...and make him a priest in your church

Here the Bishop lays hands upon the head of the ordinand, and prays:
Therefore, Father, through Jesus Christ your Son, give your Holy Spirit to Cristopher; fill him with grace and power, and make him a priest in your Church.

I felt it.

Didn't expect to. But God has a way of doing things I don't expect.

I need to think about it for a few days before trying to tell the story or describe.




It was glorious fun. Packed church. Friends from California, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Houston, Dallas, Friendswood, Austin, including one from California who showed up unannounced at the last minute. Still have houseguests. The feasting and celebration continues.

National Champions addendum

Last night, I read the news that Vince is going to the NFL. I called down the hall to my beloved, something like "did you hear Vince Young declared for the draft?" Her response:

a blank look.... then she said "Who's Vince Young?"

I just stared at her for a minute.

Then she said, "Oh, yeah, isn't he the hot-shot running back for Texas?"

THAT got her the open-mouthed, disbelieving stare.

So she tried again. "um... coach?"



Thank God for my wife, who keeps me in perspective.

Thoughts on national championships

So: The University of Texas, National Champions.

Actually, the University of Texas is now the reigning NCAA Divison 1 title holder in Football and Baseball, and for a time early this season the basketball team was ranked #2 in the country. Which makes for a bunch of happy UT alumni and fans. I've been a Texas athletics fan since...since I was born, practically. My father played football at the University of Texas. I grew up in Austin. I have pictures of myself, as a four-year-old boy, posing in front of Big Bertha with a UT cheerleader. Right now, in the CD player in my truck, there's a recording of the Longhorn Band. My sisters got tickets to the Rose Bowl and flew to Pasadena. And, yes, I watched, and cheered myself hoarse, and wore burnt orange to the office the next day.

All that said, the current state of collegiate athletics in this country has taken on a life of its own rather than being an integrated part of the education of our best and brightest. I believe that the availability of athletic challenge--for students, not as a spectator sport--is a significant part of an elite education. And every so often I wonder if being a fan of college athletics means that I’m missing the point.

How many Nobel laureates are teaching at UT? How many volumes in the libraries? Or, if that's too esoteric for you, how about this--who's the current president of the University?

(seven, but only one in Austin; eight million, give or take a few; as of Feb 1st, it's William C. Powers, Jr)

I view the current state of big-time collegiate sports, including those played at my alma maters, as entertainment—something disconnected from the purpose of a university, played by people who are not students in the usual sense of the word. Nothing wrong with entertainment; I’m a big fan of the NFL and of professional baseball at all levels, and I’m learning to be a Spurs fan, here in my first season. But that’s what professional sports are for. Professional football, baseball, and basketball leagues exist in this country for both men and women--multiples of all three, actually.

One really good reason I can think of to have scholarship athletes is one that I can put a face on. My freshman year roommate in college was a bright, articulate fellow, funny and handsome. And huge. I’m remembering him about 6-4, 275. He played center for the football team, and majored in English. Late at night, I’d be up doing Math and Physics homework, and he was almost always up late, reading glasses on, under the lamp, in the middle of yet another book. He parlayed his size and athletic skill into a university degree and a good education. Sadly, not all scholarship athletes take the same path, getting by with minimal grades and minimal effort in less than meaningful curricula.

Here's the biggest reason for my discomfort: the enormous extent to which alumni of schools, and even non-alumni residents of college towns, identify with collegiate athletics rather than the "sober, fearless pursuit of truth, beauty, and righteousness..." (to quote the language on my undergraduate diploma) is shameful. Many large-school alumni seem to care more for the performance of the current athletic team than they care for each other—at least, to judge from the content of their conversations.

When the most common place for the alumni of America's great places of learning to interact is at the stadium or in front of the TV watching sporting events, and if our conversations never go beyond sports, then we've forfeited our power to change the world.

Christmas is over

When the song of the angel is still
When the star in the sky is gone
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their sheep

The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost
to heal the broken
to feed the hungry
to release the prisoner
to rebuild the nations
to bring peace among people
to make music in the heart
---Howard Thurman

(sent to me by a seminary classmate)

The meaning of Christmas?

The third week in November, the local Christian radio station ran an advertisement for a program that was about giving toys to disadvantaged children on December 25th. A nice man with a mellifluous voice came on the air and encouraged everyone to “spread holiday cheer, and show a needy child the true meaning of Christmas.” While I have nothing against giving presents to children, and in fact I hope lots of people do so this December, I cast a skeptical eye on assigning such a grand title to that activity. If we could try to capture the ‘true meaning’ of incarnation, I doubt seriously it would include wrapping paper and a bow.

To be honest, tinsel and elves and flying reindeer disturb me, just a little. Why? Because I’m afraid that the fairy-tale world we create for ourselves at Christmas blinds us to the awe and wonder of the Christmas narrative. The event we remember is fairly simple—a young Jewish girl gives birth to a baby. Was it an international event at the time? No. Was there something clearly miraculous about it? Maybe. Two of the four gospel stories in the Bible don’t even mention Jesus’ birth. But the other two gospels tell a story that a scientific age has problems with.

The miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth wasn’t the issue for early Christians. They didn’t follow him, gives their lives to him, lay down their lives for him, because of what they knew or didn’t know about his parentage. They weren’t convinced because they had heard stories that he didn’t have a human father, or because of stories of angels and mangers and stars and camels and shepherds when he was born. No, they followed because of what they saw in the man.

Jesus showed them a new kind of living. A new kind of being. A new and unexpected manifestation of God’s love, God’s power. They looked at him and saw something of the mystery and wonder of God. They saw in Jesus something so profound, something so deep at the bedrock of reality, that their very natures were transformed by his presence. And, at the limit of their ability to comprehend what was going on, they confessed: God was in Christ.

It would not have occurred to the Biblical writers to separate this story from the world of everyday occurrence. So, in the supernaturalistic world in which they lived, they told the story of his birth with poetry and song, with silver starlight and the roar of angel wings, to allow us, the readers of the story, a way of brushing against the significance of the man as we slide past. As the creation stories of Genesis tell not how the world was created, but why, so the birth narratives stretch past the mundane, past what happened? and on toward Why? Who was this man? and What can it mean?

But when we 21st-century folk read the stories of the virgin birth, we wonder how such a thing might really happen, and we find ourselves in danger of reading into the gospel account the conclusion that Jesus was special because he was fundamentally different, when instead the story is trying to tell us that he was human, the same as us, from birth to death.

Modern Christmas stories leave me quietly disturbed because when we tell each other stories of flying reindeer and magic elves, we know they’re not in any way real. Sure, they’re heartwarming, or inspiring, or funny. But maybe, when we tell those silly stories, we push the story of Jesus away from our reality at the same time.

If we allow Jesus to be a fairy-tale, then he’s something other than one of us—kinda like us, but not really one of us. And then the gospel melts away into dirty slush, right along with the January snow.

Writing sermons is hard (part 2 of many)

Yes, I've now included several sermons as blog entries. (another one on the way soonish)

I'm firmly convinced that a sermon is an oral event. A conversation between God, the text, the preacher, and the congregation. What God says to me may get lost in translation on the way to you, which might be a good or a bad thing. Several times already at St. Thomas, I've experienced God taking what comes out of my mouth and working with it in the air on its way to you. People have commented to me at the end of the service that they've loved what I said about [turnips], when I was talking about [geese]. That's all to God's glory.

But I write sermons, and I do write most of them down as a manuscript, to be heard rather than written. You're aware that spoken English uses different grammar and rhythm than written English. Alliteration loses its power. Repitition, phrasing, become the product of the reader's attention level rather than the preacher's delivery. As a result, most of what I've been told are 'good' sermons look terrible on paper.

I'm also firmly convinced that a sermon is an event for a specific time and place and people. St. Thomas is a crowd of suburban anglo-saxon upper-middle-class Episcopalians. We're not a good cross-section of San Antonio, the United States, or Christianity for that matter. Sermons sent out written hit unknown ears, and I can't even think about writing for *everybody* in God's creation or I get totally paralyzed.

On Mary, the mother of the Messiah

one of my two readers (readership now growing at an exponential rate) has left a comment that deserves a weightier response than I can give, but here's a try.

yes, the last entry was a sermon. I made a rule for myself that I would only post a sermon as a blog entry if someone asked for a copy of it and it was already out there in written form somewhere. And in the sermon, as a deliberately shocking rhetorical device, I described Mary as a little girl. Why? Because my congregation is largely upper middle class anglo Episcopalians, who picture Mary in their minds' eyes the same way she was in their parents' or grandparents' ceramic nativity sets--blue flowing robe, white headcloth, blond hair, blue eyes, about 20-25 years old. Which, of course, is just about as likely as Oprah being a natural blonde. The fact that Jesus probably looked far more like Osama Bin Laden than, say, Kevin Costner, is something we get, intellectually, if we stop and think about it.

For all that The Blessed Virgin Mary is such a significant figure in Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism), the gospels don't give her much press time, and precious few lines.

In fact, some scholars (I shouldn't reference scholarly ideas without attribution, but it's late and I'm tired...Bultmann, for one) deny the historical veracity of the gospels' claim to Jesus being virgin born. There are many other stories from other faiths and/or mythologies that claim virgin mothers for their heroes, for one thing, and Christianity may have utilized a common story in such a way as to reach Greek-speaking audiences. Stronger challenge comes from the fact that two of the four canonical gospels don't mention it at all, and that Paul's letters contain no mention of it either.

The gospels often give us summaries of events, and almost never get to the kind of narrative detail that modern writing strives for. The annunciation story begins with the angel's announcement, and ends with Mary's acceptance--a mighty act of faith and devotion. But for her answer to such a world-changing pronouncement to be instantaneous, without fear or doubt or even anxiety, strains credulity (at least for me). I think it more likely that she acted in fear, which makes her response to God's call all the more faithful.

She then was, for the vast majority of his life, the mother (and maybe single parent) of the messiah. The creeds of faith say that Jesus was both human and divine, and Mary would have had enormous impact on making Jesus who he was. It's not too much of a stretch to say that the child Jesus learned obediance to God's will from Mary.

Was the anunciation an event forced on Mary? No.

The next question to be asked is, does it matter if Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived?