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+

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+

Fr. Ryan+

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

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+

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+

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.

Rather, he had a healthy appreciation for the fact that he was mortal (as did many of his era and beyond who kept similar “memento mori” –remember your mortality– objects on their desks).  Remembering his mortality encouraged him to live his life in a very intentional way, not wasting even one minute.  A funeral, or in this case, a series of funerals, can and should have a similar effect on us as we consider what it is to die.

Anglican Divine, Jeremy Taylor, writes in his famous 1651 book Holy Dying, that the person “…that would die well must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave; and then the gates of the grave shall never prevail upon [them] to do [them] mischief.”  What in the world does that mean?  That we should always be looking for death, or even be seeking it?  No, but that we should treat death, our own mortality, in such a way that when it is imminent (if we are afforded such an opportunity) that it does not shock us.  I remember sitting at my desk in March of 2004 as I prepared for a trip to the Holy Land reading the news reports of violence and mass death on both sides of the green line.  Before I could go on that trip, I had to be ok with my own mortality, with the fact that I could simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time and die.  I had to consider that.  To think about it.  It wasn’t easy, fun, or comfortable, but it was necessary.

For the Christian, death is not the last word.  If we treat it like it is we do a disservice to the Gospel at the least and we deny the power of the Resurrection at the extreme.  “For it is in dying that we are born into eternal life,” wrote St. Francis in his famous prayer.  You know who gets this?  Those that have been forced to face their own death.  A person like the cancer patient.  A person like the soldier.  But are they dying any more than those of us not suffering with cancer or living in a theater of war?  No.  Just in a more visible way.  They don’t have the option of ignoring their own mortality.

Culturally, we don’t like to think about death.  We like to privatize it, to hide it, to shield ourselves from it.  This is vain, because “all of us go down to the dust.”  We pull mauve curtains across hospital room doors, and when someone asks us how we’re doing with whatever is going on behind that curtain, we politely respond, “I’m fine.  Well, you know, as fine as I can be.”  Which is one of the biggest lies I have ever had the pleasure of hearing repeatedly.  Just like we hide death from ourselves, we prevent ourselves from feeling the grief of losing a friend or family member.  Because we don’t like emotion and when someone asks us how we’re doing nine times out of ten they don’t really want to hear the answer.  They don’t want to hear, “I feel awful, like a pit is opening in my stomach.  I am going to miss ____ so much I just can’t stand it.  I feel so helpless…” and then to have that dissolve into a teary heap of crumpled kleenex.  Generally, we don’t know how to deal with that.

But, we are getting better.  The advent and growth of hospice care is performing a modern miracle, not just with their patients, but with their patients’ families and friends.  We’re not hiding death behind that mauve curtain as much as we once did.  More and more of us are dying in the comfort of our own homes, surround by family not by physicians; arms wrapped in blankets, not plastic tubing; comfortable in our surroundings and not frightened.  We’re learning, slowly I think, not to fear death as much as we once did.  And this is a good thing.  Because as Jeremy Taylor writes, if our “minds and resolutions [become] capable of death and [we] thought it a dishonorable thing with greediness to keep a life that must go from us, to lay aside its thorns, and to return again circled with a glory and a diadem,” they we are living more fully into what it means to be a Christian than ever before.

None of us should ever die suddenly and unprepared, as our Great Litany prays.  Remembering our mortality is important.  The health department won’t let you keep a human skull on your desk anymore but you shouldn’t have to.  Particularly in a time like our church has just experienced, when we’ve lost four of our own so close together.  Our mortality is ever before us, and because of that, our hope is also ever before us.  I want to conclude with another quote from Jeremy Taylor:

“This should teach us to value our time, since God so values it, and, by his so small distribution of it, tells us it is the most precious thing we have.  Since therefore, in the day of our death we can have still but the same little portion of this precious time, let us in every minute of our life, I mean in every discernable portion, lay up such a stock of reason and good works, that they may convey a value to the imperfect and shorter actions of our death-bed, while God rewards the piety of our lives by his gracious acceptation and benediction upon the actions preparatory to our death-bed.”

Laying up that stock of good works isn’t hard and can begin right now.  Tell your spouse you love them.  Push back your meeting and go to your kid’s ball game.  Come to church on Sunday morning.  Tell a friend what they mean to you.  Buy a homeless person a cup of coffee.  You get the idea.  Value your time…every discernable portion.

Fr. Ryan+

“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+