The Tebow Effect
I am not a professional football fan and usually, the only times I’m watching an NFL game are when it is the superbowl or when houseguests turn it on, which was the case last night when I caught the end of the Broncos/Steelers game.
I have been slightly paying attention to the Tebow stories as many friends of mine went to UF and now follow his career in Denver. I posted on my facebook a while back about “Tebowing,” snarkily stating that people have been genuflecting for years to show reverence and gratitude to God and that this was neither nothing new, nor earth shattering. I, for example, genuflect, on average, 10-12 times per week. No one has written an article about that.
I have nothing bad or negative to say about Tebow’s faith, or his public expression of it. In fact, I think it’s a positive thing – though the SNL skit was funny. I am glad there is a professional athlete so in the public eye who is so comfortable expressing their Christianity.
I do not think God is directly helping the Denver Broncos win football games. I think God gives athletes their gifts and abilities and when they use them, whether specifically to God’s glory or not, He smiles.
After last night’s game, my brother-in-law called (a UF grad and now a Broncos follower) ecstatic about the OT win (which actually was pretty exciting). He declared in no uncertain terms that this win “was a good thing for [me]!” He added that he suspected church attendance will go up this Sunday and that, hold your breath, he might even go to church this Sunday. He said Tebow’s continued success can only be good for those on the fence in the Christian community.
Now, we all had a good laugh at his remarks. But I wonder, is the Tebow effect a good thing? What if he gets hurt and can’t play? What if they start losing? What do those eventualities do to a person who has had their faith bolstered in such a way?
A similar thing occurred in a community with which I am familiar. They were/are an Episcopalian, Christian community centered on spiritual healing. They have done some amazing things in their church – truly amazing healings: emotional, mental, spiritual, and even physical healings. I’ve been a witness to a few incredible, God-given events there. In part because of all that, their members were extremely dedicated, faithful, evangelistic people. Then, one year, one of their principal members was diagnosed with cancer. As you might imagine, much prayer and laying on of hands was offered but in the end, this wonderful woman lost her battle to the disease. It rocked the faith of some of them. How could God allow this? This was a community dedicated to spiritual healing and how could God allow them to fail when one of their own was concerned? Those were the kinds of questions some were asking, actually, including me. It was hard for them.
So I am wondering, is the Tebow effect a good thing for Christian communities? What can pastors do to deepen the faith of those who seem to have expressed a conviction that God is on Tebow’s side? What do you think?
Fr. Ryan+
Novels, Books, and Music – New on the Website
The church website has been updated with loads of new information, so be sure the check it out!
Beginning on Wednesday, January 11, our Wednesday night class will be tackling satirical novelist Christopher Moore’s hilarious adventure, Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Pick up a copy today, begin reading and join us on Wednesday, Jan.11. A fuller description as well as the reading schedule is up on the Adult Christian Education page of our church website.
Later that same month, on Sunday, January 22, we’ll be reintroducing the idea of an informal, adult, Sunday morning discussion forum. We’ll be using Tom Nelson’s good book, Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work as we seek to deepen our understanding of how our faith informs the rest of our lives. Grab a cup of coffee and join us in the Rector’s office from 9:00 am – 9:40 am for this informal time of discussion and gathering. Again, more information is available on our Adult Christian Education page of our website.
Finally, last week or choir sang a beautiful rendition of the Magnificat (S-247 for those of you familiar with the hymnal) and we wanted to share it with all. It’s available on the Choir page of the website, or by clicking here!
Fr. Ryan+
Lessons and Carols, 2011
St. George’s Gala, 2011
What a great time was had by all at the 2011 St. George’s Gala – “A Dickens’ Christmas!” We had the most people (96!) come in recent memory and raised almost $7000 for the mission and ministry of St. George’s. Great job to all on the Gala committee and thanks to everyone who came out to help decorate in the days leading up to the Gala and for those who stayed late to help clean up. There are loads of pictures up on our Facebook Page, but please enjoy these here in the meantime!
Fr. Ryan+
An Advent Hymn
Signs of endings all around us -
darkness, death, and winter days-
shroud our lives in fear and sadness,
numbing mouths that long to praise.
Come, O Christ, and dwell among us!
Hear our cries, come set us free.
Give us hope, and faith, and gladness.
Show us what there yet can be.
Can it be that from our endings,
new beginnings you create?
Life from death, and from our rendings,
realms of wholeness generate?
Take our fears, then, Lord,
and turn them into hopes for life anew:
Fading light and dying season
sing their Glorias to you.
Speak, O God, your word among us.
Barren lives your presence fill.
Swell our hearts with songs of gladness,
terrors calm forebodings still.
Let your promised realm of justice
blossom now throughout the earth;
your dominion bring now near us;
we await the saving birth.
~Words by Dean W. Nelson
Prayers of Thanksgiving
You may have noticed a dearth of posts around here recently and for that, my three and a half week old son apologizes.
This week, those of us in or related to the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a time hallmarked by family, food, travel, and shopping. Some will celebrate with an edge, remembering the Native Americans from whom we took so much. Some, who have little for which to be thankful, will be frustrated and saddened by the happiness of others. And still others will be excited at all of the ways they can spend enormous amounts of money at ungodly hours and call it “saving.” No matter who you are or which situation you find yourself in, know that we at St. George’s are praying for you and are thankful for the ways in which you may have impacted us, whether you are a parishioner or just someone who stops by this blog to check in every so often.
If you’re in the Havertown area, why not stop by the Haverford Township Clergy Association’s Interfaith Thanksgiving Service? It’s being held this year, at 8pm on Wednesday, November 23 at the Armenian Martyrs’ Congregation, 100 N. Edmonds Avenue.
If not, let me leave you with a form of prayer for Thanksgiving (ironically taken from the Church of England’s Common Worship) that you may use privately, or in place of the sometime agonizing ritual of going round the Thanksgiving table declaring for what or for whom you are thankful.
Let us give thanks to God,
the God of all peoples of the earth.
For the colour and forms of your creation
and our place within it,
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
For our daily food,
and for those whose work and skill
bring your good gifts to us,
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
For the gifts and graces inspired in human minds and hearts;
for insight and imagination,
for the skills of research
which bring healing and fulfilment to the lives of many;
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
For the light and shades of the changing seasons,
and their variety and dependability;
for new life and growth out of barrenness and decay;
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
For new hope and strength in our communities,
especially in your Church and among all you call to serve you,
we bring our thanks, good Lord;
your mercy endures for ever.
For all in whose lives we see
goodness, kindness, gentleness, patience and humility,
and all the fruit of the Spirit,
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
For the life we have been given,
and for all those whom you have given us to share it,
we bring our thanks, good Lord:
your mercy endures for ever.
He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.
~ 2 Corinthians 9:10
Fr. Ryan+
Join us for an All Souls’ Day Service
Our All Souls’ Day service focuses on the Blessing of our Memorial Garden and giving thanks for those who have gone before us. Won’t you join us on Wednesday, November 2, 2011, at 7pm?
A Narrative Reading Plan of the Holy Bible
Yesterday, in my sermon, I spoke about spiritual stewardship and nurturing your relationship with God by spending time with God in prayer, but also in reading God’s Word, the Bible. Any relationship takes work. Reading Holy Scripture helps us to nurture our relationship with God, grow closer to God, and learn more about God and ourselves. This being the 400th anniversary year of the King James Bible – the first complete Bible to be translated into English and thus the vernacular of English speaking peoples, thereby putting the Holy Scriptures firmly into the hands of the laity and not solely in the hands of the learned clerical class – I wanted to encourage you to spend some time in God’s Holy Word this coming year.
There are a few ways to do that. As always, I promote the use of the Daily Office, where, if you follow the 2-year lectionary cycle, will have you reading the vast majority of the Bible while praying Morning and Evening Prayer.
A second way is to follow a “Read the Bible in 1 Year” plan. These are difficult to follow and keep up with, and many who start them get discouraged along the way. Still, it is a laudable and worthy goal and should you wish to try it, I can point you to some good plans.
Finally, there’s this way. I developed a while ago a “Narrative Reading Plan” for the Bible, which will take you through a large chunk of the scriptures. Its operating principle is that the Bible tells one story: the story of God’s saving acts through history with God’s people. Anything that didn’t further the narrative arc of that story, I crossed out of my reading plan. It doesn’t mean it’s not important, it just means it wasn’t important for this kind of a first read-thru. So, for example, when a reader gets to the Book of Leviticus – the place where most of the “Read the Bible in 1 Year” plans go to die – I ask the reader to read a representative chapter, so that the reader can get a taste of the Law, what it sounds like, and some of the things it says. But then I direct the reader to move on to Numbers. You don’t need to read all of the Law on your first read-thru, particularly if what we’re trying to do is follow the story. It is important to grasp the nature of the Law and its major place in history, but not important to get into its minutia just yet. That can be reserved for a second read thru. The same goes for lists of “begats,” lists of conquered territories in Joshua and Judges, and so on.
So, my Bible Challenge to you is to read more of the Bible this year than you did last year. For some of you, that might mean reading the whole thing. For others of you, that might mean reading Genesis 1:1. For most of you, that means following something like the Narrative Reading Plan of the Holy Bible, which doesn’t have a time limit, only a goal of finishing. Click the link below to get started!
Narrative Reading Plan for the Bible
Fr. Ryan+
Holy Dying
St. Jerome, by Caravaggio
These past two weeks, the broader St. George’s family has experience a number of deaths – some sudden, some expected; some tragic, some a blessing. For the families of those who have died, there are a number of costs, and the least of these is financial. There is an emotional cost, an energy cost, and a spiritual cost. Those who attend the services and grieve with the families experience some of those costs as well. As I have reflected over these past few weeks, on the deaths of friends and strangers alike, I am reminded of John Donne’s famous words, “Any man’s death diminishes me…” So, it doesn’t really matter that I knew some of these folk quite well and some not at all: the fact that I, as a member of a Christian community, participated in their requiems, their burials, and their family’s grief, or really even just participated in hearing their name read during the prayers of the people, means that I have been affected by their death. Their death has diminished me. In other words, I have paid an emotional, a spiritual cost. And so have you.
The above picture is a famous painting of St. Jerome. You see on his desk there a human skull. Jerome was neither morbid, nor obsessed with the occult.
Why Young Christians Aren’t Waiting
Here’s a link to a very interesting article about young Christian believers and sexual ethics:
“Why Young Christians Aren’t Waiting Anymore”
In seminary, in an ethics class, I wrote a paper about this very topic and arrived and some of the same conclusions as this article did. Namely, the biblical witness of sexual purity (which is often contradictory at best) before marriage was written in a time when women were married immediately after puberty and men were married only a few years after that. Nowadays, young women and men are not marrying until their late twenties and even early thirties, and studies are indicating that the average age of first marriages in the US is ever-increasing.
The argument that “kids these days” are having sex more and at a younger age because the culture is saturated by sex more so than ever doesn’t hold a lot of water for me. Culture has ALWAYS been saturated by sex. Always.
I remember that when I wrote my paper, I put up what was known as an “IM Away Message” – a communication tool very firmly ensconced in the late ’90′s and early part of the 2000′s! It read, to all my friends who cared to read it, “I’m writing an ethics paper on pre-marital sex and would love your thoughts.” My favorite response, which I used as the opening line of my paper, was from a college friend. She replied, “I have lots of thoughts about pre-marital sex. I’m not any of them are appropriate for your paper.” The point was that for unmarried young people, the topic was crossing their minds. I don’t think that was a surprising finding.
I believe what we need to do a better job at, as a society, is educating our young people about the potential consequences of sex, physical and emotional. Often they understand the possible physical consequences, but have absolutely no idea about the emotional side of things.
What are your thoughts?
Fr. Ryan+
