Author: Kyle

Last Sermon for a While

Kyle

I’ve preached three of the last four Sundays, so I’m looking forward to a bit of a homiletical hiatus. Still, it’s been a rewarding month for this preacher-in-training. Here’s what I had to say today on John 4:5-42:

Throughout the centuries, readers of today’s story from John’s gospel have encountered the passage, taken in its many details, marveled at what one expert called this “first full example of [John’s] dramatic ability,”1 and emerged from their careful study with one lingering and important question: “Why does it have to be so long?” Of course I kid, but the designers of our lectionary are not ignorant of our attention spans or of the necessary vocal endurance it will take for deacons throughout the church to belt out this hefty portion of the good news today. So let’s let the question stand. Couldn’t we do justice to the story while shaving off a few verses? Couldn’t we, for instance, have heard only the first half? When this passage came up in the church’s daily lectionary a week ago, that’s exactly how we got it: the encounter with the woman one day, the follow-up with the disciples the next day.

I think if we look closely at what actually happens in this story, the logic of sticking to our full dose will become clear. So, if you can, think back to the beginning. Jesus is fatigued and thirsty after a morning’s travel. He asks for a drink of water from a woman he encounters near a well and, after the initial exchange says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (10). The woman replies, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (11). Jesus tells her that she’s misunderstood him: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (13-14). In other words, the woman has underestimated Jesus’s person and promise. The living, flowing water is not a physical gift that relieves us of the need for our daily H20; it sounds more like a spiritual gift, like his teaching and his sharing of the Spirit.2 Of course, he and the woman say lots of other things, but let’s leave it at this for our gloss of Scene One: the woman and the water.

In the second half of the story, we see Jesus turn his attention to the disciples. As is often the case, they start off scandalized by the company he’s chosen to keep, but then they move on to more immediate midday concerns: “Rabbi, eat something,” they say, and he replies, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Like the woman, they initially miss the point: “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” they say. And as with the woman, Jesus chooses to enlighten them about their misunderstanding: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” So the disciples underestimate him as well. He is sustained not by material food, he says, but by his mission.3 So that’s Scene Two: the disciples and the food.

The importance of these parallels, I believe, is that each scene contains a challenge, and these challenges are related. In Scene Two, the challenge is pretty direct and obvious: it’s to make Jesus’s mission our mission. He says, “I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting” (35). Now, as then, the time is ripe for us to go out and reap what God and other servants have sewn. The time is ripe because the need is great, and without even knowing it we reap God’s harvest as we speak a word of hope to a neighbor or engage in an act of solidarity with a stranger.

Scene One, I think, contains a similar challenge, not about mission this time but about devotion. To say it briefly, we have to choose to drink the water, a choice that will affect us every day of our lives. Like staying hydrated on a hot summer day, “being watered” by our Lord takes discipline; it’s not a lot of work, but we have to remember to do it. Drinking the water is about letting the risen Christ into our lives or—better yet—about taking time to realize that he is already there inside us. There are lots of ways to do this, of course: perhaps prayer, bible study, or just quiet time with God. That a little effort each day can make a lifetime of difference in our relationship with God is surely a sign that the Spirit is active in our lives and working within us to transform our hearts.

So, I said that the challenges Jesus has in store for us in this passage are related, and this is the point I want to really want to make clear. The way they’re related makes a difference, because this is probably the point in the sermon where we all start to feel a little weary. It sounds, I’ll admit, suspiciously like I’m trying to add to our to-do lists, maybe not just for Lent but for the rest of our lives. Perhaps, as it does to me, the very prospect exhausts you.

Well, let’s take a tip from Bishop Sutton for a moment. I loved the point he made toward the end of his sermon when he was with us back in February. He asked us to notice that Jesus didn’t say, “You are the pepper of the earth.” It strikes me that we’ll get a better handle on this morning’s gospel passage if we think about what else Jesus didn’t say. He didn’t say, for instance, “I came that you might have another to-do list, and feel guiltier about it.” He didn’t say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will add to them.” No, what he said was that he has innumerable good gifts to offer us: life abundant, rest for the weary, and, today, food and water for our journey, what John Calvin called “the secret energy by which [God] restores life in us.”4 The way our two challenges this morning are related is that Jesus claims they will sustain us.

So maybe the real challenge is simply to hear that good news—“I have food to eat that you do not know about”; “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”—to hear that good news and believe it. Believe that Jesus’s food, which is to do God’s will, really can nourish our lives. Believe that Jesus’s living water really can quench our spiritual thirst if we but stop and drink. Believe that God alone can sustain us.

This is where I think we can help each other out. Have you ever heard someone talk about a change in their life and seen the incontrovertible signs that this change is bearing fruit for them? Perhaps they light up at the mention of a new outreach project they’ve been participating in, chronicling it for you not because they want to boast, but because all the joyful details just kind of bubble up. Or perhaps they get very quiet and shy as they admit during a small-group conversation that they’ve had a profound experience of God, one they think might stick with them for years to come. They can’t really make sense of it rationally, but neither can they dismiss it and go on as if nothing had ever happened. Does hearing about those experiences ever stir something in you? Does it start to make Jesus’s promises today sound a little less far-fetched?

Let me risk a personal example. I have this inkling that the practice of keeping a journal might be a good idea for me. This is not something I want to do. It sounds exhausting. Seminarians write a lot, much of it under duress, and the thought of adding even just a couple more paragraphs each day was enough to invoke in me something approaching despair. But I had a conversation recently with a friend who has been diligently journaling for years. And when I hear her talk about all that she’s learned about herself in those pages, and how much this record of her struggles and her triumphs has meant to her as the years have passed, I start to believe that keeping a journal could be a source of life for me too, a way of deepening my awareness of how God is working within me. I’m starting to believe, and so far I haven’t been disappointed. It may not stick, of course, but for now it does feel like the kind of blessing Jesus promises us today.

So how about you? How do you need to be sustained by deepening your life of mission and devotion? How have you been sustained by these things in the past? My prayer for us today is that we ask ourselves these questions—and especially that we ask each other. That Christ can sustain us in this way with his food and his living water is such good news that it can be almost impossible for us to believe. In this third week of Lent, let’s try to help each other’s unbelief.

1 Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997): 342.

2 See Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (i–xii) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966): 178-180.

3 Anchor, 181.

4 John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005): 149.

Little Rock…Rocks

Kyle

So, I was in Little Rock this past weekend preaching at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. What a thoroughly lovely parish and a fun experience. If you ever get to Little Rock, definitely check out Whole Hog; it had been far too long since I had real barbecue. Anyway, here’s the sermon I preached on Romans 5:12-19.

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Good morning, my name is Kyle Oliver, and I bring you greetings from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where I’m a second-year divinity student. I’m here thanks to the kind generosity of this parish and especially of Mary and Dean Kumpuris, who sponsor a scholarship for seminarians in memory of their daughter Anne. I am very grateful to be here, and I’m grateful to be your guest preacher this morning, even if it is the First Sunday of Lent.

I’ve gotta tell you, though, that’s the last thing I thought I’d be saying when I first starting preparing this sermon. You see, my mind kept leaping back to an Ash Wednesday sermon I heard several years ago. It was given by a priest who may very well be the sweetest, gentlest man that I know. But you wouldn’t have guessed it sitting in the pews that day. He very starkly laid out the situation for us, starting with words like “We are all here guilty of the sin of idolatry!” And it turned out that he was just getting warmed up. It was a shocking experience, and it has stayed with me as a real landmark sermon for the beginning of Lent. “Uh oh,” I said, “I don’t think a sermon like that would be an advisable way to begin a relationship with people who had just given me money for school.”

Imagine my relief, then, when I got a look at our passage from the fifth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It speaks quite well to our Lenten situation, and it views the problem of our sinfulness in proper proportion. The message here is profoundly upbeat, very much in the spirit of our psalm’s opening line: “Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven * and whose sin is put away” (Psalm 32:1). Of course, that joy comes after several stages of reflection, examination, and confession. The first step is acknowledging that we are among this potentially happy lot. Paul makes no bones about this first point: “death spread to all because all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And so we are right to face the reality our sins, our weakness, and even our wickedness. Good Protestants that we are, we ground this reflection in scripture. On Ash Wednesday, we take a deep breath and march through a very difficult liturgy, listening as the readings and prayers form for us a list of our transgressions against God’s holy law. We need this list of the charges, because, as Paul writes next, “sin is not reckoned when there is no law” (13). So in the season of Lent, we are first called to wake up to the reality of our situation. We take note of the full extent of the law and our failure to keep it, and this renewed awareness “reckons” to us—points out to us in no uncertain terms—our enslavement to sin in all its weight and inevitability. So that’s step one on our penitential journey: taking stock of our sinful situation.

Now it’s in the next step—perhaps even more so than in all the sinning we’ve been up to previously—that we can go seriously astray. In this next step, we decide, usually without even realizing it, that we’re going to make it all up to God. We’re going to change our ways, put things right, take responsibility for our actions, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in splendidly self-sufficient fashion. We’re good Americans, after all, and we believe in accountability. And so all our well-meaning Lenten disciplines take on a note not just of penance, a means of saying we’re sorry, but of punishment, a means of suffering for and therefore, we hope, atoning for our wrongdoing.

This, Paul says, is precisely the wrong response to our predicament. Death is indeed “exercis[ing] dominion” over us (14), but we cannot flea to freedom through our own efforts. And this is where we get to the good news, which is plentiful. First and foremost, it is the news that we do not need to earn our freedom. It has been earned for us, and it is—Paul says no less than five times in this passage—a free gift. As in really and truly free. No shipping and handling. No mandatory mail-in rebate. Our redemption is a free gift that we need not and indeed cannot earn or pay for.

What’s more, Paul says, the power of this gift is like no other force in the universe. Listen again to what he writes next: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass [that would be Adam], much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification” (15-16). In other words, the effects of sin spread like a cancer. Adam and Eve eat the apple and—boom—we’re off and running, multiplying transgression upon transgression. But on the other hand, the free gift of God’s grace can and does wipe clean the face of the earth and usher in an era of abundant health and wholeness, of true and abiding rightness with God in Christ. As a very literal translation would render what comes next, “where sin abounded, grace overabounded” (17).

I implied earlier, I hope somewhat provocatively, that this whole “free gift” gospel that Paul preaches in all its power does not sit very well with our American sensibilities. We want so desperately to earn what we have. We want, like Mrs. DuBose in To Kill A Mockingbird, to live in and then depart this world “beholden to no one.” It’s encoded in our national ethos that there is something lazy or shameful about asking for help, about even needing help. By confronting us with our own sinfulness and mortality, Lent seeks to relieve us of this toxic but pernicious thought. This is the second stage of our Lenten reflection, and it will take many of us an awful lot of Lents to get the message—myself, I fear, quite definitely included.

I heard an interview recently with Eugene Peterson, author of the popular paraphrase of the Bible known as The Message. It sounds like Peterson can relate to our plight. When the interviewer asked him if his faith had ever been tested, he talked about a particular time in his life: “Yeah, those early years that I call the Badlands, when my competitive instincts weren’t working anymore. There were six years when nothing seemed to be working.” The interviewer asked, “How did you get over it? Did it just pass, or did you have to really work at it?” Peterson answered, “Well, you see that was the problem. I was used to working at things, and now working at things didn’t make any difference. So I found some people to talk to. I started running … so that became a way of being competitive without being competitive … We started keeping Sabbaths, my wife and I … We just kind of lived into that Sabbath world of rest … So there were a number of things like that. It wasn’t a program. It goes each step an arrival; each thing we did led to something else. After six years, I can’t tell you what happened, but here I was, I was whole. All that stuff had gotten integrated into something which was more like a joyful, obedient life rather than a striving, mastering life.” Listen to that. “Working at it” was part of the problem, he says. Learning to receive was part of the solution. And in the end, he “cant’ really tell [us] what happened … [he] was [just] whole.”

I think we would do well to treat our Lenten journeys, and especially our Lenten disciplines, with the same soft hands Peterson used to receive the wholeness God had in store for him. During this season, and throughout our lives, we can and should say that we’re sorry. We can and should renew our commitment to doing the best we can, and expect that God’s gift of grace in our lives will gradually raise that bar higher and higher. But if our Lenten discipline becomes another venue for trying to earn a free gift that has already been bestowed, then heaven make us free of it. Not to be overdramatic, but such practices are not just pointless, but dangerous. In the words of spiritual writer Martin Smith, if we can’t learn in Lent to accept our creatureliness and imperfection, then we will become a “menace” and not a “grace” to the people we encounter, and to ourselves. It will turn us into self-hating perfectionists and turn our life of faith into a piety contest. And a piety contest, it was recently pointed out to me, is no more likely than a pie-eating contest to win us the peace of God that we seek. Lent, I believe, seeks to teach us to receive that peace as pure gift, not earned by our merits but freely given through the merits of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Another Take on “The Real Problem” in Anglicanism Today

Kyle

I recently read with some exhaustion a Living Church account (though not this one) of the Mere Anglicanism conference held in Charleston, SC, back in January. The theme of the conference was “Biblical Anglicanism for a Global Future: Recovering the Power of the Word of God.” I have to say, especially in the added light of following this week’s hubbub around Rob Bell’s new book, I’m getting awfully tired of having my faith be portrayed as “unbiblical” by people who, in good faith, read the bible differently from how I read it (which manner is, I believe, also in good faith).

One particular case in point is the following comment about the Rev. Charles Raven’s session “The Wages of Synthesis or Lasting Treasure? Recovering the Power of the Word of Truth.” (In fairness to Raven, let me preface all this by acknowledging that I’m relying on Daniel Muth’s account of his position, so I’m happy to stand corrected if I’m misrepresenting him.)

Raven described Archbishop Rowan Williams as a brilliant committed Christian beset with an ultimately unworkable combination of hermeneutical pessimism (Scripture is unclear) and ecclesiastical optimism (if we talk long enough we will find common ground). Despite the archbishop’s best efforts, treating Christian orthodoxy as process rather than proposition does not keep all parties at the table, Raven said.

It seems to me that the accusation of “hermeneutical pessimism” gets to the very heart of what is tearing us all apart right now. I believe Williams is a hermeneutical realist; he acknowledges that faithful people encounter the biblical text and reach different conclusions about what it means. You can call that an attack on “the Power of the Word of Truth” if you like, but . . . well again, we ultimately arrive at me saying something like “but we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that point.” I believe we are called to a more hopeful and realistic doctrine of the Truth of Scripture, one that is neither relativistic nor threatened by the existence of a diversity of interpretation. We don’t have to be soft on truth to be firmly convinced that no party sees it in its entirety but, rather, “in a mirror, dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

And so it goes. The demand that orthodoxy be purely about proposition is common enough, but the history of Christianity shows–in my reading of it, though some of my classmates understandably disagree–that we’ve never gotten very far at living out our catholicity when we demand of all our fellow communicants rigid adherence to a universally agreed upon dogmatic program. Indeed, you could do a lot worse than to interpret the term “Mere Anglicanism” in exactly that spirit: our tradition chose to acknowledge the difficulty of demanding uniformity of doctrine, so we dedicated ourselves to sharing common worship. (Then again, I got into one of the two shouting matches I’ve been in during seminary defending that position.)

What seems especially unfair about Raven’s claim (or, again, Muth’s gloss of it) is the language about keeping “all parties at the table.” It sounds like we can agree, at least provisionally, that doing so is an admirable goal. But why is it intractable under the Williams formula (hermeneutical pessimism + ecclesiastical optimism)? Because the hermeneutical optimists want us pessimists to either (1) see the light and change our tune, (2) leave the table because of our dogmatic unworthiness, or (3) allow them to take the table with them somewhere else. Keep in mind that subscribers to the Williams formula are not–by and large, though we have some things to repent of, I believe–asking anyone to leave the table. What is communion, our position leads us to ask, but continuing to sit at the table and talk about the things we disagree about? So take note: in this program, no one’s being forced out (this is absolutely essential to the integrity and cost of the position, and I think my “side” has blown it in a couple of instances), though some do choose to leave.

On the other hand, what of the converse position? What would happen if the dominant formula were hermeneutical optimism (Scripture is clear) and ecclesiastical pessimism (no amount of talking will lead us to identify common ground)? That table seems to have people leaving in droves: First, most of us hermeneutical pessimists will be forced to leave for our unwillingness to sign on the dotted line (except for those few whose individual interpretations happen to fall in line and who are willing to push away from the table their brothers and sisters for whom that is not the case). Second (and of course this one is subject to my biases as a hermeneutical pessimist), there will be the inevitable trickling out of those hermeneutical optimists who find, not that their optimism was misplaced (Scripture is clear!), but that their fellow optimists just happen (out of ignorance? unfaithfulness? outright rebellion against God?) to be wrong about some point or the other. In this alternative, even if “the Power of the [unambiguous] Word of Truth” heads off the secondary trickle that has never heretofore been headed off, an awful lot of people get forced out.

So we have two alternatives, both resulting in the original table seating many fewer guests. How do we choose among them? Well, hermeneutical pessimist that I am, I return to 1 Corinthians 13:12 and then keep on reading:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Final reflections:

(1) I’m sorry about all the polemical Us vs. Them here, I really am. This article has just been eating away at me all week, and I needed to get my objections out there in the open. Obviously, the terms Raven/Muth set out here are fundamentally inadequate to capturing the complexities of the situation. But there’s a kernel of truth here that teaches us quite a bit about what all the fuss is about.

(2) Obviously, the combination of hermeneutical optimism AND ecclesiastical optimism is an attractive third option and may best account for why the Anglican Communion has made it this far with its current level of intactness. And I certainly want us to go forward with an approach that is deeply grounded in faithfulness to scripture and that trusts in the Spirit’s power to guide the Church into all truth. But aren’t we asking too much of the Bible if we expect it to somehow be the unambiguous arbiter of all our doctrinal disagreements? And isn’t that what Raven, in comparing hermeneutical optimism favorably to Williams’ ecclesiastical approach, ultimately does?

I don’t think you have to be a radical historical-critical biblical skeptic to believe the Bible contains some pretty significant ambiguities on issues that matter to our modern life together. This is why I prefer the term “hermeneutical realist” and why I believe that love–God’s love for us, our love for God, our love for each other, and Christ’s longing for us all to be one–is the only force strong enough to keep us all at the table.

(3) Incidentally, does anyone know why these Living Church issues keep ending up in the VTS mailboxes? Did the seminary score, like, a complimentary subscription for all its students? What about at the other seminaries? I’m not speaking ill of my hometown’s ecclesiastical periodical (indeed, I’m grateful, even on a day where I’ve frittered away my entire afternoon on a blog post about a single paragraph on page 26 of the February issue), but it’s slightly creepy to be getting a magazine without knowing why.

Some Roman Reflections

Kyle

The following is going to go up on the VTS Anglican Commentary at some point, but I owe you all some kind of comment on my Rome trip, so you get a sneak peak. Sorry for my absence here lately! It’s been an exciting but extremely busy semester so far. More info…sometime. Enjoy!

The first of our two weeks in Rome was spent studying the history and architecture of the early churches there. One of my more fascinating experiences that week was my visit to the Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano, the first site of Christian worship in what had been the center of pagan Rome. The church was converted to that purpose from its former identity as part of the Temple of Peace by Pope Felix in the late 520s. Felix added a beautiful Hellenistic mosaic of Christ at the parousia and an accompanying inscription describing how “THE TEMPLE BEFORE NAMED AS SACRED HAS INCREASED IN HONOR.” The church’s nearest neighbor is the circular Temple of Jupiter Stator (Jupiter the Stayer), a beautifully preserved structure that at one time served the basilica as a narthex.

What’s going on at Santi Cosma e Damiano, as far as I can tell, is a coming together of two somewhat troubling aspects of the way the Greco-Roman milieu influenced early Christianity. On the one hand, we see in Felix’s triumphant inscription the victorious spirit of Christianity’s great coming-out party. I suppose this party was fed not just by the memory of persecutions and marginalization but by the way Constantine and his successors sought to use the church as a force to unite the empire. On the other hand, we sense in the Hellenistic mosaic itself and in the church’s one-time narthex something of the Ancient Roman civic spirit, the spirit of aloof detachment.

We encountered the vestiges of that spirit in many of the churches we visited. It was like seeing represented artistically and architecturally what Bishop Tom Breidenthal describes theologically and ethically when he recounts St. Augustine’s struggle to decide how other people ought to enter in to our lives of faith (Breidenthal led our second week’s reflections on the ethics of power and the church’s vocation of service to and solidarity with the poor). Augustine in the end decided that we are to enjoy each other in God and be pushed by God into relationship with one another rather than being pulled out of such messy entanglements. But many of our experiences in Rome, including our church visits, reminded me how easy it is for us to lose track of this hard-won Augustinian insight. I pray that our church buildings and our congregations will be places where we are sent out for the messy work of relationship and service to the stranger.

Buona sera da Roma

Kyle

Well, I’ve been traveling for about a week and have seen a lot of Italy that I didn’t catch on my previous trip. My classmate and I stayed near Sorrento and saw some of the sights in Naples (yuck), Pompei (extensive and relatively pristine), Capri (touristy but stunning), the Amalfi Coast (a tough drive and a site to see!), Paestum (2500-year-old temples that are apparently in better shape than many of their contemporaries in Greece), and quiet Piano d’Sorrento (home). A happy (for us) plumbing problem at the Porto Salvo guest house got us an upgrade to the really charming Secret Garden Relais (same owner). It’s not just a clever name–it took us an hour and a half to find it. It’s in an orange grove. Behind a wall. Down a pedestrian-only street (which is saying something in Italy).

Pictures soon and news from the start of our interdisciplinary course on history, architecture, theology, ecumenism, and the ethics of power here in the Eternal City. Ciao!

(Additional) Good News of Great joy

Kyle 1 Comment

For those of you who haven’t heard through other channels (or haven’t heard the story), I’m writing to let you know that I am now engaged! Kristin and I decided sometime in November that we were ready to take the plunge, and we ordered a ring at Savitt Jewelers in New Haven when I was there for Thanksgiving.

The plan was for me to propose sometime over our Christmas visits home. Now, Kristin is from Whitefish Bay, and my parents now live in Waukesha. This, combined with the constraint of not involving her parents in the planning (so as not to spoil the surprise), had me feeling particularly anxious. Have you heard people talk about both successful and (especially) unsuccessful proposal scenarios?! We’re looking at a lot of pressure here. How do you make it a surprise? How do you make it memorable? Wisconsin, much as we both love it and miss it, seemed fraught with peril.

In case you don’t know, my lovely fiancée loves New York, and especially loves the West Village’s Church of St. Luke in the Fields. So it was only natural that she plan to be in the city for her birthday on December 18 and for church the following morning. With final exams upon me during that weekend but only one major test to take (and an online one at that), I saw my opportunity for a genuine surprise proposal. I planned to moan and groan about marathon study sessions for a liturgics class that I’d legitimately neglected (“It’s only a lot of reading if you do it,” is a sad VTS mantra but also sometimes an important survival strategy), while in reality making my way to the big proposal in the Big Apple.

My best friend, Carl, suggested a subway proposal (did I mention she also loves the subway), and our mutual friend and my co-conspirator, Julia, helped me refine the plan–Q train proposal to take advantage of the outdoor East River crossing, rendezvous point at James in Brooklyn if we failed to make the connection.

Of course, the only thing that could possibly go wrong did: as the week before the big day progressed, Kristin got so sick that it became increasingly clear she would not be going to New York for her birthday. With my tail between my legs, I got on the Megabus on Saturday morning planning to hop the Metro North to New Haven for a subdued and less-life-changing birthday visit. I almost left the ring in Virginia to avoid the temptation to propose in a decidedly sub-ideal city and circumstance.

But just before we went into the Lincoln Tunnel, I got a text to the effect of “Antibiotics doing their job! Feeling much better today and might be able to at least make it church tomorrow, yay!” I got off the bus, called Julia, and proceeded to plot a new plan. Julia called Kristin to confirm her improved state of health and insist that they meet at St. Luke’s early and grab a quick belated birthday breakfast before the service. I scouted out the beautiful St. Luke’s garden (though less beautiful in winter, of course) for a spot where she’d not see me immediately upon entering. And then I had to figure out a place to spend the night, since I’d planned on sleeping on the floor next to whatever friend’s couch she’d booked for herself that night. Thankfully, my summer roommates were around and had a couch with my name on it.

The morning arrived, as did the soon-to-be-fiancée, and everything worked out better than I could have hoped. She was indeed surprised, and we had a wonderful morning of sharing our good news with our St. Luke’s friends at coffee hour before and after the main liturgy. After that and a quick lunch with friends, I was off to Virginia on the 3 p.m. Bolt Bus. An exhausting weekend, but a wonderful one. To top it off, I was greeted by my classmates back at VTS by a surprise gathering and champaign toast.

It has been lovely being together in Wisconsin for more than a couple of hours, and it has been lovely sharing the news with family and friends. Thank you so much for all your warm wishes and prayers! We’ll let you know when we have a date, but our lives are full of uncertainty right now, and it’s liable to be a long engagement!

Sermon Catch-Up

Kyle

It’s been a busy couple of weeks (see forthcoming post), so I’m just now getting around to posting my sermons from the second and third weeks of Advent. They were each shortened a bit on the cutting-room floor, but this ought to give you the gist. Indeed, the Advent 2 sermon was given from the aisle with no notes (a new experience for me, and a surprisingly positive one), so the manuscript is really just what I handed in in homiletics class and was the starting point for my oral prep.

Advent 2
Advent 3

A Tale of Botched Science Reporting -and/or- A Plea to Headline Writers

Kyle

If I’m understanding it correctly, then I’m massively disappointed with how someone (Gizmodo? headline writers?) is shaping reports of NASA’s new findings on Gammaproteobacteria GFAJ-1. The first release I read, by Gizmodo at Wired Science via an excerpt on Episcopal Café (I love my church), made it sound like a life form had been discovered in Mono Lake whose biochemical makeup included arsenic in the places we expect phosphorus to be.

Not so, explains a second post on Wired Science by Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News. Researchers believe they have coaxed the bacteria to replace phosphorus with arsenic. The actual situation is still pretty mind-blowing but much more modest than we’d been originally led to believe (apparently Tom Faber commenting on Episcopal Café’s Facebbok page has since also caught the error). Here’s the NYT‘s take:

The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.

I’m usually not concerned with “Who’s to blame?!” in these situations, but I just spent ten minutes thinking the universe was vastly different from what we thought it was. And now I find out that, well, some people working in a lab think that maybe it might be that way and have compiled some evidence based on a clever experiment. Again, this is still a mind-blowing piece of science news, but the ball has definitely been dropped, journalistically.

So who is to blame? Well, it may be that Gizmodo just didn’t write a very good article. But if you go over to the NASA press release, I think you may find that the culprit could be who the culprit almost always is in these situations: the damn headline writer. Sure, the release itself starts with the outsized claim, “NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.” But then it immediately makes clear that the new life form is “able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic.” That, in my opinion, is a far cry from the reality touted in the headline: “NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical.” At the very least, it should be “NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Capable of Rebuilding Itself With Toxic Chemical.”

To go back to Gizmodo: Yes, “This changes everything.” But not quite so massively as it would have if they actually “discovered” (instead of, more accurately, “built”) “a completely new life form” that, when the experiment started, was a completely ordinary life form with an intriguing habitat and a possibly novel biochemical ability.

My guess is that it started with the misleading NASA headline. How many times do we have to make that mistake? Editors: please, please, please, let your writers suggest the headline. Doing otherwise is just asking to embarrass yourself…and to dash the hopes of excited science geeks.

Update (In Words and Pictures)

Kyle 1 Comment

A lot has happened in the past few weeks. Here are the ultra-highlights:

(1) I became a godfather. The new Christian in question is Josiah William Paul Kradel, son of my dear friends Adam Kradel and Melissa Wilcox. The baptism took place at Adam’s parish, Christ Church in Media, PA. It was a special day. I was struck in particular by the very real connection I felt not just with little Josiah but also with my fellow godparents. That’s us, with Adam (collar) and Melissa (right of Josiah).

(2) I ran the Marine Corps Marathon. This was also a really great experience. I will be eternally grateful to my friend and training partner Josiah Rengers (lots of Josiahs in my life), who kept me motivated and talked me through the hamstring cramps that set in as we hit the Pentagon parking lot. Strangest part: the eerie isolation of mile 20, above the Potomac on the 14th Street Bridge. I think there may be more of these in my future. That’s us with fellow runners Katie and Lara in our VTS Fighting Friars shirts.

(3) [Not a highlight in the positive sense:] The VTS chapel was destroyed by fire. Many of my colleagues have written movingly about what the chapel meant to us. What I eventually settled on is this: The thing I appreciated most about our little mismatched chapel is that it accepted you where you were. I find the austere Georgian/Colonial style so prevalent around here to be really alienating; it’s as if at any second Jonathon Edwards might just ascend the pulpit and preach damnation at me. I much prefer the stone and Gothic Revival more typical of an Anglo-Catholic parish, but for me the space can be almost too transcendent. If I’ve got an off-hours need for a prayer chapel, a parish whose Sunday worship is like being in heaven throughout the service is probably gonna be overkill. But VTS’s Immanuel Chapel did not put on any airs. It was a great place to pray late at night, and it was the perfect place to worship after my grandmother died last year, when all I wanted to do was sit in the back of the balcony and silently lean on my classmates and teachers doing the work of the liturgy for me. I will miss worshiping in a place that was so honest about its own imperfections. And I will miss the Miriam Window.

(4) I wrote some music. Well, I harmonized some music. I’m currently taking Advanced Musicianship at VTS, and it has been a great way to reconnect with my long-dormant jazz training. My final project was to reharmonize a hymn, so I took a few liberties with the Advent plainsong chant Conditor alme siderum (“Creator of the Stars of Night”). My favorite reaction came from my friend Carl: “That’s a lot of half-step motion. I think you would’ve gotten burned at the stake for that.”

We’re entering finals mode around here, so it may be more radio silence from me for a few weeks, aside from posting the sermons I’ll preach at St. John’s on 2 and 3 Advent. Exciting upcoming travel includes Milwaukee for Christmas and Rome for January term. Stay tuned!

Sermon: “How do we solve the sandwich?”

Kyle

I preached my five-minute sermon on Mark 5:21-43 today in homiletics class. I share it below in case (like at least one person I know) you enjoy reading sermons online at every possible moment. Note that it was written for and preached solely to an academic audience; I understand that the very premise of “solving the sandwich” wouldn’t fly in a congregation (“who cares!”), at least not without a lot more legwork.

My one other word of introduction is that I think I belong (at least for the time being) to the school of homiletical thought that says a sermon should be inductive, allowing the hearer to “problem solve” along with you and arrive at his or her own conclusions as you go. This is apparently the position associated with Fred Craddock and excerpted nicely here in Tom Long’s The Witness of Preaching:

Taken as a whole, then, the sermon form proposed by Craddock is an attempt to organize the flow of the sermon so that it “corresponds to the way people ordinarily experience reality and to the way life’s problem-solving activity goes on naturally and casually.” (125)*

* In this light, I couldn’t help but think about my attraction to exegesis and preaching as looking a lot like my attraction to science and engineering. See Thomas Kuhn’s “Normal Science as Puzzle Solving” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

My way of thinking about this issue is that every sermon is a “teaching sermon” in that every sermon (okay, maybe most sermons) ought to be modeling how we as Christians (indeed, as particular kinds of critically thinking Christians) engage the Biblical text.

So, without further ado…

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“How do we solve the sandwich?” This is the question I always find myself asking in Mark. He includes these “intercalations,” where one story is inserted into another, no less than nine times. In a gospel with so much forward momentum, why all this interruption and doubling back? What do we make of this surely intentional storyteller’s device? Let’s search for some clues about the theological importance of this particular Markan sandwich.

We could start by examining the two main characters, who are a study in contrast. Jairus is named and well-known, male, a religious and community leader (5:22), a person empowered to action. The bleeding woman is anonymous, female, a patient and a victim, almost certainly shunned by the likes of Jairus for her uncleanness (25) and probably taken advantage of by doctors legitimate and otherwise (26). They couldn’t be more different, these two, and yet notice where they end up: in turn, meek and mighty each fall at the feet of Jesus (22, 33). Perhaps the sandwich, then, serves to remind us that “God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11). Both are worthy of Jesus’s mercy.

Another approach might be to look carefully at the role of faith in each story. Despite his relative social empowerment, Jairus is the picture of passivity in the faith department. Before we know it, he’s just part of the crowd, along for the ride as the throng “presses in on” on the healer headed for his home (24). In contrast to the woman, who reaches out to Jesus on her own initiative and receives his healing power as a result of her faith in action (34), Jairus requires a little encouragement: “Do not fear,” Jesus tells him, “only believe” (36). Perhaps the sandwich encourages us to aim for the faith of the woman at its center, but reassures us that, in the end, grace abounds, and those of us with a more marginal faith will nevertheless receive the saving help we need.

Let me propose a third option. Suppose that, at least stylistically, there is no sandwich. What if Mark is constantly interrupting the narrative because that’s just the way things tended to go when Jesus was out among the people? What if the way these two stories comment on one another is to emphasize that Jesus, unlike the disciples, never suffers from tunnel vision? What would that mean for our lives of discipleship?

Well for starters, and this is the hard part, I think it suggests a motto for our lives as ministers. It’s a motto you’ll recognize if you join us for the fourth installment of our Harry Potter marathon on Saturday night. It’s the motto of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, a hot-shot hunter of evil wizards. The motto is this: “CONSTANT VIGILANCE.” The symbol of his vigilance is his magical left eye, which can rotate a full 360-degrees and see through both walls and the back of his own head. Now, I believe Jesus’s instant awareness “that power had gone forth from him” (30) is suggestive of his own constant vigilance: a caring attention to the needs of those around him. As ministers, our own attempts at a Christ-like constancy should always be open to finding the needs of the world in places we wouldn’t expect and at times that may not be convenient us. A magical eye sure would help.

Now, this sounds like exhausting news at best, and an unachievable standard to live up to. But suppose again that there really is no sandwich, that Mark’s meandering storytelling is simply indicative of God’s alertness and persistence and compassionate concern for the needs of all God’s children. Then the good news for us and for the those we minister to is that the love of Christ cannot be contained. It is effusive, a cup overflowing, a story that cannot help but meander, an all-seeing eye that longingly but tirelessly seeks us out. And though there will be days when our finite attention narrows or our tired eyes droop closed, we can rest assured in the knowledge that God’s never will.