3/30/13

Hallelujah!

It is of course a common tradition across the English-speaking church (at least among Protestants) to sing Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" at Easter.  I've been driving around listening to the Holy Week sections of "Messiah" the last few days.  In the video below, gathered in their beautiful gothic sanctuary, the chapel and chancel choirs of the First United Methodist Church of Wichita Falls herald the Resurrection with this great chorus.

A Prayer for Resurrection Sunday:

Almighty God, through Jesus Christ you overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life. Grant that we, who celebrate the day of our Lord's Resurrection, may, by the renewing of your Spirit arise from the death of sin to the life of righteousness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-The United Methodist Hymnal, 320 (see also The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 222)


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3/26/13

Prayers for Holy Week meditation


Among the many liturgical treasures in the (under-utilized) United Methodist Book of Worship are the prayers for Holy Week (these prayers are sometimes called "collects" - because they "collect" together the needs of the faithful community into a single prayer).  The Collects for Monday-Thursday are found in one section together in the Book of Worship (346-349) and those for Friday and Saturday are on pages 362 and 367, respectively.  In keeping with that larger Anglican liturgical heritage that we Methodists have preserved and adapted in our official worship books, most of these are taken from or inspired by The Book of Common Prayer, which was so beloved by John and Charles Wesley.

There are also alternative prayers for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday in the Hymnal.

Monday of Holy Week
God of strength and mercy, by the suffering and death of your Son, free us from slavery to sin and death and protect us in all our weakness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Tuesday of Holy Week
Holy and compassionate God, your dear Son went not up to joy before he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified.  Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross may find it the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son, our Savior.  Amen.

Wednesday of Holy Week
Most merciful God, your blessed Son, our Savior, was betrayed, whipped, and his face spat upon.  Grant us grace to endure the sufferings of the present time, to overcome all that seeks to overwhelm us, confident of the glory that shall yet be revealed; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer.  Amen.

Holy Thursday
O God, by the example of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, you taught us the greatness of true humility, and call us to watch with him in his passion.  Give us grace to serve one another in all lowliness, and to enter into the fellowship of his suffering; in his name and for his sake.  Amen.

Good Friday
Almighty God, your Son Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross so that he might draw the whole world to himself.  Grant that we, who glory in this death for our salvation, may also glory in his call to take up our cross and follow him; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Holy Saturday
Merciful and everliving God, Creator of heaven and earth, the crucified body of your Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy day.  Grant that we may await with him the dawning of the third day and rise in newness of life, through Jesus Christ our Redeemer.  Amen.

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3/25/13

Archbishop (and Pope) installed!

You probably heard about the recent election of Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church, but that event so overshadowed a second big event, you may not have heard that only 2 days after Francis was installed as Bishop of Rome, Rev. Justin Welby (whose more overtly political election took quite a bit longer) was installed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. 

It is generally understood that Roman Catholicism is the largest branch of Christianity with 1 Billion members, and Anglicanism the third largest branch (after Easter Orthodoxy) with 80 million Anglicans around the world today.  Methodism (with 60-70 million 'Wesleyan' Christians around the world) has close ties to Anglicanism going back to our origins (John and Charles Wesley, and many other early Methodist leaders including our first Bishop Thomas Coke, were all Anglican priests) and in some places (notably in the UK) the Methodists and Anglicans are actively working on "reunion" schemes.  The final hymn in Welby's installation service was even a Charles Wesley hymn. 

Archbishop Justin takes the helm as Anglicanism is in a real crisis.  Some of the other archbishops around the world have declared themselves to be in impaired or broken communion with other Anglicans (mostly in reponse to US and Canadian innovations in allowing practicing gay bishops and same-sex 'weddings').  In the US the Anglican Church in North America has been established as a more orthodox alternative to the Episcopal Church and has already been recognized as a legitimate part of Anglicanism by about half of the Anglican Communion (but not by Canterbury or the Church of England). 

Sadly, these two US churches are now involved in property disputes in the secular courts.  It is an interesting side note that the chapter in the Bible that forbids Christians from taking one another to court - 1 Cor. 6 - also warns against same-sex practice as incompatible with living under the Lordship of the God who created us male and female.     

My own sense of what needs to be done is no doubt at least as short-sighted, biased, and wrong-headed as everyone else's, but I will be praying that Archbishop Welby - known to be a moderately-conservative evangelical with lots of leadership and reconciliation experience - will bring the kind of decisive action that Anglicanism needs to recenter upon the Lord and his Word and move forward in a mission that is thoroughly built upon the Bible as wisely interpretted by the Great Tradition across the ages.

So, in case you missed it, I am happy to present videos featuring (selections from) these two momentous installations.  First that of the new Anglican Archbishop on March 21 (the feast of St. Benedict and of Thomas Cranmer).  That date is quite appropriate since St. Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury was a Benedictine monk, and Thomas Cranmer the great "Protestant Reformer" Archbishop of Canterbury who compiled the Book of Common Prayer during the Reformation Era...



And then the inaugural mass of Francis, the new Roman Catholic Pope (on March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph, guardian of Jesus and Mary).  As in Texas, they do everything "big" in Rome.

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3/21/13

Church vandalized and set on fire

Vandals broke in, smashing a window, and set Bibles and worship books on fire in an attempt to burn down the church.  Thankfully the fire did not spread far.  Where did this assault on the Christian community happen, you ask?  India?  The Middle East?  North Africa?  Actually, this attempted church-destruction took place in Wales, in the United Kingdom.  Though Wales has been home to a Christian community since ancient Roman times, I worry that we will see more of this sort of thing in the future in Western nations.

3/20/13

New District alignment posted

For those in the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, the new district alignment is now posted online here.

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3/12/13

What St. Patrick can teach us

Last year the United Methodist Church homepage featured this article on what we can learn from the ministry of Saint Patrick, the famed missionary bishop to the Irish.  Patrick's feast day is (as everyone knows thanks to beer advertising) March 17, which is this coming Sunday.  Contrary to popular belief, Patrick was not born in Ireland, but was born in Northwest England.  He was raised as a Christian in Roman Britain but was kidnapped as a youth and made a slave in Ireland.  After escaping from slavery, he was led by the Lord through a dream to seek ordination in the Church and return to the pagan Irish as a missionary to set free from spiritual slavery the very people who had once held him captive. 

Being a Saint of the British Isles, Patrick has had a special place in the memory of Anglicanism (out of which we Methodists spring) and therefore of English-speaking Christianity more generally.

The time of Patrick's ministry (late 4th - late 5th Centuries) puts him squarely in the period of the Early Church Fathers, though (in my experience) he is not often mentioned in Patristic studies or included in Patristic commentaries.  This is likely because, while Patrick left us some spiritual writings (his auto-biographical Confession, some letters, and the prayer called "The Breastplate (Lorica) of St. Patrick") he wrote no no Biblical commentaries or theological treatises, and his ministry work was on the margins of the ancient world, far from the intellectual centers where most of the theological debates were playing out that would shape Christian orthodoxy. 

His collected writings fill only about 40 pages of appendices in The Wisdom of St. Patrick.  As a side note, his Confession makes not mention of driving the snakes from Ireland, but I suspect that story actually arose as an allegory - the snakes representing pagan religions - that was then (mis)interpreted literally (as happens with other ancient and spiritual texts!).

As the article on the United Methodist website points out, Patrick found creative ways to communicate the Christian gospel to the Irish people. This year maybe we can do more than drink a green beer in honor of this great saint - maybe we can instead follow his example in finding a creative way of sharing our faith with others. 

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3/4/13

Good Blog Post on Sabbath-keeping

I recently ran across a really good post on Sabbath-keeping at the Through the Wardrobe Blog - which happens to be authored by my brother (and fellow United Methodist clergyman) Nance Hixon.  Here is the beginning of the post, click the link below to read it all:

Last night I gave a talk on the practice of Sabbath. While I was getting ready for that I looked through a number of resources, but one that I spent more time with than I expected and enjoyed more than I expected was Norman Wirzba's book Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight.

To keep people thinking about the topic and to share some things I didn't get in during the program last night, I wanted to offer a few quotations here from the book (and the book's preface by one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry).

Wendell Berry opens the preface by describing the "industrial era" with its ideal of "ceaseless pandemonium."
... The industrial economy, by definition, must never rest. Rest would deprive us of light, heat, food, water, and everything else we need or thing we need. The economic impulse of industrial life (to stretch a term) is limitless. Whatever we have, in whatever quantity, is not enough. There is not such thing as enough. Our bellies and our wallets must become oceanic, and still they will not be full. Six workdays in a week are not enough. We need a seventh. We need an eighth... We need a job for the day and one for the night. Thank God for the moon! We cannot stop to eat. Thank God for cars! We dine as we drive over another paved farm. Everybody is weary, and there is no rest.
To rest, we are persuaded, we must “get away.” But getting away involves us in haste, speed, and noise, the auxiliary pandemonium, of escape. There is, by the prevailing definition, escape, but there is no escape from escape. Or there is none unless we adopt the paradoxical and radical expedient of just stopping.

Sabbath, he says, is the answer. Berry puts it simply: "The requirement of Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest the world continues without our help."

Click here to read it all.

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