Rector Reflects: Top Ten Ideas Changing the World NOW

Ever since Naisbitt’s Megatrends tried to predict the major ideas changing our way of life into the new millennium, somebody always follows up with their version for the New Year. Time magazine (March 23) took their stab at it with their list for ’09.
1.    Having a job is your most valuable asset,
2.    Suburbs are dying and being re-created,
3.    Survival stores to make us green,
4.    Bio-banks to save our DNA and body parts,
5.    Renting a country for outsourced industry,
6.    Rising new Calvinism,
7.    EI–Ecological Intelligence,
8.    A-mortality—“growing younger”
9.    Everything Africa,
10.    Reinventing Highways.

And the list could go on from there! What didn’t make the list is my pick of the litter—“the power of one.” History may be the story of the big ideas that swept up generations.  However, it was always the individual who steps out of the crowd that makes the difference.  For starters, it was the “One Solitary Life” born in Bethlehem and raised at Easter who still makes the only difference for Christians.  Is it the movement across the globe that changes us, really, or the One who lives in our hearts and changes us into God’s image forever?  Happy Easter!  Larry

Rector’s Reflections: Taking Hold of the Resurrection

Happy Easter and a blessed Eastertide!  For years, the critics railed against John Updike’s novels for a “fuzzy faith” that the readers could not get a handle on.  Perhaps a valid criticism of his novels—and their very thick plots—but not his poetry and especially his Stanzas at Easter.  Updike died this past January from lung cancer after a career as a prolific, prize-winning author.  According to his rector, he received home communion regularly—and the oft earthy Updike was just as concrete in his incarnational faith—the risen Lord coming to him in body and blood.  The Lord is risen indeed each time we too take communion. Larry

Stanzas at Easter                   John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Why We Call this Friday GOOD

How could anyone witness a crucifixion call it “good?” Certainly the eyewitnesses retreated horrified.  Like a gigantic fist, everything Jesus stood for was crushed.  A son of Mary, a teacher of the disciples, a friend to those he helped mourned as much as any of us from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”  Nothing has changed since that Friday.  We are still “river-riders” headed for the falls.  The clue is that we read John’s crucifixion account on Good Friday.  Raymond Brown, a renowned New Testament scholar, writes that the seeds of God’s providence are sown with our tears for the way of the cross.  Whatever history we believe and think we see is simply not what God has in mind.  For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  (Isaiah 55:8)  We call this Friday GOOD because God sowed the seeds of goodness in Creation—and called it Good from the beginning.  The death and resurrection of Jesus is the new creation Paul calls Christians the new creation, dead to ourselves but alive in Christ. During Holy Week, a very influential person in my personal and professional life died from breast cancer.  Patty Lundquist served on my seminarian committee and fed me and others in more ways than Sunday dinner.  Those she touched knew a deeper joy in life.  She reminded me (again) how it is that the Life that walked the paths of the Holy Land still leaves footprints in our hearts—and why we call it GOOD.  – Larry

Poetry Corner

River-Riders
Either this life makes sense,
or perfect nonsense.
Each generation rides the river,
to the falls to vanish forever,
or carried by grace,
to the Garden only God gives,
beyond what we deserve
or desire, the everlasting flow
of life that begins and ends,
then begins again,
in the God we discover,
as the River himself.

Rector’s Reflection: Seeing is not Always Believing!

The used car salesman drove up the car that looked just perfect.  “Believe what you see!  Trust what you see,” was his refrain, “You can’t believe Carfax reports.”  My eyes could not see the Carfax truth:  “a total loss vehicle after 3 accidents.”  Don’t trust what you see is the maxim of faith.  God’s truth always lies deeper than the appearance of things—“Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.”  Anyone watching Jesus’ passion would swear it was all over.  As we take parts in Mark’s Passion Gospel on Sunday, we will say it was all over.  But eyes of faith know differently.  The gift of Easter, as TS Eliot says, “is a whole different vision altogether.”  May Palm Sunday and Holy Week begin to open our eyes of faith to really behold the gift of Easter.   Larry

Lost & Found

I went to a Virginia Seminary Conference, “Living in a Time of Fear in Financial Crisis,” and after about forty minutes of getting lost in economic theory—I found my way out into the bookstore. I discovered a little book worth its weight in gold– Adam Hamilton’s Enough: Discovering Joy through Simplicity and Generosity. That’s a mouth-full, but Hamilton’s message of “finding enough” in a life of “simplicity and generosity” is today’s best investment. We often exchange many things to live with and our anxiety over losing them—for the One to live for. The practice of keeping things simple (a single focus) and a generous spirit to others, opens our lives, as Paul says, “for Christ to live in us” and for us to be found by him. Larry

The Lenten Road

You cannot drive between Flint Hill and Front Royal right now without seeing tractors plowing fields.  Just last week, they shoveled snow!  The stages of Lent in our lives are all there—moving from lives frozen in routine, that thaw out with the grace of new weather, so that the soil can be turned and prepared for planting.  The word “Lent” comes from Medieval English for “lengthening light.” The Parable of the Sower (or soils)  compares our lives with soil that receives God’s Word and grows by his Light.  We always find ourselves somewhere along that Lenten road that leads to God’s planting.  The question is—how are we preparing ourselves for that new life.  Larry

Never Too Late for Lenten Reading

Just off the presses is Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God.  This is the book I used for a sermon and had many requests for the title.  Manning is now so popular that his name appears in larger type set than the title.  What makes Manning in demand is a clear, direct writing style that responds to many of the oft felt, rarely spoke questions—like, “What’s the point in getting out bed today?” and “Where is the bread that feeds the emptiness I have inside?” The questions Manning raises come from his forty years as a writer, Franciscan priest, and a fearless wrestling match with his own self.  He has a long list of other books that are very challenging.

The second title I have recently re-read is Rabbit, Run by the late John Updike.  “Rabbit” emerges from the four part book series that won all the awards and those who dared to read him in the 1960’s.  Recently reviewed on the Diane Rhem show, “Updike may have died but Rabbit is alive and kicking us in 2009.  If pressed, I’d say the book asks the question “when we feel trapped in life (like a rabbit) dop we have the courage to run?  And  “what can we run to that gives life?”  The three ardent critics on the Rhem show gave three thumbs up for several scenes that have remained indelible in the American literary psyche. – Larry

March Snows for Lent

Last Monday’s storm was right on time for Lent. It shuts down the world or at least changes it—and that’s what Lent should be about.  All too frequently Lent speeds us up with more things to do, and we miss the whole point of a different vision and understanding of who we are and who God is for us.  T.S. Eliot’s favorite lines for me are: “Happiness is not getting what we want, or getting rid of something, or even getting what we want.  Happiness is a different vision altogether.” May Lent provide that gift of a whole new vision of ourselves, our neighbor, and the God we find— who loves to play in the snow! Larry

Exactly What Good is Prayer?

No wonder some people have difficulty with prayer—“I’m not going to God as a heavenly Santa Claus with my list,” and—“I feel too guilty going to God now when I ignored him when I wasn’t in such need.” Yet the Jesus of the Bible never turns anyone aside– “What is it you want me to do for you?” C.S. Lewis wrote about prayer “I don’t pray to try to change God’s mind and get what I want.  I pray to God because it changes me, I see the world differently—and can find God in it.” These days are difficult financially—and when the markets define our net worth, who wouldn’t feel anxious! With prayer, we open our world beyond ourselves to God….we trade in the markets for a Kingdom, with the economy of grace. I pray it changes us to have confidence, with the words of the prayer, “where true riches are to be found.” Larry