Please watch for the bargains as you decide just what you want to donate to the students in St. Louis Park. Also think about vulunteering to help out with this project. News of specific times will appear in the August newsletter or you can ask Camille Schroeder.

Sunday, July 11th: St. Mary the Virgin in Angelican Tradition
We will explore how the Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ has been honored and understood within Anglican theology and customs. We will also review the use of prayer beads.

Sunday, July 18th: Angelican History
A very brief overview of the birth of the Anglican Tradition and subsequent developments in our history.

Sunday, July 25th: The Sacraments
What are the Seven Sacraments? Howdo we define and understand them?

Sunday, August 1st: Liturgical Prayer/Practices
What is all of this bowing, kneeling, genuflecting and crossing ourselves all about?

1 Kings17:17-24; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

The Reverend Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, June 6, 2010

The parallel stories we hear today about Elijah and Jesus raising people from the dead are the very kind of stories that non-believers can point to and say, “Your religion is phony.” These are the kind of stories that even some of us within Mother Church might want to put aside as to not have to explain them.

If we see these stories through our modern rationalistic science-worshipping lenses then, yes, they do seem silly. But if we can put aside our evidence based thinking we will find truth in these stories. As Jesus and Elijah raise these sons from death they are recognized as prophets. This is about sign and symbol pointing us toward a truth, not evidence pointing us toward facts.

The truth in these stories is that God is very present to us. When we feel dead trusting in God can bring us back to life. Think about how many times God has brought you back to life. How many times have you come to this altar for Word and Sacrament and been healed of something? Even in the midst of what we see as the most hopeless situations, God shows us signs of life.

Another truth in these stories is that God feels compassion for us. When Jesus sees the widow he has compassion for her. The Greek word used for “compassion” is splagchnizesthai it comes from the noun splagchna. Splagchna referred to the noble organs of the body, the heart, lungs, liver and intestines.

Jesus sees this widow burying her son and he feels for her from the core of his body. His empathy is so strong that he touches the funeral brier which makes him ritually unclean. Jesus reaches beyond all social and religious boundaries to bring life out of death. 

God in Christ is so intimately involved in our humanity that he feels within his organs; he is a body, a person who empathizes with us.

This is the glory and mystery of the Incarnation. It is what sets Christianity apart from any other religion: God becomes so human that he feels empathy within his body and yet remains divine. He shows forth that divinity in bringing life out of death.

New Testament scholar William Barclay points out that in addition to this story there are two other times in the Gospels when Jesus feels this depth of compassion. When he sees the crowds he sees sheep without a shepherd. He sees the spiritual need of the people. He is moved in his gut to reach out and show them the kingdom. The  other instance is before the miracle of the loaves and fishes when he is moved by the crowds hunger, exhaustion and pain.

God in Christ feels it in his gut when he sees our spiritual emptiness, our pains and our sorrow. As Barclay puts it, “He did not see men as chaff to be burned; he saw them as a harvest to reaped for God.”

God in Christ felt compassion for St. Paul. Christ lead Saul from his life of persecuting others to a life of bringing expectation and healing to others. Christ saw Saul’s inner pain masquerading as a need to hound and persecute others. Saul was dead inside using his talents to be a critic, to condemn, to stand against something rather than to be for something. Christ raised him from that funeral brier, gave him a new name, and sent him out to bring hope to the forsaken.

This is how God is calling us to feel for one another. God is calling us to listen deeply to one another’s pain. He is calling us to look past other’s behavior that repels us to see the brokenness inside.

This past Thursday we observed the Feast of Corpus Christi. In this feast we give thanks for the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. As I anticipated and then prayed through that feast day I was struck again by the compassion of God in Christ.

In the Holy Eucharist God is offering his very body and blood to us. There it is again, the glory and mystery of the Incarnation. God is embodied and then he gives that embodiment back to us.

He lets his body be broken and his blood spilled so that we can learn how to let go; how to experience forgiveness and reconciliation. As Christ walks through this life with us he sees that instead of enjoying the harmony which is God, we are living in a disjointed power game. He sees how we hurt each other and how we find it hard to forgive ourselves.

In the Holy Eucharist he offers us a way out. He says, “Here, take my body and my blood. I will suffer with you and for you. In this offering I will reconcile you to God and to each other. I love you unconditionally and I can feel your pain deep in my gut. Here, take this body and blood and live again.”

This is a mystery to enter into and enjoy not a fact to be proved or disproved. Here in this bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ we find the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament: we are broken  and God is here with us. When we learn to empathize as God empathizes then we are risen with him; we ascend to the true altar in heaven where there is no death, sorrow or crying but only life, reconciliation and hope.

Reference: New Testament Words by William Barclay (pp. 276-78)

                   Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY 1974

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

The Reverend Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, May 30, 2010

Life is a balancing act. In our working lives we are balancing our careers, our families and personal time. In retirement we are balancing our time making sure we have things to keep us busy.

We know that when our lives get out of balance we have this need to find it again. We find ourselves doing nothing but work and decide to take time off. We find ourselves sitting around too much and decide  to get out and do something. Or maybe we’ve been obsessed with a project around the house or garden and just have to step away for a while.

What about other areas of balance? Life can get really out of balance with no time spent on developing our spiritual lives. When we keep putting prayer or study or attending worship aside for other things we will soon begin to get lost in narcissism; living for nothing but ourselves or those we care about.

We also get out balance with our intellects. When we think that our strongly held beliefs and opinions are the truth we fall out of harmony with others. We lose the ability to compromise, to grow, and to get things done. We see this in our government and in our churches.

In college I took a year off to live with a community of Benedictine Monks. I learned a lot about balance from these brothers. The Benedictine motto is, “Prayer, Work, Study.” These three are kept in balance. You are instructed to not do any one of them for too long.

The daily life of Benedictines is schedule around just enough pray, work, study and recreation to keep a balanced life.

I will always remember spending time with one of the Monks, Fr. Tom. We would sit and discuss theology and the life of the Church. Just as we were really getting into the conversation, Father would stand up and say, “Let’s go clear some brush,” or “Let’s go paint those chairs.”

 A life out of balance is a life out of harmony. This Trinity Sunday we contemplate the mystery of God in Three Persons. One way I understand this mystery is to think of God as Harmony. God is not an “it.” God is pure being. And in God’s being we find a perfected Harmony. In God we find Creation, Redemption and Sanctification all in perfect balance.

In the end, the Holy Trinity is incomprehensible and uncreated. This is hard for us to understand because we are not used to perfect harmony. We are more used to defining things and then getting those definitions put in place. We have a hard time with this because in our cultural context we worship science and technology. Everything is explainable, right? There is no room for mystery.

Jesus tells us, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit comes he will guide you into all truth.” So this relationship we have with God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit is something that unfolds for us overtime. We begin to comprehend the nature of God’s Being when we learn how to find harmony in our lives.

We are in the right Christian Tradition to learn about the ins and outs of a balanced approach. Anglicanism has always been about finding balance. We are a Reformed Catholicism. We have both Protestant and Catholic traditions and theology within one body. It is hard to explain this balance to others. We live in a culture that asks, “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” And we Episcopalians answer, “Yes.”

The Anglican motto is, “Via Media”, the Middle Way. We are not going to choose between the human invented categories of Christianity. We are going to take the best of all of it and try to create a synthesis, a harmony.

And while we are very proud of this we also know how hard it is. Anglicans have been fighting with each other over doctrine and liturgical practices since the 1530’s. Because we are trying to live in a balanced way we are always in danger of letting something fall away. Some of us are in danger of becoming more Catholic than the Pope.

Others of us are in danger of being so Protestant that we forget our Catholic heritage. And then there is that third group who are always in danger of worshipping the value of inclusiveness and comprehensiveness so much that we have no foundation to stand on.

Working for balance is hard. But working for something that is difficult is a good thing. As St. Paul writes to the Church in Rome, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. It is easy to pick one way of being, seeing or doing. But there is no wisdom in living this way. We never grow up in Christ if we are never being challenged to look at things differently. There are things now that we cannot understand but if we give our life over to Christ, the Holy Spirit will come and teach us.

A life of balance leads to a life of wisdom. Wisdom is of God. And as we hear from the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom has always been. She waits for us on the heights, beside the way, at the gates and at the cross roads.

When we learn about balance which leads to harmony which leads to wisdom then we become in our hearts and minds what we worship with our lips.

Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17

The Reverend Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, May 23, 2010

Last week at the 10:15 Holy Eucharist I received a glorious vision. I looked out on the congregation of one hundred gathered that morning and noticed all of the different people. First I noticed what all of us see right away: all of the shades of color, the range of ages and the differing physical abilities. Then I could see deeper. I saw the diversity of political opinion and religious viewpoints. I saw the array of family arrangements and relationships.

In all of that perceived difference I could hear and see the unity. We were all speaking one language. It was the language of liturgy. We were reciting our common prayers together. Moving as one with our bodies or within our hearts. Through our common prayer we were speaking the language of love: the love of God in Christ; the love for God and one another. And all of it was bound together in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We sang a Sequence Hymn that morning, number 603, lyrics by Brian A. Wren. I got choked up as I sang those words,

When Christ was lifted from the earth, his arms stretched out above every culture, every birth, to draw an answering love.

Where generation, class, or race divide us to our shame, he sees not labels but a face, a person, and a name.

This is what the Church is called to be, “an answering love.” It isn’t easy to be this. We fail at it all of the time.

Often we fall into the same trap as the people in the Story of the Tower of Babel. They had found peace and unity and instead of answering that love they went off in their own arrogance. They used that unity, that strength, not to serve God’s will but to serve their own. Like Adam and Eve eating from that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they went off and built their tower to compete with God’s glory. Instead of appreciating all that God had given them, they tried to get more.

We do that in the Church. We think that it is all up to us to “grow” the Church. That if we just hone our human relations skills we can attract people and build a great monument to heaven. We think that we are solely in charge of Christ’s Church.

The people who built the tower were rebelling against God. God had told the people after the flood to go out and fill the earth. But they liked being together. They liked where they were and who they knew. Their self-aggrandizement came from their affluence. They were content to stay right where they were and keep doing things the way they had always done them.

In the Midrash Tradition, Rabbi Helbo observes this about the Tower of Babel, “Where ever you find contented satisfaction, Satan is active.”

And so they lost their peace and unity and were scattered. They lost their common language and that unifying spirit.

We see in the story from the Book of Acts how that unifying Spirit returned. It is the reversal of Babel. The faith community was gathered together in prayer and liturgy on a Holy Day in the middle of the week. The Spirit comes upon them just as Christ had promised. Now they begin to speak one language. Everyone is understanding each other. Peter preaches from the prophet Joel, “God will pour out his Spirit upon all flesh. All will begin to prophesy and have vision.”

When the Church learns to seek the unity of God instead of the prestige and comfort of institutions then we will begin to live into that answering love. God is perfect unity. As Christ tells Philip in the Gospel today, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”

God is one in three persons or aspects. We are called in all of our differences to become one. We can do that only through the power of the Holy Spirit which trains us how to love as Christ loves.

We have a training manual in that shows us how to become one. It is called the Book of Common Prayer. When we study it and pray it we learn how the Holy Scriptures and the Catholic and Apostolic Tradition leads us into a divine harmony. In the Catechism, the liturgies and our Baptismal Covenant we find our mission. That mission is to reconcile all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

Reconciliation only comes out of profound humility and grace. We can only reconcile our differences if we depend on God. We can overcome our human distinctions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ideology and theology through our willingness to give our minds and hearts over to God.

Every gathered congregation of Christians is meant to be diverse in opinion, culture and religious understanding. Anything else points away from reconciliation and toward human arrogance.

Midrash & Babel References:

The Torah, A Modern Commentary (pp. 80,85)

Edited by W. Gunther Plaut

Union of Hebrew Congregations, New York, 1981

Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 14:23-29

The Reverend Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, May 16, 2010

Years ago I met with a youth confirmation class that had just been confirmed. I was working with them to create a youth group. The first time I met with them I thought it would be good to do some reviewing  with them. I started with the Church year. They couldn’t do it; they had blank looks on their faces. They did not know the story of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost.

So I tried the Sacraments. What are the Seven Sacraments? Which are the major ones and which are the minor ones? Again, blank stares.

I asked them what they did they remember from their confirmation class. They remembered visiting other Churches and visiting a synagogue. They remembered that their service project was helping clean up a polluted pond.

Now I don’t know if they covered the basics of their religion and just ignored it. But whatever the case, it obviously wasn’t the emphasis of the course. Learning about our neighbors and helping to clean up a pond are noble efforts but that is not the focus of the sacrament of confirmation.

I set about catechizing these young people. If they weren’t going to be knowledgeable practitioners of their religion then their religion wasn’t going to be around very long.

It may sound exclusive and prejudiced on my part but I wanted to make strong Episcopalians out of this young people. I wanted to bring them into this portion of Christ’s Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I wanted to mold their impressionable young minds and help them to own and be proud of their Anglican Tradition.

That is my personal mission as an Anglican Priest: to make more Anglicans. On a more universal level, it is the mission of all Christians to make more Christians.

We see how this mission works in our story from the Book of Acts. Paul and Barnabas are in a Roman Colony. It is a place very far from home. They reach out in compassion to this young slave girl. She has a strange spirit upon her and is being used to make money for her owners. They heal her and get into trouble. They are flogged and put into prison. An earthquake comes and they get free. One of the guards witnesses the act of God and asks about this Christ they keep talking about. Paul and Barnabas catechize the guard. He washes their wounds. He and his whole household are baptized and then they have a feast.

This is what you and I as baptized ministers are doing in the world. We are healing others and ourselves. We are waiting upon God to act. When others see how we have trusted in God and see him act in our lives, they are going to ask us questions. We need to know what to teach them. Each of us is a catechist.

When we have taught them the Tradition then we invite them to be baptized. After the baptism we all have a feast. We feast at the Altar in the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood and we feast in the fellowship hall over donuts and coffee.

It is a simple formula but it is dangerous and it will require us to be ready. In our hospitality toward others we must, as St. Peter writes, “Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” (I Peter 3:15)

Yes, we Episcopalians, and all Christians should be learning about our neighbors and be concerned with the human and environmental conditions around us but first we must be concerned with the tenets of our faith. It is from our faith, our Scriptures, Sacraments and Creeds that our compassion and inclusiveness proceed.

You’ve heard me say it a thousand times but I will keep saying it until it turns around. In the Episcopal Church we have spent so much time on secular social issues, on outreach, and partisan politics that we are losing our focus on what really matters. What really matters is a knowledge of the Scriptures, the Creeds and the Sacraments.

Everyone is welcome here. Everyone is invited to the baptismal font and the altar. Everyone is welcome to put on their Baptismal Garment and become part of the Body. All are welcome to confirm their faith by study, prayer and doing their part to sustain Mother Church. As we see in St. John’s vision of heaven, “Blessed our those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gate.”

We wash our robes when we come to accept Christ as our Savior. We wash our robes when we accept the Creeds and Catechism of our faith. Every person we meet has a robe waiting here to be laundered and put on. Each of us have our robes on and sometimes we have to wash them. We have to study up on our religion. We have to repent of our sins and start over with Christ.

The gates are wide open. The robes are washed and ready. Come on in. Bring others with you.