Thinking about September 11, 2001

How could I not blog on 9-11?

This year, I've read The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, a book by Yale (and Episcopalian) theologian Miroslav Volf. Volf, while recognizing some of the merits of remembering wrongs, also explores the darker side of remembering wrongs committed. Remembering "rightly," he argues (or this is my take on what he said), doesn't necessarily mean forgetting. It does mean, as a Christian, not allowing the wrongs committed against us to become the center of our being and our identity. Otherwise, that whole "forgiveness" thing that Jesus not only offers to each of us but also asks that we forgive others as well (remember the Lord's Prayer?) is just a whole bunch of talk.

Now, I don't think that the United States is a Christian nation. I do think there are a lot of people who are Christians in policy making positions who perhaps are, in fact, allowing the events of 9-11 to shape our collective identity.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was actually in NYC at a conference at Trinity Wall Street on 9-11, wrote a relatively short but powerful work called Writing in the Dust that I recommend. He argues that the instinct to retaliate, to feel that release that comes from striking back may be human (see: the Psalms) and may make us feel better initially. However, that, he says, is not enough to justify doing so. He asks not only the more abstract theological questions about whether or not responding violently is the Christian thing to do; I don't think I would like the book if he left it there, honestly. Williams also asks the imminently practical questions, the things such as, "Will this action, whatever it is, lead us in the direction of fulfilling his goals?"

Today I am for praying, for those who have died, for those whose lives are changed forever, and for our enemies.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like...

I'm preaching on several of Jesus' parables from Matthew this week. It's got me thinking of what Jesus might say if he were alive today.

I think a modern day mustard seed parable might go something like this:

The kingdom of heaven is like buying stock in some small, random, no-name company, forgetting about it, and then decades later realizing it’s made you a millionaire

It works because emphasizes something small becoming something big, but it loses something because the mustard plant was not a particularly desirable plant.

A contemporary yeast parable might be something this:

The kingdom of heaven is like a cell phone that doesn’t run out of batteries for days, no matter how long you talk or how much you text or how many pictures you take or receive.

Again, this loses something because Jesus using a woman as the protagonist was a bit shocking.

These aren't that great. What do you think? The kingdom of heaven is like...

Bishop Daniel's Blog!

Read reflections and see pictures of the bishop of the diocese of East Carolina while he's at Lambeth!

Food for Thought: Reading

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They’ve come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don’t explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these (note: I haven't been able to confirm that this list is indeed from the organization that it says that it is, but I suppose I'll play along anyhow). So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I’ve used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

Here goes…What about you?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman*
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot*
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll*
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseini*
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (started it. didn't like it)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood*
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement- Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White*
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I absolutely refuse to read this book, and its presence makes me question the entire list. I started one of his other saccharine "books," and I despised it.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (if the complete works is on here, why is this one?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Independence Day: A Feast Day (?)

I had the 5:30 Wednesday service yesterday. To mix it up a little bit, I normally transfer a feast day from another week day. It gives people to hear about people from our past (at least that's my reasoning). The only feast day this week was (cue dramatic music) Independence Day.

As I started thinking about the service at, oh, 5:15, I didn't have any clue what to say. I ended up being very grateful I was not better prepared, because, instead of me yacking, those gathered ended up having a great discussion about why Independence Day is (or should not be) a feast day. Some thought it didn't belong at all, because July 4 is a secular holiday. Someone pointed out the Declaration of Independence's endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights passage calls us to observe it (Ironically, of course, this language was juxtaposed with the worst example of racial slavery in the history of the world). Someone else conjectured that since some of the Founding Fathers were Episcopalian, maybe they influenced the inclusion of the day in the Book of Common Prayer.

So, what do you think? Why is Independence Day a feast day, albeit a lesser one, in the Episcopal Church? Should it be?

Looking Towards Lambeth Conference 2008

I've been thinking a lot about the Anglican Communion lately, what with the Lambeth Conference coming up. I had one of those moments when I wondered how it came to be that I couldn't even think about the Anglican Communion without homosexuality popping into my head. In a moment of clarity, the pairing of homosexuality and the Anglican Communion seemed nonsensical, like discussing pickles and hardware in the same breath.

My daydreaming aside, context matters. In "Turning Away from Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church, " the lead article of Garret Keizer the June 2008 edition of Harper's Magazine, provides an accessible overview of why Anglican Communion and homosexuality are so often in the same sentence these days . The result is a series of incredible moments, words I'm still pondering, the kinds of things that I wish I had thought of saying, the kinds of moments that are worth listening to, such as:

At its most recent meeting last March, the Episcopal House of Bishops passed a resolution urging Congress to override President Bush's veto of a bill that would have outlawed the practice of water boarding. The bishops might just as well have passed a courtesy resolution thanking the caterers for the cheese.

"Episcopalians disagree about everything from stem-cell research to abortion to who should be president to Iraq... And then as humbly as possible we find our way to the communion rail and kneel and receive the Body and Blood of Christ and find our unity there..." Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire

[Bishop Orombi of Uganda] speaks... my heart paraphrases: I changed everything for you. I would not even be recognizable to my own ancestors. I changed my language, my family structures, my gods. And I am glad for this change. It was a great gift. But now you choose to change what I changed for, and you do not so much as ask me how that might make me feel?

Money determines what we don't talk about... A church that was as 'inclusive' as progressives wanted it to be, and as 'biblically based' as the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy want it to be would rectify the situation described by Bishop Stacy Sauls of Lexington, KY..."The problem is that the most isolated places need the priests with the greatest skills. But the system works so that the priests with the greatest skills go almost always to the places that are well-resourced already."

That's only a taste. His thoughtful engagement of many different Anglican folks provides a example of the Communion's potential. Keizer lets no one--no one--off the hook, and yet he still seems to treat people with empathy.

I finished the article feeling shamed, as well I should be.

I recommend it.

2008 Women for Women Power of the Purse

Yesterday I gave the invocation at the Women for Women's Power of the Purse event. Seeing as Women for Women in Greenville is not explicitly a Christian organization, seeing as Greenville is more diverse than many people are actually aware, I gave the following blessing, which I thought appropriate to the nature of the gathering:

Let us pray.

Gracious and loving God, who knows many names, we give you thanks for the many gifts of this life—the gift of this day, the gift of this food, and the gift of one another. Open our eyes that we might see you in the world about us. Open our lips that we might speak out on behalf of those who have a hard time speaking for themselves. Open our hands that we might find you through the act of giving. Open our hearts that we might recognize you in the different ways you make yourself known to us. Let your Holy Spirit be known to all Women for Women, to all the organizations it supports, and to all gathered here today and always. Amen.

First of all, note the explicit mention of the Holy Spirit. This is more than I would do in a context other than down east. To be honest, it was a stretch for me to pray something so Trinitarian at what is presumably a secular event. Judging from the reaction, though, I think the divinity of the Holy Spirit is in some major trouble, as mentioning the third person of the Trinity didn't seem to satisfy some of the Christians present. Only the first two persons--the "Dear Father God" or Jesus-- will suffice.

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, but I think I may have gotten some passive aggressive backlash a mere two hours later. One of the first questions asked of Naomi Judd, who was the event's speaker, was something to the effect of: "Do you feel you can't mention Jesus when you're speaking?" Ms. Judd handled the question beautifully, speaking about how talk show hosts want her to talk about things that don't matter, things like her daughter's weight, when she (Naomi) would rather talk about issues important to her such as Hepatitis C. She then went on to say that she recognized major world religions such as Judaism and Islam, though she didn't think everything that claims to be a religion is an actual path to the divine (I'm heavily paraphrasing here).

I recognize that this is not necessarily a prayer entirely appropriate on a Sunday morning in the context of a Christian worship service. This is something I would--and did--pray on a Wednesday morning in the Greenville Convention Center. I honestly believe it to be authentic to who I am.

Truths do not have to be mutually exclusive. Shouting how right we are will not make everyone else less right.

Musings on the 2008 Greenville-Pitt County Community Unity Breakfast

This morning I attended the Greenville Chamber of Commerce's annual Community Unity Breakfast, held annually on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's Day. Dudley E. Flood, a retired school administrator, was the keynote speaker. His point was simple, something that everyone there already knew, but something that probably needs to be by nearly everyone heard on occasion:

Difference does not imply deficiency.

I agree with the statement in the abstract. I pained to admit that I don't think my current life reflects it adequately. The truth is, I more often than not associate with and talk to people who, by and large, have a somewhat similar world view to mine. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that, but working in a church, which, as most communities of faith, is one of the primary enclaves of self-segregation in the USA, exacerbates the situation. Am I setting myself up for failure, if what I say I want is more diverse community?

Another thing that frustrates me is that the need for dialog, or what have you, is so often referred to in a two-dimensional way, that is, as something that needs to happen between black people and white people. To be fair, I don't think race relations in the United States can be truly grasped without fully exploring this long history of prejudices, stereotypes, and outright racism and bigotry between whites and African-Americans. At the same time, speaking consistently only on that level is rather narrow and does not describe even the community here in Greenville, North Carolina. Rest assured, I don't labor under the delusion that I'm saying anything remarkably profound here. I am saying that until the conversation reflects our current reality a little more closely, I'm not sure where, if anywhere, we're going to get.

In the meantime, I show up. I show up to events held at different churches and communities of faith, not all the time, but on occasion. I show up in hopes that presence is important, and know that if I don't occasionally show up, things will probably not change.

Today I'm wondering how to be both hopeful and realistic at the same time.