I’ll start teaching Confirmation Class at St. Paul in three weeks. More than in any previous year of teaching, I wonder what I’ll say. Every year I read more, study further, and separate further in my mind the beautiful liturgy with which I was raised and the truth about the world as I understand it. The more I read about the Bible and the history of the church, the more I come to doubt some things I know my students will believe. Here are a few things I believe:

more

As usual,

The Big Picture

It’s Advent again (where did the year go?) and since I didn’t manage to record any new Advent carols for you all, I will republish my series of the O Antiphons. I’ll come back and add to this post every day, rather than posting N times with no new content. Unless I have new content, but you can judge for yourself how likely that is…

December 17: O Sapienta December 18: O Adonai December 19: O Radix Jesse December 20: O Clavis David December 21: O Oriens December 22: O Rex Gentium December 23: O Emmanuel

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From the Gospel of our President and Savior Barack Obama according to his Apostle Media.

This year’s Passover Haggadah was pretty well received. The host said it was “polished,” and others commented that it “had nice flow.” I’m now comfortable making it generally available. The Mercurial repository is at http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/. You can probably check out a copy to look at with hg clone http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/.

This year I experimented with direct representation of Hebrew. In the past I’ve used embedded graphics, but they never look quite right. Now I’ve found a good source of properly-spelled Hebrew like the following:

?מַה נִּשְּׁתַּנָה הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת

I had a few complaints about the placement of vowel points under narrow characters, but nobody seemed to have actual trouble reading it. I borrowed and copied and learned from many sources in assembling this document. I hope others benefit from this document in the same way

I found this post at Sense of Events a very informative, intellectual, and moving account of the events that occurred (according to some calendars) ~2000 years ago this last weekend. Just thought I’d pass it along while I’m working on organizing my own thoughts for original reflections on a bunch of topics.

Last night, as part of my church’s Lenten observances, we walked a seven-circuit labyrinth. The one we walked is temporary—along the same design as the two built into the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, but only seven instead of eleven circuits, and marked in blue ink onto a white tarpaulin spread out over the floor.

The labyrinth experience itself was interesting—we had about 30 people walking simultaneously, so though it was nearly empty when I entered, it was quite full and we had people passing each other as I was winding my way out. (You enter and exit the labyrinth by the same path.) I enjoyed the clockwork-like, intricate dance of my fellow-travelers, both during my walk and after I left. However, that was not my favorite part.

My favorite part was the words I encountered when I got to the center. The vicar who organized borrowing this labyrinth from our Synod had left a bible open to Psalm 139 and 140 in the center. I’m not sure what text she intended to leave out, but one verse particularly spoke to me:

Psalm 139:14 - I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

I held that phrase, “fearfully and wonderfully made” all through my exit from the labyrinth, and looked it up while waiting for the rest of our group to finish in the KJV that I have on my PalmPilot. (What, doesn’t everyone keep a Bible in their pocket?) I later learned that not all translations have that same poetry, though this Hebrew/English Bible does. I need to learn to read Hebrew, I suppose, but in the mean time I’ll just hold on to the KJV’s poetry and relish the imagery that it grants me.

Marcus Borg is speaking this weekend at Boston University. He is the author of Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, which I reviewed last year, and many others.  He’s been invited by the Episcopal Diocese of Boston.  This is the same denomination that recently had a priest ordained as an imam, and that recently advocated a system of split family law for Britain.

I’m going to hear him speak; I found the book stimulated many good arguments. I hope to have some more afterwards.  I invite you to join me.  Registration is required.

(or, Why I Love Being a Soprano)

Tonight I was rehearsing a setting of the Lord’s Prayer with my church’s organist. The piece is one I know reasonably well, and is written to lead up to a beautiful high-Bb climax and then come down gracefully to end the prayer(1). As I drove home, I felt a phenomenal endorphin rush combined with immense peace and relaxation. I have other memories of this feeling: sometimes it comes after exercise, when my body is exhausted but my mind is clear. Sometimes I feel it when I pray, especially outdoors and away from all the fast-moving distractions that dominate much of my everyday life. Mostly, however, I get this feeling when I sing.

Music is very tied up in my connection to God, and in how I express myself. I went to church all through middle and high school so that I could sing with the choir, even when I was the only member of my family to attend and I had to be driven 30 minutes away to get there, because the music was important to me. The hymns of my childhood formed most of my early thoughts about religion and what God is.

Conversely, I’ve never been confident composing spoken prayers—they end up being awkward, and if I’m alone I’ll get distracted before I really finish saying everything I meant to say, especially when I’m tired.

When I’m singing, I don’t have to worry about what I’ll say or in what order the words come. When I sing, I can open up the floodgates of my soul and let the music hidden there come pouring out. This is particularly true for loud high notes. Tonight the organist told me, "It must be so fun to be able to sing a Bb", and I agreed that it was, but there’s more to it than that. It takes everything you have to give, physically and spiritually, to push the air out and fill the room with sound. But, just as you push out the last bit of air, and think you’re empty, you realize that your soul is full of that excitement and peace I mentioned before. (Sadly, it does not come with more air. More air would sometimes be nice, since the music does keep going and there’s only me to sing it.)

I am so grateful that God has given me a way to reach out to Him that I can share with others.

(1) I hate when composers abandon the soprano on a high note (especially a soft one) at the end of a piece. It can be done well, but usually isn’t, and then you squeak, and nobody likes to squeak.

The title is one of the core beliefs of the Lutheran church. It’s often… well, alright: it’s rarely heard at all. But by those who do hear it, it’s often misunderstood to mean this:

As a sort of special present, we’re offered a deal: in exchange for belief in Jesus’ divinity and agreement to serve His interests, He’ll intercede with His father to prevent the punishment we’d otherwise receive.

This is a cosmic blackmail scheme. I can’t imagine anyone happily follows such a God—with this understanding, one must either depart the Church in pride, or stew uncomfortably on it. But there are alternate explanations. For example, here’s one based on early chapters of Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time:

Humans were built as imperfect creatures. Part of that imperfection is a tendency to do things that make us and those around us unhappy. Part of that imperfection is a bad trade-off of risk vs. long term reward. We can call the behaviors based on these imperfections sin.

With this understanding of sin, we can see why the designer of mankind might want to issue a patch. We might prefer, in the interests of ourselves and our ancestors, that he’d issued it further in the past. Why was this done only after thousands of years of human history? I’m not sure, and that’s a subject for another post. For now, consider that it might be ineffable and it might be a requirement for human society to evolve to a certain point from its origins. That’s a terrible sort of answer, and I look forward to expanding on it later.

We can call the patch justification. We are irregular and broken: we commit unjust acts. It would be nice to repair humanity and human society. Sometimes this justification is thought of as being saved from an external source of sin. Then we call it salvation. I’m going to stick with the term justification, though, to emphasize that this is about internal changes to individuals and communities being made just.

We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.

That is, we cannot repair the brokenness within ourselves. We can teach our children to be better than we are, but not better enough to fix this. We can construct Utopian artificial societies… but they turn into horrors. We need help from outside the system to repair the system. That help is called grace. But maybe we can help! Maybe there’s something we can do to accept the helpful patch and assist in its application! Well, for more reasons that I won’t go into here, we can’t. This is an open debate within the Christian community. The old Lutheran dogma says grace alone, but Catholics and others will tell you that good works are required. What’s a good work? Charity, benevolence, just rule and obedient service… and belief. Belief as a requirement for salvation is part of the technical term “good work.” When Lutherans write “grace alone,” we mean that you don’t have to hold to any particular dogma to receive justification. There is no test to pass—and therefore no test to study for. Nothing humanity can do, individually or collectively, can help it receive justification.

That could be the end of the message. We could say “By grace alone we are justified.” Sometimes we do: a different Lutheran creed says simply, “Grace alone.” The creed I used in the title says a bit more, though. It tells us what the patch looks like: what change will be made to humans and to humanity in order to justify us.

We are offered (by grace) a new relationship with God. In the distant past, God spoke only to a few prophets. Even fewer spoke back. Most people did not have a meaningful relationship with God. If you were lucky, you lived in a place that knew God’s laws for how mankind should believe. But Law is a narrow channel for a relationship: most people today don’t have a relationship with their government, for example. The new relationship that is offered to us is faith.

Faith is not belief or adherence to doctrine. Faith is participation in a relationship with God. It’s not a demanded creed to which we must subscribe in order to receive the patch of justification. It is the patch of justification: a change in the relationship between God and Man, initiated and sustained by God’s unilateral action. That is, the process of justification operates through faith, not as a magic trick performed after faith.

By grace alone through faith we are justified.

Now we can understand this as a statement densely packed with technical terms:

• Grace: action by God above and beyond what he committed to in prior covenants with Man.
• Alone: unilateral action. When we say “by grace alone,” we mean that only grace accounts for the phenomenon described.
• By: a description of initiatory mechanism: the reason why something comes to be.
• Faith: participation in a relationship with God.
• Through: a description of operating mechanism: the means by which something comes to be. When we say “through faith,” we mean that the described phenomenon operates by means of faith.
• We: Mankind, collectively, individually, and as the communities intermediate between the individual and the species.
• Justified: repaired, such that we are no longer troubled by sin.
• Are: present indicative. When we say we “are justified,” we mean that the process of justification is continuous and ongoing. We have not been justified in a way that operated and then ceased, completed. We are justified each day anew by the continued operation of a faith that exists by continued operation of grace.
• Sin: flaws in the operation of Man (see “We” above).