Strangely enough tomorrow is among the best days of the year.

December 21 marks the swing from dark to light, that is the daylight gets longer, incrementally of course, surely and steadily through June. Whatever cold lies ahead will, one day, have to give way because the sun cannot be denied. A local radio host likes to talk about the 21st as the first day of spring and calls people who appreciate this day “21sters”. Regardless its kind of a coping mechanism up here and perhaps in the order of things is God’s way of allowing the coldest part of the year to at least have the blessing of increasing light.

December 21, 2008

Sunday of the Genealogy

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: A young man is on the streets of New York and stops to ask a police officer, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The officer responds, “Practice, lots of practice.”

For many years performing at Carnegie Hall in New York was the sign of accomplishment as a musician. A concert at Carnegie meant you had made it into the highest level of your craft and showcased your skill at one of the most prestigious venues in America. Musicians and performers would sometimes just stand on the stage at Carnegie and take it all in because they knew they had arrived. Whatever else happened to them in life they had played Carnegie Hall.

It’s always been this way in every human endeavor. Excellence comes from the continual growth that emerges from constant and effective practice. The constant repetition of solid fundamentals forms the foundation for the development of an increasing level of skill. A great musician is made not when the spotlight is shining on the stage but in the hours of reading music and practicing scales. A great quarterback is built when they get up every day and throw footballs, again and again, until they can do it when someone is tackling them. Every carpenter of note was created by thousands of hours of being with wood.

And it is the same way with faith. Faith grows by practice, the repetition of the fundamentals, prayer, worship, study, praxis (which means the application of ideas to real life) and from that repetition the building of a foundation for increasing skill and technique. There are no shortcuts. If you wish to excel at your job or vocation you must practice. If you wish to develop a faith that matters you must practice it as well.

Now there are communities of faith that offer shortcuts. Some give in to whatever is prevailing in the culture and avoid the difficulty of practice and discipline by saying “Do whatever you want and be whatever you want to be.” But it’s the spiritual equivalent of saying “Eat anything you want and you’ll be healthy.” Others will point to a kind of experience, an emotional happening, and say “If you have this moment everything will be fine.” But that’s being a “one hit wonder”, great when your band is on top of the charts but not such a big deal ten years down the line.

For whatever else Orthodoxy is, it is honest. It tells us, ahead of time and always that the key to a living, growing, faith, to spiritual fulfillment, lies in the transformation of ourselves into the image of Christ and this requires a conscious and deliberate effort on our part, a willingness, empowered by grace and energized by love, to put in the time and effort it takes to be Christian. There are no shortcuts, no half measures, and no quick fixes. We must practice our faith, not just the glorious and wonderful things, but the everyday things, the repetition of the fundament
als that separates the adequate from the excellent.

Yet the irony of it is that when these things are practiced, these basics, prayer, worship, study, and praxis, the process of doing these things releases the joy and power of our faith just as the practice of any skill moves the task from drudgery into art. It’s one thing to go to church service and get your heartstrings pulled for an hour or two but imagine having a deep joy unrattled by the world around you. Practice your faith and in time it will come. It’s good to be here in worship, even if you don’t feel like it all the time, but as you grow in your faith by practice you’ll start to discover why you should be here, why these hours on Saturday night and Sunday morning are the fuel for your life. Practice your faith now and when times of trouble come, and they come to us all, you won’t have to learn important lessons in the fire of adversity because you’ll already have a reserve of strength and purpose to see your way through difficult days. If you wish to have a faith like the kind we’re presented with in our Epistle reading for this Sunday of Genealogy, a faith that can endure, empower, and even transcend death then start with the everyday practice of the basics.

Of course this is not always easy, being excellent in anything is rarely easy. But ask the musician who hears the applause from Carnegie Hall if it was worth all those hours of playing scales and reading music. Question the quarterback in the afterglow of victory whether it was important to get up every morning, watch film and throw passes. Think about the times in your life when people have extolled your skills and then ponder whether it was worth developing them. Then ask yourself, for the sake of strength for each day and in anticipation of heaven’s audience, if the practice of your faith will matter.

I think you know the answer.

Snow tonight. Snow tomorrow. Snow Saturday and Sunday. A trip to western Minnesota on Saturday and LaCrosse, Wisconsin, on Sunday. Oh, and winter doesn’t start until Sunday!

Drive slow. Carry a survival kit. Nature is in charge, no matter what you think.

When I was a Baptist Pastor I remember the annual meeting where, when the topic of salary came up, my wife and I were ushered out of the room to wait, somewhere, until the discussion was over and the votes taken. What do you talk about while you’re sitting alone in a room knowing that folks are talking about you, perhaps in unkind ways (this was a Baptist church after all) and deciding whether or not to give you a raise that maybe kept your head above water.

It is a recurring theme, that so much of what you do as a servant of the church is out of your hands. You can do a marvelous job, and I can’t always say that I have, and still see the same people staring back at you with the same glassy eyes. You can paint a picture for them of what they could be, where they could go, and what God could do through them, and the next Sunday you will see them, physically and spiritually, sitting in the same pew as last week.

All you can do is pray, hope, and do the best you can, and serve with whatever strength is left. Your average parishioner is a good person, sometimes a great one, who struggles with trying to be a faithful person in a decidedly unfaithful world. The spark that lights them never comes from you, it would be preposterous to think so, but only from the Holy Spirit who touches them as they allow and always works with them, as with you, by taking them from where they are to where they should be.

It just out of your hands, and in better ones for sure, but that doesn’t always make it easy.

High today of 2 degrees below zero. Temperature down to around -20 tonight. Two hours worth of snow removal this morning and more snow on the way tomorrow. I believe there’s a need for the Antiochian Archdiocese to expand its ministry to the US Virgin Islands and I think I’ll volunteer. : o )

It’s 19 degrees outside and the rode is covered with ice as a light rain / sleet is falling from the sky. Would somebody please remind me why I live here?

December 13, 2008

When we Orthodox come to a funeral we understand two things at once.

First we see in vivid detail the fleeting nature of life and the sin with its mortality that touches us all. Even the best of us, the most sainted, must die and every work of our hands is slated to pass away. We all, as our funeral prayers say, will be one day “bereft of form, disfigured…lying in a tomb.” We discover again in moments like these that truly “All things are but feeble shadows; all things are most deluding dreams; yet in one moment only, and Death shall supplant them all.”

For the Orthodox Christian death is not a natural thing, it was not something we were designed to experience but rather something we chose when we rejected the life God had for us. Death is the separation of the soul from the body and comes to us in trauma or sickness, by stealth or after long struggle but none of us would prefer it if we had the choice and always within us, no matter how hard we rationalize it, is the nagging sense that this mortality in our bodies, this aging, sickness, struggle and the end of our life is not how we were meant to be and none of the formidable skills of our morticians can change it. An Orthodox monk once said that all of us should keep a jar of dirt with us in our home or office so we remember what we will one day be.

And so we mourn for the passing of life, for the loss we feel, for the presence of one we loved that is taken from us. Our hearts are broken for the good things lost, and the emptiness of a future absent from the ones who shared this short journey we call life. Our love reaches out to the object of our affection and because it is gone our heart feels empty and our feelings become tears. This has been the lot of every human from the mists of time and in this moment we experience it again.

Yet it is not, for we who are Orthodox, the completion of the story. Death is real and we feel its sting but even as the pain flows through us so do the still small voices of hope. We have no life in ourselves but we understand that the God who gave us life came to us in our Lord Jesus Christ and took on every bit of pain and darkness there is in the world, including the greatest of them all, death, and in doing so broke their ultimate power.

This, for Orthodox Christians, is also real, and even more real because at a day of God’s choosing it will have the last word. We do not put those we love to rest in the ground merely for sentiment and a place to visit in the days to come but rather we commit them to their grave with an intense and real hope. We believe, always have, in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. We believe that when God is ready our graves will be emptied, our mortal remains transformed into immortality, and the fullness of who we are, body and soul, will enjoy the presence of God forever. We believe that the faithful enjoy a taste of this glorious reality already. We believe this not out of wishful thinking or our own fears but rather because we have the fact of Our Lord’s own resurrection as the pledge of ours and the validity of all that He is as the proof of his promise.

So truly we see death here but the discerning eye, the eye of faith, will also see something greater. For now we cry but the tears will not have the best of us. For now we will mourn but we will not be forever in despair. On this day we will place the mortal remains of the one we love in the earth not as a permanent fact but rather as a place of rest until the angels call out “Arise!”

Comfort each other with the pleasant memories. Call to mind the good deeds she did while she was with us in this life and better yet emulate them. Be together as family and friends and keep the bonds strong. Knowing that life, even the longest one, is short in the greater flow of history resolve not to live in fear but to live well, cherishing and doing those things that truly matter. Remember her and each other in your prayers.

But more than that direct your hearts, your mind, your souls, and your lives to God in this time and always. Seek refuge in Him. Find rest in His presence. The world is often uncertain, but God remains sure and steady. All things and every one of us will pass away, but God remains. A life lived in God endures beyond time, a hope in God reaches out and grasps eternity, and those who truly journey with God, will always find their way home.

From time to time as I commute to work I listen to the local radio station, they call themselves “Relevant Radio”, broadcasting Roman Catholic programming. More often then not I want to hear something at least reasonably uplifting, something somewhere between the intelligence insulting hijinks of morning FM radio and the cheery pop music gospel of the local evangelical station. The folks at South Park were dead on right when they lampooned Christian contemporary music by having the characters form a Christian band that wrote songs by simply replacing the word “baby” from current pop songs with the word “Jesus”.

Anyways, I enjoy the alternative Relevant Radio provides, although I, of course, have disagreements about some of the theological underpinnings. What I enjoy about it is the practicality. People can call up on the phone and get answers for real questions rooted in the Roman Catholic tradition. Again, I don’t always agree with the answers but I do agree with the idea that the faith should speak to not just some theoretical world but rather the world, for better or worse, that most people inhabit.

Now we’re getting better at this in Orthodoxy, largely, I think because we’ve had such an influx of people from outside of Orthodoxy who take the idea that faith should matter for everyday life as normal. But we have a long way to go. We have to face the fact that our people, about ninety nine percent of them, are never going to be monastics and that the information, the truth, the help they need is not so much going to be about how to live in the desert for decades but rather how to survive in their ethically challenged cubicle farm today.

That would seem simple enough, take people where you find them and help them become what God would want them to be. But it seems to elude us because we want not just to have answers but to also control the kinds of questions we face as well. The result is that too often we talk right past people and use high sounding words that manage to completely avoid dealing with what really matters to those in our embrace. Out of politeness, or habit, or loyalty they will travel with us for a while but on that one occasion someone pays attention they’ll be out the door.

The truth is that we don’t necessarily need more dissections of the Fathers, more papers on so and so and their relationship to the post modern dynamic. Those things are not bad in themselves but we should always ask “To what end?” What our Orthodox people need are answers to questions like “How do I talk to my kids about sex?” and “How can my faith help me in my job as a plumber?” Now we as Orthodox have, in my opinion, the best resources around to draw on for answers to such questions. But they need to be in language people can understand, milk first then meat.

The folks at Relevant Radio are at least making an attempt to do this. Now it’s our turn.

Some insights from Stanley Kurtz.

The truth is I sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the technology out there and lately I just turn it off so I can be in a more natural mode, but its not all bad. Yesterday I went to the dollar store and purchased an audio CD of the entire New Testament which I just now put on my iPod for future use.

And when I was a kid I thought owning a transistor radio was a big deal!