BILINGUALISM

One of the key features of traveling to the UK is the "advantage" we have because we speak the same language as the people we are visiting. Of course, that is only a relative statement because, as anyone has discovered when visiting here, we are at times "two nations divided by a single language," as one street merchant once informed us.

A common language made worship at St. Mary's this morning much easier. St. Mary's is the "Mother Church" of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and while their worship bulleting was a bit challenging for me, it helped to be able to understand the liturgy.

After worship we visited the Royal Yacht Britannia, the yacht used by the Royal Family for traveling around the globe to places once ruled over by the British Empire and for four royal honeymooons. The audio narrator was helpful and somewhat easily understood also.

After lunch at the Elephant House, the "birthplace" of Harry Potter, we walked uphill to Edinburgh Castle led by a lovely guide named Patricia. We learned more about Scottish history and visited the Prisoner of War facilities used over the centuries for all sorts of prisoners including John Paul Jones who spent some time there during the American Revolution.

But the value of bilingualism came out most powerfully when we went to have some ale and wine at Deacon Brodies' Tavern. As we sat there enjoying some beverages someone commented that it was too bad we had nothing to munch on. "They don't serve food here," someone said, "we asked."

I asked, "What did you ask for?" "Chips," was the answer. "Ask them if they have any 'crisps,'" I suggested. Within two minutes we had five bags of what we call potato chips and a few bags of peanuts thrown in for good measure.

My fellow pilgrims thanked me profusely. "It pays to be bilingual," I replied.

ARE WE THERE YET?

On Friday Robin and Claire took me on a journey by car to a small coastal town for lunch. The restaurant was small, but we had reservations. I had "Smugglers Casserole" for lunch. Afterwards we visited a small village along the way back, and I took a few pictures.

The evening turned out to be the highlight of the day for me as Robin brought me to St. Mary's for a special evening program designed as one of the fundraising events for their church renovation program.

Following a format familiar to the people, they had a "program" called "Deserted Island Discs," broadcast on BBC for decades. The program featured the bishop of Newcastle, Bishop Martin, who was interviewed by one of the people from St. Mary's in the presence of an audience of about 80 people. As the interview progressed, the bishop would respond to questions, and then a song or a piece of music (from the discs) that he selected would be played for everyone to hear, and he would explain why he chose each selection.

Hearing him tell his personal story in this unique format turned out to be very inspiring for me. In all 12 musical selections were played in the 90 minute program which had a 20 minute intermission for having a glass of wine and some "nibbles." There was also a drawing which I was asked to take part in. I also had the privilege of sitting next to the bishop's wife during the program.

Early on Saturday morning we went over to the Metro station where we took the train to Central Station in Newcastle. While sitting there we watched a freight train pull through the station,but we didn't know whether it was coming in or leaving the area. Each of the cars was plainly marked, however, with the word "COAL." Who would have thunk it?

Arriving at the hotel, we learned where to go to take part in a "Vaults" tour. Unfortunately we were delayed by a military parade along the way. But we made it on time and toured the underground areas that were created by a bridge built across a valley. The history of the "vaults" was very enlightening, but the vaults themselves were filled with darkness.

This evening the group finally assembled for the first time as a whole group, and we had dinner together. We're expecting to have Compline soon, and then the others will be glad to get some sleep.

We're here now, finally, and the "pilgrimage" has begun.

TOUCHDOWN!

At home that title word means something quite different, just as the word "football" does. But I am glad that I've finally "touched down" here in England.

After starting out from home around 1:45 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, we got to JFK in record time, and then boarded my flight on schedule around 5:40 p.m. Although weather delayed our departure about two hours, we made up time and arrived here only an hour late.

I had a connecting flight to Newcastle International which left late, but again, arrived almost on time. There I was met by Robin Greenwood who brought me to his home, by way of Durham where he picked up some items he needed after becoming a "fellow" at St. John's College in Durham. We lunched at the Cathedral restaurant and visited the gift shop where I picked up a small communion set we can use for our Tuesday evening summer services.

By the time we arrived at St. Mary's Vicarage it was around 5 p.m. My inner clock read that it was "32 hours" since I had slept normally.

From there, after a shower and a brief nap, we walked over to St. Edward's Church (R.C.) for a meeting of "Churches Together," a group of churches in the Whitley Bay-Monkseaton area. Robin chairs the group. About 20 leaders from a dozen or so churches were present for the Annual General Meeting.

They discussed a full agenda including some joint projects, special services, and invitations to individual events the churches were planning. For example, they are launching a "Street Pastors" ministry geared at sending trained people to minister to people who never go to churches. They are also starting to plan a "More than Gold" emphasis aimed at reaching people with the gospel while the 2012 Olympics is underway next July (yes, it is being held here in London).

Eventually, after we walked back to St. Mary's Vicarage, I got to bed around 11 p.m. here. (It had just become dark outside around 10 p.m.) Inner clock read: "38 hours."

It's cool here—today's high will be a breezy, seaside 59 degrees F, but now that we've had breakfast, I'm raring to go.

Celtic Pilgrimage

Getting Ready for the Celtic Pilgrimage

In just a few days I will be heading out on the beginning of a trip to the UK. I'm starting out by visiting Robin Greenwood in Monkseaton in the Diocese of Newcastle, but eventually we will head together to Edinburgh where we will meet up with nine Metro New York Synod pilgrims who are heading directly to Edinburgh on Friday night.

The trip is called a "Celtic Pilgrimage," and it will include visits to places in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oban, and the Isle of Iona in Scotland. In England we will be centered in the old city of Durham and will visit areas in Northern England including Holy Island, where we will visit with Robin Greenwood's wife, Clare, for the day.

The goal of the trip is to experience some of the spirituality of the Celtic tradition and to visit places where people have sought a richer connection with God. As the journey continues, I hope I will be able to more fully explain what that all means, of course, but from a personal standpoint, I am hoping to grow spiritually during this two week trip.

My chief regret, however, is that I am leaving at a time when my family is going through a challenging time. My mother-in-law needs to move from her home where she has lived for 50 years into the Atria in South Setauket, an Assisted Living facility, and the weight of that transition falls on my wife Linda. Please keep her in your prayers.

I will be posting items on this blog in days ahead. I'm not sure how often or how long they postings will be, and I hope to include some photos, if possible. Feel free to follow along at www.hopespastor.blogspot.com.

DARKNESS AT NOON Good Friday 2010

When darkness falls, the day is over. It's as simple as that.
But on THIS day, darkness came not at sundown but at noon—high noon—the hour when the sun had reached its greatest height, the very peak of the day.
It didn't make any sense to those who gloated at the foot of the cross. At the very moment when they sensed their utter and complete victory, suddenly, inexplicably, the sun's light disappeared and darkness covered the land.
In John's account of the crucifixion of our Lord this wonder if never mentioned. Perhaps for John the whole day was filled with darkness. Or perhaps his vision was affected by the One who claimed to be the light of the world, the Light which John himself testified about—the true light that enlightens every man-- the light that the darkness of this horrible day could not extinguish.
But Matthew, Mark, and Luke saw the darkness. It had been there all along, but now it was visible to everyone standing there that day.
The darkness muffled the gloaters. First darkness—reminiscent of the darkness that covered the land of Egypt many Passovers ago—but then, after the darkness, what would be next?
If it was a victory for them, it was short-lived at best. But for the first time these people who dwelt in the land of deep darkness found themselves afraid of the dark. They had to sense that God was up to something there. After all, it's never dark at noon.
"Maybe we should postpone the party," someone might have said. Indeed! Who can party when God is up to something great, unpredictable and mysterious?
They should have sensed it earlier. They COULD have sensed it earlier. One would expect that the pain from the nails would have been enough to bring a man to total rage at his enemies, but not at THIS cross. What did he say? Did I get that right? "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing."
How incredible! How absurd! How could he say that? Certainly they knew WHAT they were doing—they knew exactly what they were doing—their hopes and their plans were coming to fruition. Success at last. No more Galilean nonsense to put up with. These educated, sophisticated, and wealthy people had thought it all through, and once they discovered Judas, the trap was set, the end they longed for finally came into view.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Didn't they? How could he make such an outrageous statement?
But what did he mean by praying, "Father forgive them?" Talk about outrageous! Who did he think he was, anyway, asking God to forgive his enemies, the very ones who had purchased the nails and set the plot in motion? This was a clue to a mystery far beyond their pay grade.
Then they heard another clue. The thief dying beside him certainly deserved his fate—just as much as the man in the middle. It's hard to imagine that he would have the nerve to ask for a future with him. It was only a matter of hours until both of them would be dead, and it wouldn't be much longer until they would be buried, out of sight, out of mind, forgotten, good riddance!
Talk about absurd? Why ask a dying man for a future? But then again, what did he have to lose?
Or was it that this thief was able to see what the educated, sophisticated religious leaders were unable to see? Blinded by their overblown estimation of their own egos?
"Today, you will be with me in Paradise," the man in the middle said. Oh really? A thief in Paradise? Rewards for the reckless and irresponsible? How could he make him such an offer? Who DID he think he was, anyway?
But then again, they might have seen the clue that stared them right in the face. The promise was given not by the other thief. It came from the "man in the middle." Do you suppose that being in the middle was more than just a coincidence? Maybe it was another clue God was using to disclose to those who could see in the dark that this man saw a future that others could not even conceive of.
The moment they waited for finally DID arrive. The sand in that fragile hourglass eventually ran out, thank God. Those three hours of darkness must have felt like an eternity. Was it ONLY three hours? Or, WAS it Eternity condensed into just three hours?
His voice was much louder than anyone might have expected. It was so loud that they could feel it deep inside their souls. Who could imagine that he would be able to summon up such strength at his moment of greatest weakness and desolation? "Father," he said. How could he even call God "Father" at a moment like this? Weak, wounded, abandoned—What kind of "Father" could he be, anyway?
"Into your hands I commit my spirit," he said. He had reached his final destination, after all. He returned to the One from whom he came. Gone. Soon to be forgotten. Not soon enough for some, but at least it was FINALLY over. The darkness would lift. The New Day would dawn. The agitator would soon be forgotten, and life would return to normal again. Leave his body on the cross. Let the vultures come and have their feast. And those who made it happen could also have theirs.
What are they doing? Taking his body down? Cleaning it? Wrapping it with cloth filled with spices? No reason to do that! But let it be—at least now the darkness could end and life could return once more to what it had been before he came. Yes, the victory was theirs. Final Victory! Or so THEY thought.

SUPPER AT SUNDOWN

(This is the first of three sermons preached at Hope during the Triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. I actually did not preach THIS sermon. I should have. But since so few people were there to hear what I did preach, I think it is best that I offer this one instead. It's a better sermon than the one I preached.)

In recent years on Maundy Thursday we have focused much attention on the event which is at the heart of the gospel lesson appointed for the day in the Gospel of John, chapter 13. That story is John's equivalent story to the accounts in the other three gospels where Jesus institutes the sacrament of Holy Communion.

In John's Gospel, instead of hearing the Words of Institution which we use in every eucharistic service as the bread and wine are consecrated, we hear Jesus giving the "New Commandment" gave to his disciples and we see Jesus humbling himself to wash the feet of his disciples. Curiously, John makes no mention of the elements of the meal itself, the institution of the sacrament, or the promise of the forgiveness of sins—all of which have been the central elements of Christian worship for twenty centuries.

I'm not sure what the motivation is behind placing the focus on the act of feet washing, and I wonder whether worshipers understand it any better understanding than I do. One thing, however, has become perfectly clear to me over the past 27 years at Hope after having offered the invitation to people to come forward so I can wash their feet. That is that people much prefer coming forward to receive the body and blood of Christ and clearly do not have any interest in having their feet washed.

Their reluctance to coming forward is no mystery to me. In fact, I wonder why those who do come for the feet washing do so. Is it just out of compassion for me as the pastor, to avoid embarrassment?

In fact, I wonder about the ceremony itself. It is obviously a "symbolic" ceremony, but when we do it the symbolic values of it seems to go unheeded. The ceremony could quite easily be carried out totally apart from a worship service, and certainly apart from the context of the Lord's Supper or even Maundy Thursday altogether. After all, John himself didn't see any need to mention the nature of the meal they were celebrating that night at sundown. In John's gospel the event is actually a "pre-Passover" meal he says they shared "before the festival of the Passover" (John 13:1). From his perspective it was not a Passover meal, as all three synoptic stories all seem to presuppose.

Don't misinterpret what I am saying,. I'm not against washing people's feet (at least not as much as nearly EVERYONE ELSE who came to worship on Maundy Thursday seem to be.) I just wonder whether continuing to offer people a chance to take part in a ceremony that they don't take part in is a good way to conduct a public worship service.

To state it differently, what would it be like if, when the time came for people to come forward to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, everyone decided to stay put instead of coming forward? How would we make sense out of continuing to celebrate Holy Communion? Would we keep offering it?

There are two sad implications coming out of our current practice of offering to wash people's feet. First, the lack of participation negates the very message Jesus was trying to get across in the original context. If no one is willing to even allow their pastor to wash their feet, a rather passive, non-labor intensive action, then how can we believe that they are more willing to do the harder part of what Jesus was demonstrating by this action, i.e., to keep the "New Commandment" he gave? Actually can we even call the "New Commandment" a "commandment" if no one actually obeys it? Like the old question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make any sound?"

The other sad implication of continuing to offer unwelcome invitations for feet washing is that it diverts attention away from the one part of the Maundy Thursday story that we actually DO take seriously, the Lord's Supper. That part of the Event of Maundy Thursday gets more-or-less relegated to the "Let's get this long service over" portion to the evening instead of serving as the climax of that sacred hour.

How different we might feel like at our Maundy Thursday celebrations if, instead of doing something no one wants to do, we offered people a whole, real meal with real food, and then brought it to the high point of "re-membering" the new covenant by sharing significant pieces of bread and real cups of wine and giving people enough time to eat, drink, and then reflect on the meaning of THAT, as I am sure those bewildered disciples must have done. I wonder whether the "sleepiness" of the disciples might have been caused by what they had just experienced, and not just by the busy-ness of the day.

Something important happened that night at sundown. Yes, Jesus gave a new commandment to his followers, and we would do well to focus long and hard on how good a job we do on keeping that, although I wonder whether the best time to talk about that is when the vast majority of the congregation isn't even present. But the other thing that happened is that these disciples who gathered there that night left that upper room much different from the way they began the evening. By eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ at that supper at sundown they were transformed into the very Body of Christ themselves for the sake of the world. They became what they ate (and drank) and the world has never been the same since.

METEOR SHOWER

Around three o’clock on Monday morning, I couldn’t wait any longer. When I went to bed the night before it was raining furiously, but the weather forecast said that by 3 a.m. the sky would be clear.
So I got up and went over to the window facing east to see if the stars were out. The weatherman was right. The skies were clear, and the stars sparkled brilliantly.
I knelt on the love seat so I could stare out the window, but after a few minutes of watching for a shooting star, my neck started to hurt, and I had to decide whether to get serious or get back into bed.
Just as I was about to give up my heavenly quest, I saw one. It was a thin but long downward streak in the eastern sky. Unlike other times when I had sat under summer skies watching, this one was clearly a shooting star. No doubt about it.
So, instead of getting back into my snug bed, I found my bathrobe and headed down to the kitchen to pursue more miraculous visions.
The sliding glass doors were clean and clear, and they faced eastward, but the Christmas lights from the front of the house reflected clearly against the window, forcing me to take a daring step. I turned around a kitchen chair and opened the door. I knew that it was below freezing outdoors, but now I could gaze directly into the clear evening sky.
In the silence I waited, slowly turning my head from side to side just in case a meteorite strayed from its appointed location. I wondered to myself about how wonderful it was to be able to see these marvelous streaks of light coming predictably on the same day each year. Suddenly there was another. This one was a thick and short streak, like an accent mark or apostrophe angling down from right to left, like a teacher’s check mark on a test, but without the bottom part.
I wondered some more. These shooting stars were like “mini-miracles” coming into view, but only visible to those who had the patience and warm clothing to witness their brief visit to our world.
In the distance I heard a sound. The oil burner was going on. Of course, after all the glass doors were letting cold air in. Another streak, another “miracle” I thought. Then I hear the refrigerator go on. I suppose that happens often, but most of the time nobody notices. Then another streak, and then another. What a miraculous night this was turning out to be!
I saw the lights of a plane in the distance. People were going from somewhere to somewhere else, each with his or her own itinerary, traveling perhaps thousands of miles in a matter of just a few hours.
As I began to feel the chilling sir, all of a sudden I had a remarkable insight. Here I was, shivering on a December’s night to watch streaks of light in the sky as though they were some sort of miracle, but all around me were these things that were incredibly made, even by human hands, which no one pays too much attention to. Meteorites exist only for the second it takes for them to flare through the sky. Then they are no more. My refrigerator has been faithfully serving our family for twenty years, and that oil burner warms our whole house, I never gave them a second thought. And that jet in sky? I marvel that birds can fly, much less people. Aren’t these also true wonders which God mysteriously provides for us?
I’m glad I saw some shooting stars that night. It was probably my best shower-watching night ever. But what I discovered in the simple sounds and the sights of the night was much greater. be able to see these marvellous just in case a meteorite strayed from its appointed location.