St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

One aspect of prayer is that they are often words uttered in the midst of absolute powerlessness. When we can't do anything, prayer allows us to recreate a space for liberty, for action, for our thoughts to have some meaning.

Jesus says in Luke, ""No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Well, there goes capitalism.

Instead of work, Jesus encourages what looks like a sort of discipleship. It almost seems flip, the way he is answering the questions, raising the bar each time someone makes these promises to follow him.

After I heard the story, the only words I could utter were “Oh No!”

TV demonstrates how ruptured the world is. As I am on the treadmill, listening to my Ipod shuffle to “O Come All Ye Faithful” when I first learn the story. The TV has a text feed that is reporting one young woman who has just gone to mass. She says “it felt very real.”

What possible good did it do the world for Christ to go without food for forty days? Why should we follow such an example?

Feb 26

Hebrews 2:14-15 14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

When the empire threatens the oppressed, or a torturer causes a victim pain, they assume that they will not pay the consequences. Victims believe that their voices cannot be heard, and in the midst of great pain, they go silent.

I'm reminded of the story The Immortals by Borges. In the story, a visitor to the land of the immortals finds individuals of extreme lassitude. After living for hundreds of years, they are bored, lacking any sense of urgency. Time is, after all, meaningless to them - and they have seen everything and done everything. Their work is, finally, worthless. They are spiritually dead.

Ash Wednesday is one day which affirms a fact that everyone understands: we die. This sense of finality is what makes our work important. And this knowledge, this ultimacy, is not a horrible event for us.

In the first letter of Paul to Timothy, the apostle writes "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by God's word and by prayer."

Gerald Bieseker-Mast writes in a recent paper:

"To say this yet another way: accepting God's will means accepting the way that God works in the world--not by might or by power but by the spirit. If God does not impose God's will on God's world against the will of God's disobedient creatures, then for the disciples of Jesus to willlingly accept in any given moment the painful effects of disobedient practices or structures on the disciple without trying to crush them and without accepting their ultimate sovereignty is to accept the will of God, without God's will being seen as the sovereign cause of the suffering caused by disobedience. It is only in this sense that it is right to understand Jesus' crucifixion as the will of God--as a way of responding to enemies even unto death that comports most fully with the way in which God intervenes in history, with the way God briings God's purposes amidst disobedient creatures, and with the will of God for those of us who seek to pursue God's purposes in our daily lives."

A recent Time article described three elements of Ford's personal peity which i think represent "traditional" Anglican piety.

Ford dismissed a prayer group in part because it was becoming a political networking breakfast. Instead, he participated quietly in a smaller group focused on prayer.

Second, the day Ford pardoned Nixon, he went to an Anglican service at St. John's Lafayette Square - with no sermon. He participated equally with 50 other people before going on TV to pardon Nixon. The service simply offered a time to reflect upon his calling.

Third, he refused to use his piety as a political efficacy.

His was a faith that gives the heart enough strength to engage the public, that isn't paraded around as a badge of honor, a way of separating the righteous from the unrighteous, deeply aware of the incipient hypocrisy that public attestations of faith presume. But in a culture where everything is spectacle, how long can such a quiet, reserved faith survive?

From the Chaplain at Keble College, Allen Shin:

A couple of weeks ago when students from Tudor School in Oxford visited the chapel, they posed some tough questions after my brief talk on the chapel. One of the questions has been on my mind. How would you respond to the suggestion that in this post-modern society religious spirituality is in decline and perhaps on its ways out and this is a good thing? I rambled on with a half- baked, half-intelligent answer along the line that religion could never disappear, for it is an integral dimension of the human social fabric since the dawn of the human society. In all honesty I must admit I was being defensive, after all without religion I'd have to find a new job.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey in his lecture, Beyond Religion? (1964), noted the fact that in the New Testament the word religion seldom occurs and said, "it is not one of the characteristic words for Christian attitude toward God." Dr Ramsey suggested inthis lecture the notion of "religionless" Christianity, the term first coined by Bonhoeffer. The Victorian English theologian, F. D. Maurice, also suggested a similar idea: "We have been dosing our people with religion, when what they want is not that, but the living God." If we take these suggestions to heart, then, perhaps it is a good thing that religious spirituality is in the decline and dying out.

But, the nagging question still remains about human spirituality, for the spirituality in large part has been defined in terms of religious norms and customs throughout human history. To me "religious spirituality" sounds redundant and "irreligious spirituality", an oxymoron. I thing it's generally safe to say that all human beings are spiritual, although doubtful in some
instances. So, what is special about religious spirituality? And can we even talk of spirituality apart from religion? This is a complex issue.

The English word "religion" is derived from the Latin word religio. In the Hebrew Old Testament and in the Greek New Testament, there is no one particular Hebrew or Greek word corresponding to the word religio or its derivatives. Different words or phrase describing the act of worship or the disposition of holiness are translated into religio or its derivatives. In the Latin Vulgate Bible we would find nine occurrences of the term reliio or its variations in the Old Testament and seven in the New Testament, none of which appear in the Gospels. This is an interesting finding because it raises the question, Wasn't Jesus concerned about religion?

The etymology of the word "religion" has been a matter of debate from ancient times. Cicero derived religion from relegere (to go over again, to carefully ponder): "Those who carefully took in hand all things pertaining to the gods were called religiosi, from relegere" (De natura deorum II, xxviii). This also captures what we do with the Bible, reading it over and over again and carefully pondering upon its words. Another theory suggests that it is derived from the Latin ablative res (with regard to) plus legere (to gather), which describes the organisational dimension of religion. But, the most generally accepted theory was first given by Lactantius, the fourth-century Christian apologist: "We are tied to God and bound (religati) to Him by the bond of
piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful consideration (relegendo), that religion has received its name" (Divine Institutes IV, xxviii). St. Augustine of Hippo initially related religio with religere in the sense of recovering: "having lost God through neglect
(negligentes), we recover (religentes) Him and are drawn to Him" (City of God X, iii). However, he must not have been satisfied with this notion which implies redemption as the primary meaning of religion, for he later accepted the derivation given by Lactantius: "Religion binds us (religat) to the one Almighty God" (Retractions, I, xiii, "On the True Religion"). So, the notion of binding has been the classic Christian understanding of religion.