Prayer for Use of Technology

Lord, I am so often overtaken by machines, trapped by technology. My older skills are dying: I telephone instead of writing letters, I put on the CD instead of opening the lid of the piano, I drive to the shops in a sealed box well out of reach of my neighbours. And sometimes I feel controlled by what I should be controlling.

Help me to find my life again, enhanced and not eroded by these technical aids. Help me to take control, at least in my heart, and put them in their place. I do know that it is really a useful, impressive place: a place worthy of products of the highest human ingenuity. But I know too that it is a place where they are subordinate to human needs and human cares.

Help me, Lord, to rejoice at the machines, and to be hopeful about the future benefits they can bring.

May technology serve us Lord, so that we may better serve one another, and you.

Amen

—written by Jeff Astley and found at the After Sunday website

Liturgically correct sock-wearing

On May 11, we celebrated Pentecost at King of Peace and encouraged all to wear red. The participation was great and our seats were filled with red-wearing worshippers. That day, our Senior Warden Robin Davenport-Ray announced that we don't always wear the same color, but jokingly added that "next week the color will be blue." Yesterday, more than the usual number of folks were wearing blue, though none seemed to be in response to the remark made in announcements the previous week. Perhaps it was coincidence, or maybe a subliminal response to the suggestion.

In any case, it seems we have nothing on the mother church of the Diocese of Georgia. An Episcopal Church News Service article reports that the group at Christ Church Episcopal in Savannah has taken to liturgically correct sock-wearing as a playful way of being community. The story is online here: Episcopal joy persists in Savannah despite trying times.

The Vicar's Study & Where God Is

As my official church title is Vicar (meaning I serve King of Peace vicariously for the Bishop) and as my home office (where I do the real writing) has books and computer equipment kinda like this one...here is cartoonist Dave Walker's view from England of an office not unlike mine. Pretty accurate considering he has never come by my house. He also has a nice cartoon for showing where God actually is, that fits well with the Kids in the Kingdom yesterday where we went on a hunt to find all the places where God is present and discovered God is everywhere.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

The Church Is Not Ours

The church is not ours. The church is God's. The story is not ours. The story is God's. We are simply stewards of God's story. God's story tells us what God is up to, and God is up to the work of transformation. Transformation happens in the church, not because we are so smart or good at what we do. Transformation happens because God is good and is still at work reconciling the world through Christ. After all, the church's claim is not "He was risen," but rather, "He is risen!"

—Rick Barger, A New and Right Spirit

The Trinity

In tomorrow's Gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

That phrase "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" is perhaps the clearest formulation of the three persons of the Trinity we find in scripture. While we look and find things that point to the Truth of this understanding of God, the word "Trinity" itself is not found in the Bible. And yet, because of this quote from Matthew and some other passages, we would be hard pressed to declare the idea of the Trinity to be unscriptural. I bring this up as tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday of the church year devoted to a doctrine. As I said in my sermon last year, The Mathematics of The Trinity,

A seminary professor of mine asserted that if you can describe The Trinity, clear and distinctly so that anyone can understand it, then you are a heretic. Keep talking and we’ll figure out which kind. This is because our language and our under-standing fall short of being able to describe God.

John Wesley put it this way, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the triune God!” God is more than we can wrap our minds around and that is necessarily so.

Yet, we believe that God reveals God's inner life through nature (general revelation) and through scripture (specific revelation) and that though we can't comprehend fully who God is, we do trust that the outer self God reveals to us is a trustworthy guide to the inner life of God. And as Jesus was a full expression of that, we believe that within the Trinity, dwells all the love and compassion we saw manifest in Jesus. So while we fall short of comprehending God, we do gain much in the exercise of thinking about who God is and how God has acted. For a different take on this, there is the sermon in the archives Three Short Sermons on The Trinity.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

An Ardent Desire

All day today and tomorrow through lunch I will be at Trinity Episcopal Church in Statesboro, Georgia. They are the church that sponsored me for the ordination process. I will be there as a member of the Commission on Ministry, the group with the Diocese of Georgia that approves persons for ordination. It is a great honor to hear what God has been doing in the lives of the women and men who come before us. In that spirit, I offer this quote from Henri Nouwen:

It is not enough for the priests and ministers of the future to be moral people, well-trained, eager to help their fellow humans...the central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word, and to taste fully God's infinite goodness?

I pray for those seeking to respond to the call God has placed on their lives to do, not something higher or better, but to a particular ministry of ordained leadership within the ministry of Christ's Body, the church, which is the work of all the baptized.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

PS: Newly in the archives is Jay Weldon's Pentecost sermon, which he gave at St. Mark's Woodbine: We Need to Be a Little Crazy and my religion column for today's Tribune & Georgian: Consuming God.

Expanding Opportunities

Today, King of Peace will present a proposal to the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Georgia. Their approval is needed for any borrowing of money and building. I will be traveling to Statesboro, Georgia with Bill Bruce, JoAnn White, Colby Stilson, and Robert Davenport-Ray. We will ask for permission to get a line of credit of up to $100,000 to give us the room financially to take on a two-stage project.

In stage one, we will hook up to the City of Kingsland's sewage system, replacing our currently overtaxed septic system. This is the biggest facility issue blocking not only future building expansion, but also increasing use of the church and preschool. This project is estimated to cost $30,450 and to take less than two months to complete.

We are also working on plans to add an office and meeting space on what is currently the back porch of the church. That project is still in the engineering phase, but is estimated to cost $68,300 for the 1,300 sq. ft. addition. The proposed floor plan is online at kingofpeace.org/building/ As shown online it has not been completed by an architect or approved by the State Fire Marshall's office and so is subject to their changes.

Beginning phase two depends upon our completing the sewage project on budget and taking care of minor leak issues in the gutter and roof without incurring major expense while keeping the church's offerings up to meet the church's expenses. If these indicators stay in line, we will be building more meeting room before the year is out. This is all your church working to follow A Vision for the Future we laid out last fall to accommodate our future growth in a way that is both forward looking and fiscally responsible.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Five Heavy Words

The Eighth Bishop of Georgia, the Rt, Rev. H.W. Shipps, offered the following reflection for the newsletter of St. Paul the Apostle Episcopal Church in Savannah, where he attends:

Discussion of the means of our redemption, a major issue during the 16th century Reformation, is never out of date. Christians today must know the means by which we are saved. Several of the terms overlap in meaning, but point to the same divine action.

Justification How are you, a sinner, justified and brought into a right relationship before a righteous God? By the merits of the wholly righteous Son of God who offered himself as a propitiation or expiation for the sins of the whole world. Some would say forensic sacrifice. This unmerited gift is imputed or imparted to an individual at baptism.

Sanctification Although we are also sanctified at baptism, what usually is meant is the growth in holiness that follows baptism. The Christian matures in faith and practice while living in the context of Christ’s Eucharistic body, the Church. This is an infused gift of Grace.

Righteousness We have none of our own devising. All righteousness is a gift of God, imputed to us from Christ’s righteousness. Thus we can stand before God as redeemed sinners in a right relationship with God. We cannot earn righteousness by good deeds. St. Paul is very clear on this.

Redemption We are redeemed from our lost selves by Christ’s oblation of himself once offered for the sins of the whole world. Some would say a substitutionary sacrifice. Christ’s resurrection then completes our salvation.

Atonement Our at-one-ment with God is obtained by the self offering of the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Our sins treated as non-existent, as never having occurred, after our repentance and the confession of them. By the pure offering of Christ we thus are reconciled to God.

+HW Shipps

Prayer Anywhere

You can set up an altar to God in your minds by means of prayer. And so it is fitting to pray at your trade, on a journey, standing at a counter or sitting at your handicraft.

—John Crysostom (347-407)

The Good Samaritan and the Tipping Point

In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell tells of an expirement into the context in which someone would help someone else in need that used a retelling of The Good Samaritan as the context and then created a fake scenario in which someone needed help. They found that the telling of the story mattered less than those conducting the study thought it might:

Some years ago two Princeton University psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson, decided to conduct a study inspired by the biblical story of the Good Samaritan. As you may recall, that story, from the New Testament Gospel of Luke, tells of a traveler who has been beaten and robbed and left for dead by the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Both a priest and a Levite—worthy, pious men—came upon the man but didn’t stop, “passing by the on the other side.” The only man to help was a Samaritan—the member of a despised minority—who “went up to him and bound up his wound” and took him to an inn. Darley and Batson decided to replicate that study at the Princeton Theological Seminary. This was an experiment very much in the tradition of the FAE, and it is an important demonstration of how the Power of Context has implication for the way we think about social epidemics of all kind, not just violent crime.

Darley and Batson met with a group of seminarians, individually, and asked each one to prepare a short, extemporaneous talk on a given biblical theme, then walk over to a nearby building to present it. Along the way to the presentation, each student ran into a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning. The question was, who would stop and help? Darley and Batson introduced three variables into the experiment, to make its results more meaningful. First, before the experiment even started, they gave the students a questionnaire about why they had chosen to study theology. Did they see religion as a means for personal and spiritual fulfillment? Or were the looking for a practical tool for find meaning in everyday life? Then they varied the subject of the theme the students were asked to talk about. Some were asked to speak on the relevance of the professional clergy to the religious vocation. Others were given the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finally, the instruction given by the experimenters to each student varied as well. In some of the cases, as he sent the students on their way, the experimenter would look at his watch and say, “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving.” In other cases, he would say, “It will be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head over now.”

If you ask people to predict which seminarians played the Good Samaritan (and subsequent studies have done just this) their answers are highly consistent. They almost all say that the students who entered the ministry to help people and those reminded of the importance of compassion by having just read the parable of the Good Samaritan will be the most likely to stop. Most of us, I think, would agree with those conclusions. In fact, neither of those factors made any difference. “It is hard to think of a context in which norms concern helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritans, and yet it did not significantly increase helping behavior,” Darley and Batson concluded. ”Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literal stepped over the victim as he hurried on this way.” The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush. Of the group that was, 10 percent stopped to help. Of the group who knew they had a few minutes to spare, 63 percent stopped.

What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior. The words “Oh, you’re late” had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering—of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person.

—pages 163-166 of Malcolm Gladwell's, The Tipping Point

It reminds me of an earlier post in which Brother Richard Carter of the Melanesian Brotherhood told of a boy who didn't want to pass by even though it was just a play: I don't want to walk past.

Pentecost in Photos

May 11 was Pentecost Sunday. We celebrated both the birth of the Christian Church and Mother's Day. We also sent the Rev. John Rogers off for a year to be the interim rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Brunswick, Georgia.

The Episcopal Church Aids Mayanmar

Episcopal Relief and Development is, once again, responding to tragedy with support. ERD has a proven ability to find partners with whom to work to get the aid in after a natural disaster. Now that the low-lying Irrawaddy River Delta has been flooded with a 12-foot wall of water, food is short, the water supply is tainted and more suffering is anticipated. Abagail Nelson, ERD's VP for Programs says,

Episcopal Relief and Development's programs in Myanmar have helped people achieve economic stability through education, vocational training, and micro-finance initiatives. We have also provided tools and training to improve the food supply and access to clean water. This is a major disaster that will require a strong and committed response. Survivors urgently need water, food, and shelter. We must respond generously to save lives now and help people recover.

To help people affected by the cyclone in Myanmar, make a donation to ERD's "Myanmar & Cyclone Response" online here, or by calling 1-800-334-7626, ext. 5129. Gifts can be mailed to: Episcopal Relief and Development "Myanmar & Cyclone Response" P.O. Box 7058, Merrifield, VA 22116-7058 or click the ERD link above to donate funds online.

You can also find online an Update from the Anglican Church of the Province of Myanmar.

The highest perfection

The highest perfection consists not in interior favors or in great raptures or in visions, or in the spirit of prophecy, but in the bringing of our wills so closely in conformity with the will of God that, as soon as we realize that He wills anything, we desire it ourselves with all our might, and take the bitter with the sweet, knowing that to be His Majesty’s will.

—Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)