There is a paradox in the world of building highways. A reasonable person might observe a congested four lane road and believe that doubling the size of the road to eight lanes would decrease traffic congestion. But the reality is quite different and has been observed in cities around the world for fifty years. If you build a bigger road from point A to point B, the traffic congestion will remain about the same as before or worse. Read more…
Rights
I have followed the latest culture wars over the appointment of Sarah Jeong to the New York Times editorial board. When I first heard about the appointment, I was upset about the apparent double standard and Ms. Jeong’s tweets about white people that would be judged racist or worse if any other race group were to be substituted for “white.” But then I read what she said and realized that, very often, her writings were in response to even uglier words hurled by her detractors. Not a great strategy for a response to ugliness, but understandable if you are not a member of the dominant power group in North America that is white. Read more…
Cultural Epistemology
According to that wizard of the web, Google, epistemology is “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.” Reading a National Geographic article about India recently, I reached a new understanding of how we come to know things – it is often culturally dictated.
Warning: This note contains references to human practices that are seldom mentioned in public. While other countries were mentioned in the article, India was the most developed nation of the group. So, we have the very odd situation of urban and rural residents of India who pay good money for cell phones with Internet service, defecating in open fields. The global health term for this practice is “OD” and the first word is “Open.” Read more…
Schedule 80
Being co-owner of a winery, I get to do some things with technology that are not generally done by the average home-owning handy-person. The latest project has involved installing a seven-ton (84,000 BTU) glycol chilling unit to cool wine tanks. The plumbing used to circulate the coolant (propylene glycol) is a stronger form of PVC pipe like they use for your lawn sprinklers called “Schedule 80.” The stronger stuff withstands the constant pressure and temperature changes in this application. The cheap stuff at the big-box hardware store will never hold up to these conditions. Read more…
The Eschaton
The “eschaton” (pronounced “esk’ ka ton’’) is a Greek word in the Bible referring to the end of times. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet preaching about the imminent end of time and the return of the “son of man.” He uses this word a lot. For me, in these last few days of sabbatical, it is also the end of times. The end of that daily view of the blue Aegean Sea, the end of daily swims in the sea, talking to locals, writing and reflecting about serious things. I am sad to see the time go. Most of all, I am grateful for the time.
Hubris, Ignorance and just plain Foolishness
My uncle wrote his physics Ph.D. dissertation in 1939 at the University of Chicago on nuclear fusion. Fusion is the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and nearly all suns in the cosmos. Only a decade before did scientists realize that lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium could fuse together to form a heavier element and give off energy in the process. There was great confidence in the 1920s and 30s that figuring out how to harness the energy of the sun was just around the corner. Soon the world would be powered by abundant, inexpensive, non-polluting energy sources. Today, 77 years later, the optimism has been tempered with the sobering and very challenging scientific and engineering realities along with massive amounts of investment. We still have not achieved sustainable nuclear fusion in the laboratory.
Fear of the Lord
Our Daily Office scripture today includes a passage from Isaiah that may be relevant to our national political process.
For the Lord spoke thus to me while his hand was strong upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. (Isaiah 8:11-13)
Wikipedia makes a useful distinction between “fear of the Lord” and “fear of God.”
“Fear of the Lord” generally refers to a specific sense of respect, awe, and submission to a deity, while Fear of God suggests apprehension of Divine punishment.
S0410 – For the Sake of Unity
Sermon 10 April 2016 GEC Muskogee OK
Acts 9:16 (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
For the Sake of Unity
We need to do some teaching, preaching and proclamation today. We will start with some history of the development of the Nicene Creed and then we will talk about human sexuality. Somehow we will tie this all together with the abundant haul of fish.
First the creed: Ancient historians wrote that in the fourth and fifth centuries, you could not go for a haircut on the streets of ancient cities like Rome, Corinth, Alexandria or Jerusalem with getting into a heated discussion with your barber whether Christ was fully human, fully divine or both. Christianity in its first four centuries was as diverse and divided as it is today. Each geographical region had its own understanding of the nature of Christ, who Jesus was, why he was crucified, what the crucifixion/resurrection meant and so on. There were never any outright wars because the occupying army of the Roman Empire kept a firm grip even on local flare ups. But there were heated disagreements about the nature of Christ and his relationship to God the Father.
Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire with Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313. Although the Council of Nicaea was convened twelve years later, paganism was legal and flourished throughout the empire. Four years before Nicaea, Sunday was declared the Empire-wide day of rest in honor of the Roman sun-god, Sol Invictus we maintain that pagan tradition even today although the Christian god has replaced Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun.
Constantine did not want religious unrest to become civil unrest in his Empire so the Council of Nicaea was called with over 300 bishops attending from all over the Empire. Constantine paid for the travel expenses and two months of lodging for the hundreds of bishops and their delegations. He arranged the meeting hall and called the meeting to order saying “Let all contentious disputation be discarded; and let us seek in the divinely-inspired word the solution of the questions at issue.” He then exhorted the bishops to “unanimity and concord.”
Eventually 315 of the 318 bishops all agreed to the wording of the Creed. The move was as brilliant politically as it was theologically. Not everyone was happy with every detail, but the Empire was at least united behind a single doctrinal statement. Interestingly that ecumenical council took up a number of other topics such as: separating the date of Easter from the Jewish Passover date, the ordination of eunuchs, the prohibition of kneeling on Sundays, the validity of baptism by heretics and the re acceptance of lapsed Christians.
Why do we take time today to mention this? Because when the church makes a correction in doctrine, not everyone agrees. Many of the bishops who originally opposed but later voted for the Creed did so “for the sake of unity.”
Twelve hundred years later, Elizabeth the first will come to the throne and preside over a contentious church in England. Half the clergy had very Protestant sympathies while the other half leaned in a Roman Catholic direction. “What will be the church of the realm?” they asked their new queen. “Catholic or Protestant?” The queen blinked and said “Both. We will all worship in one house with one Book of Common Prayer and you will all agree to get along.” Like Constantine’s creed, the Elizabethan via media or “middle way” was brilliant politically and theologically. It served a greater good; for the sake of unity.
When it comes to marriage, weddings and blessings we are bewildered with a confusion of terms. ONLY the state can marry a couple. A marriage is a legal contract that bestows certain legal rights on the couple. When a couple comes to the church for a wedding, the first half of the service involves vows the couple make to one another. Once the vows are completed, they have done everything the state requires for them to be legally married. They could leave the church at that point and sign contracts. A priest or minister acts on behalf of the state up to this point to ensure that they are legally married. After a wedding, I complete the marriage certificate and mail it to the County Recorder of Deeds.
The ONLY thing a church does sacramentally is to bless the couple. It is a blessing of their life together and it is an implicit recognition that their love for each other reflects Christ’s love for the church. When I was interviewing in 2010 with the vestry at Grace for this position as rector someone asked me what I thought about same-gender marriage. I explained the important distinction between the state marriage and the church’s blessing. I was tired. It had been a long two days and I replied, “Let’s put this in perspective. I have been to Groton Connecticut and seen Episcopal Navy chaplains break a champagne bottle over the bow of a nuclear submarine. In that commissioning, an Episcopal priest blesses a piece of military hardware that could incinerate a continent. Most people seem to not have any moral difficulty with that blessing but some do when it comes to blessing two people who love each other! Which one of those would you be willing to bless?”
In the next two months we will begin discussions around the issue of blessing same-gender couples. Please leave the issue of marriage out of the discussion because that has been decided by the civil courts of our land. Please leave the term “wedding” out of the discussion because that is just a term we use for a particular kind of church service. We are only going to talk about whether this church supports blessing any two people who love each other and who will vow to continue that.
We will also take up the issue of diversity in this church and how people of all social classes are welcome into the full life, ministry and leadership of the church. Yes, we hold leaders to higher standards, but we also know that none of us are saints and we are never called to judge. We are called by the Bible to welcome, to accept, to encourage, to teach and to love our leaders and members just like Jesus did.
These two issues of same gender blessings and diversity are little more than speed bumps on our journey. We have a mountain to climb in front of us that is the very survival of this church. When we can get past the speed bumps for the sake of unity, then we can begin to encourage, support, accept, teach and love each other like the disciples did. And when we do that, we will haul in an amazing catch of fish.
Perspective 1
Although most people outside of the church tend to think the opposite, theology always plays catch up ball with the faith and actual practices of the people. For example, toward the end of the period of Roman persecutions of Christians, many people in north Africa watched while some bishops and priests apostatized (disavowed) their faith or turned in other Christians to the Roman authorities in order to save their skins. That some priests and bishops were still alive after a persecution while other families lost loved ones who refused to deny their faith did not go unnoticed by the people. After the persecutions stopped and North African people went back to their pre-persecution lives, many faithful Christians understandably questioned whether a priest or bishop could continue to celebrate holy Eucharist or baptize after they had denied their faith (these were called “traditors” the Latin root of our words for
traitor and treason
). Some people believed that the traditors who had denied their faith to save themselves were no longer “valid” in presiding in the sacramental life of the church.
Perspective 2
In the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic weapons, one of the projects my uncle supervised was “Monte Carlo calculations” of the properties of neutron shields and deflectors. No they weren’t gambling. Monte Carlo calculations are statistical methods of simulation. When you have to lift a five-ton weapon with a propeller driven, 1940’s vintage aircraft, it is critical to know how much lead is needed. Too much and it literally won’t fly. Too little and the weapon won’t work. Uncle Bob once described to me what it was like to have a building with 500 math and physics graduate students sitting at desks with calculators cranking out computations. Today, an undergraduate could do those same computations (all of them that took 500 students several months) on an average laptop in a few minutes.
If you want a nice break from touristy San Francisco, take the ferry over to Angel Island. If you climb around the military fortifications on the west end of the island, guarding the entrance to San Francisco Bay, you will find an historical plaque. The plaque talks about how Congress in the early 1800s authorized $5M to build these guns and fortifications. About three years after the guns were in place, the introduction of steel cladding on military ship’s wooden hulls rendered the entire gun emplacement obsolete. Such is the nature of progress. Today’s edge on the enemy (or the competition) becomes tomorrow’s scrap for the recycle bin.
Since the advent of transistors in the 1970s, electronic computing has been marching along to Gordon Moore’s Law (founder of Intel) that states memory capacity and CPU speed will double every 18 months. People have predicted the demise of Moore’s Law several times in the last decade, but it continues to march on towards the fundamental limits of physics or until something radically different comes along.
Quantum computing is radically different. Today’s quantum computers must be cooled to near absolute zero (-473 degrees Fahrenheit or really really cold) and they must be completely isolated from radio waves of all kinds. These machines are the sci-fi of today but it appears that in the next few years to a decade ahead, practical quantum computers will be built that are millions or billions of times faster than any computer existing today.
Sadly, one major push for quantum computing comes from the financial industry that just wants a bigger calculator to predict market trends. Another major use for these ultra-fast computers will be encrypting messages and decrypting secret data. Those who rely upon conventional style computers for encryption of data will someday find that quantum computers will be able to break their “unbreakable” encryption.
Someday in the future, the recent FBI square off against Apple regarding the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone will seem as quaint and silly as an old rotary dial telephone is today. It is always helpful to have some perspective on what we call “progress.”