[Propertalk] 2 Easter a rcl

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Here's what I have for Sunday. Someone sent me the facebook thing at the 
beginning. I think I'll drop it off. The poem at the end I like, but 
wonder whether I'll add it on.

Anyway - to edit later on.

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY    		        THE SECOND SUNDAY 
OF EASTER - A
ACTS 2:14a, 22-32				      			           1st MAY, 2011
1 PETER 1:3-9						              	                 PSALM 16
JOHN 20:19-31

	Apropos of nothing, I was highly amused when a friend sent me the 
statement, “You have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone.” I 
hope she wasn’t talking about me!

	“Wrestling with God isn’t denying God.” 1 If you don’t ask questions 
it’s highly unlikely you’ll get answers! Of course, sometimes we don’t 
know what questions to ask, but that in itself can be useful.

	In a recent article in the magazine “Christianity Today”, Mollie 
Ziegler Hemingway began by saying, “When you think of some of the most 
passionate, persistent, and eloquent advocates for social change — 
William Wilberforce, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. — you 
think of men who were confident in the rightness of their cause.

	“But a new study published in Psychological Science says that it's 
doubt, not confidence, that leads individuals to advance their beliefs 
and attempt to persuade others.” 2

	If you and I paint with very broad brushes and allow ourselves to make 
sweeping generalizations, one of the things that can appear to divide 
Christian denominations is this whole issue of the ability to question, 
to challenge commonly accepted beliefs and practices.

	It’s not been that long ago that some people were horrified if, say, a 
priest – especially a Roman Catholic one, but not him alone – if a 
priest were subjected to an interrogation about something he’d said in 
regard to faith. To accept such behaviour, however, – not allowing 
questions, and differences of opinion – is one of the things I think 
that leads to dissatisfaction about religious feeling and life. It 
suggests, immediately, and with a fair degree of force, that anyone who 
questions is deficient, and if deficient in one area, then probably in 
many.

	This is a commonly used tactic in the political arena. There ARE those 
who would plant a seed that someone is not familiar with something, or 
completely convinced of its accuracy, and leave the rest up to insidious 
mental processes to devalue the individual as being unfit for our 
attention and support.

	Time and again, however, it’s been a serious question, even a 
challenge, which has provoked a person out of complacency and into a 
rigourous study of faith, for instance, and opened up incredible 
insights into the operation of God in our lives.

	Lack of questioning – or a prohibition of questioning – does us ALL a 
deep disservice, therefore, because it can hold up our search for 
meaning and truth within our own personal circumstances, and it can 
stunt our intellectual and spiritual growth if we’re told that
		“Their’s not to reason why,
		Their’s but to do and die:” 3

	One of the incredible things that God has never said is, “Because I say 
so.” Yes, God DOES tell us what we should and shouldn’t do – but nine 
hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, God tells us, in one 
way or another, not to do or say something, NOT to lay down the law but 
to point out that, if we do, it won’t give us safety, or peace, or 
growth.

	YES, Jesus was furious about seeing a lack of justice and mercy as the 
outgrowth of faith and worship, and He did tell people to straighten up. 
But when all was said and done, He still left it up to each of us to 
wrestle with what we should do, to live with questions, in fact, to 
enjoy them.

	It seems that doubt is the doorway to the strength which we all seek, 
and no one should be belittled because of it.

	The poet Billy Collins, in talking of his background and where he finds 
himself today, wrote that “doubt is the faithful companion of belief. ‘A 
faith untested is no faith at all’” he says, “was the mantra of my 
childhood.” 4

	Collins talked of his parents, saying that, on the way home from 
worship, his father would mock “the sanctimoniousness of the sermon and, 
if there was one, the unfairness of the ‘second collection’,” yet his 
mother confided in Collins that his father “would never leave the house 
without his rosary in his pocket and … that he would kneel by his 
bedside every night to say his prayers.”

	Collins’ mother, on the other hand “harbored none of (his) father’s 
conflicts and antipathies. She was an unshakable believer … (a) muscular 
Catholic …” 5

	The fact that such a couple existed side-by-side, in love and 
understanding, we presume, isn’t a contradiction. It’s merely one of the 
ways in which we all find our doubts and certainties aired and, 
gradually, resolved. We all have to learn to be as compassionate as 
that, as understanding of the way in which people process material and 
experiences.

	Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht commented that "The only 
thing such doubters really need, that believers have, is a sense that 
people like themselves have always been around, that they are part of a 
grand history. I hope it is clear now that doubt has such a history of 
its own, and that to be a doubter is a great old allegiance, deserving 
quiet respect and open pride." 6

	This may be the greatest lesson which we all need to learn – how to get 
along with others who have different ways and different speeds of coming 
to a conclusion about how to live, and why to live, and for whom to 
live. However we do this, though, we’re encouraged to keep on going, to 
put one foot in front of the other and face up to each of the day’s 
events.

	Paul J. Griffiths, now on the faculty of Duke University, wrote a short 
essay about his religious and spiritual journey from the time of his 
attendance at Oxford University. He was sitting in the reading room of 
the New Bodleian Library there. “I decide,” he wrote so calmly, “I 
decide that I need to be baptized. I’m twenty. It’s a sunny day. I’ve 
just HAD my morning coffee ON the King’s Arms across the street, and 
I’ve been reading (the writings of the early church theologian) 
Athanasius in preparation for a tutorial on the Arian heresy. The 
tableau – the sun across the blond wood reading tables, the soft smells 
of damp wool and old paper, the feel of sandals on my feet as I walk up 
and down beside tall stacks of shelves – (the tableau) is clear to me 
still. Baptism is one decision among many. …

	“Six months later or so, at Easter in 1977 at the Church of St. Mary 
Magdalen in Oxford, I am baptized ….

	“(T)he reception of the sacraments had no transformative effect upon 
the fabric of my experience or upon my intellectual passions – none, at 
least, then discernible to me. I would not have wanted them to. But in 
fact, I now think, the reception of the sacraments was efficacious; it 
began to set me aside, to place me beside myself, and, equally slowly, 
to make my studies less an instrument for self-gratification and the 
domination of others and more an ecstasy of response to God.” 7

	  1996 found Griffiths in Chennai, India, to study. One day, he writes, 
“I’m walking past the Catholic cathedral … when a large crowd of people 
makes a noisy exit. They gather behind a decrepit but beribboned and 
garlanded flatbed truck, and as it moves slowly away, they walk behind 
it, singing. … I follow, … I learn that an image of St. Thomas the 
Apostle is being paraded through the city as part of that saint’s feast 
day on July 3. I have long known that Thomas was
supposed to have brought Christianity to India, and this piece of 
knowledge now comes alive. … By now there are thousands of people 
following the truck-borne image, and I, along with them, am transported. 
…

	“What remains is gratitude for the God-given gift of time, of thought, 
and of the companionship of the saints, living and dead,.… They showed 
me, before I had any hope of understanding it (I still have not much), 
the scope and flexibility and fascination of the gospel’s challenge to 
thought.” 8

	In a few minutes we, as one small group of God’s people in Albany, will 
be baptising and welcoming Zoe Rose into God’s family. And we’ll give 
her a vocation to follow. Of course, she’ll choose her own – or rather I 
hope she’ll try to discern what God’s wish for her is. One thing is 
clear, however. We tell her that she has to “confess the faith of Christ 
crucified …”, to proclaim by how she lives her life, and responds to 
others, and resects others, what she understands about Jesus.

	She’s two, right? Can she understand what we ask of her? Probably more 
than we’d care to admit. She may even scare us by how much she takes in 
and gives out. But whether she’s two or a hundred and two, it’s our job 
to nurture her so that she can take on her vocation to follow God’s 
lead. Notice, I didn’t say, “Stop asking questions.”  Like Thomas, whose 
witness and teaching produced a flourishing Christian Church in India, 
Zoe Rose is given the privilege of being able to ask questions and to 
say, “I don’t understand. Show me more. Help me see why I should accept 
this and allow it to colour the behaviour of my entire life.”

	I wish more people would ask questions, rather than follow along after 
some of the human garbage trucks that leave trails of nonsense for the 
non-questioning to make their stomach acids work overtime.

	“‘The opposite of faith isn’t doubt — it's certainty,’ wrote Pastor 
Peter Marty in the August 2010 issue of the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
in America's magazine, The Lutheran. Equating certainty with 
self-righteousness and arrogance, Marty encouraged everyone to open 
their minds. ‘Doubt is really quite beautiful. For too long we have been 
denying doubt the respect it deserves.’” 9

	God give us more Thomases, then, and more Zoe Roses, to raise the 
standards of conversation and keep us intellectually honest in our 
faith.

	And God help us to remember that saying, “I don’t know.” when someone 
asks a question, isn’t a crime either. It only becomes a crime if we 
won’t wrestle with the questions ourselves.

	Let’s baptise Zoe Rose in that faith!



POEM: -



	"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious 
life?"
		-  Mary Oliver, from her poem "The Summer Day"

	The Summer Day
	by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

	"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from The Truro Bear and Other 
Adventures: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2008. Reprinted with 
permission.




NOTES

1 	From a Hospice Chaplain, on Hospice Foundation of America 
Teleconference/DVD programme, 13th April, 2010.
	
2	“THROWING INKWELLS ‘In Praise of Confidence Doubt is to be endured, 
not celebrated.’” By Mollie Ziegler Hemingway | posted 3/21/2011 10:17AM 
http://lists.christianitytoday.com/t/112066600/7738212/197312/0/

3	“Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

4	“Introduction” by Billy Collins in “The Best Spiritual Writing 2011”, 
edited by Philip Zaleski. Introduction © Billy Collins and the book © 
Philip Zaleski, both in 2010. Published by Penguin Books, New York. 
2010. Page xv.

5	Collins, ibid. page xvi.

6	From the Amazon site regarding “Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters 
and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas 
Jefferson and Emily Dickinson” © 2003 Jennifer Michael Hecht.  Published 
by HarperCollins. New York. Paperback edition published in 2004. From a 
review by Martha C. Knox.
 
http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Doubters-Innovation-Jefferson-Dickinson/dp/0060097957

7	“Turning Points” by Paul J. Griffiths in “The Best Spiritual Writing 
2011”. Edited by Philip Zaleski. Penguin Books © 2010. Pages 49-50. 
First appeared in The Christian Century, November 3, 2009.

8	Griffiths, Ibid, pages 56-7.

9	Peter Marty, quoted in “Throwing Inkwells”, op. cit

Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)