Bloomsday in Ireland

Our time in Dublin just happned to include June 16 - Bloomsday. Bloomsday is the holiday that celebrates the great Irish novelist, James Joyce. His great novel, Ulysses takes place on June 16th. Although I was not in the "right" part of Dublin to take in the celebration, I did see a the banners celebrating Bloomsday and a few people dressed up in Edwardian clothes, going to the sites included in the novel.

I have to admit that I tried and failed at Ulysses. I barely got by a few chapters until I just couldn't figure it out. I have enjoyed Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as well as his first book, Dubliners, a collection of short stories. I decided that, since I was going to be in Dublin, I would take Dubliners with me for another read. It was an amazing experience. All the streets, the parks, the pubs of Dublin became a bit more real to me as I read Joyce and his descriptions of his city.

While on the bus ride out to Newgrange, I picked up the book and read the first story, The Sisters. All of the sudden, I remembered the impression it left on me when I first read it. It is a story of a young boy, who finds out that an ailing priest whom he had befriended, died the past night. He is angry at how superficially all the adults are taking this. The priest made a huge impression on the boy. The boy reflects, "the duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards to secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them."

The priests decline toward death started when he dropped a chalice. One of the sisters recalls, "It was the chalice he broke...That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still...They say it was the boy's fault. But poor James was so nervous. God be merciful to him!"

I always held that image in my head as I went into ministry: dropping the chalice. For me, it was a symbol of that moment when a person consciously or unconsciously decides to stop the struggle to live and look forward to death. I've seen it time and again in ministry. People put up a valiant fight, then one day, it just gets too heavy - death is more preferrable to life.

Rereading it, dropping the chalice reminded me of the weight of ministry. Often, ministry is so filled up with the day-to-day, the mundane ordinary stuff that has to get done, that I don't realize what my calling is. I then am reminded of my seminary days, when I was in awe of what I was called to do, and filled with a sense of unworthiness. Nonetheless, God did call me, as God called other men and women to somehow handle these sacred mysteries - to handle the body and blood of Christ. To preach God's Word to people. To be a vehicle of God's presence. No wonder the priest dropped the chalice, no wonder he got so nervous.

In some ways, I think God blesses us with the ordinary, so that the awsome mystery and gravity of what we do as ministers does not overwhelm us. T.S. Eliot said that "humans cannot take too much reality." I think that is what happened to the priest. Ultimately, the reality got to him, it overwhelmed him with its weight and sent him to his death.

James Joyce had a lot to say to me in Ireland. He really is a writer that plumbs the depths of our life. He understood the gritty reality of life as well as the spiritual side. I am grateful that I had the perfect occasion to encounter his writings once more. Now, perhaps with a lot of help from a companion book I can try to work on Ulysses again.

A Dutchman in Ireland

I never really imagined going to Ireland. There are many other places in Europe and elsewhere I'd rather go, but since my wife had business there, I tagged along. I have to admit, I went there with trepidation. I am half Dutch and, from early in life, my father gave me a strong sense of what it means to be of Dutch heritage. Unfortunately, part of that heritage is a strong suspicion of anything Roman Catholic. With Ireland's history of religious conflict, I was a little skittish about being a Protestant minister with Dutch ancestry in that country.

The first impression I had was the remarkable similarity between Ireland and America: two countries that had to battle to get rid of the English. In some sense, there is a shared tradition of independence. There are statues all over Dublin of men who fought to liberate Ireland, just like Boston is filled with statues of men who fought to liberate America. I was feeling a bit better.

One day, we took an excursion that passed by the famous sight where the "Battle of the Boyne" took place in 1690. The tour guide explained it to me. It was an ordinary looking meadow next to the river Boyne, with cows lounging around. Yet it was a battle that still has an effect on life in Ireland.

It seems that when James II ascended the throne of England and Ireland, he turned the country back to Catholicism. This angered the protestant nobility, who eventually threw him off the throne in what was called "the glorious revolution." They crowned his daughter, Mary II, who was protestant and married to William III, or William of Orange, the King of the Netherlands (this is where the Dutch problem comes in).

James II retreated to Ireland and tried to gather up Irish forces to retake the throne. When William III heard of this, he sent his troops to Ireland. In the Battle of the Boyne, William III soundly defeated James II. Since Irish catholics rallied around James II, they were persecuted by William and Mary, and by the British monarchs ever since. It took almost two hundred years for Irish Catholics to be able to vote, to send their children to school or to own land. It took even more time for Ireland to gain its independence.

In some way, my Dutch heart leaped as we passed the sight of the Battle. Part of me was pushing for William III. Then I realized what his victory meant for the Irish and felt ashamed of my pride.

James II and William III entered into my trip later in the week, when I came to Christ Church. This church was originally a Viking church, and rebuilt by the Normans when they invaded. There is much history there. You can find the church treasures stored downstairs in the crypt of the church. This includes communion ware and candlesticks given by James II when he came to Ireland to view his domain and celebrate Mass. It also includes even bigger gold communion ware and candlesticks given by William III when he came to England as its conquering monarch and attended protestant services there.

As we came up from the crypt, one of the ministers of the church let visitors know that they would be having a prayer service for peace in one of the chapels. He told us that since Ireland has had such a bloody history of conflict involving religion, and since the Christ Church has had a historical part in that conflict, they pray for peace every day at noon.

When I heard this, I felt humbled. It brought it all back home. In my twenties, I began to get over a lot of the Dutch anti-catholic rhetoric of my childhood to see the beauty, depth and faith in Roman Catholicism. There is a lot of history that needs to be reconciled, work that is being done in Christ Church and other places. This is one reason I work for ecumenical bodies, and consider the reconciliation of all denominations as the number one priority of the church today.

Flying back, it really came to me. The reason so many Dutch are anti-catholic is because the Netherlands spent hundreds of years fighting to liberate their country from Roman Catholic Spain with William III's father and grandfather their national heroes. In a deeper sense, The Dutch and the Irish (and the Americans) do have something in common - the yearning for liberation from the oppression of a foreign power. And religion gets mixed up into the whole mess.

History is with us. The Battle of the Boyne still affects the Irish, just like the battles with Spain still affects the Dutch. Yet history does move on, miraculous things happen: liberation and peace comes to Ireland. Irish Protestants and Catholics pray for peace. Another tour guide explained the Irish flag this way: the green symbolizes the Catholic Nationalists, supporting an independent Ireland. The orange (as in William of Orange) symbolizes the protestant Unionists, the protestants who yearn for a reunion with Great Britain. The white in the middle symbolizes peace. The white expresses a hope that the green and the orange can find reconciliation and peace. This is my hope and prayer, too.

The Long View

This weekend, I was attending an ecclesiastical council of one of our association students in discernment. It was a great occasion. In the bulletin was a prayer attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated while serving Mass in a small chapel in a cancer hospital. If you haven't seen the movie, "Romero," starring Raul Julia, I highly recommend it. Romero was made archbishop of El Salvador because he seemed so timid, so humble, he probably wouldn't cause waves. Were they in for a surprise. When Romero became archbishop, he witnessed the suffering and oppression of his people at the hands of a brutual government and became the tireless voice of justice on their behalf.

In any case, this prayer spoke to me that day, and speaks to all of us who often get frustrated when our efforts seem like a "drop in the bucket."

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.

Amen.

Happy 500th Birthday John Calvin

July 10th marks the 500th anniversary of John Calvin, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) reformation theologian. When I tell people that I will be celebrating this, I get a lot of strange looks. One of the great gifts Princeton Seminary has given us this year is a website devoted to the reading of the entire of Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion," his theological masterpiece, in one year: http://www2.ptsem.edu/ConEd/Calvin/. Each day, the website gives you the reading and commentary on the section of the Institutes being read that week. You can even get the Institutes read on a podcast. I talk about this with great excitement with my friends, and again get strange looks. I know what they're thinking: isn't this the John Calvin who gave us the horrible doctrine of predestination? Isn't this the man who preached fire and brimstone, and intimidated the good people of Geneva into living a strict, joyless life?

Many times when people give me these and other misreadings of John Calvin, I ask them if they ever read anything by him. For the most part, the answer is either "no" or "not for a long time." This is quite unfortunate. When I started reading Calvin in seminary I was shocked to find someone who wrote with beauty and depth and grace. He was a man who would talk about the "sweetness of the Lord" as much as anything else. Calvin was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. Part of his classical education was the art of rhetoric. Unfortunately, rhetoric is no longer taught as much as it should. Rhetoric is the ability to put your point of view forward with as much conviction, art and grace as to thoroughly convince the reader or listener of your point of view. This is why the preaching professor at Andover Newton is a professor of "Sacred Rhetoric." Calvin was suspicious of art in general. He was an iconoclast at heart, believing images without thoughtful reflection and explanation have a way of making too powerful impression on a person. The faculty of reason is always needed to balance out these nonverbal messages. His art was the art of rhetoric, the art of words and reason, and he used his art with the utmost beauty.

I used to joke in seminary that our church history class theme was "he wasn't such a bad guy after all!" Week after week I would find my professors trying to reclaim the goodness of a figure in church history who has been judged as bad by our modern minds. John Calvin fits this mode. Calvin did indeed pastor and teach in Geneva, yet his authority in town was never as great as many think. He was actually born in Noyon, France, and came to Geneva partly by invitation, partly by exhile. French protestants in his day were being slaughtered by the Catholic government and he was a marked man. It took years for Calvin even to have citizenship in Geneva. Up to that point, he could not even vote in civil matters. He was constantly battling with the city government over the rights of the church versus the state.

It is true that Calvin did believe and teach the doctrine of predestination. Yet we must remember that everybody else, with the exception of a few thinkers, also believed in predestination, including Roman Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas. If you actually read what Calvin says about it, you might be surprised. It has a place in his Institutes, but not a high profile place. In essence, he believed that Christians should not discuss this doctrine or talk about it too much, as it causes far too much anxiety. He also believed that no one really knows his or her fate in life. You could be the best Christian churchgoer and still be headed for damnation. This totally eliminates all the judgments that we humans make about ourselves and others. Ultimately, he encourages us to act as if we are elected by God for glory and leave the rest to the mystery to God. Obviously, a lot of theology has been done since then to give us a better understanding of heaven and hell, and God's election, but for his time, Calvin offered a theology that actually had pastoral overtones to them. Unfortunately, after Calvin died, his "followers" took this doctrine and made it a central pillar of "Calvinism." They used it as a litmus test of orthodoxy, and strayed far from Calvin's original intentions. Sometimes, I wonder if Calvin would actually be a "Calvinist."

Yet Calvin, was also someone who "told it like it is." He was not about to be blinded to the reality of human sin. He took it very seriously, and if we have a problem of with his understanding of sin, perhaps it says as much or more about us than it does about Calvin. He was a man afflicted by many illnesses in life. He was also a man in the midst of a religious battle that had more than theological implications. It involved governments and wars, about persecution and freedom. If his writings seem far too anti-Catholic, we have to realize that he was writing for the survival of a people of faith to believe in what they believe. In this country, we take this far too lightly. In his time, what you believed was literally a matter of life or death.

Calvin was a brilliant thinker, versed in the ancient classics. He knew ancient Hebrew, Greek, Latin and other languages. He read the Bible in its original languages. He wrote his most famous works in Latin and then translated them into French. He took reformed doctrines that were being preached and written about and organized them in a systematic, coherent order that stands the test of time. Many politidal writers say that Calvin was the father of modern democracy, that much of America's founding documents owe a great debt to Calvin.

John Calvin was a monumental figure. He was a theologian who represented a milestone in Christian thought. So as July 10 approaches, please think of him. Offer God a prayer of gratitude for his gift to your life. Whether you know it or not, your life is probably better because of John Calvin.

Let's start at the very beginning

A great theologian (I can't remember who!) said where you begin is crucial to your theology. To begin here, we must begin with Jesus Christ, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. In the beginning was the Word, namely Jesus Christ. As the Barmen declaration so aptly put it: Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

Over my years of study and ministry, I have encountered many theologians and spiritual writers who have influenced me. John Calvin, whom we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of his birth is a fundamental influence. Karl Barth is the "modern" theologian who influences me the most. I am also a student of Reformed Church history, and have been duly influenced by the great Puritan "divines" of the 17th century.

Yet, as a pastor, I am also influenced by the lives of the many saints in my congregation. I live in the Houghs Neck section of Quincy, Massachusetts, a peninsula that juts out into the bay. It is a beautiful place to live, with magnificent views of the water and a great perspective on the Boston skyline. Many people here in Houghs Neck have lived here all their lives: they could not think of living anywhere else. There is a sense of community and stability here that is sadly lacking in many other places in our world. I often joke that everyone in my congregation is a "lifetime member." Their faithfulness and commitment to this small church is inspiring.

I am totally new to blogging and hope that this might serve as many people out there as possible. I pray for God's grace and peace to you all.