Breaking News! Nun Beauty Pageant Called Off!

I heard about this the other day on the morning radio show I listen to, and I'm said to hear that it's been cancelled.

Evidently an Italian monk had proposed a beauty contest for Italian nuns, dubbed by some as Nun Miss Italy 2008. The media picked this up and ran with it, making it seem like he was going to have the nuns send in pictures of themselves in swimsuits under their habits, praying in lingerie, etc. Sadly, that was not what he meant at all, now he says, naturally after the fact.

He instead meant that nuns would send him facts about their spirituality and other vague, inner-beauty type attributes for him to post on his blog. His superiors weren't happy, naturally, about the portrayal of their order in the world media. What a misunderstanding!!! Not just some weird nun fetish event.

I really think that this sounds like a bored priest just joking around on his blog and the idea spun out of control.

Afterall, what Catholic boy or man hasn't wondered what's under a nun's habit? Or is that just me? :-)

I think it's pretty neat that the priest's monastery has internet and that he blogs. I guess it's not a monastic order. Which begs the question, do vows of silence extend to typing too?

A Defining Moment

Here's Tricia's sermon from Sunday, August 24th, 2008.

A Defining Moment

We are about to enter full bore into the political season, that time of a presidential election year when the campaigning gets even more intense than it has been. That final home stretch of the campaign traditionally starts with each political party’s convention.

Beginning tomorrow it will be the Democrats. The following week it will be the Republicans. Even in this era when the candidates were chosen months ago, the conventions still serve a purpose.

The conventions have become a time for leaders of both parties to come together to talk about what they believe, and how they identify themselves. We have seen – and will continue to see – arguments and debates over the foundational and core issues for both parties.

In one way or another, positive or negative, the conventions are defining moments in our political process, a time for candidates to define who they are.

A few moments ago we heard the story of another defining moment.
Jesus and his disciples are walking on a dusty road north of Palestine. Jesus has been busy in recent days, healing the sick, feeding thousands, teaching and debating with religious leaders.
He is aware that news about him is spreading rapidly throughout that part of the world.

And so he asks his disciples, “What do you hear people saying about me?” Kind of like John McCain or Barack Obama checking the latest polls to see what people are thinking and saying.
The disciples are happy to tell Jesus some of the things they have heard.

“Some people are saying that you are John the Baptist, returned from the grave.

“Others are saying that you are the reincarnation of the great prophet Elijah, the one who didn’t die, but whose body was whisked straight into heaven to be with God.

“I heard someone say you might be the great prophet Jeremiah come back to life, or maybe one of the other prophets.”

People of this generation expected that the long-awaited Messiah would appear soon. But before the Messiah’s appearance, they believed that others would come to announce the Messiah’s impending arrival, and prepare the way.

The disciples were hearing the rumblings of people who thought that Jesus was one of those forerunners, someone who had come to prepare the way for the Messiah.

Jesus listens as his disciples relate the different things they have heard. Then he asks them a harder question.

“OK, that’s what everyone else is saying. But who do you say that I am?”

Peter, always the most impetuous and brash of the bunch, bursts in before anyone else can say anything.

“You are the Messiah, the son of the living God,” he says. Other translations say, “You are the Christ.”

Nowadays we use the word “Christ” as if it were Jesus’ second name. But Christ is not Jesus’ name, it is his vocation, his title. Christ is another word for Messiah, the anointed one, the savior and liberator who God sends to redeem the world.

By acknowledging Jesus as the Christ, Peter is recognizing that Jesus is not just another prophet sent to prepare the way for the messiah who is still to come. Jesus is not just another great teacher, healer, or moral leader. He is indeed all of those things, but he is much, much more.

This man walking with his friends down the dusty road is the Son of God, God’s emissary of salvation, the very revelation and presence of God among us. Not a forerunner of the Christ, but the Christ, the real thing.

Peter’s pronouncement is the first time that anyone has recognized Jesus for who he really is, who understands that the turning point in the history of faith is here with this man Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is delighted with Peter’s answer. “Blessed are you!” he says, adding God has chosen Peter to be the first to recognize the Messiah. Peter’s answer, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” is the foundation upon which all of Christianity will be based.

“On this rock I will build my church,” Jesus says. The church is rooted in this confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.

Peter’s recognition of Jesus is a great moment – a defining moment in Christian history.

But it was just a moment.

Jesus has been identified for who he really is. But even Peter will soon forget his moment of divine inspiration. Even Peter will deny knowing that Jesus in the Messiah, deny knowing that he even knows this man.

And so the question, “Who do you say that I am?” must be asked again and again.
“Who do you say that I am?” is a question that must be asked of every Christian in every generation. It is a question that must continually be asked of the Church, because how the Church answers this question determines what kind of church we are.

Who do we say that Jesus is? We may agree with Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the son of the living God.

But what does that really mean almost 2,000 years after the Messiah’s death? What does it say about what we believe and how we act now?

What does it mean that the long-awaited Messiah is not a great king or political leader, but a poor carpenter? Not a divine mythic figure who descends to earth in glory, but an ordinary baby born in a barn. Not a conquering hero, but a man nailed to a cross and left to die like a common criminal.

Jesus’ union with God comes through his compassion, humility, love and care. Jesus is the Christ not by the way of the conquering hero, but by the way of the suffering servant.

In his letter to the Christians in Philippi, the apostle Paul explains how Jesus became the Christ.
“Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness,” Paul writes.

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

It was only after that death that God gave Jesus “the name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord.”

To confess that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God is not just to say empty words. It is to live a life modeled on the one who emptied himself, took the form of a slave and died on the cross.

If we confess that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, then we must believe that God prefers humility to arrogance and certitude; that God prefers equality to hierarchy; that God has special love and concern for the poor, the needy, the outcast.

We must believe that God’s love is not reserved for one elite group, but extends to all people. We must believe that forgiveness, love, and compassion are at the core of our faith.

And we must live with them at the core of our lives.

Amen.

Tricia's Sermon for August 17, 2008

As will become the norm here at the St. Dunstan's blog, here is yesterday's sermon by Tricia. I hope that posting it here will help foster discussion, hopefully helping us think about these ideas a little longer than just in our pews on Sunday.

The Rev. Patricia Templeton


Learning to be a Better Messiah

It was one of those times that I wished I had kept my mouth shut.

It was in a New Testament class in seminary. I have forgotten what the passage we were discussing was, but I remember being struck by a sudden insight, one I felt compelled to share.

“It seems like Jesus is growing in his role as Messiah, becoming stronger and more confident,” I said.

My professor looked at me in horror.

“Jesus did not grow in his role,” he said emphatically. “He was born the Messiah, the son of God. He did not have to learn how to do his job.”

I thought about that professor this week and wondered what he might have to say about today’s gospel reading. Because its message is pretty clear – in this story Jesus learns a lesson about being the Messiah. And he learns it from a lowly woman.

Jesus has just had yet another run in with the religious authorities, who are indignant that he and his followers to not have the proper regard for the religious purity codes.

They have been seen not washing their hands properly before eating, and eating food that may not have been prepared properly. Even worse, they have been seen eating with people who are considered unclean – like tax collectors and prostitutes.

Jesus’ reply is scathing. Purity is not determined by external factors, but by what is in one’s heart, he says.

After this conversation with the disciples, Jesus goes immediately to Tyre, in what is now known as Syria, an area that was not heavily Jewish. In Mark’s version of this story, Jesus goes into a house and doesn’t want anyone to know he is there.

In other words, Jesus wants some time away, a chance to be by himself. No confrontations, no requests for healing, no words of wisdom. Just some badly needed time apart.

It isn’t to be. Even in those days before instant communications, word somehow quickly spreads that Jesus is in town. And immediately someone appears, demanding something of him.

That someone is a Canaanite woman, not a Jew. She begins shouting, demanding that Jesus help her daughter, who is tormented by a demon, or who is what we today would call mentally ill.

Talk about impure. It would be harder for a Jewish man to come into contact with someone less pure than this – a woman, a foreigner, and a pagan. In the thinking of the time, she must have committed some grave sin to cause her child to be possessed.

And she is inappropriately assertive – it was unheard of for a woman to publicly approach a Jewish man.

But this is not just any Jewish man, this is Jesus. And since he has just declared that none of these outward appearances are indicators of what is in one’s heart, we expect that he will treat this woman with respect, as a fellow child of God.

That is why his response to her is so shocking.

At first, he ignores her – following the advice my mother used to give me about my younger brothers when they were bothering me – if you ignore them they will go away. That strategy never really worked for me, and it doesn’t work for Jesus, either.

Next he tells her that she is not his concern. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he curtly tells her.

But the woman is persistent. She kneels before him, begging for help.

Jesus goes from curt to downright rude and insulting.

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says.

It has been amusing this week to read commentaries by learned Biblical scholars, leaping to Jesus’ defense, explaining that he wasn’t really rude, that he didn’t really mean what he said.

It was a word play that the woman would recognize, one said. Jesus was just testing her to see how strong her faith was, another suggested. He never intended not to help the woman, another declared.

But the truth is that not just one, but two gospels tell us that this is indeed what Jesus said, and he apparently meant every word of it. He was tired, he wanted to be alone, and he wanted to put this woman who was bothering him in her place.

The problem is that the woman refused to be put.

Think about what tremendous courage it took for her to approach Jesus in the first place. She knows her place in society. She knows the rules of the culture that forbid someone like her from talking to someone like Jesus.

But she is desperate.

We can imagine that she has tried every way she knows to get help for her daughter. Nothing has worked. Her great love for her ill child emboldens her to keep pushing, to refuse to walk away from even the dimmest glimmer of hope.

She doesn’t even flinch when Jesus calls her a dog.

Instead, she fires back, “Sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

I imagine that at this point there is a long silence. Jesus must be astounded at the woman’s brashness and audacity. But he also realizes her great love and courage.

And in a moment of insight, he realizes that he is wrong – and is willing to admit that this poor woman has gotten the best of him.

“Woman, great is your faith!” he exclaims. “Let it be done for you as you wish.”

And the daughter in healed.

This unnamed, uneducated Canaanite woman is the only person in scripture who verbally spars with Jesus and wins. Religious scholars and leaders try to debate him, to trip him up, to get the best of him – but they always fail.

It is not the woman’s great intellect that challenges Jesus, but her courage and love. Because of those things, the woman and her daughter’s lives are changed forever by this encounter with Jesus.

But Jesus’ life is also changed by his encounter with the Canaanite woman. This person, who started out as an unwelcome interruption and intrusion, becomes God’s representative and bearer of truth.

She challenges Jesus to exercise his ministry in a new way, to venture beyond the familiar voices of tradition and hear a new word from God.

From this moment on, Jesus’ ministry is not the same. The Canaanite woman opens his eyes, broadens his perspective, and changes him and his mission.

Soon he tells his disciples not just to preach, teach, and heal the people of Israel, but to go and make disciples of all nations.

With all due respect to my New Testament professor, what this woman does is give Jesus a lesson in how to be the Messiah, not just to serve and save the Jews, but to serve and save the world.
I
suppose there are some who take comfort from the idea of a Messiah who comes into the world fully developed and formed, who never stumbles or falls, who never makes a mistake or needs to learn anything.

But as jarring as Jesus’ rudeness is in this story, I prefer the portrait of him it offers – of a savior who gets annoyed and tired, who says things he regrets, who sometimes wishes life were easier.
But this is also a savior who is willing to learn from experience, who is willing to admit he is wrong, who is willing to listen and change his mind.

This is a savior we can learn from and follow.

Amen.

Faith and Gymnastics, or, Are the Chinese Too Young?

With the Olympics underway at the very same time the school year is getting underway, my colleagues and I have naturally been following the Olympics. I won't dwell on the probable reason for our interest stemming from the excitement of the Games compared to the mind and body numbing of the meetings of pre-planning (that's for another post since I also attended a vestry meeting last night!). However, the Olympic topic we've been focusing on during breaks and at the lunch table is not Michael Phelps's quest to break Mark Spitz's record of gold medals in a single Games, but the age of the Chinese woman's gymnastics team.

A few years ago, the Olympics instituted a rule similar to the one they imposed for figure skating: you have to be at least 16 years old to compete, or turn 16 during the calendar year. They wanted to protect young athletes from being both exploited by their countries or, in the case of gymnastics, used unfairly by their countries. In gymnastics, the younger the athlete, the more amazing the skills they can perform. There is debate about why this is, but much of the advantage to being younger has to do with the fact that they weigh less, so they are able to do more, whipping their bodies around faster and harder, and it is much easier to stop these movements if you weigh less too (I'll skip the physics lesson.)

This morning's NY Times has an article about how more questions have arisen about the Chinese gymnastics team now that they won the team competition yesterday. Like how come one of the girls is missing a tooth, yet has no bruises around her face from a fall, suggesting that it might be a baby tooth that fell out and has yet to be replaced. Also, just looking at the women's/girl's physiques, some seem to have not yet hit that wonderful time of life known as puberty. From the Times' article:

"The Chinese gymnasts lack curves and have an average height of 4 foot 9 and an average weight of 77 pounds. The women on the U.S. team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are 3 1/2 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier."

As junior high teachers, my colleagues and I are used to looking at a variety of students who have and haven't hit puberty yet. The Americans look like they have gone through it; the Chinese, not so much.

But the article points out that the Chinese government has provided the passports for their gymnasts, and (surprise!) all of them satisfy the age requirement. A government, especially a totalitarian one, possibly lying in order to avoid a scandal? In the words of Homer Simpson, that's unpossible!

Excuse the heavy-handed, religious connection, but I couldn't help but think about how this Olympic controversy lends itself to a discussion of faith. One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is Hebrews 11:1, "Faith is is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen." As many wiser, smarter, and more knowledgeable people than me have pointed out, it's not faith in something if you can prove it. So sometimes you just have to let go, and have faith.

But at the same time, faith need not be blind or stupid. When there is enough evidence for reasonable doubt, even biblical quotes fail to reassure us. In this gymnastic controversy, I'm not suggesting that we should just have blind faith, though: there is too much evidence that creates doubt for us to have faith in the Chinese government, especially with their history of behavior. And that's what makes this situation difficult. With the International Olympic Committee satisfied by the gymnasts' government-issued passport, there is nowhere to go from here, as frustratingly un-satisfying as that is.

This isn't just sour grapes, though, because Team USA finished second: with all the falls and stumbles in the last rotation, the floor exercise, there was no way we could have won or deserved to do so. The potential falsehoods by the Chinese team, however, is just a travesty of the sportsmanship and spirit of competition that the Olympics stand for, which is why this incident mars the gymnastics competition.

But I have faith that there are plenty of other incidents in these Beijing Games that do and will showcase the amazing spirit and humanity of the Olympics, despite Chinese gymnastics knocking a tooth out of the Games.

And after the first comment on this story, in the interest of balance, here is a Dan Wetzel column on Yahoo! that takes the position that the age thing is just sour grapes by the Karolyis, who Wetzel claims would love to break the rules too.

Maggie's Sermon from 8/3/08

One of the things I'm going to try and do on this blog is post the weekly sermon up for people to discuss. I have been remiss in this so far this summer, especially now that I'm getting ready to go back to work, but here is the latest sermon available for us, Maggie Harney's from July 20th. A comment on this blog post mentioned this sermon, and here it is.

"Weeds in the Field"

I have been trying to garden for 30 years. Trying is the operative word here. I began gardening when I had my first baby. While she was napping, I would garden outside the open window to her bedroom. When she woke up and gave a little cry, gardening was over for the day.

In that first garden, I planted begonias and impatiens in full sun, and they fried. I planted marigolds and petunias in the shade, and they failed to bloom. I never amended the soil or fertilized my plants. I didn’t know you were supposed to, and the plants starved. ( I did a better job with my baby, although there was some trial and error in that endeavor too.)

Sometimes in my garden, I would learn my lesson in one year, and sometimes it took me 2 or 3 years making the same mistake before I got the message about sun and shade and fertilizer. After many years, I finally figured out how much shade I had, and what kind of plants would grow there. I became a fairly competent and confident shade gardener. Then one afternoon in late August about 10 years ago, a big thunderstorm came through and blew down three old water oaks, one pine tree and 3 dogwoods. That made a garden in full sun, and I had to start learning all over again. Now we are in a drought and that brings on another set of problems. I am a self-taught gardener, and learning is a slow process, especially when Mother Nature keeps changing the rules in my backyard.

A hundred years ago, gardening was something most people knew how to do, something they learned as kids. Everyone depended on a gardener or farmer so they could eat. There was no asparagus in the middle of July shipped in from an unknown grower in Peru. There were no Rainier cherries from Washington shipped to North Carolina. If you wanted a Georgia peach, you had best get yourself to Georgia. People knew about growing crops, what the land needed, when to let the land lie fallow, when to fertilize, when to plant, when to harvest. Such knowledge was not a hobby. Knowing how to grow crops was essential to human life.

In recent months, we have begun to have a deeper appreciation for wheat and corn as floods have destroyed crops in the mid-west and food prices have soared. We don’t take wheat and corn for granted the way we used to. And we see pictures of people who are starving in poor countries because some corn has been turned from food into biofuel so the developed world can keep driving cars, tractors and trucks.

When Jesus told the story about the farmer who sowed a wheat field, Jesus was talking about something that everyone understood was important. And they probably knew half a dozen ways that a crop could be destroyed—by drought or flood, by someone setting fire to the field or by animals trampling through it. Perhaps folks even knew of an incident when an enemy came into a field and sowed weeds to destroy the crop. The problem here, of course, is that you can’t see what has happened until it is too late. The weeds and the wheat look alike as young plants and by the time they show what they really are, you can’t pull out those weeds without uprooting the wheat too.

Imagine how you would feel when it first dawned on you that every other plant in the field was a weed--weeds that suck up precious water when it rains and pull nutrients from the soil that otherwise would go to the wheat. The farmer must have felt horror and then fury as he understood that this was deliberate sabotage of his crop. And he might have felt panic when he thought that people were going to go hungry, maybe his own children would not have enough to eat. The farmer’s servants wanted to know if they should go and pull the weeds, but the farmer said that they had to be patient if they were to save any of the crop.

Weed control and critter control are major preoccupations for farmers and gardeners. I have friends in Oregon who are grape growers. Keeping the bugs and the birds off the fruit is vital to their livelihood so they put up nets over the grapevines. Other friends in North Carolina have a large vegetable garden. They also have a large herd of deer that wander through their property. These gardeners put up a tall fence with an electric wire to protect the garden from the deer and raccoons. Farming is hard work, and people go to great lengths to protect what they have planted. They will spend back-breaking hours in the hot sun in order to protect the crop from being overrun with weeds. So it was only natural that the servants in the parable should assume that the farmer would want to pull all those weeds from his field. Wheat is good, and weeds are bad so lets get rid of them.

There is a great temptation to make clear distinctions between what is good and what is evil. Usually we think of ourselves as the people who wear the white hats and some other person or community or political party or nation that wears the black hat. But we really know better, don’t we? Good and evil are usually not pure. Like the farmer’s field, good and evil are often co-mingled. And that makes it so much harder to judge. How do you pull out a weed when its roots are intertwined with the roots of the wheat? What if you cannot even truly identify what is weed and what is wheat?

As we have become an increasingly global community, our lives are intertwined with the lives of others in ways that are very hard to sort out. Should we buy the asparagus from Peru that was flown in by plane using up the world’s limited oil supplies? If we don’t buy the asparagus, what happens to the Peruvian peasant who makes a living picking asparagus? And what happens in our own country if we build tall fences and don’t allow illegal immigrants to pick our crops at low wages? Will food prices go even higher if we have to pay higher wages to American pickers? Even the experts argue about what is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, good or bad.

Many people have begun to wonder if the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is the best way to pull out the evil of terrorism. Terrorists are hard to identify because their lives are intertwined with innocent people. We watch with horror as suicide bombers mix with ordinary shoppers in the markets and then kill themselves and many others. On the other hand, we have watched American firepower destroy the homes of innocent poor people and the infrastructure of two nations in an effort to rout out terrorism. And we wonder if there might have been another way.
Long before the attack on our own homeland, a young American named Greg Mortensen, began to build schools in the remote mountains villages of Pakistan. He believes with all his heart that providing non-sectarian education for boys and girls is the way to end extreme poverty and loosen the hold of radical Islam on people’s lives. But, building schools takes time. Greg Mortensen must befriend the villagers first, understand their customs and values, work with tribal leaders. Then he returns to the United States to raise the funds and goes back to Pakistan and Afghanistan to buy the building materials, transports those materials up into the mountains and builds the schools with the villagers. Greg Mortensen’s amazing story is told in the book Three Cups of Tea. It is a story of heroism, conscience and incredible patience.

If it is difficult to clearly understand what is good and what is evil when it is half a world away, can we at least begin to look at the weeds and wheat in our own lives? What are the weeds that might choke out the wheat in your spiritual life--religious prejudices, racism, sexism, envy, pride, addiction? We all have weeds that sprout from our fears and insecurities, and sometimes our weeds are so high, we can’t see over them. Sometimes the weeds are planted by another person. Maybe someone has entered your field and scattered a rumor, sown a little deceit, planted a suspicion, dug in an untruth. These weeds are very hard to pull out by the roots, and all too often you just have to live with these weeds for a long time, maybe a life time.

So we, like the farmer, must be patient. We cannot rid ourselves of all the weeds in our lives. But, we can become astute observers who learn to distinguish between weeds and wheat. We can learn to distinguish between good and evil even at the early stages when they look a lot alike. We can get to know how to walk on by those weeds that promise happiness and grow nothing but trouble. Ultimately, we can learn patience, learn when to trust God, learn when to surrender to God’s greater wisdom, learn to accept that God alone can cleanse the field on the last day.

Amen.