What's In A Name?

As Jan and I prepare to retire in June, I have given some thought to the future of this blog. I have found it useful as a way to clarify my thoughts about a wide variety of topics. It has created a very small amount of controversy: a couple of snarky comments, and some questioning by a search committee about whether the political views expressed here were normal parts of my sermons (they aren't, but the committee didn't recommend that I be called to serve that congregation.)

I plan to continue the blog in retirement, but The Gospel in ToyTown will no longer be an appropriate name. I am not very good at finding the right name for things - I was amazed that I came up with The Gospel in ToyTown - and hope that some suggestions will come from readers. A little information about our retirements may get some of you thinking about names:

1. Jan and I plan to live somewhere near Beverly, Massachusetts.
2. We will be helping with childcare for our granddaughter Emmaline.
3. We will be spending time with friends in New Hampshire's Mount Washington Valley.
4. I will be spending a bit more time than I have this past year as a Trustee of Episcopal Divinity School.
5. I will continue to work some, taking services for vacationing parish clergy, serving as an interim priest, and helping out at whatever parish we decide to join.

Send me your suggestions (dsweir@alumni.umass.edu). There may even be a prize for the winner.

The Year of the Lord's Favor

In teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus quoted Isaiah's prophecy of the year of the Lord's favor. But quickly the one who came to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord is himself unacceptable to his neighbors. Jesus' unsettling words about God's care for foreigners challenged the narrowness of his neighbors' thinking, challenged it, not from outside the tradition of Israel, but from within that tradition. God's care for all people - articulated in the calling of Abraham and Sarah to be a blessing to the nations - was, like the theologia crucis of Christian tradition, often a neglected aspect of Israel's tradition.

The anger of Jesus' neighbors was, oddly, an indication that tradition and theology were important to them. It mattered to them how one thought about and understood God and the nature of God's relationship with Israel. As an occupied people, ruled over by pagan Rome, it is no wonder that Jesus' neighbors adopted a circle the wagons understanding of being God's chosen people.

I see the reaction of Jesus' neighbors in sharp contrast to what has been - and still in some ways is - the American response to different ways of understanding the faith. I grew up in a time when it seemed that what mattered was that we believed and not what or in whom we believed.

While I have not been happy about the acrimony - and demonization - that has marked many of the debates within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, the debates are about important matters. Theology does matter. Not all ways of talking about God are equally true. There are interpretations of Scripture and Tradition that are quite simply wrong. Sadly, some of them, like the prosperity Gospel or the teaching of the Left Behind series, are very popular, but that doesn't make them right. The struggle, as in Nazareth, between different theological positions is a critical task for the Church. The struggle will not, of course, result in perfect theology, in a perfect understanding of God. But that does not mean that it should or can be avoided. In that struggle we may, by God's grace, find greater clarity about who and whose we are, greater clarity about what God is doing in our time, and greater clarity about our sharing in the missio Dei.

The neighbors at Nazareth may not have come to a greater clarity about what it meant to be God's chosen people. But Luke's community, the community in which the story of Jesus' teaching at Nazareth was preserved, that community was granted a clarity about the wideness of God's love, the love incarnate in Jesus .

A Long Silence

When Pope Benedict urged Roman Catholic priests to blog, there was some discussion of whether or not he should blog. One commentator that I heard said that if he did, he would have to accept the discipline of blogging every day.

So, I have failed as a blogger, having let a month go by without posting. There are, of course, reasons for that, chiefly the fact that I have been sick since I last posted. Not seriously, I am at death's door,sick, but sick enough with bronchitis and a hematoma that I managed to create by coughing to have slowed me down considerably.

Besides that, I have been preoccupied with thoughts about retiring. Not so much musings on where we will live, what part-time work I can do, and what it will be like to live near our granddaughter, but thoughts about leave-taking from a parish that I have served for the past eight years. An Alban Institute publication, which I have not yet consulted, likened it to running through thistles. Responsible leave-taking is hard work and I don't imagine that I will get it right. I will make mistakes and will leave some messes for others to clean up after I'm gone. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't work at getting it as right as possible.

We set the date and then, for a number of reasons, decided to make that date, at least for the present, a tentative one. We now have a retirement window - June and July - and will find in the next month the date that seems to work best for all of us.

Holy Innocents

The three days following Christmas Day are Saints Days: St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist and the Holy Innocents. Although all three of these call for serious reflection, I have found myself reflecting a bit more on the Holy Innocents during the past few days and I have found myself drawn to three things about the story in Matthew 2:13-16:

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because
they are no more."

1. The story is a true story. By that I don't mean that it actually happened, although it may have, but that it is a story that reveals to us something that is true. In this case, what we see is that tyrants will stop at nothing to hold on to power.


2. Power is seductive. While we may set out to use the legitimate power that we have for good, we can be tempted to use it to impose our notion of what is good on everyone else.


3. People in power - and that may mean all of us to some extent - don't have to commit murder in order to cause suffering and death for others. We can do that by simple neglect. It is no wonder that the title of Jonathan Kozol's book about homeless families in America is Rachel and Her Children.

The placing of this Saints Day so close to Christmas is no accident. Not only is this story part of Matthew's Nativity narrative, the story is a stark reminder of what Christmas - the Incarnation - is all about: God's acting to share human life at its deepest level and to redeem it from darkness. The words of the 20th century theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman remind me of the Christmas work that we are called to do:

When the song of the angels is silent

When the star in the sky is gone

When the kings and princes are home

When the shepherds are again tending their sheep

When the manger is darkened and still

The work of Christmas begins --

To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry

To rebuild the nations

To bring peace among people

To befriend the lonely

To release the prisoner

To make music in the heart.

The Anglican Covenant

Having been released a week before Christmas, it is hardly surprising that many of us haven't even bothered to read the final (?) version of The Anglican Covenant. What may be surprising is that some people have had the time to read and comment on the document. I have avoided paying much attention to comments about the specific provisions of the final section - that would require that I go beyond the quick read that I have given it. I am, however, paying attention to more general comments and found two of them worth reading and re-reading. Fr. Tobias Haller has a well thought out post Incarnation (?) at his blog In a Godward Direction. Fr. Mark Harris has a somewhat less irenic post, Coal in your Christmas Socking? One lump, or two?, at his blog Preludium. The adoption or rejection of the Covenant by the Churches of the Anglican Communion will take time - not months, but years - and discovering whether the Covenant will strengthen the Communion will take even longer, maybe decades. The Anglican Communion is, I think, slowly coming to terms with it's British colonial past. My hope and prayer for the Communion is that Anglican will embrace the difficult work of maintaining relationships in spite of our diffences and not yield to the temptation to sameness. As a Provost of Coventry Cathedral once asked, "What kind of a Church would it be, if everyone in it were just like me?" Boring, to be sure, but more than boring - not the Body of Christ.