The Gospel According to Andrew

All four Advent candles are burning now - or glowing softly, if you go in for LED candles as we do. Three of them are purple; one is rose. There's a logic in that proportion. Purple is the liturgical color of preparation, repentance, and what we might call sorrow redeemed. Rose is the color of joy, lit for the first time on Gaudete Sunday. It is a faithful joy rooted in God's steadfast love and committed to hope, but which does not pretend everything is rainbows and sunshine. Holy Joy coexists with the pain of loved ones missing, of martyrs suffering and dying, and of a world which is not yet as God has promised it will be.  I think there's an important insight embedded in the fact that the first three Feast days after Christmas commemorate martyrs. December 26 is the Feast of Stephen - as in "Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen" - deacon and protomartyr. December 27th is the Feast of John the Evangelist. He is considered a "white" mar...

The Embertides are quarterly periods of fasting and prayer within the western Christian calendar. There's an old rhyming mnemonic which helps me remember how they fall within the year: "Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy." That's a bit terse, so it might help to know Lucy means St. Lucy's day, December 13th, while "Crucy" is Holy Cross Day, or September 14th. Penty is the Feast of Pentecost. Lenty is Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday. In each case, the Ember Days fall on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following. The Christian preference for fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays dates at least as far back as The Didache. These days remind me Jesus was betrayed on a Wednesday, crucified on a Friday, and "descended to the dead" on a Saturday. Seen in that light, they become echoes of Holy Week spread throughout the Christian Year. Two of these occasions, Advent and Lent, are already seasons of preparation. The other two fall, the ember days after "...

 Historically speaking, martyrdom is sometimes the express lane to canonization. And yes, Charlie Kirk is a martyr. The word in Greek means "witness." He was murdered, it is true, and more specifically, assassinated. These facts do not preclude martyrdom. If we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a martyr, or Janani Luwum (the Archbishop of Uganda who was murdered for opposing Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda), or Thomas a Becket (who was murdered at the Altar in Canterbury Cathedral when four Anglo-Norman knights took Henry II's outburst about "this meddlesome priest" rather too literally), then Charlie Kirk is a martyr as well. His public witness to his understanding of the Christian faith, including social doctrine, cost him his life.  There are some Christians, particularly mainline Protestants, who will find his conservative, Evangelical expression of the Christian message unrecognizable. It's important to note such an assessment cuts both ways. As...

This week in Sunday Services, we heard readings from Psalm 77 and 2 Kings 2. As a general rule, the Psalm responds to the Old Testament reading. The first 14 verses of 2 Kings are the story of Elijah's assumption into heaven and Elisha's assumption of Elijah's role as God's prophet to Israel. Psalm 77 recalls the story of the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea. How are these themes related to each other? I think that's a good question to ask any time we're reading two or more passages of Scripture in mutual context. The RCL reading from 2 Kings skips an important piece of the story, so we actually miss just how doggedly Elisha follows Elijah on their last couple of days together on earth, and the human dynamics of it. The story begins in Gilgal. Elijah tells Elisha, "Stay here. God has sent me to Bethel." Elisha refuses and follows Elijah to Bethel. When they get to Bethel, the company of prophets there tells Elisha God is going to take Elijah that ...

  It occurs to me the Bible never offers us a map of the valley of the shadow of death. The places where the Wisdom literature, or the Psalms of Lament, run right up against our grief, pain, and loss are long on candor and short on answers. The Psalmists alternate between confession, complaint, and trust. Sometimes they curse their enemies. Job wants to file charges against God. Some of the Prophets wish God would just get it over with already. Some of them die in Exile, receiving no more than visions of Jerusalem restored.   Of all the things the Bible is, it most emphatically is not a self-help manual. There's no plan for walking through grief, no promise that if you do x, y, and z, it will all be better in the morning. What we get instead is a promise God will not abandon us, given to people who had lost everything. The Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and the exiles which followed shattered the Hebrews' world. Into such cataclysm, God speaks. The servant songs in Isaiah s...

  There's a lot of dodgy theodicy in our folk theology. That's not hard to understand, because pain is hard to understand. We try to explain it to ourselves and often make things worse when we lean on explanations that seem to explain things, but don't really reflect Who God Is.   For example: "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". This isn't Scriptural at all. In fact, it's Friedrich Nietzsche. The first rule of quoting Nietzsche is: Don't!   What we can say is God can desires our salvation and will, if we cooperate, work all things together for the good of those who love Him.   On that subject, be really careful about rolling Romans 8:28 out in the immediate shock of pain and loss. While I won't deny the truth of it, I do prefer Romans 12:15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." There's more compassion and grace in sitting with the grieving in their grief than in trying to explain it. Let the griev...