Giving thanks for the gift of all the wonderful folks at St. Marks, Capitol Hill today. It is a gift for to learn, teach, preach, and practice wisdom with friends on 3rd and A street in Southeast DC. It is a gift to live in tension with believers, skeptics, skeptical-believers, atheists, agnostics along various spectra, Episcopalians, Buddhist-Episcopalians, former Evangelicals, Jews, nones, recovering Roman Catholics, and those who have never been to church before but came in search of bread. The space made for the presence & absence of faith, the mystery of experiencing the Holy Eucharist together, and a common commitment to share in the sacrament of bread and wine no matter who you are or where you come from, no matter what you believe or do not believe is an invitation to accept and give love. For me, I find that this simple invitation, each time, deepens and binds me to something greater than myself. In this invitation I find grace in a holy dying and holy living that asks me to seek wisdom, love my enemy, and consider the possibility that as God is permanent and the World fluent, the World is permanent and God is fluent (A. Whitehead). After an encounter in open communion yesterday during our Thanksgiving Service in which we sang one of my favorite hymns, I Am the Bread of Life from the 1982 Hymnal (coincidentally written by my wife Hannahs godmother Betty Carr Pulkingham), I received a beautiful email on worship and thanksgiving last night from a friend at St. Marks. This perspective, published in a diocesan journal some years ago, is still true (for him) today. I am thankful for perspectives like his that, for me, mean I am able to say that I attend not one but two seminaries! Worship as an Act of Faith During a sermon in late 1996, Wesley Carr (soon to be Dean of Westminister Cathedral) told us that the Book of Common Prayer states our Anglican theology and that, consequently, our theology and worship are intertwined. On one level, his comment seemed unremarkable: when we come together to worship God, it seems logical that our activity would reflect our beliefs. But for me the comment was profound and reassuring because it reflected precisely where I am in my own spiritual journey. Most of us would explain their coming to church as an expression of their faith: “I worship because I believe.” I explain it differently: “I believe because I worship.” That difference in perspective stems from my personal religious journey (which is somewhat baffling, even to me). Both my parents were ethnic Jews, but they raised me as a member of the Ethical Culture movement, which holds that the concept of God has gotten in the way of religion and that the central religious issue is how we treat one another. Although I think my parents were agnostics, I (with the certainty of youth) was an atheist. I considered myself, however, to be deeply religious and joined the Queens, Philadelphia, and Washington Ethical Societies. After I left the Washington Ethical Society and started attending St. Mark’s, I found myself caught in the tension of wanting to participate fully while being an atheist. Although I think some could have carried off that balancing act, I couldn’t. Looking back, I think that Jim Adams (our former Rector) being at St. Mark’s was the first of three circumstances (being an Episcopalian, there had to be three) that combined to make me enough of a believer to embrace God and Christ. Jim’s ever-present skepticism taught me that doubting the existence of God is OK -- that skepticism and belief are really the same thing -- in a way that just hearing the words at St. Mark’s could not. The second circumstance was a conversation with Jim during my second confirmation class weekend, just before I had to declare my relationship to St. Mark’s. When I asked Jim why he was a Christian, he responded that when he was young, he was having trouble because of his desire to control everyone and everything. He said that giving up his life to God and to Christ allowed him to give up his need to control. Because control was (and is) an (if not “the”) issue for me, it was like hearing the voice of God inviting me, like Jim, to struggle, as a Christian, with my desire to control. The third circumstance that leads me to believe is my yearning to take communion, which is the profoundest sign that God is alive in my life. I can, to some extent, explain this yearning intellectually, because I have often longed for ritual and tradition. But that does not explain the emotional void I feel when I attend a service where I cannot take communion (like a service at my step-mother’s Unitarian Church or a Catholic service some years back). My yearning for the Eucharist most symbolizes my faith in God. I am willing, indeed, eager to love the Eucharist without understanding why. It is the ultimate surrender of control for this control freak (see above), a true act of grace for which I am grateful to God. So like most of us, I worship out of faith. In reaching for the bread and wine, I celebrate the miracle that God has allowed me to break down my wall of logic and control and bring me to his embrace. I believe in God because he gives me both the Eucharist and the desire to accept it.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 16:20:22 +0000
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