I am falling behind the times faster than I thought. It seems that all my children, nephews and nieces, all adults, are on Facebook. But that’s not all! So is my wife, my banker, and Barak Obama. And they’ve all got these lists of friends. I wonder if my nephews and nieces think it’s odd to be “friends” with “Old Auntie D?” What do I have? A half dozen theology nuts, a guy named Geezer and a few others who sometimes leave anonymous comments. Obviously there is something I’m missing here, but the odd thing is, I don’t really care very much, and that bothers me too. Isn’t this something I should care about? I wonder if Martin Marty is on Facebook. If he is that may be just the thing that tips me into it, or onto it, or whatever you call it.
Month: August 2008
Lambeth Sidebar
Some of my readers may wonder why I have shown such little interest in the Lambeth Conference now coming into its final days, not to rise again for another ten years. After all, even Stephen Colbert did a lengthy piece on it. There are plenty of other sites that are dedicated to, one might even say obsessed with, Lambeth, and I have offered my thoughts on several of them. I taught a workshop on Lambeth at the small rural church I serve in retirement, and offered my materials to any other priest in our diocese who might want to use them. I get daily updates on Lambeth goings on from multiple sources of varying reliability. The one thing they all have trouble with is remembering and having faith that this is not our church but God’s church of which we are the temporal custodians.
I love our Anglican ways, especially as they are expressed in the Episcopal Church, and I hope that the greater Anglican Communion can grow in godly wisdom and strength. I favor a covenant of some kind to give more structure and identity to the communion, but not in a form that is built around punitive discipline. I regret the controversies over homosexuality and personally favor full inclusion in ways that bring all into making commitment to the fullness of the Christian moral life, and that would mean finding a way to provide blessings for same sex unions, but only through a solid biblically based theological argument.
My prescription for dealing with fulminating extremists frothing at the mouth is probably not very acceptable to the majority. I would require them to join together in missionary outreach for three to five years in a certain place. The Falkland Islands come to mind, perhaps somewhere in the outer Aleutians, or, if they are too cold and wet, how about Midway?
In the meantime, I want to get on with proclaiming the gospel, celebrating the sacraments, teaching and forming disciples, helping others discover their gifts for ministry, and being the pastor I am called to be, even as a retired priest and aspiring curmudgeon.
Time in a Bottle
Time is such a precious commodity. Children anticipating some wonderful future event discover it to pass way too slow. Adults know it to be the opposite, increasing in velocity with each passing year. A recent conversation on another blog circled around the nature of time as they pursued the question of universal salvation. The problem is always one of coming to an understanding of what it means to say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, what it means to confess Jesus as Lord and whether there is any human time limit to when that confession must be made. It reminded me of an old Jim Croce song:
If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that Id like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you
If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
Id save every day like a treasure and then,
Again, I would spend them with you
Grasping time seems to lie just beyond our reach, and when it finally comes, it slips through our tightly held fingers never to be retrieved or redeemed by our own effort. Saving time in a bottle is, after all, just wishful thinking suitable for romantic songs.
At least that is true from a human point of view, but it seems to me that the birth, life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus demonstrate that from God’s point of view none of that is true. It’s not, I believe, that in God’s presence there is no time, but that in God time is fungible, elastic, multidirectional, multidimensional. The mystery of it is enormous, and we must be extremely cautious about making salvation seem like a limited time television offer with operators standing by to receive our urgent call at 1-800 JESUS SAVES.
I think something like that is what C.S. Lewis was driving at in his classic little book The Great Divorce where those long dead and existing in hell always had a chance to go to heaven but chose to turn away, even after having taken a brief “fam” trip to see what it was like.