The following is translated from German – I mention that because there are a few spots where the phrases don't translate well into English. This was the sermon I gave yesterday when I was subbing for our priest, who's on a trip this week.

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Isaiah 55:10-11, Psalm 65:10-14, Romans 8:18-23, Matthew 13:1-23)

I don't know who of you likes to work in the garden or in the fields, but if so, then today's readings are just for you. The opening hymn, Morning Has Broken, fits this theme. All that's missing are the chirping of birds and perhaps as a Communion hymn the "Morning Mood" from the Peer Gynt suite.

Today we hear about seeds, sprouts, blooms and grains. That all has something to say, a mystical meaning, a message for us. Unfortunately for us modern people, we tend to associate different things with gardening: mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, pulling weeds, maybe spray against bugs. It's all about appearances, largely a façade for the neighbors – so that everyone in the neighborhood knows that no slobs live here.

But that's not at all what is meant in the readings. Most people today in Europe or North America no longer have a close connection to Mother Earth. Gardens are a thing of hobbies or for show. Tilling the fields is just a thing for farmers, while we go and buy our food at the supermarket. Fresh food from the garden is uncommon, sometimes even a burden: anyone with a friend who gardens will no doubt be showered with extra zucchinis and apples and cherries until you can't stand them anymore. But our existence certainly doesn't depend on it.

Back then, in Jesus' time, it was different. The overwhelming majority of people had to till the fields so that they had anything to eat. Even those who did not have to work in the fields were intimately aware of the work required and how it was going. Everyone knew if the harvest was good: you couldn't just go and get bananas from Central America or apples from Spain or asparagus from Greece. If the harvest wasn't good, you went hungry, and everyone else you knew did, too. In times of starvation, whosoever didn't grab a farming tool didn't eat.

Whoever works in their garden today thus only gets a tiny inkling of the enormous labor required to get nourishment from the fields. For tilling the soil is of necessity communal work. Alone, one can't sow the seeds, milk the cows, cut the fruit trees, and so on. Out in the fields, community is necessary, even vital. It's no coincidence that the earliest mighty civilizations – Egypt, for example – crystallized around agriculture. The first states – the first societies capable of survival – were primarily for encouraging and managing agriculture, and were made possible by agriculture's own existence.

Society itself is like a plant. It needs a bit of "tender loving care", as we say in English. It needs love. Plants may not think, but they need love anyway. Whosoever cares most for his plants will bear the greatest fruit.

I hear from some people that it's not necessary to go to church every Sunday, that the institution of church itself is a load of crap, that they feel turned off by organized religion (which sounds rather like "organized crime", and maybe intentionally). Such people like to say that nature is their church.

What the images in today's readings show us, however, is the exact opposite. Nature, life itself, needs community to flourish and grow. Whosoever cares most for his plants will bear the greatest fruit. Whosoever works most in the fields will reap the greatest harvest. Nature needs this care, this attention, this work so that it is useful to us. Society benefits when we all work together.

Further, it's of course the case that we can "meet God" anywhere in the world, whether in church or on the highest mountain or the deepest valley. But the question is rather, how and where can I most likely meet and experience God?

It is perhaps the case that Nature can be a church. But the truth is, society – the Church – is our nature.

In the community – communion – we celebrate Nature, and indeed our nature. Just as the individual can't bring nature to its fullest flower without the community, so too can one not bring oneself to the fullest flower without community. Naturally I get annoyed with things in the church's institutions. You have no idea how angry I get about the church, whether it's the recent vote on female bishops in the Church of England, or the fighting over our own central common funding scheme, or the latest pronouncements from Rome or Constantinople or Moscow. Nevertheless this community is vital for finding our own fulfillment, so that our nature finds its fulfillment – so that the Kingdom of God gets ever closer. It begins by going to church on Sunday, but also must continue with deaconry and social welfare, personally caring for others while also donating to worthy causes. It's work. Back-breaking work even. But if we want to reap the harvest, we have to till the fields.

In nature's fields, we are ourselves the seeds. We need this attention, this tender loving care. We bloom ourselves. The celebration of Holy Communion is an important part of this care, where we both in a mystical as well as literal sense water and feed ourselves, so that we can be a rich harvest.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Whosoever cares most for his plants will bear the greatest fruit. If we love one another and work for and with one another, then the harvest will be truly great. Amen.

Today I had to run the church service once again (this seems to be habit-forming). As it happens we use the Roman Catholic lectionary used in Germany, but with a few minor modifications, and sometimes if the translation is a tad blatantly sexist (such as using "Brothers" instead of "Brothers and sisters" in the Epistles), then we either modify the text accordingly, or more rarely, use a different translation.

Sermon for Proper 9, Lectionary Year A

(Zechariah 9:9-12, Romans 7:15-25a, Matthew 11:16-19,25-30)

Today’s Gospel has an interesting idea in it, one of the better-known sayings of Jesus as the closing line: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”. The image of the yoke is an interesting choice, because it contrasts a bit with another well-known statement Jesus makes elsewhere, in the Gospel of John: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’.”

Freedom on the one hand, and yokes on the other. Is there a contradiction?

A frequent criticism I hear from non-Christians regarding the concept of Christian belief is the notion that by submitting ourselves to the restrictions and laws of our God, we make ourselves slaves. By believing in an all-powerful, all-seeing God, the parallel to a totalitarian state is made. God as Orwell’s Big Brother. All pretty threatening, worrying stuff. And indeed in some parts of the Church, the requirement to do private confession does have an aftertaste of the police state about it. So what is the meaning of freedom?

Most of us in Western countries, countries of the Enlightenment, tend to think of freedom mostly in the sense of “freedom to”. We are free to say what we want. We are free to live where we want. We are free to meet whom we want. And so on. We believe strongly in a free will and a free conscience. All those are good things.

So when someone comes along and talks about a yoke as a good thing, it’s a bit of a shock to us. If I came to you and told you to wear a harness so you’d feel freer, you’d think I was completely mad. So what is Jesus talking about here?

Well, freedom isn’t just “freedom to”. I think the best and most concise definition of basic human freedoms was made by Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, which went on to form the basis of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. These “Four Freedoms” are as follows:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Note that the first two are “of” freedoms or “to” freedoms — freedom to think, say and believe what you want. But the next two are “freedom from”. To achieve these “from” freedoms, a bit more cooperative effort is necessary – a society to maintain and protect these basic freedoms and to give them meaning. “Society” means some basic set of rules of the road, rules of conduct, ethical rules, things that govern how we treat each other and ourselves.

The yoke of Jesus is a metaphor for the Law, and the New Covenant that Jesus represents. It is a set of rules we voluntarily agree to in order to realize the potential freedom they bring. If we follow those rules in good faith and in good conscience, but also of our own free will, then unimagined potential in our society can be released. But there is another word in there that is easily forgotten: the burden of this yoke is light. In contrast to other belief systems or religions, the Christian message has a very simple, clear basis: love God and love one another. From these twin ideas flow everything else. The rules don’t get much simpler than that, even if we often miss the target. The burden is light because we bear it willingly and reap its rewards in this life as well as the next.

So what are we being freed from? Simply put, sin. What is sin? I think the most basic definition of sin is when we fail to fulfill those two basic commandments – we fail to love God and one another, and we fail to follow through on that love. I would go a bit further and equate love with life itself. When it says “the wages of sin is death”, this reversal of working to allow life – our life – to flourish is made clear. Life itself is holy; damaging life is not.

Paul notices this in his Epistle as he notices his own failings: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me”. This failure, this listening to the wrong voices or impulses, shouldn’t make us just feel bad or disappointed. It should motivate us to try harder to bring those two basic commandments to fulfillment in ourselves and in our society. The reality that we make mistakes or don’t live up to the high standard that God’s Law implies isn’t a reason to give up. It’s a reason to keep trying. It’s a reason to work for life itself.

Thus the ironic discovery we make here is that by voluntarily obeying some very basic rules, rules of love, we liberate ourselves. We choose life. As Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

My yoke is easy, my burden is light; I am the way, the truth and the light; and the truth shall set you free. Amen.

I mentioned before about how our parish is likely going to have a full-body baptismal pool, rather like the ones in early churches (such as at Ephesus).

Our rector is currently on vacation, so yesterday it fell to me to plan and run the Sunday service in German. Here is a translation of the sermon I delivered. It has more or less the same starting point as the previous one because of the way the lectionary works.

Sermon for Proper 6, Lectionary Year A

(Exodus 19:2-6a, Psalm 100, Romans 5:6-11, Matthew 9:36-10:8)

In the readings in the Bible, we are confronted repeatedly with imagery that is clearly intended to illustrate the Christian message. The image that is perhaps most common is that of a journey: Abraham and Sarah leaving their homeland in what's now Iraq to go to Canaan, today's Israel; Noah and his Ark; Moses and the tribes of Israel on the way from Egypt back to the Holy Land; Mary and Joseph searching for a place to sleep, or indeed the Wise Men from the East searching for the newborn Jesus; Jesus wandering for forty days and forty nights through the wilderness.

In those times where Israel was held captive, whether in exile in Babylon or in Egypt, its people longed to go on a journey, back into their homeland, back into God's embrace.

In today's Gospel, we see this again. Jesus speaks of "lost sheep". For us today, that image isn't so pregnant as it was for people of those days, because most of us don't experience firsthand what a shepherd does. Most people, I think, have an image of the shepherd sitting there on a grassy hill watching over his flock. But shepherds rarely sit still. Mostly they are in constant motion, from one meadow to the next, and they have to pay great attention that all stay together -- for protection, for a feeling of safety. So Jesus asks the Twelve to find the lost sheep in His name and bring them back, so that all -- so that we -- can walk the same path together.

The psalm also mentions this idea: "we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture". Each of us is a sheep, and each of us sometimes gets lost or leaves the way -- we go in the wrong direction, separate ourselves from others and from the group that provides us protection and comfort. We have a word for that: sin. Sin is that which separates us from God, but also from each other.

Paul has the solution for us, but also a reminder. He notes that we human beings are not normally ready to stick out our necks for others. We don't like to sacrifice ourselves and seek first and foremost our own advantage. We do, however, have an example that leads us back together: Jesus Christ, who made the ultimate sacrifice, His own life. He did it so that we could reconcile ourselves -- so that we learn to get along; so that we learn to overcome our differences. And sometimes it's necessary that we forgive ourselves, so that we can forgive others and reconcile. When we are enemies of each other, we are enemies of God.

When we have problems with one another, it's very, very hard to admit our own error. That is a sacrifice that very few are willing to make. We lose face, or so we think. But in reality it is a thing that brings release and relief, just as it brings release and relief to admit our own sin. We say casually "nobody's perfect", but we don't take those words to heart. We can't manage to reconcile ourselves to others if we can't bring ourselves to admit our own faults clearly and openly -- and then the other is more willing to do the same.

So that we come together, whether it's in the family, at work, or indeed in ecumenism, we must all make sacrifices so that true community and reconciliation can take place. Holier-than-thou fingerpointing may feel good at first, but it doesn't really help us at all.

This is why we have to learn to accept and deal with the idea of sin. We don't like to admit error, certainly not in public. It's embarrassing. Others make fun of us. But it takes courage -- the courage to admit our faults and to work on them, to improve ourselves for the future, without harping on (or even noticing) the faults of others. Once we forgive ourselves, forgive our friends and neighbors, and reconcile ourselves to one another and with God, we can fulfill the mission given us by Christ in today's Gospel: go to the lost sheep of Israel, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God is near. For when we do this, the Kingdom comes ever nearer. Amen.

In our church's newspaper, there is a blurb (annoyingly without names or references) reporting about a 35-year-old woman in Munich who was pregnant with her first child.

Your comments would be appreciated, as this is a work in progress for Saturday's English service at our parish. Funnily enough, its development ran parallel to some of our recent discussion. ;-)

Sermon for Lent

(John 9:1-41)

As many of you know, I suffer from a host of health problems. I won’t get into all the various illnesses I have, but suffice it to say that lately I’ve had a lot of health issues to deal with. I told this to a colleague earlier this week, and his reaction was to ask if I’d been cursed or if I had walked under a ladder or something.

In today’s Gospel, we have a man who was born blind, and the disciples have a similar sort of reaction. What sort of sin did this man commit to have been born blind? Or did his parents do something so terribly wrong that God punished them by making their son blind?

So we have to ask, does God make us suffer?

The »problem of suffering« is a common idea that is used to attack the very nature of belief in God. The premise is that an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God would not or even could not allow suffering, therefore there is no God.

The counter to that occurs to me as a parent quite easily. My children are very young and don’t understand very much yet, so my attempts at raising them will often seem irrational to them, even cruel. Here is my daughter enjoying herself tremendously as she draws on the walls and furniture, and along comes Daddy to take away the magic marker and tell her off, spoiling her fun. Not very easy to understand for a two-year-old. So from her point of view, Daddy makes her suffer sometimes, and she is as yet unable to see the greater good – the fact that Daddy is just trying to teach her the rules of social interaction, among which is not to draw with magic markers all over Mommy’s valuable lamp.

Jesus, insightful as always, points this out. He says, the man »was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him«. So what we perceive as suffering has a larger purpose that we simple-minded short-term-thinking human beings have difficulty seeing or appreciating. We see our short-term pain – like my daughter being yelled at by Daddy – and fail to see the long-term gain. We don’t think very well in terms of long spans of time, certainly not in generations, centuries or even millennia.

To add some more depth to the story, Jesus is once again confronted by the Pharisees, the learned ones who think they know it all. As is typical for them, they can’t see the forest for the trees, so rather than praise God for the blind man’s healing, they nitpick about how Jesus supposedly broke the Sabbath. They too lack the insight to see the bigger picture. They even assume the blind man must have been »born into sin« to deserve being blind.

So Jesus points out what by now is plain to us. The Pharisees, for all their learning and intellect, may see physically, but they fail to see spiritually. They are blind – far blinder than the »blind« man ever was.

Thus the key to understanding our own suffering, and to appreciating God’s work in our lives, is to open our inward eyes and truly see what is going on around us – to see that short-term pain as a learning opportunity, as a chance to care for one another, as a chance to show compassion and sympathy, as a chance to be healed. In so doing, we open our eyes to see the true light of the world, who is ever in our midst when we need Him. Amen.

Since our priest is still on short-term leave due to the arrival of their third child, I ended up planning tomorrow's service and writing a sermon on the fly, though he will at least lead the service. Here is the sermon, translated into English.

Sermon for readings Genesis 18:20-32 and Luke 11:1-13

In the readings today from the Old Testament and the Gospel we have two apparent opposites. Both are examples of prayer. In the first story, Abraham is praying for mercy for the just people in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; in the Gospel, we see the words of the Lord's Prayer, as Jesus teaches it to us. In the first story we have the wrathful God apparently about to destroy whole cities; in the second, we have the loving God who seems to tell us we can have anything we pray for.

The opposites go further. Abraham prays for others -- he prays for the people in Sodom and Gomorrah, whom he wants to save from the wrath of God. But Jesus teaches us to pray for ourselves. »Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you«. Abraham talks to God; Jesus Christ is God. And so on.

But both stories have a common message. God keeps His word. God keeps His promises. He does what He says. He is faithful and He is merciful. He would rather spare the many wicked than harm the few innocent, and He hears what Abraham says to Him. This is what Jesus is referring to when He says, »Ask, and it will be given to you«.

This asking, knocking, seeking: These are all parts of initiating a relationship. I don't like to talk of God's Will too much and there aren't many places where I think I can say for sure what God's Will is, but this is one case where I feel pretty sure: God wants us to build a relationship with Him. Ask. Knock. Seek. Have faith in me. I am here for you.

And prayer is the spiritual tool with which we build that relationship. So we speak to God in the depths of our hearts. It isn't the dry recitations of set pieces of texts. For I don't believe that the Lord's Prayer was meant to be recited exactly as Jesus said it in the Gospel. Rather, it was meant to inspire us to similar ways of prayer. This is why Jesus moves on to make his parable of the friend and the loaves of bread, to take up the idea of our "daily bread".

This is why I'm such a fan of the Celts. They had countless prayers that were poetic and rhythmic, almost musical. They effortlessly made up new ones, and you could almost dance to each one. The closing blessing we'll use today is one such example. Prayer should thus give wing to the heart and mind, so that we come closer to God and each other. It is more than mere dialog: it is sensuality.

In closing here is one such prayer:

The hand of God hold me
The love of Christ in my veins
The strength of the Spirit bathe me.
The Three guard me and aid me,
The Three guard me and aid me.
The hand of the Spirit bathes me
Step by step, the Three aid me. Amen.

I mentioned briefly in Em's blog that I'm running the upcoming Sunday service for the first time, since our priest's family had their third child, and I'm delivering the sermon in German (the sermons I've done until now were in English). But for grins and giggles, here is the text in English.

---

Sermon for Luke 10:38-42

As I was researching today's Gospel reading, I came across an old tale from Scotland in another sermon. The story goes like this: There was a poor shepherd boy who was tending his few sheep on a deserted mountaintop, when he spotted a beautiful little flower next to his foot. He knelt down, plucked the flower, and noticed that it was more beautiful than any flower that he had ever seen. He held it close to his eyes and drank in its beauty. As he did so, he heard a low rumbling sound, turned around and saw a cave opening behind him. As the sun's rays shone into the cave opening, he saw the glittering of jewels and gold and precious metals.

Clasping the flower to his chest, he went into the cave. He laid the flower on the ground and picked up as much gold and silver as he could carry. Then he turned to leave, when a deep voice boomed from the depths of the cave, saying, "You forgot the best."

He looked around, thinking he must have overlooked some special treasure, and began putting more wonderful bits of jewels and gold in his pockets until there was no possible way he could carry any more. His arms overflowed with unimaginable treasures fit for emperors of ages old. As he again turned to leave, the voice sounded again. "You forgot the best."

But he simply couldn't carry any more, so he hurried out of the cave as quickly as he could. As he left the cave, the opening closed behind him. He turned to look, and all the treasure in his arms turned to sand and dust, and the voice called out, now faint behind the wall of rock, "You forgot the best: For the flower was the key to the mountain."

In today's Gospel, we have another flower that we easily forget: Martha, the poor sister that carries the load for everyone. Jesus comes for a visit, and at Martha's and Mary's house, the household has its hands full. Martha thinks she has to deal with everything and be a good hostess, cook the food, get the drinks, and so on. (Remember in those days such work was hardly trivial.) But her sister Mary, she's so brazen, she just sits down comfortably to listen to what Jesus has to say.

You can imagine how you'd feel in the same situation. A famous person comes for a visit, perhaps the bishop, or the Queen, and you have to take care of everything, while your spouse or your sister just sits there and chats with your guest. I'd blow my stack, too. And indeed Martha snaps at Jesus. "Tell her then to help me!"

But Martha isn't hit by a bolt of lightning or cast into the pits of Hell, but rather Jesus reminds us between the lines that Martha is special, too. For Mary may be the good student and listens to Jesus the Teacher when he comes to talk, and indeed Jesus says "Mary has chosen the better part". But Jesus doesn't berate Martha or tell her to drop everything and come hither. So she wasn't wrong, either. So Martha puts what Jesus talks about into action. Mary represents the treasures of Jesus' words, to pick up our Scottish story. Martha is the flower, the key that can't be forgotten.

Both parts are necessary in life. Listening and believing -- the "better part", as Jesus says, on the one hand, represented by Mary; but also caring and giving, turning Jesus' words into real action in the here and now, caring for others, providing where there is need, represented by Martha.

Piety, faith and belief are worthless if we don't care for one another. Selflessness and sympathy are the key part of our belief. The great treasures of Godliness turn to dust if we forget that key. Amen.

To continue on with the previous article, I'd like to talk about the central element of Christian practice in the Catholic (and Anglican) tradition: The Holy Eucharist.

To understand a Christian in that tradition, you really have to understand the sacrament of the Eucharist, or as it's also known, Holy Communion. There is a lot about the Eucharist that is misunderstood or even downright shocking to non-Christians, considering that it is, after all, a very bloody affair. Indeed much of the imagery from the Middle Ages, not to mention Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, is -- let's face it -- very distressing:



You will wonder how on Earth any sane person can celebrate something like that. When I had my period of emotional distance from the Church, I wondered about it, too. Much of Eucharistic theology will sound repulsive to some, even many. But I think it's important to try to understand it.

Some people also mockingly wonder about how many pieces of bread it takes to make a Jesus; some time ago, Smooch posted a picture similarly poking fun at the notion of God being a zombie and then turning into bread and we eat it and we're saved and "yeah, that makes sense".

But the thing is, we in our modern age have to remember some things about ourselves to understand what the Eucharist is -- things we've forgotten. It is understandable that we forget them, because they aren't pleasant or comfortable, but once you get used to them and make peace with them, they actually fall into place to make a very vibrant, dramatic picture of humanity.

Eucharist comes from the Greek word εὐχαριστῶ, "I give thanks". When we participate in the Eucharist, we Christians give thanks for someone dying -- Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That sounds harsh and brutal and sacrificial, and in a way it is. But in that same sense we also give thanks for His life, because life and death are inherently linked together. As Christians, we believe that Jesus was not only the Son of God, he was God -- God took mortal form, walked this Earth, lived, loved -- and died -- like one of us.

This is one of the things that is different about Christianity compared to many other religions, the idea that our God literally died like one of us, to be like us and share our fate. I find that to be a very touching message -- God sharing our mortality.

Thus the first seemingly unpleasant thing we remember in the Eucharist is death -- Christ's death, but in a way it foreshadows our own deaths. It is a reminder to live our own lives to the fullest while we can -- a very positive thing, actually.

The second seemingly unpleasant thing is sacrifice. The whole structure of the Eucharist is a deliberate echo of Jewish sacrificial ceremonies -- the altar, references to Jesus as the "Lamb of God", and so on. Yet sacrifice is a good thing. Even if you don't believe in God or if you believe that the "historical" Jesus was a poor deluded sap, it still leaves the fact that He was willing to let himself be killed in the hope of sending a message to us idiots that we should just love one another. A remarkable sacrifice, one that motivated many to do great works of good (if tragically also motivating some to do great works of evil as well). We also all do sacrifices all the time -- the soldier who sacrifices to protect others, the parent who sacrifices for his or her children, the friend who sacrifices for a friend in need. And the point of Jesus' sacrifice was to be a sacrifice to end all ritual sacrifices, a final cleansing.

When we do this, it's intended to make this sacrifice imminently present in us, so that we carry it with us in ourselves -- in the hopes that we sacrifice ourselves for others with that same generosity that Jesus once had for all of humanity.

But that other name we have for this sacrament -- Communion -- shouldn't be forgotten, because it too has a special meaning. "Communion" comes from the Latin communio, in turn coming from the Greek κοινωνία, "fellowship". The word has the same root as "community" -- which is no coincidence. When we participate in a Holy Communion service, what takes place is more than just a mere mumbling of words, but we try to establish a Community -- literally the Kingdom of God -- for a little while, a place of peace and harmony. The whole structure of the Communion service is designed to move people into this feeling of unity, peace and harmony until the moment where they are ready to receive the consecrated bread and wine.

In our own services, we even make a point of standing in a circle around the altar while the Eucharistic prayers are spoken and sung; usually the bread and wine are then passed from person to person. Indeed the title of the altar book I designed for the Old Catholics (the illustration was done by BoE based on a medieval illustration) illustrates the idea perfectly:



The illustration shows the Holy Spirit (which in Christian theology consecrates the bread and wine) descending as a dove with the bread, while the rays in the middle represent the spirit radiating out from the bread to the apostles gathered around at Pentecost, after which they were moved to carry out the Gospel to the world in peace.

What actually is in the bread and wine isn't all that interesting to us, though we do treat it with due reverence and care. But the central aspect of Communion to us is locked up in those two words -- thanksgiving and fellowship -- and not in the finer points of Eucharistic theology. Once you appreciate the bonding with your fellow human beings there as you share the quietude, the feeling of peace, the sharing of community and the thanksgiving for the person who set it all in motion, the thanksgiving for your own life to have enjoyed it all in the first place, then you begin to appreciate that that bloodiness isn't so bad after all -- it actually makes you appreciate it that much more.

This is actually a slightly edited collection of stuff I wrote over in Jason's blog in reply to Teh Smooch, but I wanted to make sure I could find it again for future reference (and who knows, maybe someone else will find it interesting).

Faith doesn't explain; it deepens

Faith isn't about "attributing" anything or making things up to explain things. That's just a total misunderstanding about what it's about. Faith is about combining philosophy with spirituality, searching for deeper meaning in things, finding new perspectives, and finding commonalities with each other and with nature.

Claiming something else is rather like a Flat Earth type coming to you and telling you what science is, when you know full well his idea of "science" is bollocks. He's heard a few science words thrown around and knows the terminology, but doesn't understand the deeper meaning of science because he doesn't want to. I submit a lot of anti-religious atheists feel and act the same way about religion and belief.

I know you (Teh Smooch) grew up in a Christian church, but like any institution, churches tend to fossilize and lose track of what they're originally all about. Scientific institutions can fossilize in the same way, then someone comes along and renews them. The same happens with belief. The problem is that you keep targeting the old fossilized forms of belief without seeing the living bits that are the truly relevant parts.

To put it in terms of psychology or neuroscience, science could be seen as "left-brain" -- rationalistic, deterministic and so on. Belief works very differently, more "right-brain" if you will: emotional, intuitive, primal. It's not a cause-and-effect thing. It's not meant to explain things, either. It's meant to be a guide, a source of inspiration, something to uplift people. Science just can't really do that. Yes, scientists can look at a nebula in wonder, but that's hardly a monopoly of scientists -- and I'd wager the believing scientist gets that much more wonder out of it. What hath God wrought!

Religion is not a theory

Atheists often speak of religion not providing adequate evidence or proof. But they're thinking in terms of collecting data, which misses the point. Religion is essentially not about hypotheses and data and theories. Religion isn't a theory, if you will.

Smooch posited that science chips away and belief over time and that there is ever less space for belief.

Would the basis of my belief still be around in 200 years? I don't see why not, because that basis has been around as long as there have been human beings. It is innate to our selves. There is nothing in the basis of my belief that science can contradict, because it's just not in the realm of what science is capable of dealing with.

Maybe you should try to experience other religious groups that are more enlightened than your old church, because I think (to use a Biblical term) the scales would fall from your eyes if you just let it happen. Stop thinking so hard about it. Even if you still choose not to believe (which is perfectly OK), you could at least come to appreciate how others arrive at their beliefs and understand that the just is no inherent conflict between the two worlds. Those who try to say there is a conflict just have their own divisive agenda -- divide and control. Whether it's the Biblical fundamentalist or the radical atheist-secularist, it doesn't matter. Both aren't doing us any favors.

Western and Eastern Christianity and the Reformation

I think part of the problem for you (teh Smooch) with Christianity is that you came from a thoroughly Westernized Protestant church. Western churches, particularly those that arose from the Reformation, tend to have a very literalist ("left-brain", to stick to my metaphor) bent to them. The trap is that they were torn out of the original basis of religious belief and landed smack in the middle of pure rationalism -- and ended up the deer in the headlights of science as they tried to occupy the same space.

The irony is that the Reformation also gave birth to modern science. Without the Reformation, science would never have developed in western Europe.

Eastern churches, and to a lesser degree some parts of Anglican churches and the Roman Catholic Church, stuck closer to the original ancient mysticism and spirituality. Unfortunately a lot of that mysticism has been regurgitated and recycled by New Age types and turned into some ridiculous junk. But there are some common roots of Tao, Buddhism and eastern Christianity (which itself is arguably closer to the origins of Christianity itself). There are forms of mystic prayer in eastern Christianity that died out in the West, but cross-pollenated with Zen and Tao. I mentioned the best-known one recently -- the Prayer of the Heart, also called the Jesus Prayer. Prayer in the old tradition wasn't about reciting words, either, or asking for things -- it was basically a kind of meditation. What we really essentially do in classical prayer is ask for insight, and when meditation is done properly, you can hardly argue that God refuses us that.

Religious icons also have a deep symbolic and mystical meaning to them. They are meant for reflection, not as literal portraits. That's why they don't bother looking realistic at all. It's all about the posture, the coloring, the positioning and so on. They are windows into eternity, as some say. We have a few small ones, and I find them endlessly fascinating, as I do medieval calligraphy, for similar reasons. And they also help to give us insight.

Next consider the idea of Real Presence in the Eucharist -- the notion that God is present in bread and wine. That might sound pretty crazy to a hard rationalist. But consider the emotional power of the ceremony of the Eucharist, and at the same time consider the emotional attachment you have to, say, your wedding ring and how you would feel if someone abused it. Naturally you treat it with some reverence. In the same way, I treat the bread and wine with great reverence because of the emotional attachment I have to the other people present and to God. A literal "presence of God" in the bread and wine doesn't really enter into it -- it's just not that interesting in the end. It is what it is.

Meanwhile in the West, many Protestants and Catholics turned prayer and the Eucharist into some stupid hocus-pocus. Is the bread and wine literally Christ, or not? Can we pray for this or that and expect God to do it? Can "faith healers" really touch people and heal them? And all of that totally, utterly, completely misses the point. Religion is about one thing and one thing only: Our relationship with God and His creation (meaning, each other). Trying to turn it into something else is merely a perversion of it. But if you look at it that way, I think you can see how and why a scientist can fit in belief with his rational way of thinking, because they are truly very different things.

The Bible and Dogma

I don't doubt the Bible at all. Far from it. I simply don't view it as being something that is to be taken word-for-word on its own. Context matters, and the Bible is a historical document. Learning about the history behind it tells us a lot about the meaning of the words in it, and goes a long way to explaining those perceived inconsistencies that hardcore atheists like to go on about. Furthermore, it helps to have the Church (by which I mean all the Church, i.e. all Christians in history) there to interpret it together and try to find some kind of consensus on what it all means, while still giving the individual conscience supremacy in the end.

Meanwhile "dogma" is a word that has gotten a bad rep. "Dogma" really means "that which we all agree to believe". (Christianity began in a remarkably democratic fashion and always sought consensus; anything agreed by consensus was dogma.) It was never meant to be binding with legal penalties and whatnot -- that's the result of the rather legalistic way the Roman Catholic Church has evolved, unfortunately. So I do take it as dogma that there is one God, that Jesus was His son and so on, and have no trouble with the word "dogma" in that sense. I do have trouble with the word the way the Roman Catholic Church tends to use and implement it, though. Maybe it helps to think of "dogma" as "definitions" rather than, well, dogma.

Our parish, you see, is currently trying to think of a name for itself. The topic is fraught with trouble, as the parish members at first couldn't really be bothered to make suggestions, so the vestry (including yours truly) tried to make its own suggestions and came up with a short list to vote on (St. Columba of Iona and Irenaeus of Lyon were the two candidates). When Frère Roger Schütz, founder of the Taizé community, was murdered last year, his name was added to the list, since the Old Catholics are very fond of the Taizé community and liturgy, and many Old Catholics have been there (our priest met Roger several times). So the parish duly decided to choose him, but contingent on Taizé's consent.

Unfortunately they weren't too keen on the idea -- a number of public buildings and things have been named for him already, without their consent, and since Roger was not the type to promote himself (he apparently always was taken aback by all the attention he got), they weren't happy about it. So they asked us not to do it.

So now we're coming up with new ideas, and the parish is finally showing some involvement. A number of people said they would like to have a female name; others said they'd like to have the parish named for an Old Catholic.

So I, being my usual self, suggested to our priest that we take one Dr. Thürlings, the theologian who did the first German Old Catholic liturgy. This would get us lots of attention in the press and in the neighborhood, as we would thus be called the Parish of Adolf.

He didn't seem to like the idea too much.

Our diocese is having a synod in September in Mainz (which I've heard is a nice city, though I've never been there), and because our parish is at least on paper quite large -- 1700 members covering the whole state of Lower Saxony -- we have to send six delegates. The problem is that practically speaking the parish isn't really that big. Active membership (i.e. people who actually come to services regularly and who do something in the parish) is much smaller, perhaps a couple hundred, scattered around the state, with concentrations in Hannover and Osnabrück.

So we had to collar a bunch of people into running for the election. Because I'm on the vestry and do various other things in the parish, not to mention being self-employed and thus theoretically more readily able to take time off to go to a synod, I was pressed into service to try and fill up the list so we had enough candidates. However, since every election I've ever been in (except for once in a Democratic caucus) has ended in, ahhh, ignominious failure, which is of course why I chose to reject democracy and impose my iron will instead, I didn't seriously expect to be elected. (Even if I weren't elected, I probably would end up going anyway because of the way the rules work -- anyone who gets a vote is automatically an alternate, and because of our diaspora problems, we nearly always need alternates.)

So the voting was yesterday, and all the results came in late last night, shortly before midnight (since I maintain the website, I had to wait for the priest to get me the results so they could be posted).

When he sent them I thought he was pulling my leg. I was the top vote-getter. Not only that, I was the only candidate who got votes from everyone.*

Hmmmm, maybe this election thing isn't such a bad plan after all.

Of course, in keeping with our usual poking each other over being Old Catholic versus Anglican/Episcopalian -- as one example, when the priest teased me about something once, I suggested he was trying to give me a heart attack just so he could preside at my funeral, whereupon he said "Yup, in German according to Old Catholic rites, of course", and I said I'd climb out of my grave if he did, and he said that was precisely the idea -- he closed his e-mail with the line "Since the parish clearly is willing to invest such trust in you, perhaps you could consider becoming Old Catholic!". :-D

So my conquest of the parish continues and soon I shall seize control of the synod. From there, uh...hmmm, any ideas what I could do with a bishop's synod to wreak mayhem?

* - To be fair I know for a fact that one person voted against herself, because she only was running to fulfill her duty but didn't really want to go if she could avoid it...