Session 14 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 14 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

Part 9: The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony or Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer

Review: In our sessions on the BCP, we have been looking at how the sacraments express our response to the human experience of “rite of passage” or eventful time.  In our sessions on the seven sacraments, we now reflect upon Holy Matrimony.  Of the seven sacraments two are dominical or “commanded by our Lord,” namely Baptism and Eucharist.  The five other are five pastoral sacraments that were implicit in the practice of Jesus and the New Testament churches.  One must admit that all of the sacraments have gone through many different changes in how they have been regarded in the history of their practice within the church.  One can note that for much of history in some churches marriage has not been permitted for those who felt called to the ordained ministry.  Marriage has had varying manifestations in the various locations throughout the world and the church has adapted to customs but also influenced the practice of civil marriage.

Probably a major crisis in life is loneliness or aloneness.  About the primordial person Adam, the writer of Genesis believed that God understood aloneness and so God in the creation account said, “It is not good for Adam to be alone.”  Was this said by a God who doubted the adequacy of God’s own companionship with Adam?  This primordial insight expressed the truth that no one can feel complete while alone.  One can advance in a high degree of self-reliance but not even that can be done alone.  This insight shows us that God is most evident and speaks mainly through other people; it is within human community that we learn language.  We learn that we are not alone; we learn that we belong together in a general way, but we also learn that the mutual magnets of particular love bring people together to share with one another in the fullness of ways that people can share.  Fellowship, companionship, mutual joy and ecstasy, joint stewardship in tasks, procreation and the fostering of the next generation are all a part of the basic intuition regarding how human beings are supposed to be together. 

The Episcopal Church regards marriage to be a sacrament, a mystery, in that we believe that in the companionship of marriage persons encounter the mystery of God’s presence.  An ordained clergy does not preside at a marriage to make love happen but to acknowledge that it has and the blessing stands in the moment of offering to God with thanksgiving the vows of the couple.

Marriage involves four vows.  Spouses to each other, the vows of the community to support the couple and in the blessing, we the church, understand God to be making a vow to be present in the wonder of love.

Spouses need to keep renewing their vows in their daily practice.  Spouses need the support of their communities (including the society at large to encourage commitment in the married life).  Spouses need to continue to go to find God in the mystery of their love.  The marriage rite expresses the vows that are lived into for the rest of married life together.

Among traditional churches, The Episcopal Church believes and practices that God’s Holy Spirit can inspire new understanding and new practice and new wisdom.  We also believe that God inspires rules, practices and theology from the event of care.  We, in the Episcopal Church are flattered when people wish to gather with us to pray and we endeavor to love and care for the people to desire to be with us.  With regard to Episcopal Christians who have found themselves in lifelong committed relationships with people of the same-sex it has seemed reasonable, just and loving to acknowledge the blessing and grace present in these loving relationships and provide a community of support for these brothers and sisters in Christ.  Recently, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church has approved liturgies for us to acknowledge, celebrate, bless and support the persons who have known such commitments of love.  Like everything in the church the implementation of new liturgies sometimes have an uneven reception in how people understand and respond to the changes.   It is important to inform ourselves about how such liturgies can be done with integrity and continuity within our faith community that has always relied upon Scripture, tradition and reason to appraise what we do in our faith and community practice.  It should be known that just as in our country we do not yet fully practice the great ideal of The Declaration of Independence that states that all people are created equal, so too Christian Churches have not yet completed the full practice of the meaning of love as it known in justice.  This is not said as a condemnation, it is noted as an invitation for us always to be seeking God grace to surpass ourselves in love and justice.  We have to use our imaginations to ask in faith, “What would Jesus do and how would he respond?”  I do not think that Jesus would tell parables today using slaves as subject matter because of how terrible the very notion of slavery has come to be known.  We embrace our current understanding of science, psychology and sociology and we ask  what would Jesus do today.  We may come up with some different perspectives but in the Episcopal Church we have come to believe that the life-long commitment of love among our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should have a liturgy of blessing/a marriage and loving support, as a true acknowledgment of their love.

Exercise:

Ponder your own history with loneliness and the important event of being in love to want to spend a life with a companion and friend and to bear witness that God is love.  Ponder the meaning of your marriage within a community.  How important is it to you that your community recognizes your marriage?  Do you have the habit of setting up a support team for your married life?  Did you know that in America when clergy officiate at a wedding they most often do so for both the State and the Church?  Did you know that some countries separate the civil ceremony and the Church Blessing ceremony? 

Father Phil

Session 15 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 15 

 Review: I have explained the Episcopal Church as a particular Christian family among other Christian families.  As each family has a name, I began by looking at the meaning of our name.   Each family has defining heirlooms and I spent quite a few sessions reflecting upon the chief heirloom of the Episcopal, the Book of Common Prayer.  I presented the Book of Common Prayer as being organized by invoking God’s presence upon the times of our life.  I see the Book of Common presenting prayer strategies for our various experiences of time, regular time, special time, and rite of passage time.

A family has a history and a genealogy and with this come legend and lore and a continual looking to the resources of our past and the current resources of our age in our methods of defining and living the significant purpose of our lives.  Our Episcopal Church has a history, it has a genealogy but much of it we delve into not because we can return to the past but because we are seeking significant purposes of faith in our current life.  We also hope for a future in what we are leaving for the people in our lives who will outlive us.

I would to present the history, the genealogy and the lore of The Episcopal Church as an interacting dynamic between Holy Scripture, Tradition and Reason.  The relationship between these three are something like trying to argue about what came first, the chicken or the egg.

It is false for any family to think that they exist alone and so when I talk about my family, I do so, also by referring to who is not in my family.  The world outside of my family helped to define my family.  So too when we are speaking about the Episcopal Church and all of its ancestors in faith traditions, we and all faith traditions cannot escape the fact that we existed among people in the world who have not been members of one’s faith tradition.  Traditions derive and form in world settings greater than their own arbitrary community boundaries.

Holy Scripture refers broadly to the Bible in the content form that it has come to be used in the Episcopal Church.  Tradition refers to the communities that received Holy Scripture and collected the writings and passed them on but also it refers to all of the faith practices that have been standard for various communities of faith at various times.  So there are practices and applications in community traditions that may not have explicit formulae in the Holy Scriptures.  (For example, it may be a tradition for a priest to wear a chasuble at Eucharist without claiming that Jesus wore the same at the Last Supper. The use of a chasuble comes from adopting a standard Eucharistic vestment.  It becomes an honored tradition even while not mentioned in Holy Scriptures, though it is consistent with Temple priests wearing robes).

Reason refers broadly to human experience and specifically how we work collaboratively to interpret the meaning and function and value of Holy Scripture and Tradition for our lives today.

We could say that our history, tradition and lore date from pre-historic times and Holy Scripture relate significant oral traditions that derived from pre-historic times and eventually became written as writing became a significant technology of memory in being able to connect people of the past with succeeding generations.

Part of my American tradition is the inheritance of Pragmatism.  In Pragmatism we admit that truth values are revealed by how an idea or concept functions for a community.  I would like to be as “functionally” orientated as possible in leading up to the functional value of the Episcopal Church in our lives.

The history of the past is so vast that all one can do is choose arbitrary reductions of information to present a view of history.  This does not make the views true; it only means that they are offered to see if useful insights can arise.

For my own understanding, I divide history into Pre-Modern or Classical, Modern and Post-Modern Periods.  Each of these periods have habits and features that define their utility as it pertains to human relationship to what has come to be called the Divine.  Subsequent period retain the habits and understanding of the previous periods even though same words or terms can come to have different functional meaning or value in the later period.

In the Pre-Modern or Classical understanding of God, God became one who is known and who speaks directly to and through people in ways that “seem” to be self-evidential to the ones who present the words of God.  God may be special and different (such difference is so great as to disqualify limited humanity from knowing such greatness) but this great God can become known and supports purposeful behavior within the community.  God was also located in space but also able to be invisibly evident.

In the Modern Period, the understanding of God comes to be admitted as a “human understanding” of God in a very deliberate way.  In the Modern Period when Reason takes over as an interior attribute that humanity has access to, it essentially replaces God as the self-evident reality of life.  From the Pre-Modern view it seems like arrogant “humanism” to say that all experience of God is but human experience.  But from the Modern point of view it seems to be humble to but admit that nobody has a “non-human experience” of God.  The pride of the Modern period is modern science and the constant attempt to find alternative answers for the phenomena that used to be attributed to actions of God.

The Post-Modern Period is much more recent.  The Post-Modern Period involves a critique of the Modern Period and in part is caused by disillusionment with the modern notion of progress.  Look what progress has done; we can really now do atrocious things to destroy the world and each other.  It seems like each scientific advance has several devastating consequences, e.g., environmental ruin or unchecked population growth.  In terms of theology and philosophy, Post-Modernism is based upon the insight that human experience is essentially mediated through the use of language, so whether word or deed, everything has come to language.  Everything is constituted by language including the long history of humanity with the sublime entity that is known in the English language as God.

In our next sessions, we are going to try to look at our history, genealogy and lore of Scripture, Tradition and Reason in light of these characterizations of human history.  But we cannot be but where we are in 2013, and whether one likes it or not, by participation in all of the manifestations of our informational age, we are Post-Modern people.  Lots of people are living in reactive fear and nostalgia to this while I would like to explore the possibility of a vital and dynamic faith in our Post-Modern Age as members of The Episcopal Church.

Exercise:

Why does the Bible or Greek mythology sometimes seem inaccessible to us today?  What does Holy Scripture mean to you?  What does Church Tradition mean to you?  What does Reason mean to you?  If we say that our authority and identity in the Episcopal Church involves the relationship between Scripture Tradition and Reason what does that mean in practice?  Can a person like St. Peter who is a Jew honoring their dietary restriction be led by the Holy Spirit and reason to think that a Gentile who eats pork can be regarded as equally obedient to God?   Can people of reason come to judge slavery as inhumane and unchristian even though New Testament times tolerate slavery?  In what other areas can reason over turn Scripture?  Geocentric or Heliocentric solar system?  Flat earth or round earth?  Evolution or seven day creation?

Father Phil

Session 16 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 16 

At my current age of sixty nine is it possible for me to attain a realistic empathy with who I was at the age of six or sixteen or thirty or fifty or sixty?  I have progressively gained more experience and education and reflection upon my life.  So how do I pretend or imagine or even remember how I was at sixteen without projecting my experience of being sixty two onto my memories of how I was a sixteen?  Can I just black out forty six years and pretend that I am accessing my life at the age of sixteen?  I don’t think so.

If you understand the dilemma that I have with myself, imagine our collective dilemma of trying to access our Church’s memories from thousands of years ago when we did not live and must rely upon a small number of accounts in documents that have unknown paths of transmission in how they were put together and passed on and saved.  There is no actual original document of all of the writings that comprise the collection in the Bible.

How can my life and what I say and write in my current context ever be considered as relevant in any general sense to people beyond the immediate setting where I live, work, speak and write?   There are so many published words now that the selective process for gaining a hearing beyond one’s own immediate situation is daunting, accidental or based upon who has publishing success to make sure words have a wider public to find listeners or readers.  Ancient societies have very few words that have been preserved by the technology of writing so we can say that more attention and more authority is accorded to the few words we have that came to be translated and read.  A counter assertion would be to say that important words were bound to be remembered and saved because their inherent truth or importance.  What is the memorable importance of commercial billing transactions on ancient cuneiform clay tablets that have survived, except the durability of their text format?

As I attempt to draw from the history and the genealogy that provide us with information about who we are as Episcopalians, I fully admit that I live in 2020 and that I have been influenced by modern science and other disciplines available in a standard educational experience today.  I also admit that I have accepted the notion that all of our lives are mediated through our use of language.  And when we say that we use reason, we are referring to how we use language and how language orders all of our lives.  So being persons who possess language as a chief defining feature of our humanity proceeds any notion of Scripture or Tradition.  Scripture and Tradition presume a community people who use language and it may seem silly but from the outset we cannot ignore the fact that we are language using people.

As I look at the formative identity as it has come to us in the Bible and in the traditions that received the biblical writing and “voted” on the books to include in the Bible and who have used the Bible within a variety of worshipping traditions for perhaps three thousand year(assuming our continuity with Hebrew-Judaic religious traditions), I want to look for common questions of humanity and then look at the details of the answers to these common questions that have been given in the 3000 years of Scriptural and traditional communities of worship.

Let us look at the question of general issue and detail of culture in an example:

The issue of faster transportation.  Why do we need to go more than five miles from where we live?  How do we do it?  Details of Culture: Donkey, Horse, horse and cart, oxen and cart, chariot and horse, train, car, plane.  Transportation is a universal human question; the details of how it is answered varies in time.  Take for example the Amish.  They want to freeze the mode of transportation as horse and buggy as the divine designated stopping point for transportation.  Other religious people differ.  Point?  There is a universal question or principle in every human activity and there are details of different cultural practices throughout the history of people.

Cars and transportation are one thing but what about the value and meaning of personhood?  Human labor and division of labor and task designations of people is a universal question.  Ancient societies and some not so ancient have answered this question with various forms of servitude or slavery.  Just as I cannot go back that insist that I should have been seeking different values at the age of sixteen, we cannot go back to ancient cultures and insist that they understand human personhood in such a way as to prohibit slavery.  Even a person in servitude did not know how to understand the way in which we understand freedom.  Slavery as a detail of modern culture is one that we want to be completely rid of.  How do we tolerate details of culture in biblical people without judging them as having nothing relevant to offer to us today?  Wow, if these people practiced slavery, how can I believe that they were enlightened about God?  So how do we interpret the cultures of the Bible and subsequent Church history and tradition with a non-judgmental charity?  We probably can’t.  We do make the judgments even while we know it is unrealistic and anachronistic  to demand that people before us be like us in the details of how we express our values today.

My strategy then is to look at questions that might be common to humanity at in every age and see how the wisdom of the Bible and church traditions ask and illuminate those questions.  How can we look at the details of cultural practice from other era and find that they do not fit today?

Next up I will propose some of these common questions.

Exercise:

What great questions do you think people in the Bible were trying to answer as well as people of faith in the history of Christianity?

Father Phil

Session 17 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 17 

As we look to how we have come to be formed as the Episcopal Church, I want to look at some questions that might be regarded to be universal for people of all times.  And these questions that arrive in living have been dealt with in our biblical and church traditions.  Before looking at the variety of answers that have come in the formation of our identity as the Episcopal Church, we might attempt to present some of these basic questions of life.

Where did we come from?

How did we get here?

How can I know a time before human recorded memory?

Why are people different from one another?

Why do babies die?

Why do some people live a very long life and others much shorter lives?

Why are animals more self-sufficient days after birth and humans need more care until age twelve or later?

If we can know a being greater than us, who is that being?

What is the name of the greatest being?

How can we know that we know the greatest being?

How can God be known?

How can we trust that God can be known?

What do we do when there is disagreement about God?

What is the best way to live together?

What do we call not living together well?

Why does war and fighting occur?

Why do people live together?

What happens when people who don’t live together encounter each other?

Why do people speak different languages?

Why do we treat death differently than animals seem to treat death?

Why is death a hard experience for us?

What happens to me when I die?

What has happened to my friends and family who have died?

What happens to animals when they die?

If I see that flesh decays, how can I know that a person has any permanence?

How do we decide when we have human disagreement?

Will this world ever end?

What will happen to all people if the world ends?

If the world ends how is it likely to happen?

Why are some people lucky and other people not so lucky?

Why did writing come to some people first?

What does written language mean for a culture?

What information from the past is reliable?  How do we determine whether information is reliable?

If good people die do they die in a more advanced state than people not so good?

Why is there innocent suffering in the world?

What can we believe about God?

Can we believe that God is good and loving?

Can we believe that God is all powerful?

Does God intervene in the world?

What is the logic that governs when, where and how God intervenes in the world?

Is God located through the top of the sky?

Is God an invisible reality everywhere?

Why do things happens and repeat themselves with regularity?  Sunrise?  Sunset?

Is there a proper way to get God’s attention?

Does God’s anger happen in the harsh events of life?

Did people in the past understand God and life the same way that I do?

How come we get sick?

Why do people drown in water but need to drink it to stay alive?

What is blood for in people and in animals?

What causes diseases?

What do we do to protect the community when it seems as though unseen things are causing diseases?

How come some people recover from sickness and others don’t?

What are we supposed to eat?

Does God have any rules for eating?  How would we know such rules?

How does birth happen?

What do we do with children?

Who are we supposed to marry?

What is love?

How is love known?

Is love and being married the same?

How do we determine the written words of God?

Does God write?

How does God communicate?

Does God prescribe the kind of clothes we wear?

Does God prescribe one particular pattern for all human relationship with one template for all times?

How do we define evil and badness?

Who gets to define what is bad and evil?

How come some bad people have good luck?

How come some good people have bad luck?

Does God have favorites?

Are some people chosen by God as God’s favorite people and does that make other people not favored by God?

If I feel favored by God can someone on the other side of the world feel favored by God too?

Does justice exist?

How do we practice justice?

Can we believe that there is some way for everything to be fair and even?

Why do we feel a need for fairness or justice?

Does life allow the strongest people to win and set the rules?

Is success a sign of God’s blessing?

Is failure a sign of God’s curse?

What do the stars in the sky have to do with me?

Do you see how there are some great basic questions in life that could occur in any human time period?  And we could also have different details in how these questions have been answered or attempted to be answered.  And we can see that communities of faith have sanctioned answers and practices to deal with these questions at different times and in different ways and they have felt inspired by God to give their particular answers and practice.  If we observe variation over time in how people of faith have tried to answers these questions and suggest community practice of faith to live with these questions, how are we to understand the different practices and answers that have been given over a long period of time?  Some answers and practice seem to have longer duration in their relevance or their usage.  For example, we retain the perceptual commonsense that “the sun rises” even though we are no longer people who believe in a flat earth.  For a long time in religious history a flat earth was unquestioned truth, even biblical truth in the way it was understood by most people.

Do you see how understanding Scripture and tradition will be much concerned with how “change in truth” is sanctioned and who has the community authority to sanction changes in understanding.  A major change in understanding led to the separation of Christianity from Judaism and so we cannot be naïve about change and actual consequence in the practice of faith communities.  Changes in understanding still happen and they often divide faith communities.  This is something that we must understand if we are to understand how we came to be the Episcopal Church.

Exercise:

Look at the list of questions above.  What other basic questions would you add to the list?  

Father Phil

Session 18 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 18 

As I look at the wisdom traditions that are found in the Bible and in the writings of our Christian traditions and in the inherited practices, I assert that the great insights we have received, sometimes called revelation have functioned to help our ancestors survive and forge an identity and transmit what each of them have added to a living tradition that still lives today.  Our tradition is not a tradition dead in letters in a page in a book or in books; it is words with Spirit that are alive enough to inspire new words of insight for pragmatic and wise living.

 We call the first section of the Bible, the Old Testament but for the Jewish people, it is not old at all, because it is their Hebrew Scriptures that they know to be alive within their worshiping communities today.  The Hebrew Scriptures functions differently for Jews who have located themselves more completely within the Hebrew Scriptures tradition.

In looking at the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures we find many insights that have arisen to address the great questions of life.  About the Hebrew Scriptures we might say that it was not written for me in the way that a personal letter is written to me.  In fact, though I presume the relevance of the Bible to me, it was not written to me or for me per se.  Any writing past or present has a writing occasion and in that occasion the writer is the sender of the message and there is a specific intended receiver.  Biblical writing was not writing like an anonymous message in a bottle and cast into the sea for some possible but uncertain future reader.  When one is looking at an ancient writing such as the Old Testament, it is very hard to define single writing occasions since the Book is a collection of the text results of writing occasions.  Some writing occasions include the complete re-using and re-editing of previous writings into a new occasion.  The final edition is made up of many different editors and we have lost details of the ancient contexts of the writing occasions (who wrote it, where, and to whom).  We have to do scholarly work to match up what we know from general history and archaeology to provide some light upon the writing occasions.  We mostly rely upon internal evidence itself, such as the reference to certain tools or weapons that indicate a particular Age or era.

When I look at the Hebrew Scriptures I find writing that is the technology of memory of great insights that inspired people as they dealt with the great questions of life.  The book of Genesis presents an insight in answer to the question of where we came from.  The infinite regression (mentally trying to conceive the first chicken and the first egg) is brought to a break through when the word of God creates life as we know it.  So word as emanating from God creates the world as the writers of the book of Genesis knows the world.  All definitions of beginning of anything still leave us with questions and mystery.  The word of God created this world.  In science, the big bang started everything and from a single bang has differentiated into what we have today.  What came before the big bang?  Is God a Being with language like human beings such that God would speak?  Whether scientific big bang or creation by word of God, we still are left with mystery.  The truth of the big bang and of the creation story is the universal truth of origin quest within humanity.  The “Origin Quest” make-up of humanity is the greater revelation of Genesis than being able to verify the creation story as an historic event.    This big insight is so profound as to inspire endless attempts to prove the “origin quest” truth.  And so the bigger question of life is living with “origin quest” as defining our basic humanity.  No one can presume to give a final answer to “origin quest” since it is something we live with and we give many insights about “origin quest.”

The Hebrew Scriptures gives many different goals to the creation story that arose because of the basic human “origin quest.”  One of the main functions of the book of Genesis has to do with the forming of a functional identity of the people who resided in what came to be called Israel.  The irony is that much of the writing and editing of this functional identity did not occur until after what were called the exiles.  The people of Israel were carried off into exile by the Assyrians, Babylonians and the Medes and Persians.  It was in the times of losing their land that the writing was done with a fervor that literally made their writing their new interior “topography.”  Their writing became what constituted (constructed) their identity as a people who could retain that identity without being in their land. At the same time the writing constituted the Jews as a people who were uniquely married to a particular land. This marriage is so profound that the connection remains today even for those who have never set foot there.  One cannot miss the profundity of how the Hebrew Scriptures have created this bond for such a long ethnic/communal continuity and a long connection to a particular geographical location.

The Hebrew Scriptures have more particular relevance to the formation of the identity of the Jewish people than it does to me as a “Gentile” Christian.  We cannot ever usurp or forget the particular relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures to the Jewish people; the Scriptures are inextricably woven into Jewish self-identity.  It is important for us to appreciate this as we attempt to understand how our community identity has been born out of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jews who were the architects of the Hebrew Scripture religious traditions.

Let’s be honest then; the Hebrew Scriptures are written from a point of view, namely, the point of view of the Jewish peoples.  The Hebrew Scriptures were written to help constitute them as a people and to serve as “Spirit of the words” to continue their communal identity in their future.  One of chief reasons that the Bible carries weight and authority is because it is unique in how it uses pre-historic wisdom epics as a way to give foundation to practices that are found in the practices of the Jewish community.

The writers of the Hebrew Scriptures use the pre-historic wisdom epics about humanity in general and the symbolic narratives from the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, tribes of Israel, Moses)  to create the foundations for how the historic identity was forged during the Davidic and post-Davidic times.  We will look at this use of pre-historic wisdom epics and symbolic narratives of the patriarchs as creating what I would call sonar or echo effect between history and pre-history.  It is something like this: The community practices Sabbath.  Why do I have to give up a day?  The ancient epic of oral tradition has the seventh day of God’s rest from creating.   Thus, there is a day of religious obligation.  The practice is taught by looking into oral epic story tradition and oral tradition comes to textual form as an explanation of the religious practice of Sabbath.  I hope that you do not cease to be amazed by the living Spirit in how tradition occurs and how it relives in new ways.  This will be even more crucial when we show how the New Testament writers used the Hebrew Scriptures as the template for telling the story of Jesus Christ.

Exercise:

Is this your vision of how the Bible came to us? A Holy Spirit Dove whispering verbatim words into various authors ears as they write them down.  Is this your view of how the Bible is understood?  All of the words have but one meaning and if I understand the meanings of the words, I can understand the correct meaning?  How do you think the Jews feel about Christian uses the Hebrew Scriptures as a Christian book for Christian purposes?

Father Phil

Session 19 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 19 

One of the many dilemmas of our modern life has been the growth of modern scholarship.  Modern life has provided the leisure for the people to become passionately interested in the study of the past.  We have special studies for all kinds of study of the past.  We have modern radioactive and carbon dating techniques that allow us to understand fairly accurately the age of earth matter and the age of human cultural remains.  We have better knowledge of history than the people who actually were responsible for the compilation of the Bible.  It sounds arrogant but it’s true.  Archaeologists and historians do not set out to prove the events in the Bible to be true; they try to interpret the various data that they have using the various methods of processing the historical data.

This means that we modern people have come to view objective history reports to be the main criteria of what is true.  This view of things that “truly happened” has then been used by defenders of the accuracy of the Bible to say all of the events in the Bible are true in the same way as modern journalistic writing.   People who love the Bible and its truths do not need to import modern historical criteria to appreciate its value for faith inspiration in our lives.  Modern persons embrace the natural laws of science as being descriptive of the world 2000 years ago as they are now.  So, if one threw a rock in the air 3000 years ago, the gravitational effect would be the same as we understand it today.  When Biblical writers report events that do not conform to the laws of nature as we understand them today, we do not have to make a false choice between modern science or the credibility of the Bible.  We in our own lives practice difference discourse with art and aesthetics than we do with science.  Every day we combine all kinds of genre and language types in our reading and speaking.  While we are fascinated with science, we might say that language use that moves us to change our moral and spiritual lives conform to the discourse of literary art and aesthetics and hence are true in a profoundly equal but different way than the truths of science.  You and I live this way whether we have ever come to actually express it in this way.  Do not let fundamentalists who are confused in their use of discourse tell you that you don’t have faith or don’t believe the Bible if you can appreciate the story value of a prophet levitating axe heads to the surface of the water without denying the scientific impossibility of the same.    We can still hold a special place in our discourse for the uncanny, the awesome and the wonderful without trying to say the Bible is a modern scientific view of how things actually happened.

Do not put false truth criteria upon the Bible or its writers and end up defending the wrong meanings for the wrong reasons.

As we look at the Hebrew Scriptures, scholars place the writing anywhere from 500 BCE to 250 BCE, with the Book of Daniel being even later.  This might logically seem like a late date for a book that gives an account of creation and pre-historic humanity.  It may seem to be more amazing that this is well after the years of King David (c. 1040–970 BCE) when events seem to be moving into the time of historical record.  It is important to understand the diversity of the kinds of writings that are in the Hebrew Scriptures and not to treat everything as historical events.

What we are going to look at are the main issues that are found in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures and how they represent a literary wonder as the writers wrote to inculcate and inform the very values and the identity of the Jewish people.  As Christians, we have received the value of the Hebrew Scriptures in our formation and in our continuing journey to understand the foundations of our faith.  The words of the Hebrew Scriptures have created much of our ancient past from which most of our Christian symbols have derived.

Exercise:

Do you ever cry at a movie?  Are you ever moved or inspired by a piece of music or art?  Do you ever get emotionally involved or influenced by a work of fiction, a novel?  Are you griped by the excitement of a sporting event?  What is the truth value of your reactions to these different cultural experiences?  Are they true?  Does each and every word of the Bible have to be true in the same way that an eyewitness to an accident gives a “true” account of the accident?  Can you accept that the fact that you have very refined language finesse and you can make distinctions of meanings and truths when reading the Bible?  There is a series on the Bible on the History Channel that you may want to watch.   Look at what Dr. Joel Hoffman writes about history and fiction in the Hebrew Scriptures: http://huff.to/15tuVGP

Father Phil

Session 20 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 20:  

I make an assumption of us at St. Mary's Episcopal Church; I assume that we have not felt called nor have we chosen to be an expression of faith in the intellectual, social, cultural, technological mode of the Amish.  We choose not to fear our modern world and insulate ourselves in a lifestyle to keep the post-modern world from interacting with our daily patterns of life.  Yes, the abundance of modern knowledge and information threatens to dissolve the distinction of the words of our Bible, Prayer Book and Christian tradition.  The words of our distinct tradition may seem to be failing to make a recognizable difference among all of the other branding with words that we receive in our information age.  If one trusts the recent polls that reveal that the majority of American Roman Catholic lay people are at odds with their church leaders about current social issues, it is an indication that they do not want an “ecclesiastical” isolation or insulation from our modern world.  In our world women are empowered by acknowledgment of their inherent being and ability, the world is facing a population problem and there is a growing honesty about the deep orientations of people that cannot be ostracized or called inherently sinful while professing equal love and justice for all.  

We in the church have been caught flat-footed with the changes in the world and have too often just responded with church jargon of the past and perhaps believe that church jargon will just make us magically more engaged with the post-modern world or encourage post-modern people to enter a time-warp compartment on Sunday where we can pretend that the post-modern world never happened because we with our Scriptures and traditions can live in liturgical isolation even as our full participation in the informational age betrays such an isolation.

As a priest, I want for us to be able to speak our Gospel, our good news of how we can profess the meaningful and useful relationship with Christ in our lives.  We begin by understanding our post-modern situation.

To understand the postmodernism that envelops our culture we need to understand “word.”  In John’s Gospel poetic metaphor Jesus is called the Word of God that created all things.  One might also say that word still creates all things today in the sense of meaningful interaction with other people and our environment.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, “My words are spirit and they are life.”  Words are invisible and they inhabit our invisible insides and we exchange our lives most intimately with each other through our words because words get processed in some mysterious perhaps electrical event in the brain.  And with our words the actions of our body get animated into the deeds we execute.  Words are spirit or mysteriously processed inside of us and they become flesh in our actions.  This understanding of John’s Gospel might be called a postmodern understanding of it.

In postmodernism, one can understand that all experience is mediated through our use of word.  When I say a certain object is a tree.  Endless follow up question can be asked. Which tree?  This tree?  What do you mean by this?  The one that I am pointing to now?  What does “pointing to the one” mean?  Yes, we assume a tree is there by the habit of our cultural training, but in interacting with the tree we end up assuming an endless chain of synonyms for the human experience of tree.  Fortunately most of our pragmatic use of items in our world is governed by a naïve realism of general cultural agreement on what words mean.  But In a real sense even when we grasp a certain tree with our hands we are expressing a colossal universe of our word culture.  This kind of verbal “play” seems silly when referring to things that we can see and touch but it becomes more evident when we try to speak about meaningful things that cannot be seen or touched, like God, love, joy and truth.  Suddenly it seems as though we can share more precise language about a tree that we can see than about God or love or “the church” all of which we cannot “see.”  When words begin to refer to things that cannot be seen or touched or heard then there is the lack of precision in agreement and that can make practical human agreement problematic.  However, the lack of precision in agreement should not discount the profound significance in meaning of words about what cannot be seen.

In looking at the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures one can find a collection of words that came to be created by a profound idea so profound that the people who discovered it confessed that it had come from the horizon of human experience.  And what was this profound idea that generated the production of the one of great written wonders of the ancient world?  It was the understanding of the profound notion of unity to be an organizing principle of the universe.  It is stated in the famous confession of Judaism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One.”  The revolutionary idea/revelation that was going to bring into being a new way of understanding how to be human in this world was this revolutionary belief in One God, a God whose greatness could not be fully comprehended.  The only humble thing to do was to admit that God’s name was unpronounceable. What I would like for us to understand as we look at the Hebrew Scriptures is that they were compiled by wisdom scribes who were perhaps dumb-founded by all that their people had survived and so they were inspired to write out as much detail of their corporate memory of why they had survived.  Because if they could write the mystery in words of their survival, they might leave those words as a gift to continue the survival and blessing of people who word read them and form their own worship identity from these word.  The words of the Hebrew Scriptures are spirit and they are life; they have and do mysteriously interact on the invisible place inside where word meaning occurs.

And so the scribes collected and collated the memory of how their people were formed and related to the revelation that “The Lord your God is One.”  And what one finds in these writings is that they are honest with human messiness.  They are honest with the struggle of people to understand the revelation and who live when there was the availability of a Smorgasbord variety of other deities to challenge their loyalty to the One God.

We will be looking at how the corporate memories came to writing in the Scriptures around this great idea, this great revelation, the change that came from a horizon of human experience and revolutionized a people, peoples and the world. 

Exercise:

Take an object and say the word for it.  And then see how long you can create a string of other words that equal what you have just said.  Do you see how words referring to other words could be endless even when you are talking about “this tree” right here.   You might Google the word “God” or “Love” and you would not have enough time in your life to explore all of the different words for these “meaningful” invisible realities.  How can something be meaningful but invisible?  What does that tell you about being human and words and using words about words that are supposed to refer to experience?  If you can appreciate the “above” you understand why in the midst of differences, it is practical to have an authority like the king of old who would say a yard equals the length of his arm, “end of discussion.”  So there are practical reasons to have methods of “authority” for promoting orderly community interaction.  The question today is whether allowing too much authority to reside in a monarch or pope is the most adequate way to live in our postmodern world.  How do you think authority works in practical ways in the Episcopal Church?

Father Phil