The Canticle of the Old Man

Psalm 71: 17 – 21 Deus docuisti me

O God, you have taught me since I was young, *
and to this day I tell of your wonderful works.
And now that I am old and gray-headed, O God,
do not forsake me, *
till I make known your strength to this generation
and your power to all who are to come.
Your righteousness, O God, reaches to the heavens; *
you have done great things; who is like you, O God?
You have shown me great troubles and adversities, *
but you will restore my life
and bring me up again from the deep places of the earth.
You strengthen me more and more; *
you enfold and comfort me.

There is popular myth abroad in the Church that says that we need younger people in order to grow the Church. To quote a lovely C. S. Lewis character, “My uncle, Dr. Duncanson, . . . used to say, ‘Show it to me in the word of God.’ And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.” The word of God does not say we need younger people to grow the Church. What it does say is that we who have years of Christian experience need to step up and give clear witness to what we have experienced and what we know.

God has taught many of us since we were young. And now that we are old and gray-headed we actually have something valuable to say. It is we who can make known God’s strength to this coming generation and His power to all who are to come. The Canticle of the Old Man from Psalm 71 makes our responsibility clear; we have the long length of Christian experience and we know that God has carried us through, and carries us through even today.

Our experience has included great troubles and adversities and time after time God has restored our lives and brought us up from the deep places of the earth. We know the truth the Psalmist testifies to when he cries, “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me” (Ps. 42:7). And we know that time after time we can testify to the truth that we know that our Redeemer liveth! (Job 19:25). We are called to share that long experience of grace with the coming generations. Through joy, through sorrow, through meadows green and rocky valleys God has sustained us. We have every expectation that He will sustain us still.

We know and experience the truth that he strengthens us more and more, that he enfolds and comforts us. There are many who have not yet begun to walk with Christ who need to hear that testimony from us. There are many young in Christ who need to hear that God does carry his people through. We have a testimony to share.

We need to share in words spoken and written, in words gentle and kind, in words bold and forthright, “in season and out of season.” And we need to pray that God Himself will open doors for us to share our faith in words of grace filled the wisdom garnered from long experience.

The Overwhelming Sea

I have seen the sun lie low upon the sea,
All the swelling waters, hammered molten gold.
I have seen God’s fiery light on surging waters bold
Crashing on the rocks that hem the sundering sea.
I have ridden the waves of the roiling sea
When the night was stormy dark, the waters bitter cold.
Up I rose to heaven as the mighty waters rolled
And plunged to the depths of the overwhelming sea.
Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterspouts,
All you breakers and waves have rolled over me.
My sails are stripped away, I am laid bare for You to see.
The angels danced over me with loud cries and shouts.
At last in sweet surrender I am at perfect peace.
As I rest quietly in You, all my strivings cease.

There is a danger swimming in the overwhelming sea. The danger is the desire to struggle on gasping for air as the waves and billows crash against you. Surrender is a gift that can, and often is, refused, and so, Judas went and hung himself kicking at the end of the rope until the very end.

Surrender once accepted is a tremendous relief. The truth is that the first complete surrender is the worst to endure, so many fears, a dread of abject helplessness; but once received, what peace, what joy, and as one finally catches one’s breath, what jubilation. Who could ever have thought that sweet surrender could be so grand!

All subsequent surrenders harken back to the first surrender, and surrender becomes a delight and not a dread. Of course there are moments of stupid, even sluggish, resistance. But the memory and the joy of surrender calls you back to the beginning and you find that surrender itself is a foundation stone that lies upon the Bedrock who is Christ Jesus.

If Only the Moon Was Made of Green Cheese

"If only” the moon was made of green cheese, but it isn’t. Rather it is a glorious ball of rock whose chief attraction has been that it reflects the light of the sun waxing and waning as it wends its way across the heavens. It is what it is and it can never be anything else. That is also true of your past and my past. It is what it is and no amount of worrying or whimpering will actually change it.

It is a common trait of humankind to say “if only.” “If only” I had done this, or not done that then everything would have turned out differently. By differently I of course mean better, as though in some illusive past Neverland I had powers that I still don’t have today. “If only” gives voice to our sense of inadequacy and guilt when we review what we regard as the mistakes of the past.

True, some things we did or failed to do changed the direction of our lives, or horror of horrors changed the direction of someone else’s life. There are some obvious problems with that. I once asked a physicist what constituted scientific proof. He remarked that that if you set up a vacuum system and ran your experiment in it one hundred times and eleven of those trials gave the answer you were looking for, then you could publish a paper on that in some scientific journal. What I wanted to know was where in nature you could find a vacuum system to validate that “proof” in real world experience? The point is that we don’t live in a vacuum system. In the past, and I might add in the present, we lived and even now live by the light we have. Some times that light was at best partial. In that light we did this or that and whether or not we did it well it is done.

“If only” in the past we could have acted on the basis of acquired wisdom that sometimes is only earned by difficult and sometimes painful experience. “If only” in the past we could have made better decisions, but of course, like it or not, we lived by the light we had then! True, the light we had in the past may have been a little murky, or to be perfectly frank our light may actually in the clear light of today appear to be darkness. There is absolutely no point in asking if we had done things differently, would things have turned out differently.

There is another factor. In the past as well as in the present we were and are social beings whose actions cannot be evaluated apart from the people we interact with at any given period of time. Just because we might have done things differently (an impossibility) doesn’t mean that those around us would have responded constructively. It doesn’t work that way. We don’t, and never did, have that kind of power. Usually when human beings say “if only” they are looking for ways to blame themselves, or others. The blame and shame game is not one that Christian’s can afford to play.

This is where the dear Christ enters in to this land of woe and sin. It is not for nothing that He is called the Redeemer. He became incarnate in human flesh in order to make an exchange with us, His precious life for our past, even for our past decisions as well as for our sins; His precious life for our inadequacies, our sorrow and our sin. He has the power to redeem the past, not take it away, but redeem it, draw its fangs and transform it. He has the power to restore the years the locusts have eaten.

Quoting Alice

You don’t know Alice, but I did. Long ago she went to meet her Maker Who I am sure had some incisive questions to ask her. In the early nineteen seventies I was in a small parish, 80 to 100 people, in Watertown, Massachusetts. Alice had been a bishop’s secretary in a diocese in Pennsylvania. That is to say her church experience was extensive, which is not quite the same thing as having a living faith. She had now reached her seniority and that point in life where she felt that neither tact nor courtesy should govern her words.

The encounter happened in the center aisle of the nave immediately after the Sunday morning service. She was fuming.. She started, “Young man . . .” and I knew immediately for a reason soon to be apparent that I was in trouble. “Young man. You not only talk too much about Jesus, you even make the mistake of praying to him.” She didn’t realize that what she considered to be a stern rebuke I received as a compliment.

What else is Christian faith about if it is not about Jesus the Christ. Take “Christ” out of “Christianity” and all you are left with is “ianity,” which is close to inanity. From the viewpoint of the Theologian Hans Kung, the question at issue is basic” “The wholly personal decision for God and for Jesus is the properly basic Christian decision: It is a question of Christian existence or non-existence, of being a Christian or not being a Christian” (Hans Kung, The Christian Challenge (New York: Doubleday, 1979), p. 260.)

There is a difference between being with people and consciously being with people. Take the Cocktail Party Syndrome. Two people are excitedly talking face to face, but neither is listening to what the other is saying, merely waiting for the chance to fire another brilliant conversational salvo. There is no true meeting here, just self-imposed isolation in the midst of the crowd.

True worship is intentional not accidental. To worship one must know what one is doing. Sunday morning worship is about being with Jesus Who brings us hand in hand to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. He says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). In our prayers we confess: “You alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen” (Gloria in excelsis). That is a prayer of adoration to Jesus.

When you come to worship open the eyes of your heart and acknowledge that Jesus is here waiting for you, that God the Father is calling you to Himself in love, and that the most gracious Holy Spirit is here ready to open for you deep fellowship with the God Whom you love.

7 Basic Principles Governing Parish Life

There are a number of basic principles that govern parish life. These principles are simple, straightforward and universal.

1. God the Father Himself knows each of us by name and has called us into community through the redeeming work of God the Son. This is the deliberate intention of God the Father who wants you to be in His family. Each parish family is an expression of the universal “The Kingdom of God.”

2. The Church is the Body of Christ, and Christ Jesus Himself is the Head. This means that He is the Lord of the Church and will not willingly surrender control of the Church to his members; after all the foot doesn’t tell the Body where to go, the Head does.

3. The power of the shared life of the parish congregation flows from the Head in the Person of the Holy Spirit. This is not mere theory. The Holy Spirit brings to us every experience of the Presence of God our loving Father, and every experience of the Presence of Jesus.

4. There are certain personality characteristics that identify the members of the Body of Christ. The two central personality traits are Love and Holiness. Holiness without Love is ferocious and inhumane, and Love without Holiness descends into the sappy and tawdry.

5. Love is an action verb rather than a descriptive noun. Love is what you say and do before it is an emotion. In this we know love in that Jesus died for us; by this we demonstrate love in that we give our lives for each other in ways both small and great. Love also includes reaching out to others to bring them into the Kingdom of God.

6. Holiness includes not only basic commandment keeping, but also justice which means doing the right thing, giving a fair deal, be willing for honest give and take, and all that sort of thing.

7. The seventh principle is the fundamental acknowledgement expressed clearly in this collect from the Book of Common Prayer: “Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as are right; that we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The Red Carpet

This is a true story. Steel Valley in Western Pennsylvania runs along the banks of the Mononghela and Youghiogheny Rivers south east of Pittsburgh. In one of those smoky grit grimed cities was an Episcopal Church that needed a new carpet for the Nave. The Rector, being empowered by the Vestry to oversee the purchase of the carpet had an eye for joy and had a beautiful red carpet installed. The carpet was wonderful and brought that joy and grace to the interior of the Nave. The Senior Warden was horrified when he saw the red carpet and cried out indignantly,“But . . . but . . . but, this is supposed to be the House of Sorrows!”

That great Scot’s preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne observed, “Some people are afraid of anything like joy in religion. They have none themselves, and they do not love to see it in others. Their religion is something like the stars, very high, and very clear, but very cold. When they see tears of anxiety, or tears of joy, they cry out in fear, “Enthusiasm, enthusiasm!”1

As I write this there is a chill in the air; it’s 23ᵒ F outside, but that’s not what I mean. By Sunday it will be in the mid-sixties. No, the chill in the air is deeper and more pervasive than mere fluctuations in temperature. This chill is a spiritual chill that characterizes the Church in the West. On one end of the spectrum it flows logically from the shallow mirth and sensuality of old tired liberalism and is evenly matched by the chill that flows from rigid conservatism; be it Anglo-Catholicism or English Evangelicalism. What is missing is the joy and fire of the Holy Spirit!

Recapturing the joy of the Holy Spirit is a simple matter and the secret is in our own tradition. What if we were to not only sing the words of Hymn 508 from the 1982 Hymnal but actually pray them as we sung them? “Breath on me, Breath of God, till I am wholly thine, till all this earthly part of me glows with a fire divine.”

By nature the roots of our faith are not cold and formal, but warm and personal; filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit.

1 Robert Murray M’Cheyne, “Sermon 2”, in Memoirs and Remains of the Rev. R. M. M’Cheyne, ed. Andrew Bonar, (Edinburgh: William Oliphant, MDCCLXV), p. 316-317, (contemporized by Robin P. Smith).

Complexity

People often feel that life is very complex. But is it? The reality is that life is only complex when we borrow from the future and the past and complicate the present with things beyond our control. Life comes at us moment by moment and we can only deal with the present, and often enough we have no idea what is on the other side of the next wave rolling towards us.

A week and a half ago the weather forecasters were saying that we were going to have some cold weather but it would warm up in time for the Super Bowl and its parties. Last Tuesday the big party tent in the Cotton Bowl collapsed because of the wind and ice. There was an interesting spin in a news release, “It didn’t collapse, it just came down faster than we expected.” For the last several days the media has been showing video clips of crowds gathering for the big party celebrations; unfortunately the clips showed almost empty streets and only a few hardy Green Bay fans bundled against the cold.

James in his Epistle warns, “Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16).

How do we plan for the future, both as a congregation and as individuals? A few basic principles will help. First, and most basic, God is still on His throne, and He isn’t willing to surrender control to us. Second, He loves us, and intends the best for us. Third, He has given some clear directions. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6), and lest we think that counter-intuitive He has also said, “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Fourth, and perhaps most difficult; we need to not only to pray for wisdom, we have to listen.