The Shrine of the Three Kings

This past Sunday, I began my sermon with the observation that there were three options offered for the gospel reading on the 2^nd Sunday of the Christmas Season. (Yes, the celebration of Christmas does not end on December 26^th.) I noted that I had chosen Matthew 2:1-12 which is the story of the wise men following the star in the east to the place where Jesus was born and then giving him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. We all know the story! I told the congregation that I had made this choice because it was a special favorite of mine, and that I felt a special affinity for the wise men. Several years ago, I had visited their final resting place. Now completely alert, the congregation stared at me. Then I said, “Of course, you all know where that is!” Suddenly I had everyone’s undivided attention. People spoke up and said, “No, we don’t know where that is” and “This is news to us” and “We’ve never heard of that, tell us.”

I then proceeded to relate the story of how I had been called up to active duty in the US Army in 1997 and subsequently stationed in Babenhausen, Germany near Frankfurt. It was not far from the Rhine River valley. One weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the famous cathedral in Cologne which sits on the east bank of the Rhine. By some miracle, it was spared during the bombing of the city in WWII. What surprised me the first time I was there was the discovery  that, hanging over the high altar, there is a large gold reliquary in which it is believed are the bones of the three kings. I told the people that I stood there looking at it in awe, wondering, is that possible? The Wise Men? The Three Kings? Really! Here! It was an epiphany! 

Following a Star

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea

in the days of Herod the King, behold there

came wise men from the east to Jerusalem saying,

Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we

have seen his star in the east , and are come to worship him.

                                   

                                        Matthew 2:1-2

            All that we know of the wise men is found in twelve verses in the second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Their story begins very simply with a star. They follow it first to Jerusalem where they talk to King Herod.  The chief priests and scribes direct them to Bethlehem. They go, see the child, present their gifts and then depart, returning home by “another way,” to avoid a second meeting with Herod.

Interestingly, the Matthean account does not tell us how many of them there were and it omits any mention of their names. It certainly doesn’t describe them as kings. Legend and other sources such as the History of the Three Kings by John of Hildesheim (1310-1375) have filled in the details of the story and given them names: Gaspard (Jasper), Melchior, and Balthazar.  The wise men appear on the stage of history for a brief moment and then they disappear. And yet their story continues to be told and acted out yearly in countless Christmas and Epiphany pageants. I can remember being dressed up as one of the wise men for a Feast of Lights service back in the mid-1950’s.

            There is more to this story than initially meets the eye! The contribution which the three kings make should not be diminished. God presents His Son Jesus to the world, and they are there at the beginning to receive Him and pay homage. They fulfill the ancient prophecy. They follow the star and find what they have been seeking.

The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute,*

                           and the kings of Arabia and Saba offer gifts.

                     All kings shall bow down before him; *

   and all the nations do him service.

                                                                        Psalm 72:10-11

Epiphany

            The Three Kings are an important part of a mysterious process which Paul talks about it in his letter to the Ephesians: “For he [God] has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, . . .”

            The Church uses the wise men and the star as symbols of the Epiphany, the “showing forth” of Jesus to the world. “Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king.” The wise men are the initial receivers. They come to see and believe! But they are more than that! They represent a feeling, an intuition, an inner spiritual certainty that there is more going on in this world than what we see on the surface. Remember my fellow North Dakotan Peggy Lee singing, “Is that all there is?” No, it is not all there is! The Three Kings came to Bethlehem bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But they brought more than that. They carried a gift for each of us, a contagious inner certainty that there was a compassionate God who was going to reveal a great truth incarnate in an infant. They were “romantics” who were pushing the boundaries of orthodox knowledge. And they were right!

            I had someone not long ago tell me in all seriousness that we needed to put our trust in science. I laughed! This clever technological self-absorbed world may appear to be a much more sophisticated place than that world of simple shepherds and romantic wise men. That is a superficial assessment. It still needs to hear the simple message of the birth of Jesus. It needs to stand in awe at the Shrine of the Three Kings in homage to a great faith in the promise of salvation which is enshrined there.

            The blunt message which needs to be communicated to people today as another Christmas Season quickly transitions into the past is: Don’t let the story go! Keep the message alive in you minds! Begin your own journey!

Put A Star In Your Life

            So here again is the Star. Keep following it to your goal of a conviction of the truth of the promises of God! Here is the Christmas story. Keep retelling it! Here we all are. Will our lives become epiphanies (manifestations) of the grand design/plan of God laid before the world on Christmas morning?

            Christianity is made up of simple truths, deceptively simple truths. But in that simplicity, great power for life and love resides. The Wise Men knew it! That is why they traveled so far to see for themselves. How far are we willing to go? Here is the Star. Who will follow it?

Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?

For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

Epilogue

            After I preached the sermon from which these remarks are an abridgement, I was approached by a number of people in the congregation who wanted to talk more about the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne and what it means. That indicates any number of things to me, uppermost of which is the hunger of people to hear about the mystery of creation which has been revealed in Jesus. They are also interested in the possibilities of the quest for truth which is what for me the journey of the wise men represents. During the medieval period, it was called the Quest for the Holy Grail. A more modern representation of this can be found in the work of the German romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) who wrote under the name of Novalis. He called this quest the Search for the Blue Flower. For him it was the point at which finitude and infinity intersected, a place where hopes and deep desiring became reality. It was a romantic quest which led between “inspiration and common life.” We don’t have enough people today willing to make this journey. One stepping off point for me is the Shrine of the Three Kings. Each of us must find their own beginning and the Church is there to point the way.

 

 

           

 

 

           

A Reflection for the Season of Advent

       It strikes me that people my age have lived through an unsettling communications revolution, in large part due to the internet and the cell phone. Such a contrast to what used to be! In the early 1950’s, I can actually remember my family’s telephone being for a short while, on a party line. When we wanted to call someone, we picked up the handset, put it to our ear, and a female voice said, “Number please” and you responded Capital 3-5515.  I was taught by my parents that the telephone was not for frivolous use. You said what you needed to say and then got off the phone. Boy, has that ever changed! When we see people driving around talking endlessly on cell phones and – God help us - even texting while they are driving, what we are really seeing is the relentless progression of the saturation of our lives by constant communication. My question is: do people really have that much to say? I don’t think so!

            I say all this as a means of leading into my intended subject which is messages.  The Communication of Messages! Life is a process of receiving messages and acting on them. To illustrate this point, I would tell the following parable. It is entitled:

The Castaway

            Once upon a time there was a man who was marooned on a desert island. In the course of becoming a castaway, he had also lost his memory. Every day at noon he would walk down to the water’ edge and would pick up a bottle with a slip of paper in it on which was written a message. Every day the messages were different. One day the paper said. “A leaf fell from a tree this afternoon in Havana, Cuba.” On another day on the slip of paper was written the message: “E=MC2 ”. One day the message in the bottle said simply, “When you combine oxygen and hydrogen in the proper proportions, water is the product.” None of these messages meant anything to the man because he had lost his memory and besides, they were quite mundane and harmless. So the days passed with a bottled message arriving each day which the man read and ignored. Ignored, that is, until the day a bottle washed up on the shore which contained the message, “Cannibals from the next island will arrive tomorrow and will have you for lunch.” Needless to say, that particular message caught the man’s attention. It was a “life message.”

The Advent Message

            Hopefully, I have made my point. Life is a process of receiving messages, sorting them as to importance, and then acting or not acting upon them.  During the Season of Advent, in some sense, we stand on a sandy shore – like the castaway – gazing out at a vast ocean which occasionally produces messages for us. The Advent messages which we receive are provoking to say the least. They are intended to assault our consciousness! The messengers are familiar names: the prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist and the angel Gabriel, to name just a few. They bring us life messages and demand our attention.

What happens during the Season of Advent is that, during these four weeks, we are introduced to what is coming.  That is the magic word in Advent, “coming.” In these readings we are given quick glimpses of the promised birth of the Messiah.  Advent is the prelude to the Church year which contains all of the major themes of Christianity.

The very first Advent reading which we heard this year was the following from the beginning of the 64^th chapter of Isaiah: 

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down , . . .

            What an image! It tells us exactly what is going to happen. In response to the anticipation of “God coming down,” the Season of Advent then week by week builds in intensity as it calls each one of us to an awareness of the burning need for preparation: Last Sunday we heard from the 1^st chapter of Mark this message:  “Therefore keep awake: for you do not know when the Master of the house will come, . . . I say to all: Watch!”  Both last Sunday and this Sunday, we hear the voice of John the Baptist, the “forerunner” of the Messiah. His voice is strident: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”  Next Sunday, the angel Gabriel will make his appearance and will announce to Mary that she is going to bear a child. Advent is a prelude of preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will recreate God’s world. During the Season of Advent, we find special solace in the following passage:

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.

                                                                                                            Isaiah 65:17

I see the Season of Advent as a great four week drama which, as it unfolds, reveals the undoing of Adam’s error which threw the whole creation out of kilter and estranged humanity from God. This for me is the most powerful expression of the meaning of the Season of Advent.  Paradise will be restored!

All life is a process of change!  As Christians, we believe that this is a process of redemption, a movement toward salvation.  The point of the lections in the Season of Advent is that everything is in a process of transition from fallenness to re-creation and that God is in control of the movement.  This is the story which is told during Advent.

 Human beings rail against the temporary condition of their lives.  They perceive this as a movement toward death (end) which they are powerless to stop.  They are willing to listen to any alternative.  The serpent’s suggestion to Eve echoes in every age and finds an attentive listener in each one of us.  “You will not die.  God knows that when you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.”

Only in Jesus are we able to break out of the grip of this dreadful journey.  In Jesus the finitude of human beings is subsumed into infinity.  The opposition is destroyed.

It is the anticipation of the accomplishment of this which evokes numerous mentions of joy and rejoicing in the Advent readings:

Sing aloud, O Daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel!

Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter

of Jerusalem.  The Lord has taken away the judgments

against you, he has cast out your enemies.  The King of

Israel is in your midst; you shall fear evil no more. 

                                                Zephaniah 3:14-20 (3 Advent C)

Why?  Because God is going to visit and redeem his people!  Saving history moves on.  The story unfolds.  Transition and change are unstoppable, but they are a part of God’s plan.   The movement is toward the restoration of the Kingdom (Paradise). We heard this expressed in the psalm today.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, *

                      then were we like those who dream.

                                                                                    Psalm 126:1

 

            We need to see our lives as prelude also, moving introductions to greater moments, greater and deeper understandings which lie ahead.  These “deeper understandings” are revealed to us during the rest of the church year. One understanding which needs to be emphasized at this time of the year is the belief that there is more to reality than the material world which we experience every day. Advent lifts the veil so that we can see into the reality beyond!

Conclusion

            I strongly believe that all sermons should have decisive conclusions and now is the time. The gospel never ends; sermons definitely should! To end this Advent reflection, I will take you back to that desert island and you are now the person on it looking out at the vastness of the ocean and wondering what the next message will be. Of course this parable is an analogy about the human condition. We find ourselves in this world gazing at the enormity of the universe and we can’t help but wonder who we are, where we came from, what it all means, and whether anyone cares for us. Don’t worry! The message in the Season of Advent is clear. On December 25 another bottle will float to shore and there will be a message in it which will read:

            For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:  and the government

            shall be upon his shoulders: and his name shall be called Wonderful,

            Counselor, The mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of

            Peace.                                                                                                                                       Isaiah 9: 6

I understand that message and, hopefully, so do you!

The Rev. Dr. Richard B. Tudor

                                                                                               

Giants in the Earth

                                                         All Saints Day

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

                                                                                                Matthew 5:8

            Frederick Buechner, who is a much beloved and well read author of books about the Christian experience, wrote one which is titled, The Sacred Journey. It is the story of his childhood and some of the formative experiences which he had while growing up. For Buechner, life is a sacred journey filled with messages from God. Everyone has to make the journey, but not everyone gets the messages. In the opening chapter of this short memoir, he writes of the giants of his childhood, who literally “held up the world” for him. It would be Buechner’s conviction that all of us have known people like that, i.e. “giants” who took our world on their shoulders for a space of time.

            The Church has had its share of giants during its long history. We call them saints. The ones we know best lived during the early formative years of the infant Church. St. Peter and St. Paul would be examples of well known early Christian saints.   Every parish church during its history has had faithful members whose commitment and hard work kept that church alive and enabled its Christian witness. Many of them fall into the category of saints who have been long forgotten. This morning I would like to tell you the story of two people, both women as it happens, whose lives made a significant difference for two parish churches with which I have been associated during my life time.

Miss Murphy

            The first church is my home parish, St. George’s in Bismarck, North Dakota. Many of the details of my early years in that church are vague, but one memory which isn’t is my recollection of our choir. I can still see those people processing down the center aisle as though it were yesterday. The choir at St. George’s was – I suspect – like untold numbers of other small church choirs. Everyone in the choir didn’t have a great voice. As little kids we would sometimes snicker when some of the ladies hit sour notes. The men compensated for their lack of talent with volume. The thing which makes a church choir significant are the people who Sunday after Sunday and year after year show up and put on their choir robes and support the liturgy in that so valuable part of the worship life of the church. Where would we be without music?

            One of the great saints of my parish church sang in that choir. For the fifteen years that I belonged to that church, I can never remember seeing the choir sing without her.  Time would have stopped! Her name was Rita Murphy or Miss Murphy as she was respectfully addressed by everyone. She taught freshman English at Bismarck High. She never married. In those years it seemed like there were a large number of single women who gave their lives to teaching. At the beginning of the school year, Miss Murphy would tell each group of her students the one cardinal rule in her classes. It was: “Books open and mouths shut!” I believe she taught at Bismarck High for almost forty years. She was a legend in her own time. I never heard much about her background. She originally was from Grafton, North Dakota, a small town in the northeaster quadrant of our state. Something was said at one time that she had had a brother Lloyd who died in WWII when the hospital ship on which he was a patient was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese in the Pacific. When we knew her, she had no family, only the church, which for her seemed to be more than enough. There is a message in that!

            As I say, she was always in church every Sunday year after year. In our minds, St. George’s would not have been St. George’s without her. She had a big voice and the ability to almost dictate the tempo of the singing. She was a chaperone of the high school choir when it went on its annual tour. My brother and I were in the choir and on Sunday during the tour when the fifty or so Scandinavians went off to find a Lutheran church, Miss Murphy said to Tom and I, “Come on, boys!” and off we would go to the Episcopal Church. Those small congregations never knew what hit them when Miss Murphy strode in, picked up the singing, and took it in the direction she wanted to go. She was a good soul who didn’t have a mean bone in her body and didn’t believe anyone else did either. She was a beacon of stability for our parish church.

            In 1968, when it came time for me to leave for my first year in seminary, the night before I left, she called me up to wish me well and to tell me how proud she was of me. I found out several months later that, at the time she called, she knew that she was dying of cancer. She did die during my first year at seminary and the church was never the same without her. She did however greatly impact St. George’s after her death. She left our little parish church over half a million dollar and in 1968 that was a lot of money. She lived frugally as a single teacher and apparently handled her money very well. Because of her commitment in life and in death, St. George’s has been able to continue its corporate life of witness, a task which would have been very difficult without the support of the Rita Murphy Foundation, her bequest to the church.

Ann Lassey 

            In 1974 I returned to North Dakota to take a look at two churches who were interested in having me come and be their priest. (St. Peter’s was a parish and St. Michael & All Angel’s was a mission) My first Sunday there, I was driven out forty miles into the country to the mission church, by a couple named Julius and Ann Lassey. Over the course of my time there - over fourteen years - they became very close friends of mine and almost acted as surrogate parents for me. Everyone thinks that the clergy come to lead the church armed with all they need to know. Actually, it is the churches who train the clergy and not the seminaries. Young clergy in particular need a great deal of support and often guidance from older members and the Lasseys provided that for me. Julius died about half way through my fourteen years there. From that time on, Ann assumed a large leadership role in our congregation. She was a person whose life defined goodness and kindness. I did a lot up there to keep with two congregations to keep them moving and not stagnating. Whenever I would begin one of those projects – a nursery school for example – Ann would call me up and tell me she wanted to see me. I would go over and she would tell me that if we needed some extra money to get things off the ground, she would provide it. She owned a lot of land and the minerals were all leased to oil companies. One time she called me up and said, “Richard, I just drove by the church and saw poor Les Walling dragging hoses around to water the lawn. (St. Peter’s was on a large corner lot.) She continued, “Get an estimate on an automatic sprinkler system and then come and see me.” In short order, we had a completely computerized sprinkler system with nine zones, and shortly thereafter, one of the best looking lawns in town. She was a person who was always positive and cheerful. I have a picture of her which is a cherished possession.

            In 1989, about two months before we left the area to move to St. Louis, Ann became seriously ill. After admission to the hospital, she lapsed into a coma. It was Easter Sunday. Liz and I got a call from the hospital that she had died and they wanted me to come up. Suddenly we heard a great deal of commotion on the phone and someone said, “My God, she’s still alive!” Liz and I went running up to see her. We will never forget it. We were in her room with her stepdaughter Bonnie and a few other close friends of hers. All of a sudden Ann came to and sat up in bed. She said something like, “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone I love is in this room.” We visited with her for a while and she was perfectly lucid. She told us all how much she cared for us and what our being there meant to her. Shortly after we all left, she fell back into a coma and died a few hours after midnight. The people at the hospital had never seen anything like it and neither had I. She was a remarkable woman. It was as if God had given her a few extra hours to say her last goodbyes.

            I made the following statement at her funeral: “One of the most powerful images in the New Testament is that of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. To define his role, Jesus told the touching story of the shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep untended and went off in search of one that was lost. Why? It is because of the immeasurable value of just one life. I have seen the truth of this played out in my years in leading parish churches. Who can ever really accurately estimate the value and the consequences of their own life and the lives of others which touch theirs? Many or all of us here this morning can probably testify to the value of one life which touched ours.

            So God bless Rita Murphy and Ann Lassey, giants & saints in the church, whose lives for a time held up the world in which I lived. I tell you their stories on All Saint’s Sunday to make the point to you of the potential effect that one life – possibly your life – can have in the lives of others.

            The celebration of All Saint’s reminds us that nothing is ever really lost in this world. Lives of commitment and faith go on touching the lives of others long after death. Life is not meaningless! Love, faith, and commitment – all of these things count for much! They are acts of personal witness to the love shown to the world in the life of Jesus Christ and they will not be forgotten.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

 

That's Entertainment?

 

“And now Ladies and Gentlemen, for your entertainment

on our stage tonight, we have a really, really big show.”

                                                                                    Ed Sullivan, 1963

            We have a serious problem in American society, one that has been growing for a long time. Today, it has reached epidemic proportions. It is the insatiable public hunger for entertainment. This “hunger” – at bottom a need for distraction – has invaded nearly all areas of our lives. We now live in a society of constant noise: television, radio, cell phones, and recorded music. We sit at stop lights and often the music from other cars is so loud that it makes our cars vibrate. This apparently is a new inalienable right, the right to make your own noise no matter how intrusive and annoying it is to others.

            This entertainment hunger is addictive! Television is the primary culprit. It is the 20^th century medium, which - from an innocent beginning - has now become a monster. It feeds the entertainment disease and it is with us every hour of every day. It is almost impossible to escape it. Everywhere one goes, televisions are blaring whether people are watching them or not. When I was rector of a parish and doing a lot of home visitation, often I would have to ask people to turn off their TV’s so I could talk with them. Remember when we were content with just one television set in the home? Now everyone in a household has to have their own. Some people have to sleep with them turned on. Apparently many people are uncomfortable with silence. No wonder! They experience so little of it.

            Here is a story about the pervasiveness of television programs and how our brains absorb and retain what we hear. In 1989, just before I came to St. Louis, I went to Honduras with the North Dakota National Guard. I was the chaplain with the 164^th Combat Engineer Group. Our people were building a farm-to-market road and our rotation in country lasted three weeks. On the night before we were to fly back to the States, we were taken to a bivouac near the airport, fed, and given army cots. There was literally nothing to do and so about three hundred soldiers were just lying on their cots early in the evening wide awake waiting for darkness. Suddenly I heard someone start singing, “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they’re the modern stone age family, from the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history . . .” Most of the soldiers joined in and sang through the whole lyric of the Flintstones theme song. When they finished, the leader sang, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, about this tiny ship. . .” Again a large number of the soldiers joined him in singing the Gilligan’s Island theme. This went on for a long time through many, many television program theme songs. I just laid back on my cot and laughed! I was amazed that all these guys retained an almost perfect memory of all those songs. Thinking about it later, I was not so amazed. They had all been raised on this stuff and had heard it countless times. They had all been away from television for three weeks and most of them were a bit homesick. Singing those TV theme songs was very expressive of a need!

            The amusing thing about television today is that, even with the multiplicity of channels available, there is very little that people want to watch. Years ago, we would have thought that having 150 program choices would be entertainment heaven. Sadly, the human hunger for entertainment has become so jaded that most of what is on is no longer satisfying. Enter the bizarre in the form of reality TV. Someone please explain to me the popularity of this phenomenon. Don’t people know that it’s all carefully staged? If this stuff has anything to do with reality, God help us.

            This introduces an attendant issue in the entertainment discussion, i.e. the reality programming called television news. The onslaught on our minds & emotions by television news reporting and commentary 24/7 has changed the world and not for the better. I have to observe that the steady barrage of political opinion from the left on CNN and the right on Fox has contributed greatly to the cynicism and division in our country. I say, “Enough already!” This steady barrage of (bad) news is depressing. People are sick and tired of it!

            It is amusing to me what all this communication capability has done to people. They are isolated & insulated in their own little worlds of social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc. The other day I was in a coffee shop in Bismarck, North Dakota with my brother and a friend of mine. We were doing some reminiscing and we happened to notice three young people sitting at a nearby table. Well, they were sitting together but that is about as far as it went!  We watched them for a while and not one of them ever spoke to the other two. They were totally absorbed in their lap tops, IPads and cell phones. So much for face to face conversation! People would rather play with their electronic toys than talk to each other.

            Speaking of electronics, I have a theory about the poor level of achievement in public schools. One of the reasons is the great difficulty which education has with the issue of homework. Today’s children have been brought up on a steady diet of television, music, cell phones, and video games which they can enjoy literally all the time. Entertainment! This “training” makes it nearly impossible for a child to sit down in front of a text book and do math problems. That is definitely not entertainment! It’s work! Which is a child going to choose, entertainment or work? You’ve got to be kidding!  The whole system breaks down at the point when the student has to sit down and do the work. Boring! How often have you heard that? The entertainment culture has bred a deep need for instant gratification.

****************************

            My real problem with all of this has to do with the fact that many people think that everything should become part of the entertainment culture, even the church. What kind of churches have popped up everywhere and have enjoyed a rapid rate of growth? You guessed it! It is churches which entertain people with performances of popular music. It’s called entertainment evangelism. The people sit in comfortable theatre seats and enjoy musical and other presentations which require no input or participation on their part. They have seemingly done away with a formal liturgy and the sacraments. Is this really the church? I wonder!

            Worshipping is not about entertainment! It is about transcendence and a sometimes agonizing assessment of our personal lives. It is about the element of personal sacrifice modeled for us by Jesus. It’s about personal transformation, a painful process at best. It is about a call to die to self and a summons to rise to new life in the community of the faithful. It’s about a call to reconciliation and mission and personal witness! I have rarely found the church to be entertaining. I have found it to be deeply challenging and fulfilling! The church quite frankly is serious business and it ought to be so. What we desperately need in our society is less entertainment and a more serious focus on the many perplexing questions about life which confront us daily. Our souls are dying in this glut of entertainment.

 

                                                                        The Rev. Dr. Richard B. Tudor

It's Rally Day!

          Sound the Trumpets! Beat the drums! All across the church today, congregations are gathering to celebrate “Rally Day.” That at least is how the Lutherans designate the day. Episcopal churches don’t use that name but they attempt to do the same thing. On the Sunday after Labor Day, churches “rally” their membership after the parish church has been in hibernation all summer. What they are doing is “gearing up” for the program year, i.e. choir practices, children’s Sunday School, ECW meetings, adult education, etc. More activity! On Rally Day, parish clergy will be carefully counting the house. It is a good indicator of who are the faithful. There is nothing more encouraging than a strong beginning! There will be disappointment if the attendance is lower than expected.

The Great Awakenings

            To put the day in perspective, I would like to talk about two religious movements called the First & Second Great Awakenings. They occurred in Protestant churches in New England and took place in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I see an analogy between what took place in the Great Awakenings and what we today attempt to do on the Sunday after Labor Day. Certainly it is no stretch to say that the parish church attempts to “awaken” after three months of relative inactivity.

            However, we need to be clear that the two great awakenings were much more than just an attempt to shake congregations out of a summer of lethargy. They were intense efforts by deeply serious parish pastors to rekindle deeper faith & commitment in their people. They were attempts to renew belief in people who were guilty of backsliding & complacency (secular drift). In the minds of the clergy the “awakening” was a matter of life and death! St. Paul spoke to this issue. Read Romans 13, verses eleven and twelve:

. . . you know what hour it is, how it is full tine now for you to wake

      from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we believed;

                the night is far gone, the day is at hand.

            Paul strikes a note of urgency; his message is that people need to wake up to an awareness of the need to look to their salvation. Now is the time! Awaken!

            To understand the effort put into the great awakenings, we need to be aware that Church people founded this country and they were deadly serious about establishing a Christian society, at least initially. The American society of the 17^th century changed in the 18^th & 19^th centuries. The clergy were distressed about the direction it was taking and they attempted to call it back to an earlier standard of faith and devotion. They did the “calling back” by preaching powerful sermons. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were two of the greatest preachers in the 18^th century. Hearing Whitefield preach was apparently a life changing experience. He held crowds as large as 5,000 or 10,000 people spellbound. Why was he able to do this?

The Word

            Whitefield had the conviction of the Word of God in his heart! He was able to effectively & emotionally transfer that feeling to others. His faith was contagious! He took seriously the imperative to preach the gospel. Whitefield and Edwards were driven to teach what were called the three tenets of the gospel: 1) The Sovereignty of the Creator God; 2) The Fallenness (depravity) of man; and 3) The Redemption of humanity by God’s Son Jesus. These preachers taught the core statement which energized the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, i.e. “The righteous shall live by faith.”  (Romans 1:17) Whitefield preached the Grace of God and he preached it so effectively that it literally lifted people from their seats.

            Of course what was really happening in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the fact that the modern world was taking shape. Enlightenment thought was influencing the development of all institutions in society. Science and technology were on the march, pushing the church and its dependence on the revelation of God out to the boundaries of life.

            We - living at the beginning of the 21^st century - understand this process very well. We see the end product, a well developed, aggressive secularity. What do these words secular and secularity mean? In some sense they mean that what you see is what you get. No supernatural explanations! Secularity is defined by what it denies. There will be no religious explanations of reality. This is what the church leadership in the 18^th & 19^th centuries were reacting to and this is what the Church is facing today.

            What is the Church to do? Are the only options to fight them or join them? There is only one option. The Church must do what the leadership did in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, turn to the Word of God. What else have we? The Church is different from every other institution in society in that it has been entrusted with the responsibility of carrying a message (the free gift of the grace of God) which it has received out into the world. The Church has heard the Word of God in the person of Jesus and it must preach that Word! That responsibility is its life. It is what drives and energizes the Church. Put another way: the Church has something to say and it must say it powerfully and with effect. This “responsibility” is what was at the center of the fervor driving the great awakening and it is what should inspire us today. We are not going to attract people to committed membership in the church with gimmicks and clever marketing strategies. The Word must be preached unequivocally! It must touch the hearts of the people who hear it!

The Road to Emmaus

            In the 24^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel we find a story which speaks directly to the issue. It takes place on the afternoon and early evening of the first Easter. Two followers of Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a journey of about seven miles. While they are walking, a stranger joins them. They talk with him about all that has happened that day. The stranger listens to all that they have to say about Jesus and the dramatic events permeating his life and death and he then interprets them using the scriptures. The three travelers reach Emmaus at the end of the day and the two disciples ask the stranger to “stay with them.” When the stranger takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it, Luke tells us that the eyes of the two disciples were opened and they recognize the stranger as Jesus. He immediately vanishes! Then they say to each other (and this is the punch line), “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?”

            Here is the key to what should happen to us when we attend worship. Do our hearts burn within us when we hear the scriptures, the Word of God opened to us. When and if that ever happened, that will be the moment when our own personal “Great Awakening” will occur.

            There is a hymn in the Episcopal Hymnal 1980 which directly speaks to the subject. It is # 546. The music was composed by Handel. Here is the first verse:

Awake my soul, stretch every nerve and press with vigor on:

                        A heavenly race demands thy zeal and an immortal crown,

                          And an immortal crown.

Postscript 

            I think that it would be a good idea to make the first Sunday after Labor Day an official liturgical observance.  Call it “Great Awakening Sunday.” The focus could be to instill an enthusiasm for evangelism in the local congregation. God knows that the Episcopal Church could use that important emphasis.

 

           

 

 

Back To Nature!

The heavens are telling the glory of God, *

     and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

                                                                                                Psalm 19:1

            The best thing about summer is the opportunity to spend more time outdoors. That was particularly true when I was growing up in North Dakota. When we were let out of school at the end of May, we literally lived outside for three months. We only went home to eat and sleep. It was before television! Our parents never worried about us. We were just outside somewhere. Sadly, times have changed and so has American society. Liz and I sit out in our backyard every night but we rarely see any of our neighbors. We don’t understand it! Why would anyone choose air conditioning and television over being outside? There is a larger issue - at least for me - at play here.

            It has been my experience that people live in a tension between urbanization and all its stresses, and a need to be nearer to (God’s) creation. Cities are human creations and the outside, the countryside, is more revelatory of the hand of God. I like to point out to people when talking about this subject that when the United States was founded, 98% of the people lived on farms and 2% lived in cities. Now the situation is completely reversed. Today 99% live in cities and less than 1% live on farms (or vineyards). Sometimes I wonder just how well our inner selves have made that transition. I personally think that there is a void within us which city life is just not able to fill.

            One of my theories about urban sprawl is that people keep moving from the city to suburbs further and further away because of the need to return to some semblance of living in the country. One sees this in cutesy subdivision names like Country Estates, Highland Meadows, or Jost Farms. Were people really meant to live on top of each other? I don’t think so! In large population areas like St. Louis, life becomes more and more impersonal. Who really knows their neighbors? Live in a small town for a while and you will see and feel the difference and it will shock you!

            The tension between urban and rural, city and country is revealed in the history of modern thought. Following the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, Western society began to industrialize because of the development of machines. Machines meant factories which were located in cities. People left the countryside and small villages (their roots) and came to the cities to work in those factories. Large cities like the London described by Charles Dickens in his novels came into being. Slums became a reality.

Many people deplored this new “modern” society which the triumph of reason had created. It was a cold, arid, unfeeling world from which God had seemingly been banished. Nature had become an inanimate (dead) thing) to be mastered and exploited instead of something at which to marvel. In reaction to this state of affairs, the spirit of Romanticism developed. It was an attempt to infuse feeling, emotion and mystery back into the world. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and John Constable created paintings of woodland scenes and harbors which literally glowed with a holy light. Their paintings were a statement that nature was alive and that the world was a deeper, more complicated mystery than human reason had yet discovered.

It is interesting to note that Jesus himself avoided the larger cities like Caesarea Philippi and instead focused the majority of his ministry in smaller towns and villages where people lived who were close to the land and very open and responsive to his parables about sowers of seeds, vineyards and harvesting. 

            I say, Amen! All of us need to take the time to reestablish a spiritual communication with nature. Take a drive out to a rural area and look carefully at the beautiful countryside and think of Turner and Constable and the “holy light” which they saw in nature. Can you see it? It should warm your soul!

 

                                                                                               

On The Death of a Parish Priest

 

George Plattenburg Service

July 9, 2014

            We are gathered here this morning to do two things: 1) As we always do when we gather to worship, celebrate the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus; and the more poignant – painful task today of 2) Honoring the memory of a man, a colleague – George Plattenburg - who made the decision fairly early in his life to give his life to Christian ministry and more particularly, to the ministry which takes place in parish churches. I think that I can say without too much fear of disagreement that that is a noble calling! For this service I chose not to read one of the recommended Burial Office Gospels, but instead picked one from the service for the ordination of a priest. In case you didn’t appreciate it the first time, here it is again:

            And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. Teaching and Preaching and Healing! That is the model for ministry which Jesus sets before us. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to the disciples, “The Harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

            George Plattenburg was one of those, I am guessing, back in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s whose imagination was stirred by that imperative from Jesus and he decided to become one of those laborers following the direction of the Lord of the harvest. Again, it was and is a noble calling!

            George was born in Oxford, Ohio. His father was an Episcopal clergyman, the archdeacon of the Diocese of Ohio at one time. George spent his childhood in Ohio and also in upstate New York where he graduated from high school. He went to college at Sewanee – the University of the South - a place well known in the Episcopal Church, graduating in 1955. Having been in ROTC in college, 2^nd  Lt. George Plattenburg spent three years in the Air Force as a navigation officer. It looks like he then made a brief run at a business career but decided instead to heed the call to the ministry and he became a seminary student at Bexley Hall, an Episcopal Seminary in Gambier, Ohio. (This was back in the day when Episcopal postulants actually went to Episcopal seminaries.) He was graduated in 1962 and was ordained to the priesthood the next year.

He began his ordained career as an assistant at a parish in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then he took his growing family to Kemmerer, Wyoming where he served what is called a two point parish. That means that every Sunday he had one service in a small church and then drove forty five miles to a second church where he officiated and preached at another service. And he did that summer and winter, rain and shine. I’m sure he even drove it in blizzard conditions.

I knew a young Lutheran clergyman who went to seminary in St. Paul,

Minnesota. He signed on to become the pastor of a three point  

place in North Dakota. Before he went out there, he got married. His

new wife had not been part of the decision to go there. When they

drove into the small (and I mean small) town where they were going to

 live, he stole a sidelong glance at his wife. She was sitting there

crying! It was not an easy transition!

George was in Kemmerer for seven years and I would guess that it was there that he really learned how to be a parish priest. Years ago we used to say that it was the small rural parishes that did the actual training of parish clergy. They are demanding situations! The clergyman is a one man band. George then spent some time in Moline, Illinois and in 1976 moved to St. Louis where he spent the last 38 years of his life.

I knew George in the 1990’s when he was involved in the Urban Partnership, a ministry of two priests alternately serving four small urban parishes. Prior to that he was an associate at St Peter’s, Ladue where he worked for David Benson. His last place before retirement was St. John’s, Tower Grove Park.

            George’s son George Jr. was good enough to share some memories of his father with me.  I especially liked two images. The first was of George, Jr. accompanying his father numerous times on that forty-five mile trip between those two small towns in southwestern Wyoming so that he could serve as the acolyte. The second description  with which I was really taken was of George’s weekly sermon preparation. Every clergy person who has ever served in a small parish knows about the pressure of that weekly sermon. It was always there over your head, week after week after week. There wasn’t anyone else to spell you of the preaching responsibility. Apparently George used to put it off until late Saturday evening or even early Sunday morning. The process by which he did his sermons was described to me as “creative panic.” I understand that completely! I have been there.

            What is there that is so compelling about parish ministry? I could write a book! It is still striking to me how little people really appreciate the great value of this institution which came into being through the action of the Holy Spirit following the Ascension of Jesus. That action gave us a place, a sacred place, to live our lives in the midst of the chaos & confusion of secularity, most importantly during our transition moments. Each one of us makes a life journey and the parish church offers us a sanctuary along the way where we can be strengthened through the power of the gospel which Sunday after Sunday by a process sometimes of creative panic is preached there. God bless the people who make that happen. God bless the parish clergy! God bless George for his decision to follow that vocation and answer the summons of the Lord of the harvest.

            It is not an easy life to choose, but the Lord of the Harvest remembers those who have been faithful. George Plattenburg, rest in peace!  You fought the good fight! Amen.