EXIT INTERVIEW AFTER FOUR DECADES WORKING IN THE CHURCH

I was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1984.  This followed an undergraduate degree in Religion from the University of Richmond, a Master of Theological Studies from the Virginia Seminary, and additional work as a special student at Duke University Divinity School.   I had the privilege of serving churches in Virginia and North Carolina, until my retirement in 2019.

I officiated at my last service as a full time clergy person as Rector of Grace and Holy Trinity Church in Richmond, Virginia on June 30, 2019.  I am now setting out on a whole new chapter of my life.  I am tremendously grateful to have come to this point and look forward to the future. And of course, in this moment I pause to reflect on the journey.

In a very real sense, this water shed moment…following over 16 years of service at Grace and Holy Trinity Church, eleven years as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rocky Mount, NC, over five years as Rector of St. John’s Church in West Point, Virginia, three years as Assistant to the Rector at St. Stephen’s in Durham, NC, and three years as a lay Director of Christian Education at Christ Church in Raleigh, NC…was the result of my baptism.  

I was baptized on November 14, 1954 at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kinston, NC.  (A place where I also worked as a Youth Minister for one year following college – 1976 through 1977.)  

St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Kinston, NC

My baptismal service took place at 4:00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, with the priest, Edwin Moseley, my parents, the church organist, and my godfather Carter Darrow present.  The service used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and obviously it happened prior to the liturgical renewal (resulting in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer)  which reclaimed ancient practice of public baptisms.

Still, a sacrament is a sacrament, and God was at work in the Word and the Water.  I hasten to add, that my parents weren’t just “having me done.” They raised me in the Church, taking me week by week to services, for the first 18 years of my existence.  That worked its magic.  More on that in a minute.

But first, let me say,  I adored my godfather.  He lived not far away in Tarboro, NC and was my great-uncle as well as godfather.  He worked in the telecommunications industry and was also a peanut farmer.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching him roll a cigarette, one handed, while driving.  When I visited he let me go up in the attic of his house and take home a treasure or two.  I still have a book which I received from him. 

Published in 1918 and entitled “Aviation Book” it was a large picture book measuring 10 inches by 13 inches.  On the cover were French biplanes dropping bombs in the First World War.  Oh!,..the hours I spent as a boy pouring over these pictures. 

The story features Tom and Jack who are “brothers and chums.”  They have an Uncle, Uncle Sam, who knows all about aviation and proceeds to tell them about the history of aviation, the role of “aeroplanes” in the War and the promising future of aviation for transportation, freight, mail and more.  For a boy in the early 1960s, this book from 1918 was the stuff of dreams. I also remember getting a full, cardboard skeleton from that attic, another treasure. 

And lest you think that was all Carter was about for me, let me say, he was active in the church and set a great example.   He had a beautiful tenor voice and sang in the choir. He came to my confirmation on May 14, 1967 and gave me a prayer book, which I still have and which is inscribed by him. 

And he kept reappearing in my life, even after he ran into the surf at the beach in South Carolina and suffered a fatal heart attack. The very first Sunday I was at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rocky Mount, NC, (in 1993) I looked at the back of the processional cross, and saw it was given in memory of Carter’s brother who had died in the flu epidemic in 1917.  And then when I looked around at historic photos on the walls of that church, I saw Carter, in a choir photo.  Apparently, for a while at least, he had been in Rocky Mount, (which is just a few miles from Tarboro) and had sung in the choir.

All of which is to say, thank you Carter! I could not have asked for more in a godfather.  And I am grateful to my parents for their commitment on my behalf.  Okay…now back to the topic at hand.

I was baptized a few months after my birth.  And then, my parents raised me in the church.  There is nothing spectacular here, really.  I simply experienced the ancient, time tested, worship of the church.   So maybe, in a quiet way, it was spectacular! It certainly was priceless and it formed me.  The liturgy of the Church, week in and week out, did its work.  

Admittedly, as a younger person, I struggled with it.  I was particularly prone to the “Episcopal crouch” during prayers.   This is where you are supposed to be kneeling, but it gets to be too much, so you just slouch back and put your butt on the pew behind you.  This always got my father’s attention and he reached over to push me back up into proper position.  Regardless, by the time I was a teenager, I actually enjoyed going to church. 

I also became interested in the Bible.  My Sunday School was no great shakes where that is concerned. I do remember in grammar school learning about the Patriarchs. We cut out pictures of Abraham and pasted them on tiles so we could hang them on our walls at home.  I was so taken with the Bedouin lifestyle, that I dressed with a keffiyeh, (a bath towel) and herded the neighborhood dogs (before leash laws) for several weeks. 

But then…in my public high school in small town eastern North Carolina…there were two Bible classes. Old Testament and New Testament. The salary for the teacher was funded by local churches.  The school chipped in a classroom and offered the classes for credit.   I don’t support this arrangement today, although, a course in comparative religions would go a long way to combat the ignorance that seems to be pervasive in the US today. At any rate, at the time, it enabled me to have a structured way to read the great Bible stories.  I also had to memorize things –a Bible verse a week for instance, and the names of the 12 tribes of Israel as well as the names of all the books of the Bible.   

Where the Bible memorization verse was concerned, we had to go up to the teacher and recite our chosen verse each Friday.  “Jesus wept” was a great favorite.  But you could only use it once.  Another favorite was “So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.” (I Samuel 25:22)  You have to love adolescent boys.

I also admired my priest when I was in high school, the Rev. John Askew Winslow.  I had no idea at the time how old he was (late 60s), but I just admired his fire and his personal history.  He was ordained in 1928 and the Bible he was given at that time by his bishop is a cherished possession.  He started his ordained ministry in the Great Depression in the mountains of Virginia. I remember him talking about the people moving him on, while he was out making calls, away from the still so he wouldn’t get in trouble.   

The Rev. John A. Winslow in December 1971

I also remember a dinner party in my house in Kinston…this would have been in the early 1970s…and someone was talking about how great things used to be.  John’s face grew red and he said, “Don’t talk to me about the good old times.  I had people dying in my arms due to malnourishment in the Depression.”  That ended that piece of nostalgia!  And I only admired him more.  

He also brought civil rights leaders to talk to the youth group.  I don’t know how, but he brought Richmond Flowers to talk to us (and anyone else in the parish who wanted to come on a Sunday evening.) Flowers served “as the Attorney General of the U.S. state of Alabama from 1963 to 1967,  was best known for his opposition to then Governor George C. Wallace's policy of racial segregation.”  My eyes were wide open!     Read more here:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Flowers_Sr.

But people and classes notwithstanding, the most important thing of all was simply…going to church each Sunday.  

I grew up in the Episcopal Church, so we used the Prayer Book.  The Prayer Book, imperfectly but in reality, enshrines 2000 years of Christian experience.  Whether it was Daily Morning Prayer or Holy Communion, we were using a book that had its roots in the ancient traditions of the church, and in the synagogue before it.

The return to the ancient tradition of weekly Eucharist was a part of the liturgical renewal that resulted in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. While I was growing up, Eucharist happened about once or twice a month.  I remember standing at the back of the church and looking at the altar, and was always thrilled to see the veiled chalice, which indicated communion was to be the service of the day.  Something in me realized the importance and centrality of the Eucharist.

At the same time, Prayer Book worship, whatever the service, had “good bones.”  The prayers and the readings grew out of a long tradition and distilled the best of the Christian experience and faith.  And one of the good things about this was and is, worship is not a “production” and it is not dependent on the clergy or the officiants.  Those leading worship do not have to invent it, they simply have to deliver it.  

We can trust the process!  It doesn’t depend on us.  There is power in the ancient wisdom of the church and its worship.  There don’t have to be “bells and whistles.” Great programs are wonderful.  Mission trips (though be careful for those can be really toxic, especially where international travel is concerned) can be great. 

(Check out this link on toxic charity http://www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/toxic-charity)

 Outreach projects in the local community, are a vital part of the mission.  (Personally, I am drawn to projects that do not involve travel and that can happen all year around, not just for a week or two once a year.) 

Regardless, the bedrock, I believe,  is the ancient and traditional, still relevant, worship of the church.  The weekly round of prayers and scripture, is powerful. And I don’t mean worship can’t be updated.  Translate it to English for English speakers, of course. (Following the example of the 1611 translation of the Bible, the King James Version.)  But keep the bones!  The structure!  The story!

And regardless of how often it is offered, the central story is preserved for us in the Eucharistic prayer. This is the part of the service where God’s mighty acts are recounted, culminating in the story of Jesus and the institution of the Lord’s Supper. 

A proper Eucharistic prayer gives thanks to God for the divine blessing and work of creation and it recalls and gives thanks for the revelation of God to humanity.  In terms of this revelation,   N.T. Wright has compared it to a “five act drama”.  The first four acts, Creation, Fall, Israel, and Jesus have happened.  The fifth act, the renewal and recreation of everything, will happen. (See “The New Testament and the People of God” page 140ff.)  We are to be faithful to that vision of renewal and to live in that hope.  A good Eucharistic prayer calls all this to mind. 

And I do not wish to be harsh here to the free church tradition, which has so much to teach and give us all.  Still, the ancient, liturgy of the church…with its Bible readings and with the Holy Eucharist, that is bedrock as far as I am concerned. 

The Bible readings assigned are getting more inclusive of the richness of the canon of Scripture and that is a good thing.  The Revised Common Lectionary, though not perfect, is a good thing.  And the Holy Eucharist, done in a traditional way, reaffirms the central story, proclamation, and good news of Scripture.

Now, an aside here. There are some celebrations of the Eucharist which miss the point, in my opinion.  I was recently at a celebration where the Eucharistic prayer ran this way: “O God of mystery and promise, you invite us to discover you in the intimate places of ourselves and our lives. You invite us to discover you in the complexities of our humanity, in passionate and tender loving, in struggle and pain, in confusion and unknowing, in flashes of insight and wisdom.  You call us beyond ourselves to places of imagination, beyond the silent stars, in the deep rhythm of the ocean, in the unending cycles of day and night, seasons of life and death.”  (I don’t know the source of this prayer.)

Now, this is all very poetic. And it is all about us.  It is about our seeking, and not about the proclamation of God’s mighty acts.  As a Eucharistic prayer it is narcissistic 

 and fails miserably.  I am not saying all that language about seeking etc. can’t be useful and meaningful, but it needs to be surrounded by proclamation of God’s mighty acts.  A focus on our seeking, by itself, it fails.

By comparison, here’s the beef!  An ecumenical Eucharistic prayer:  “Fountain of life and source of all goodness, you (God almighty) made all things and fill them with your blessing; your created them to rejoice in the splendor of your radiance…We acclaim you, holy Lord, glorious in power. Your mighty works reveal your wisdom and love. You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our care, so that, in obedience to you, our Creator, we might rule and serve all your creatures.  When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not abandon us to the power of death. In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you.  Again and again you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation.  Father, you loved the world so much that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our Savior.  Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, he lived as one of us, yet without sin.  To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation; to prisoners, freedom, to the sorrowful, joy.  To fulfill your purpose he gave himself up to death; and rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole  creation new.” (Book of Common Prayer, Page 373ff).   Now THAT is a eucharistic prayer!!!

With the ancient and traditional prayers of the Church, with the lectionary, which brings a wide range of Holy Scripture to us, and with sound Eucharistic prayers, we are bathed in the message, in the good news.  The sermon can fall short, but we are still getting what we need simply through good liturgy.  

To read more about where worship can go wrong and miss the point, especially where music is concerned, check this out: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ponderanew/2016/06/06/why-would-anyone-sing-in-church-these-days/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=FBCP-EVG&fbclid=IwAR3B7adtFa5P_kChykd-0Vhqml4mEqmgImk-aUD3_D2LPQQdTA0y7zE60D0

This is my story, at any rate.  Here is the bottom line.  Relax everybody.  You don’t have to have bells and whistles and a huge and different production every Sunday. Embrace your baptism and then… You just have to… first…be present…and second…embrace the tradition of the church.  It starts with a commitment to be there. And it continues with exposure to traditional worship. That is what my parents gave me, and I am so grateful. They took me when I wanted and when I didn’t.  And the worship of the church did what it has done for people for 2000 years.  Not everyone is captured, that is for sure.  That is okay. But never doubt the message.  Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.  I am sure there are lots of ways to get there, but I just want to give a shout out for the mundane and…extraordinary…experience of traditional worship.

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The Roman Catholic Church and Sex...Is there Hope for a Reformation?

This post is focused on the Roman Catholic Church.  But first,   full disclosure… I am Protestant…but also consider myself to be catholic.  I am a Christian who exercises the faith within the  Episcopal Church, a denomination that grew out of the Church of England.

The Church of England is reformed, but in the end, the Reformation in England was a conservative one.  With numerous ups and downs, movements this way and that, the Church of England ended up by affirming what it considers to be the essentials of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church;

1) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments 

2) The Sacraments commanded by Jesus in Scripture, Holy Communion and Holy Baptism 

3) The Creeds especially the Nicene Creed which was agreed upon in Ecumenical Councils and

4) The apostolic ministry of Bishops. 

 So that is where I am coming from.  Now, back to the Roman Catholic Church.

I know that using the descriptive, “Roman”, is controversial. (See McBrien's "Catholicism" for his argument for not using the descriptive, "Roman."    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CO4GOD2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

The descriptive, "Roman" is not perfect, but it is better than conceding the word “catholic” to those Christian groups in communion with the Bishop of Rome.  Without the descriptive word, “Roman” it would seem that only those churches in communion with Rome are catholic.  That is simply not true.

In reality, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church is much larger than the churches currently in communion with or recognized by Rome. I know that the Roman Catholic Church uses the term differently, but I disagree.  So, when talking about the Roman Catholic Church, I am talking about all those churches which are in some way formally related to the Bishop of Rome, i.e. the Pope. I am talking about churches which concede authority to that one person.

Now, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the one true church. I disagree.   I include the Roman Catholic Church and I only wish they would include me…and the Lutherans, Methodists, the Baptists and so on, as a part of the Church.  What all these churches hold in common is so much more than the differences.

Regardless, and with that as a preface, here’s the bee in my bonnet at the present moment. The Roman Catholic Church has been guilty of incredible perversity and sin.  I am not talking about way back when, I am talking about recent history.  As one instance, the New York Times (March 2, 2016 page A 15)  ran this headline, “Pennsylvania Diocese Leaders Knew of Sex Abuse for Decades, Grand Jury Says.”  This is one in along line of stories about the awful, and awfully sinful behavior of the Roman Catholic Church.

There are many, many reasons the Roman Catholic Church protected evil predators.  I think that their governance structure, which has no place for the rank and file, for lay people, is a factor.  It was too easy for the ordained folks to circle the wagons.  And this is not even to address the fact that women are not given full status or included in decision making, either as lay people or as "religious." 

But I also think a big part of the problem lies with the Roman Catholic understanding of sexuality.  Since about the year 1000 the Roman Catholic Church decreed that clergy should be celibate.  Hardly any of them were, but without priests having "legitimate" children, the Roman Catholic Church could protect its interests and property.  (I put "legitimate" in quotes.  My father taught me that adults can certainly act in illegitimate ways, but children are always legitimate.)

This elevation of celibacy might have been a practical matter in a lot of ways.   But it couldn’t have been made without sexual intercourse being seen as somehow not quite proper for holy people.  There was a denigration of robust human sexuality, leading I think, to a misunderstanding and suppression of sexual response in the name of spiritual progress.  Suppression ends badly.

So…what is the Roman Catholic teaching about sex?  Here you go…and I am using the official “Catechism of the (Roman) Catholic Church” as my source.   

“People should cultivate chastity in the way that is suited to their state of life.  Some profess virginity or consecrated celibacy…Others live in the way prescribed by the moral law, whether they are married or single.  Married people are called to live conjugal chastity; others practice chastity in continence.” (Paragraph 2349, Catechism of the Catholic Church, English copyright 1994)

“Those who are engaged to be married are called to live chastity in continence….They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love.” (Paragraph 2350)

“(E)very action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil…” ( Paragraph 2370)

“Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.  The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.  For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.” (Paragraph 2352).

“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.  They are contrary to the natural law.  They close the act to the gift of life.  They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.  Under no circumstances can they be approved…Homosexual persons are called to chastity.  By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”  (Catechism paragraphs 2357 and 2359)

So there you have the whole repressive theology of the Roman Catholic Church concerning sex. No birth control. Sex only in heterosexual marriage and then only for procreation.  No masturbation. No homosexual relationships.  And here’s the thing…beliefs have consequences, and I think we are seeing those consequences in the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, world wide, where sexual predation is concerned.

I like Francis, I do. He has made some great statements.  But…the institution over which he presides is way off base and misguided on the subject of sexuality.  Unless and until this underlying issue is addressed, I do not hold out much hope for a true reformation of the Roman Catholic Church.



PS  And just to continue the conversation, nuance it a bit, and make it clear I am not arguing for having no rules...here's a great article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/opinion/sunday/sex-christian.html?auth=login-email&login=email  And a quote from the article: "Purity culture as it was modeled for evangelical teenagers in the 1990s is not the future of Christian sexual ethics. But neither is the progressive Christian approach that simply baptizes casual sex in the name of self-expression and divorces sex from covenant faithfulness and self-sacrificial love."

I BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY...

 I am retiring soon, after 40 years of working in the church, 35 of them as an ordained minister.  Naturally enough, given this transition and my age, I am thinking about death, MY death.  My own death is coming into focus in a way it hasn’t heretofore.

Maybe I have 10 more good years, maybe less or maybe more. But death is coming.  This knowledge can make one frantic…I’ve got to keep moving to do all the things I said I wanted to do.  It can also contribute to melancholia… to a deep sense of regret at all the things I’d hoped to do but didn’t.  Looking back contributes to sadness.  Looking forward contributes to anxiety and frantic activity.

When I start thinking this way, I betray my own faith.  After all, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”  Those words, at this point in my life, are starting to have ever greater meaning.

One of the things I am doing as I retire, is giving away my theological library.  I am keeping very few things.  One book I received years ago, but never really read, is “Dogmatics in Outline” by Karl Barth.  I almost gave this thin volume away, but ultimately rescued it from the pile. I am glad I did so because it had a timely word for me regarding resurrection.

The origin of the book merits a word. The book relates a series of lectures given by Barth just after WWII.  “These lectures were delivered in the semi-ruins of the once stately Kurfürsten Schloss in Bonn…Most people in the Germany of to-day have in their own way and in their own place endured and survived much, almost beyond all measure.  I noted the same in my Bonn lads.  With their grave faces, which had still to learn how to smile again, they no less impressed me than I them, I who was an alien, the centre of all sorts of gossip from old times. For me the situation will remain unforgettable.  By a mere coincidence it was my fiftieth semester.  And when it was past, my impression was that for me it was the best ever”  writes Barth in the Foreword.

Now, on to the topic at hand. Toward the end of the book and in the section on resurrection, Barth says, “A Christian looks back (as done when talking about sin and the forgiveness of sin). A Christian looks forward, we now say.  This looking back and looking forward constitute the life of a Christian…the life of a (person) who has received the Holy Spirit, who may live in the congregation and is called to be in it a light of the world. A (person) looks forward.  We take a turn, as it were, of 180 degrees: behind us lies our sin and before us death, dying, the coffin, the grave, the end. The (person) who does not take it seriously that we are looking to that end, the (person) who does not realise what dying means, who is not terrified at it, who has perhaps not enough joy in life and so does not know the fear of the end, who has not yet understood that this life is a gift of God…the (person) who, in other words, does not grasp the beauty of this life, cannot grasp the significance of ‘resurrection’. For this word is the answer to death’s terror…”

This is a good sort of looking back and looking forward, released from sadness and anxiety.  And speaking of the future Barth goes on to say,  “And now the Christian…looks forward.  What is the meaning of the Christian hope in this life? A life after death? An event apart from death?  A tiny soul which, like a butterfly, flutters away above the grave and is still preserved somewhere,  in order to live on immortally?  That was how the heathen looked on the life after death.  But that is not the Christian hope.  (My emphasis!)   ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body.’  Body in the Bible is quite simply (humanity)… (humanity) moreover, under the sign of sin, (humanity) laid low. And to…(humanity) it is said, Thou shalt rise again.  Resurrection means not the continuation of this life, but life’s completion…”

So what I have to look forward to is life’s completion. I don’t have to be overcome with regrets or become frantic.  In God’s grace, my life and the life of all creation, will be completed.  That only comes through death, but death itself is transformed.  It is not simply a terror, but death becomes  the door, opening into new life in the age to come.  As I prepare to retire, and as I live with all the thoughts and questions this brings to the surface…I find myself saying, with new meaning, hope, and purpose… “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.”  So, onward to the future!

(Quotes are from "Dogmatics in Outline" by Karl Barth, trans. G.T. Thomson, publ by the Philosophical Library, New York, NY, 1949.  Foreword page 7, quotes on resurrection pgs 153 ff)

STAY TUNED...I certainly haven't used this blog very frequently.  But that may be about to change.  I am retiring on June 30, 2019.  My plan is to use this blog, at least a bit more than in the past, to discuss and keep track of what my thoughts are during this important transition. Please stay tuned.   Just below, a photo of me preaching my last Easter Sunday Sermon.