I have just finished the third attempt at my sermon for Sunday on being a sacrificial community.  It has proved difficult to write and I'm still not over enamoured with what I've got.  Far easier was the study material on OT sacrifice and its relationship to atonement theology which I could basically lift out of books!

The easy path is to do grumpy skint minister impressions (actually impression is not needed, I am both!)  and bang on about priorities, giving and so on.  But it doesn't really achieve anything helpful.  It is almost as easy to become a judgemental hypocrite and use the Amos passage 'I hate I despise your Mission Praise,' as one Methodist tutor I knew used to paraphrase it, to point out the disparity between Sunday and the rest of the week - but am I any better?

In the end I have a rather unsatisfactory approach that says that since the end of the Jewish sacrifices in the first century, we have a choice whether or not to sacrifice (from Latin: sacer facere, to make holy, hence, to offer to God) but that the demand for quality and the 'cost' (loss of self-orientated potential it incurs) remain valid.  This probably works better at an individual level than communal, though it ought to apply to both.  I end up with Romans 12:1-3 'living sacrifices' which suggests both 'corporate' and 'embodied' stuff.

It still feels rather 'shouty, shouty' as one local minister would put it, but hopefully H Sp will be active in weeding out my agenda to let people hear something apppropriate.  Roll on Missionary Community and Mr Bosch's 'mission in may modes' which is just so much more preachable (I think...).

This blog has been getting too heavy/serious of late and needs a little levity injected into it.  So, pinched from cyberspace, here is another old theology joke or two....

Jesus asked the theologians, 'who do you say that I am?'   

They replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma of which we find the ultimate meaning in our interpersonal relationships.”

And Jesus said, “Huh?”

Or, in a more complex theologians' version...

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Cone find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asks the four famous theologians the same Christological question, “Who do you say that I am?”

Karl Barth stands up and says: “You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism.”

Not prepared for Barth’s brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: “You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogia entis, the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.”

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: “You are the impossible possibility who brings to us, your children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.”

Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: “You are my Oppressed One, my soul’s shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic.”

And Jesus says, “What !?!”

 

Or there's a Mormon version which goes thus...

Jesus said, Whom do men say that I am? 

And his disciples answered and said, Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias,  or other of the old prophets. 

And Jesus answered and said, But whom do you say that I am? 

Peter answered and said, "Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple." 

And Jesus answering, said, "What?" 

A lot of stuff I read talks about 'Tradition' as if it is a univserally understood concept - for example the four-fold idea of 'Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience.'  But what is it?

Is it shorthand for 'Creeds and Canon Law', in which case the Baptist assertion that we don't do tradition has some basis?  Or is it a more woolly term that embraces 'the way we do things around here' in which case Baptists are the prime example of lots of it.  The classic of course being the one Baptist tradition is we don't do Tradition.

This is not just idle speculation, or even a bit of mischievious fun, it does seem that the word either gets used carelessly or everyone else understands better than I do what its referent is.

The most common comment I encounter in the real world of church (if that is not an oxymoron) is that you must never do anything twice or it becomes a tradition, i.e. something that has to happen long after anyone remembers why it is done.  Breaking with tradition is fraught with danger and woe betide the minister who suggests that my congregation abandon the dire doggerel and tortured tunes of a Victorian farmer philanthropist who once was in membership here.

I think perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between 'Tradition' and 'traditions' but quite where that may be I do not know.  In the meantime, I am preparing to encounter the ire of some folk when we have a 'cafe style' service on Mothering Sunday and no 'cult of maternity' celebration at all.

I have just come in from ferrying one of my wrinklies to the home of two others for a 'shut ins' communion.  When I was training for ministry one of my supervisors said he always liked to take at least one other person with him when he was doing a 'home communion' because it is a better symbol of the church gathering.  I think he is right - and sometimes it gets a few done in one go, which is also helpful from a logistics perspective!

As they chatted about past events and remembered their children's childhood (before I was born...) one of them observed that 'God gave us memory so there could be roses in December.'  I like that - it has depth and meaning, it is hopeful and honest.  It may be that supermarkets and hothousing make it more figurative than literal, but to me it carries a powerful truth: 'Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age.' 

I have now typed it into 'Google' and find it is far from original, indeed it originates with J M Barrie, may have been part of a song sung by Vera Lynn and is certainly the name of a book about grief.  Yet it was 'a word in season' for two elderly women on a dull February afternoon when communion happened.

Sorry, bad puns once again.

In the early 1980's a jolly band of cartoon friars advertised crisps.  They probably wouldn't be allowed to nowadays, crisp eating is hardly synonymous with healthy lifestyles or the being of a monk-type person.

Today I was reading about a 'Chalcedonian Corelation' for the interdisciplinary nature of practical theology, which I'll get to in a bit, but its reference to 'logical priors' took me back to my engineer days and the images conjured up by 'Bayesian Priors' (which are mathematical). 

In my imagination, Bayesian Priors were an order of rather rotund monks in brown habits with jolly faces who laughed a lot - and probably understood some of the mathematical concepts about as well as most Christians understand Chalcedon.

Logical Priors sound much less jolly - they are tall, thin monks in grey habits with long noses and serious expressions.  They are very kindly folk, but deadly, deadly serious.

So, to Chalcedonian Correlation (which maybe should be Caledonian Correlation since it comes from Scotland!)

It asserts that there are four factors...

• Indissoluble differentiation
• Inseparable unity
• Indestructible order
• Logical prioity of theology

Indissoluble differentiation (which to a mathemetican doing calculus is a nonsense btw) means that theology is not history/psychology/anthropology etc and vice versa - the disicplines are not each other and definable boundaries exist.

Inseparable unity means that despite this, the various disciplines can inform each other and, perhaps (though this is now my interpretation) are part of greater whole through which God's revelation occurs.

Indestructible order means that there is effectively a hierarchy of authority.  Crudely, this suggests that subjects that refer out to others are higher up (I think) the authority tree.  Thus, theology has precedence over sociology because while theology may call up sociology, the converse is not (so they argue) true.  The logical priority of theology is, they assert, given.

I think this idea - which does get a bit more discussion in the book which I have yet to read, is interesting, but not automatically universally seen as true.  I can see that a psychologist or anthropologist, for example, could make a parallel argument asserting the logical priority of their field, since they may well perceive theology differently.  There is nothing wrong with the basic idea of a logical prior, it is just that beyond mathematics, it is more difficult to decide what it is.

Maybe there is a Logical Monastery somewhere where all the Logical Priors spend their days earnestly seeking their correct order?  I suspect the KP Friars have far more fun though! Any thoughts?