stage and digging out the basement””eight months before the production was scheduled to arrive at the theater. Now he’s responsible for a crew of 10 electricians, one of whom is his son, Frank Billings.

Mr. Billings hasn’t ever seen the show, and neither has Jack Farmer, 61, who as fly floor spends the duration of the performance on catwalks behind the stage that are as high as 100 feet in the air. “I’ve seen the tops of heads and hear the songs,” he says.

Incredible–read it all.

Whew, after a good start to the second half that was far too close for comfort–KSH.

Churchwardenship must be one of the strangest voluntary occupations you could imagine, since it is partly intensely practical and partly quietly spiritual. I inhabit a world of aumbries, risk assessments, blocked drains, corporals, coffee mornings, quinquennial architect’s reports, vestments, child protection policies, intercessions rotas, gluten-free wafers, ”˜open gardens’ and altar frontals. In the course of a week I may telephone an undertaker, polish the paten and chalice, write a Statement of Need in preparation for a Faculty application, deal with a query concerning property in the village owned by the diocese (of which I am perforce a trustee), check the communion wine hasn’t gone off, and assist the vicar on Sunday to serve the bread and wine, with as much reverence and discretion as I can muster.

I act as a sober usher at funerals, remove plastic flowers from grave sides and lock the church at night. I am partly preoccupied with ­centuries-old ritual and partly with how to raise £15,000 a year (just to stand still, without spending anything on maintenance, let alone improvements) in a village of 265 souls. And always, at the back of my mind, are pressing anxieties about the future: how we can attract sufficient numbers of the young or youngish, who won’t write us off as a weird relict sect but who understandably look for better facilities, visual aids and a more diverse liturgy?

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The Obama administration and its allies see few, if any, viable options to end the carnage in Syria as President Bashar al-Assad’s forces continue their offensive against the opposition to his rule in what has become the uprising’s most violent month.

With no appetite for a military intervention, a flagging Arab League initiative and the failed effort to win a U.N. Security Council resolution, officials said the current situation could continue for months. Plans for an international “Friends of Syria” conference and stepped-up humanitarian aid are seen as unlikely to change the grim calculus on the ground.

“What frustrates .”‰.”‰. us is that there are no silver bullets here,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There are no good options.”

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Some Catholics expressed relief but others were unmoved after President Barack Obama on Friday loosened a requirement that religious employers cover contraception in health plans, an issue that had turned into a political firestorm in recent weeks.

Under the new policy, religious employers opposed to most forms of birth control wouldn’t be required to directly pay for such coverage in their workers’ insurance policies. Instead, insurance companies would be required to offer contraception without explicitly charging either the religious employer or worker. That shift means the cost of providing the coverage to religious employers is likely to be spread across all policyholders by insurers.

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God our Father, who hast created us in thine own image, with a mind to understand thy works, a heart to love thee, and a will to serve thee: Increase in us that knowledge, that love and that obedience, that we may grow daily in thy likeness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. A Song. On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the LORD loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God. Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Ethiopia–“this one was born there,” they say. And of Zion it shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her”; for the Most High himself will establish her. The LORD records as he registers the peoples, “This one was born there.” Singers and dancers alike say, “All my springs are in you.”

-Psalm 87