Seven whole days

Ann sent me a supplement to my post a couple of days ago on wheelchair accessibility.

From the ultimate repository of such thingz.

Not enough church buildings are accessible to people in wheelchairs. Often, we say we’re accessible, but it’s just not true. Here’s my favorite test: could a person in a wheelchair celebrate the Eucharist? If not, your church is not fully accessible. A decision has been made about who counts in the Body of Christ, and the answer is “not people in wheelchairs.”

The parish I serve fits into this category. We have some ramps, but we’re not quite there yet. Our budding campaign to work on our buildings will vastly improve the situation in our Parish House. Our church building (across the street) has a ramp. You can get in the door, if your wheelchair is small enough to fit on the non-ADA-compliant ramp. Then we have a nice spot for you. On the side of the church. Out of view. Oh, and you can’t come to the Holy Table to receive communion. But we’ll bring it to you. Do we value people in wheelchairs? Sure, but not as much as we could. What’s it going to take? Gizmodo knows.

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In terrific memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer describes the modern minister. He says, rightly so, that we too often become nothing more than a “quivering mass of availability.” That seems about right. We like to do the easy bits, but we priests don’t always want to do the hard things, and we sometimes don’t want to challenge people. As I’ve said before, we need to do this work. The church is about salvation, not just self-improvement.

The Anglican Centrist ties all this together nicely, in a posting on priestly vocation and leadership.

While the ministry of bishops and presbyters may well have therapeutic, prophetic, counter-cultural and mystical results, I would like to assert that bishops and priests are called to serve the whole baptised people of God as leaders with particular charisms of ministry which are not primarily therapy, prophesy, rebellion or mysticism. Moreover, it needs to be said that we in the Church are not merely participants in a gathering of like-minded folks with similar ideas and goals, who have organized ourselves with a form purely of our own devising.

No, we who believe we are living inside a reality shaped not by ourselves but by Jesus Christ, believe that we have been given a form that itself is shaped like the One who formed it. As Rowan Williams writes in his reflection on the work of Michael Ramsey,

“the Church is never left to reimagine itself or reshape itself according to its own priorities of the moment; for it to be itself, it has received those gifts that express and determine its essential self as a place where the eternal self-giving of Christ is happening in such a way as to heal and change lives.”

There it is. So if your priest isn’t focused on healing and changing lives, remind her or him of what it’s all about. If you, dear reader, are a priest, remember that our vocation is too important to stop our work with therapy and encouragement. Those things are necessary, but they’re only one bit of a larger purpose.

Apparently the saying is indeed true. Everything is relative. Take, for example, Pope John Paul II. I would have labeled him a conservative. Why? Well, he shut down liberation theologians from teaching. He quashed any talk of women’s ordination or even easing up on celibacy for priests. Oh, yes, and he sheltered Cardinal Law in Vatican diplomatic limbo (ahem) rather than allow him to face scrutiny or criminal charges in the US.

Well, it turns out that some people think John Paul’s great downfall was that he was too liberal. I am not making this up, and it’s not satire. Sometimes reality defies the imagination.

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While looking for an illustration for my previous post on blogging, I ran across this:

According to some researchers, blogging might be good for us.

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

OK, I can buy that. Lots of blogs that I read seem to fit that bill. But I think things are different in many cases, especially in Anglican-land. I fail to see how bile-filled vitriolic hate-mongering tirades could be “therapeutic” either for author or reader. (Did I just make my feelings clear there?) Maybe there’s another way to phrase this. Blogging could be good for us. For Christians, blogging should be good for us.

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I took this photo at General Convention 2006, in Columbus. There was one pair of boots for each US solider who had been killed in Iraq, about 2500 at that time. There were also shoes representing the men, women, and children killed in the civilian population in Iraq. It was a moving display that really helped lots of us understand the incalculable cost of war in a new way. Appropriately enough, the display was called “Eyes Wide Open.”

We need to be careful at times like this to remember that we are commemorating soldiers who have died, and that we must not just treat this holiday merely as a consumer feast, a casual day off, or — worst of all — a jingoistic patriotic celebration.

(There are a couple more photos of the “Eyes Wide Open” display in my flickr set of General Convention 2006, if you want to look.)

I’ve heard of people getting upset when clergy point out that for Christians, especially in church, the cross is our predominant symbol, not the American flag. This story takes things to a new level:

A local church pastor who removed the U.S. flag from the church sanctuary has taken a leave of absence after receiving harassing and threatening notes — including one left in his hymnbook in the church, police and church officials said. …

“Sean [Allen, pastor] was of the belief that because we are a church, we are a people of Christ, we should be focusing on the cross of Christ,” Long said. “So he removed the flags from the sanctuary.”

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We waste a lot of food in this country. While I never subscribed to the “eat your veggies because others are starving” line of reasoning, I do think we need to fix our waste (and our waist!) problem. According to a recent article in the NY Times, we waste an astonishing 27% of food available for consumption.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.

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The good people at 815 had to know it would inspire some mockery. Apparently they also felt it would inspire people. I’m talking about the new ad campaign of the Episcopal Church. Here’s the tag: “Get closer to God. Slice carrots.”

I’m not making this up. As my blogging friend Peter Mayer points out, many people who are not in church have no problem with Jesus. So why don’t we talk about Jesus or, I don’t know, God? If we’re trying to compete based on good works, I’m afraid we’re doomed. The Red Cross or any number of other entities is much more effective at “getting things done” than we are.

Church is about salvation. I think the reason our attendance is plummeting is that we’ve forgotten that. The related problem is that liberals got wishy-washy about salvation. Some of us let others define it. Salvation is not (repeat after me) about getting into heaven. Check out the New Testament on salvation, and you learn that it’s about eternal life, which starts in this early pilgrimage. The Greek word (sozo) that gets translated as “salvation” is also translated as “wholeness” or “health” or “redemption.” So why can’t we talk about that?

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I enjoyed this when it first appeared in the Church Times. Dave Walker has reprised it on the Church Times Blog.

The funny this is that this is pretty much exactly what my office is like, except that I don’t have a lectern. Oh, and it’s always $20 for bus fare, because we don’t have trains, being in gasoline-guzzling America.

Click the picture to see it slightly larger.

This is from one of the newest entries in my blogroll, the GAFCON blog, written by the Revd Dr Christian Troll, self-described “doctrinal warrior.” It contains many insights into the thinking of a certain kind of Anglican. I encourage you to go visit the blog.

For today, I give you this sample entry, in its entirety. I don’t like to do that, but I couldn’t find a good way to excerpt this. I hope Fr. Troll won’t mind. I certainly would not want to enter debate with such a formidable rhetorician.

”As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Rom 9:13

Something the liberals destroying our Church with their perverted message of love never mention is that The Word makes it clear that hating some folks is simply part and parcel of what every Bible believer must do. The Sodomites and wishy-washy liberals can squirm and scream like babies all they wish, but the fact is that The Bible shows some people were only created so those prepared to show obedience to Orthodox teaching can do so by hating them.

In the examply of Esau we are called to hate him because he was red and hairy (Gen 26:25). There can be no apology for saying that Scripture teaches we must sometimes despise people for the way they look. That’s just the way things are, and it’s why I cannot accept any compromise whatsoever when it comes to hiring domestic staff for the Manse. Servants must be pleasing to the eye, even if they come from lands where most folk are Roman Catholics, hairy and despicable. God loved Jacob because he was a smooth man (Gen 27:11), and if we are to be faithful to The Word we have no option other than to similarly value those qualities.

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.