From the Epistle of Bernstein’s Mass:
“So we wait in silent treason until reason is restored,
and we await the season of the Word of the Lord.”
Month: November 2016
Use Your Disillusion
Today’s sermon from North Presbyterian Church, Kalamazoo.
Click here to read the bulletin, including the biblical text.
Sermon Outline:
I. There are moments in life when the things we depend upon let us down
A. Economy, church, country, relationships: spouse/family/friends, self: body/soul
1. “What the heck just happened?”
B. We get disillusioned
1. Actually a good thing: “Dis-illusion”
2. In these moments, we get to find out where our faith really lies
Today’s gospel
II. “temple” “adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God”
A. Center of Jewish life: national/ethnic/religious
B. Literally “House of God”
1. “God (Ultimate Good) lives in this place”
III. Jesus: “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
A. Offensive: Unpatriotic, sacrilegious, blasphemous
B. Unthinkable: “How would all of this work without it?”
IV. Jesus elaborates
A. To the optimists: “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”
1. Don’t be tricked by big personalities, making promises they can’t fulfill
B. To the pessimists: “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”
1. It’s not the end of the world
C. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”
1. Not an apocalyptic vision
2. Just the way things are in this world: war, natural disaster, poverty, disease
3. Don’t freak out!
D. The believer’s place in all this: “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.”
1. Expect to be hated
2. Faith in God is always a threat to the status quo
a) Calls into question all the other little idols we are tempted to put our faith in
b) God is the only absolute; everything else is relative
V. “This will give you an opportunity to testify.”
A. Learn to see disillusionment as an opportunity
B. Testify (like a witness in a courtroom)
1. Speak the truth about what really matters (the way it really is)
VI. Testify how? “So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance”
A. Counterintuitive: Should pastors and lawyers really do this?
VII. Why not? “for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”
A. Because the truth you speak does not come from you yourself
1. You didn’t make this up
B. Grounded in reality itself
1. Comes from God, who needs no defender
2. Truth is truth, whether they choose to believe it or not
a) Constant, like the Law of Gravity
VIII. Will they listen? “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.”
A. No. People are selfish/sinful; choose to hear/believe what they want to hear/believe
B. In this broken world, all truth is an “inconvenient truth”
C. God’s truth has no ideology/party affiliation
IX. “But not a hair of your head will perish.”
A. In spite of being “put to death”
1. Interesting dichotomy: physical death/spiritual perishing
B. Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
1. Fear a meaningless life, based on lies
C. Mark 8:36: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
X. “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
A. Spiritually alive, meaningful life, have the life that really counts
B. John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live”
C. Romero: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”
D. Romans 8:35-39: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
1. Why: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
XI. If you are feeling disillusioned today, do not fear/despair
A. All we have lost is our illusions
B. Christ id inviting you today to “use your disillusion”
C. Disillusionment is an opportunity
1. To find out for ourselves what it is that we really believe in
2. Knowing what we really believe in frees us speak truth to the powerful in the world
XII. Jesus Christ came into this world to show humanity the heart of God
A. But we could not bear to listen
1. When we failed to silence him, we killed him
2. But God raised Jesus from the tomb, demonstrating once and for all (in the words of Desmond Tutu) that “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, life is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, through God who loves us.”
XIII. All of the lies in the world cannot falsify the truth of God, and all the powers of death in the world cannot overcome the power of God’s love, which has been poured out so abundantly for us in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.
XIV. This is how I am able to stand before you today, disillusioned but unafraid
XV. This is how we are able to stand before the dark powers of the world and proclaim the truth, with St. Paul:
A. “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Beauty in a Hard Life
Incredible entries from the Siena International Photo Awards, as reported on NPR.
This one is my favorite, of an Iraqi fisherman on the River Euphrates:
Click here to read the full article and see other entries on NPR.
![By No machine-readable author provided. Enslin assumed (based on copyright claims). [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://hoppinghadrianswall.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/st-martin-beuron.jpg?w=900)
November 11 – Feast of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop (d.397)
First reading at Vigils from Benedictine Daily Prayer.
From The Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus
ACCORDINGLY, at a certain period, when [Martin] had nothing except his arms and his simple military dress, in the middle of winter, a winter which had shown itself more severe than ordinary, so that the extreme cold was proving fatal to many, he happened to meet at the gate of the city of Amiens a poor man destitute of clothing. He was entreating those that passed by to have compassion upon him, but all passed the wretched man without notice, when Martin, that man full of God, recognized that a being to whom others showed no pity, was, in that respect, left to him. Yet, what should he do? He had nothing except the cloak in which he was clad, for he had already parted with the rest of his garments for similar purposes. Taking, therefore, his sword with which he was girt, he divided his cloak into two equal parts, and gave one part to the poor man, while he again clothed himself with the remainder. Upon this, some of the by-standers laughed, because he was now an unsightly object, and stood out as but partly dressed. Many, however, who were of sounder understanding, groaned deeply because they themselves had done nothing similar. They especially felt this, because, being possessed of more than Martin, they could have clothed the poor man without reducing themselves to nakedness. In the following night, when Martin had resigned himself to sleep, he had a vision of Christ arrayed in that part of his cloak with which he had clothed the poor man. He contemplated the Lord with the greatest attention, and was told to own as his the robe which he had given. Ere long, he heard Jesus saying with a clear voice to the multitude of angels standing round — “Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe.” The Lord, truly mindful of his own words (who had said when on earth — “Inasmuch as ye have done these things to one of the least of these, ye have done them unto me”), declared that he himself had been clothed in that poor man; and to confirm the testimony he bore to so good a deed, he condescended to show him himself in that very dress which the poor man had received.
Excerpted from http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~eknuth/npnf2-11/sulpitiu/lifeofst.html on November 11, 2016.
Missed Opportunities
“There are many things the Spirit could do through us, for the healing and redeeming of the world, if it were not for our cowardice, slackness, fastidiousness, or self-centered concentration on our own jobs. Individual Christians cannot attain to their full stature till they throw in their hand with the saints and the angels: more, with the broken, the struggling, and the meek. But most of us are too prudent, too careful to do that.”
-Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity, p.96
Sorrow
Initial thoughts post-election:
“The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land
as plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden skies.
A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers,
but wakes to a morning with no reason for waking.”
‘Office Work’: Praying the Liturgy of the Hours
“Indeed, let nothing be preferred to the Work of God.”
-Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 43
The heart of Benedictine spirituality is the Divine Office. Also called the ‘Liturgy of the Hours’ or the Opus Dei (Latin: ‘Work of God’). The Office is the daily cycle of prayer, centering on the chanting of Psalms and the reading of Scripture. The purpose of this exercise is, as monks have called it, ‘the sanctification of time.’ We frame our days and pause periodically from our work to reset our lives in the context of eternity. All of life is sacred; the Office is how we remember that.
There are many good breviaries and prayer books available to assist this process in an orderly way. Most famous among Anglicans and Episcopalians is The Book of Common Prayer. This is a fantastic resource, even for Protestants of other denominations. Presbyterians have their own version in The Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer. Roman Catholics have the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours. The breviary I use is Benedictine Daily Prayer (abbreviated BDP), edited by Dr. Maxwell Johnson and published by Liturgical Press. What I like best about this one is its similarity to the practice of the Office at St. Gregory’s. When I pray, I like to feel connected to my brothers in the cloister, even though I can only visit the monastery once a month or so.
At St. Gregory’s, the monks say seven offices daily. They rise at 4am for Matins (also called Vigils in BDP), followed by Lauds at 6. During the day, they pause from their work every two or three hours for the “Little Hours” of Terce, Sext, and None. Vespers concludes the work day at 5pm, followed by Compline before bed. They recite the entire Psalter each week, as prescribed in the Rule of St. Benedict.
Naturally, it is difficult for someone outside the cloister to keep this kind of schedule (in point of fact, it’s not easy for monks themselves). In my own practice, I get up between 6 and 7 for a combined service of Vigils and Lauds. During the day, I try to say as many of the Little Hours as possible. Vespers is a non-negotiable. Compline is usually the last thing I do before lying down at night.
BDP uses a four-week cycle of Psalms at Vigils (with an option to do it in two weeks), a two-week cycle at Lauds, weekly at Vespers, and daily at the Little Hours and Compline. Most of the Psalter is said during this time, with perhaps a half-dozen omissions for the imprecatory (cursing) Psalms that are also omitted in the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours.
My schedule requires a certain flexibility with the time at which the hours are said. Traditionally the hours were said at the “crosspoints” of the old analogue clocks (12, 3, 6, and 9; am and pm). I usually use these as a base-point and leave myself a window of an hour before or after, in which to recite that office. It ends up looking roughly thus:
6am (5-7): Vigils and Lauds (approx. 30-35 minutes)
9am (8-10): Terce (5 mins.)
12pm (11-1): Sext (5 mins.)
3pm (2-4): None (5 mins.)
6pm (5-7): Vespers (15-20 mins.)
9pm (8-10): Compline (10 mins.)
On busy days, I say a combined Vigils and Lauds, at least one of the Little Hours, Vespers, and Compline. My bare minimum is Lauds and Vespers, inserting the longer Scripture readings from Vigils. I only do this as a last resort, since it causes me to miss much of the Psalter at Vigils.
Work meetings and family commitments don’t always allow for me to say all three of the Little Hours, but I keep the goal of saying all three before my eyes. This provides a helpful framework for my day. It might seem like a lot, but each of these offices can be recited in as little as 5 minutes. If you think about it, that’s no longer than the average coffee or cigarette break at work (and without the added risk of lung cancer). The benefits are as psychological as they are spiritual. As a person who lives with ADHD, this helps me to stay on-task and organized. If I am working on a large project at work, I find that I often return to it with mind refreshed and renewed perspective. I keep an older edition of BDP in my car for this purpose, should I need to say an office on the run. The best days are when I manage to say all three.
The Divine Office is meant to be sung, rather than said. At Vigils and Lauds, I typically sing the hymn and say the rest. At the Little Hours and Compline, I sing the hymn, the Psalms, the Gospel Canticle, and the Marian Antiphon. At Vespers, I sing the entire office, except for the reading and responsory.
Learning to Live a ‘Regular Life’
I have written several posts recently about my forthcoming clothing as an oblate novice at St. Gregory’s Abbey, an Episcopal Benedictine monastery in Three Rivers, Michigan. Click here to read about my experience at the abbey and how it is that oblates ‘take the monastery with them’ into the world.
Oblates, while not monks or nuns themselves, live in the world according to a version of the Rule of St. Benedict that is adapted to their station in life.
The Latin for ‘Rule’ is Regula. Many will note its similarity to the English ‘regular’, which we often take to mean ‘average’ or ‘mundane’. In point of fact, ‘regular’ technically means ‘according to the rule’. I rather appreciate this coincidence.
I have spent much of my life trying to be exceptional in one sense or another. In high school, I prided myself on being a nonconformist who refused to dress, talk, or think like my peers. Much of this, I think, came from a deep fear of inferiority. I was an anxious and socially awkward teenager. So, I tried to justify this awkwardness by believing that I must be special, set aside for some higher purpose.
Coming into contact with the charismatic fundamentalist movement at church, my sense of exceptionalism found a religious basis. There was a praise and worship chorus I used to sing at church that went, “I’m gonna be a history-maker in this land!” I would pray things like, “God, I’ll do anything; just don’t let me be normal.”
At the same time, there were certain passages in the Bible that terrified me. One of these was 1 Thessalonians 4:11 (NIV):
make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you.
At nineteen years old, I wanted to do anything but that!
But now, at thirty-six, my feelings on the matter are beginning to change. A “quiet life” is beginning to sound pretty good. As I wrote last week, my impulse toward heroic exceptionalism eventually thrust me into a psychosomatic health crisis. The Rule (Regula) of St. Benedict and the brothers at St. Gregory’s showed me another way to live. After running away from it for so many years, I began to want a regular life.
But what does a Benedictine life actually look like for a married person with kids and a job?
The answer to that question will probably remain a ‘work-in-progress’ for the rest of my life. In the following posts, I will outline my personal Regula or ‘Rule of Life’ that I will be practicing as an oblate. This draft Rule is subject to amendment and approval by the abbot, whose guidance I rely on.
The Manifesto of Saints
The sermon for All Saints’ Day from North Presbyterian Church.
Click here to read the service bulletin (including the biblical text)
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 