Where is God?

By Bill Lewellis
Jan. 11, 2016

In "Night," Elie Wiesel’s book about the horrors of living in a concentration camp, he tells about the night a young boy was hung. He didn’t weigh enough to die instantly. He struggled for life at the end of the rope. The other prisoners were forced to watch without being able to help.

Behind him, Wiesel heard a man ask: “Where is God now?” Wiesel heard a voice within him answer, “Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on the gallows."

During most of my days as a priest, whenever anyone in a especially tragic situation asked me, “Where is God?” I thought of this passage from "Night."

Where is God during any person’s suffering? God is suffering, weeping with them. God was jumping from the flames, out of the 80th floor of the Twin Towers. God was crying with the parents of young children when a gunman fatally shot 20 of them at the the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

As God was with the Irish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Polish and Italian immigrants who were once spat upon and marginalized, so now God is with the Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics and others who are rashly judged and marginalized today.

No answer we can give to this mystery is satisfactory. We still wonder. We still hurt. In my wonder, I like Elie Wiesel’s answer best.

Where was God when Jesus died on the cross? Suffering and dying with him. Where was God when the Jews experienced the tragic horrors of the Holocaust? Suffering and dying with them.

I favor this reflection so much more than the one offered in an Internet video I saw recently. It said that God is not with us because we, our culture or the laws of our land push God away.

Incarnation: God getting down

By Bill Lewellis

Anglican reflection on our relationship with God begins with Christmas … with God getting down. From there, we move toward the cross and resurrection. In many faith groups, reflection about our relationship with God begins with Good Friday and Easter… with fallen humanity that needs to be saved. I’m not suggesting that one way of getting at the mystery of our relationship with God is better than the other. How would I know? But they are different. And one surely works better for me: to begin not with “Am I saved?” but with “Have I gotten down?” Do I know people in low places?

   The basic Christmas truth is that Jesus is God getting down  and that God continues to touch us through flesh and blood. God uses many media of self disclosure. God touches us through family, relatives, friends, people we don’t even know, even unlikely persons? It’s all part of Incarnation. What story might you tell to celebrate God’s Incarnation … about one way, perhaps, that the word became flesh in your life? How have you touched others?

   Christmas is about a special moment of God’s intervention in history. Christian theology calls it the coming – the already but not yet coming – of the kingdom of God. Through his life and ministry, Jesus pointed to the coming of the kingdom of God. He used subversive speech -- parables and stories that subverted the ordinary, familiar, taken-for-granted world in which we live, while pointing to a strange, surprising world, a world turned upside down. And we know what happened to him.

   I recall years ago when I first heard the phrase altruistic donation. A new way to think about the coming of the kingdom. Altruistic donation. I knew what each word meant, but the phrase in its specialized context was new to me. It has to do with organ donors. Of the more than 100,000 living kidney donors in the U.S., less than one half of one percent were altruistic donors in the sense of people who gave their organs to strangers.

   One would think there might be more. Actually, there are. Many more people make the altruistic offer. Few altruistic donors, however, are accepted. Only about 5%, one of every 20 who make the offer. Most are rejected because altruistic donors must pass rigorous physical and mental health testing. That makes sense. But I do long for a world where altruistic donation of any sort would be the norm, where the presumption would not have to be that altruistic donors have mental health issues.

   That’s my take on the coming of the kingdom, a time when our world will be filled with altruistic donors, joining God to do what we can do to bring about right relationships. God has already gotten down to make the relationship between God and us right. Now, we need continually to get down to make relationships among ourselves right.

   In Episode #32 of The West Wing, a person on the president's staff, having undergone a traumatic event, is required to see a doctor of the American Trauma Victims Association. The session goes on all day and well into the night. The diagnosis is PTSD. Josh is worried that this will cause him to be let go from the president's staff. When Josh heads back to his office, he passes Leo, chief-of-staff and recovering alcoholic, who is sitting in the lobby. "How'd it go?" Leo asks. After some banter, Josh tells Leo what he has been trying to hide – fear about losing his job. Then Leo tells him a story.

   "This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out."A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, 'Hey you. Can you help me out?' The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on."Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, 'Father, I'm down in this hole can you help me out?' The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, 'Hey, Joe, it's me can you help me out?' And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, 'Are you stupid? Now we're both down here.' The friend says, 'Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out.'"

   After that, Leo tells Josh not to worry about his job. "As long as I got a job, you got a job."

   Now that’s a Christmas story. The mystery and the scandal of incarnation. The Word was made flesh. God getting down. “Are you stupid, God? Now we’re both down here.” That’s the Christmas story, not so much a story about Jesus as it is a story of God. God is in the hole with us.

   That’s what we discover at the manger. That’s where Christianity begins, with God becoming one of us. Theologians call it the Incarnation. Not the birthday of Jesus – we don’t know when Jesus was born – but the Incarnation. That’s the mystery we contemplate with joy and wonder at the manger. 

Communicate … Your Ministry

Communicate… Your Ministry
By Bill Lewellis
Introduction/Communication Biases
and
Part 1: Communication-Evangelism

 [This is a copyrighted work in progress.]

I have worked in the general areas of communication-evangelism and media relations for two dioceses and with four bishops for nearly 45 years: first for 15 years in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown (150 congregations and 260,000 communicants) on the staff of the founding bishop of that diocese, then for the past 30 years for the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, with the late Bishop Mark Dyer, Bishop Paul Marshall and Bishop Sean Rowe.

During the course of this experience, I have developed “biases” that I continually critique. Using that construct, I hope to offer with some directness and clarity what I have learned about the theology, ministry and practice of communication in a church context and how I have appropriated this experience, emphasizing what has made sense to me and what has worked for me.

The following may serve initially as both an introduction and a hint of content to come. I intend to revise and expand this to be both a table of contents and a summary of the topics.

1.      Christian communication is about proclaiming the gospel. (Communicate … your ministry. You are neither an independent journalist nor a house organist, but rather a communication-evangelist.)

2.      Every church is a small church that needs to extend its pulpit. (The church exists for those who do not belong to it.)

3.      Don’t confuse evangelism with publicity. (Why do you want media coverage?)

4.      Think not how but what… (There’s no “s” in communication. Communications is generally about tactics and a multiplicity of media. Communication, no “s,” is about content and strategy.)

5.      The media are not out to get you. (Establish and maintain credibility, take advantage of opportunities, create opportunities, and be of some use to your media contacts.)

6       Over the long haul, the coverage/cooperation you get from the media for what you’d like to accomplish will generally be in inverse proportion to the control you attempt to retain over the story.

7.      God uses many media of self-disclosure.

8.      You don’t have to be a technician to use technology. If you don’t know your way around online, however, you’ll soon be out of the information and communication flow.

9.      Communication builds community. (Gather the folks. Tell the secrets. Break the Bread … as in Acts. 2:42)

All rights reserved – The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis
Communication Minister/Editor (retired), Diocese of Bethlehem
610-393-1833; [email protected] or [email protected]
Be attentive. Be intelligent. Be reasonable. Be responsible.
Be in love. And, if necessary, change. —Bernard Lonergan
http://www.diobeth.typepad.com; www.diobeth.org

 

 

Communicate… Your Ministry
By Bill Lewellis
Part 1: Communication-Evangelism

Christian communication is about proclaiming the gospel. A communication ministry that does not proclaim the gospel, however sophisticated it may be, is not a Christian communication ministry. If gospel proclamation is not the reason for our communication efforts, what in the world are we communicating?

Communication as a church ministry makes no sense unless it supports evangelism, putting God’s good news before people, what God is doing in our world… putting that before people in such a way that they are invited to deal with the discipleship imperative: Follow me.

Church communicators and editors of most if not all denominations, dioceses and judicatories often find themselves trapped in one of two paradigms. Each is problematic. Some define themselves as independent journalists. Some allow themselves to be defined as house organists.

Many talented professionals have labored under the illusion that they could divorce their concerns from the concerns of the church. Similarly gifted individuals have labored in the shadow of institutional power as promoters of the institution.

In an attempt to think outside of those boxes, I have tried to be a communication-evangelist. I’d love to find a term that trips more easily off the tongue.

I have tried to lift up three realities: (1) Church communication ministry is about proclaiming the gospel. The communication minister’s mission statement is: tell secrets. More about that later. (2) Communication is the basic ministry of every baptized person. It’s about the Word continuing to become flesh. (3) Even the largest churches are not big enough spaces in which to publish glad tidings. Because the church exists for those who do not belong to it, we need to find creative ways to tell our stories and to extend our pulpits

With that in mind, I have worked over the years to develop, in addition to our diocesan newspaper, a few ministries that may be unique.

Several newspapers in various parts of our diocese, sometimes as many as seven, publish monthly columns written by our bishop. The combined circulation of those newspapers that publish the column regularly is 300,000. When all seven publish the column, it’s about half a million.

Several newspapers readily accept and publish columns, op-eds and letters to the editor that I write.

The largest regional daily newspaper in our diocese has developed and nurtures regular consultation with the local interfaith community. Because I have outlasted several generations of editors and journalists at the paper as well as the churches, synagogues and mosques of people now involved, most people no longer know that this evolved from a presentation I made to editors and the interfaith community some 14 years ago.

Cable systems that reach into some 200,000 northeastern Pennsylvania homes have, at my request, carried live Episcopal teleconferences, including the Trinity Institute. The largest system has produced and aired some of our events, including ordinations.

Several cable systems that reach into some 400,000 northeastern Pennsylvania homes carry on a weekly basis an “Interfaith TV” hour for which I select and provide the tapes. The hour usually consists of two half-hour programs professionally produced at national, regional and local levels by various denominations and independent producers.

Communication as a church ministry is about telling secrets.

Whenever we talk about God, we’re in the realm of mystery and sacrament, secret and sign, hidden yet revealed… a presence to be encountered in our relationships and in the signs of our worship. The Greek word, musterion, from which we get our word mystery (something hidden) was translated into Latin as sacramentum, (sacrament, sign, something visible).

Christian thinkers used both words to refer to the hidden presence of the real — the partially veiled and partially unveiled presence of God — to refer to visible signs (persons, loved ones, the church, bread and wine) that communicate something of God’s hidden presence.

When rightly used in religion, mystery describes “a reality, something visible, that suggests the hidden presence of God.” (Hold that thought.)

I once knew a preacher who punctuated with whispers.

When he was about to say something he really wanted you to hear, he leaned forward and lowered his voice. It was wonderfully effective. He leaned forward to whisper; people leaned forward to hear.

“Bob preaches like he’s telling secrets,” someone once quipped.

Each of us encounters God in God’s mysterion. We walk frequently along the edges of the divine mystery. If we listen closely, as we live God’s love, we hear secrets. And we “tell secrets” of God’s visitation… of how we were blinded by the light, of how the Christ within us recognized himself under the world’s disguises.

I once heard a Maryknoll missionary say something like this. “Many years ago when I came to work with the people in this faraway land. I came with the intent to bring God to them. I soon discovered that God was here before me.” He told them that secret, again and again.

 “Of this gospel,” Paul says in Ephesians (3:7-10), “I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace… given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known…”

“The aim of communication for Christians,” William Fore wrote in his excellent book on television and religion, “is to help people interpret their existence in the light of what God has done for them as manifest in Jesus Christ.”

He went on to say that the Christian communicator does not ask, “How can I communicate the gospel in such a way that others will accept it?”  He characterizes that as “the public relations question, the manipulative question.”

Rather, our task is to put the gospel before people in such a way that it is so clear to them that they can accept it, or reject it — but always for the right reasons. Our objective should be to present the gospel in ways so clear and self-evident that the recipient will have an “Aha!” experience, so that the good news will make complete sense to his or her own inner world, so that the recipient will say, in effect, ‘I already knew that!’”

God is there before we get there. Communication-evangelism helps people discover the God who is already in their hearts... and then gets out of God’s way.

A few years ago in Bethlehem, we had a large, movable satellite dish installed on the four-story bell tower of our Cathedral. I invited the local newspaper to send a photographer. He took the photo as a crane had lifted the dish seemed suspended from the sky and the cross on the roof of the adjoining cathedral church was visible through the mesh of the dish.

As I cross a bridge into South Bethlehem, just before getting to Diocesan House, a version of that image continues to intrigue me. I use it to get focused, to get centered. It’s a juxtaposition in search of a theology of communication. From the bridge, both the cross on the roof of the cathedral and the satellite dish on the bell tower come into view. Glancing at one, then at the other… I remember the moment when one was seen through the other.

The cross of the Mediator, Jesus Christ, is a window into the heart of God. The satellite dish is symbolic of the many and various other media of God’s self-disclosure. “Long ago,” the Letter to the Hebrews begins, “God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways...” God still uses many media of self disclosure.

Where will God show up today? For whom might I be a clue? To whom might I tell a secret?.

A friend once said to me, “I think each of us preaches one sermon over and over: with words, by how we live our lives and by how we nurture our relationships.”

One story/image I discovered at least 30 years ago frequently replays in my head and in my heart. Because it’s open-ended, it’s ever fresh. It helps me also to recognize what’s happening when we do “tell secrets” of God’s visitation.

A little boy wandered into a sculptor’s studio and watched a master sculptor work with hammer and chisel on a large piece of marble. Marble chips flew.. It wasn’t enough to hold the interest of a little child very long. Months later he returned and, to his surprise, where once stood only a large block of marble there now stood a majestic and power Aslan-like lion. “How did you know,” he asked the sculptor, “there was a lion in the marble?” “I knew,” the sculptor replied, “because I saw the lion first in my heart. The real secret, though, is that it was the lion in my heart who recognized himself in the marble.”

Where I first read this story of the Christ within who recognizes himself unformed in the disguises of the world, it was used to illustrate the relationship between spirituality and ministry, between contemplation and action, between prayer and mission.

It suggests to me also the relationship between communication and evangelism… and that, for each of us as Christian disciples, our basic ministry is communication. It’s about God’s word becoming flesh. Incarnation continues. So, not only is communication in the church about proclaiming the gospel. Communication is also your ministry. Communicate… Your Ministry.

All rights reserved – The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis
Communication Minister/Editor (retired), Diocese of Bethlehem
610-393-1833; [email protected] or [email protected]
Be attentive. Be intelligent. Be reasonable. Be responsible.
Be in love. And, if necessary, change. —Bernard Lonergan
http://www.diobeth.typepad.com; www.diobeth.org

 

Clear Grace – Sermon by Bill Lewellis

Clear Grace
Pent 14B, Proper 17B, August 30, 2015
Redeemer, Longport NJ (Bill Lewellis)
Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45
James 1:17-27; Mark: 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

[This sermon is an expanded version of my column – also here – published August 29 in The Morning Call.]

Clarity
A nun who taught me in grade school had a technique more efficient than waterboarding. She would sit you down, sit across from you, look you in the eye, and say, “Now tell the truth and shame the devil.” Whatever you may think of that, you know it is clear.

Clear too are a few truths from today’s readings: Every generous act of giving is from above … Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers … You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition … There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.

All of these are clear truths, clear commands. What can make them clearer? As an old priest friend used to say, “When you’ve made your point, stop boring.”

***********************

In concert, at the metro
On a cold Friday in January 2007, during morning rush hour, a white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T and a Washington Nationals baseball cap emerged from the metro at the L’Enfant Plaza station in Washington.

He positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he threw in a few dollars and pocket change: seed money. He swiveled the case to face pedestrian traffic … and began to play six classical pieces for the next 43 minutes.

It was a social experiment sponsored by the Washington Post: “If a world-famous musician and his $3 million fiddle brought some of history’s most beautiful music to a rush-hour crowd in a DC metro station, would people stop and listen”



Not really. Of 1,100 people walking by, 27 stopped to listen. Hardly anyone noticed.

Hardly anyone noticed when Joshua Bell played some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

[Journalist Gene Weingarten received a Pulitzer for his feature story about it. I have drawn some of my description from his story.] 

Joshua Bell’s concert hall performances are regularly sold out. He earned just over $32 when he set out his case at the metro stop. Hardly anyone noticed.

Was that because it was free? Because it was unscheduled? Because of the clothes he wore? Because of the venue?

Attentiveness
In any event, hardly anyone noticed.

People who have received emails from me may have noticed my signature line – running for some 25 years: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible, Be in love, If necessary, change.

The first phrase, “Be attentive,” is about noticing. It’s about being attentive to all of our senses, to what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Being attentive to our experience, to our imagination, to the voices and hearts of those around us.

Be not among those who hardly notice.

Do we notice during Eucharist, when we receive the bread of life?

2014
Seven years later, last year, Bell gave it another try. This one was advertised by the Post: at 12:30 p.m., Sept. 30, Bell would perform for 30 minutes in the main hall of Union Station.

He would trade the baseball cap and long-sleeve T for a crisp black shirt. Busy commuters would be traded for what the Post hoped would be a large and engaged audience, there to hear a program of Mendelssohn and Bach.

Not surprisingly, the area was crowded. Though the music was not more beautiful than seven years before.

Both events are evocative. They call out to us. They might say something to each of us, about how we go about our lives.

Grace
A friend of mine, one time journalist for the New York Times and the Washington Post who now helps Episcopal dioceses and agencies improve their communication, said that reflecting on these two events had him thinking about grace.

“Grace” is a common enough word, but also one of those in-words used often by those of us who have had the privilege of reading and thinking a lot about theology.

“Grace” suggests God’s love for us, God’s mercy, God’s compassion, God’s forgiveness … all of this even before we ask.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become convinced that the less one says about God, the better.

When anyone goes on and on about God, be sure they don’t know what they’re talking about.

They may be sincere, but that’s not saying much if they don’t know what they’re talking about. To say someone is “sincere” may be the lowest form of compliment.

Think about how you use “sincere.” “And she’s sincere” is ok. “But he’s sincere,” however is not saying much. The “but” usually implies they’re wrong, but they’re “sincere.”

Two statements seem to me today to sum up all the theology I’ve ever learned.

One is that God is like Jesus.

The other is that grace is “undeserved blessing.”

And I’m “sincere” about that.

Among the few spiritual disciplines
We don’t deserve grace, to be sure, my journalist friend Jim Naughton wrote recently, but what we need to reckon with is the fact that we don’t recognize it.

“It wears the wrong clothes … shows up in the wrong places … at the wrong times. It comes in the guise of people we generally avoid. 
We hardly notice. We fail to see it for what it is.

“We take the word of others – experts, advance teams – for what grace is and what it isn’t, when we must pay attention and when we can walk on by.

“Perhaps we don’t trust ourselves to recognize and respond to grace when we see it or hear it. Or perhaps life is constructed in such a way that grace needs references and a spot on our calendar before we can give it its due.

“Henry James once urged readers: ‘Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.’

“This,” my friend said, “is among the few spiritual disciplines that still make sense to me.”

Trying to be one of those on whom nothing is lost. Not being among those who hardly notice. Being attentive.

###

 

 

Column by Bill Lewellis

Be not among those who hardly notice
Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, August 29, 2015
601 words 

[The link to The Morning Call is here. A version of this column, expanded for a sermon, is here.]

Friday, January 12, 2007, the morning rush hour in Washington DC.

A white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T and a Washington Nationals cap stood against a wall at the L’Enfant Plaza station. He removed a violin from a case, swiveled the open case toward the foot traffic … and began to play six classical pieces for 43 minutes.

The social experiment was sponsored by the Washington Post: If a world-famous musician played some of history’s most beautiful music in a DC metro station, would people stop to listen?

Hardly anyone noticed. Twenty-seven people stopped to listen. One thousand and seventy walked on by.

Hardly anyone noticed when Joshua Bell played some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

Journalist Gene Weingarten received a Pulitzer for his feature story about this non-event. (I have drawn some of my description from his story.) 

The 2007 stunt raised questions about beauty and society's perception of it.

Some $32 were dropped in the case that ordinarily held a $3 million fiddle.

Hardly anyone noticed.

Readers who have received emails from me may have noticed my signature line – running for some 25 years: Be attentive; be intelligent; be reasonable; be responsible; be in love; if necessary, change.

The first phrase, Be attentive, is about noticing. It’s about being attentive to all of our senses, to what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. Being attentive to our experience, to our imagination, to the voices and hearts of those around us.

Be not among those who hardly notice.

Last year, Joshua Bell gave it another try. This one was advertised by the Post: 12:30 p.m., Sept. 30. He dressed in his black shirt and trousers concert attire for his scheduled 30 minutes of Mendelssohn and Bach in the main hall of Union Station. The area was crowded. People not only stopped to listen; they came to listen.

A friend of mine, onetime journalist for the New York Times and the Washington Post who now helps Episcopal dioceses and agencies improve their communication, said that reflecting on these two events had him thinking about grace.

We don’t deserve grace, to be sure, Jim Naughton acknowledged, but what we need to reckon with is the fact that we don’t recognize it.

“It wears the wrong clothes … shows up in the wrong places … at the wrong times. It comes in the guise of people we generally avoid. We hardly notice. We fail to see it for what it is.

“We take the word of others – experts, advance teams – for what grace is and what it isn’t, when we must pay attention and when we can walk on by.

“Perhaps we don’t trust ourselves to recognize and respond to grace when we see it or hear it. Or perhaps life is constructed in such a way that grace needs references and a spot on our calendar before we can give it its due.

“Henry James once urged readers: ‘Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.’

“This,” my friend said, “is among the few spiritual disciplines that still make sense to me.”

Let us pray: Guide us, gracious God. May we be attentive to our experience, to the voices and hearts of those around us;insightful in our interpretation of what we have been attentive to;reasonable in our judgments; responsible in our decisions;and always open to inner conversion, to transformation in your truth and your love.

 

Be one on whom nothing is lost. Especially grace. Be not among those who hardly notice. Be attentive.

 

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], an Episcopal priest, retired since 2010, served on the bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

I've been haunted by screens

By Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, May 2, 2015

I've been haunted –fascinated – by screens: movie screens, television screens, computer screens. For a long time, as the following example suggests.

"Long ago, rain fell on mud and became rock … half a billion years ago … but even before that … beneath the rocks … are the words of God. Listen."

Those who have seen the beautiful 1992 film directed by Robert Redford, A River Runs Through It, based on Norman Maclean's book, may remember this opening scene where Maclean's father, a Presbyterian minister and seasoned fly fisherman, bends down to the height of his two young sons with a river stone between his fingers.

In the closing scene, a narrator speaks over striking images of nature: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."

Then the last line, one I've used in a sermon on baptism: "I am haunted by waters."

The first time I saw A River Runs Through It, it seemed to me to be the creative “screening” of the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things came into being through him…  life…   light that shines in the darkness,  without being overcome … And the word became flesh, and lived among us.”

Another line from the film “screens” all those scriptures that suggest on the one hand that we cannot earn or merit salvation (God’s love), that it is free – that’s why we call it grace – but, on the other hand, not easy. It’s Norman Maclean's reflection on his father's love of fly fishing, and the expertise he had gained.

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

I am haunted by screens.

The incredible thing about screens is they can take us to emotional heights and depths we never imagined. Their power, for example, is that any one of us might walk into a darkened theater and move out into the light a different person. In a way, good movies have that power in common with a moving liturgy.

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman often visited the sick and wounded as a volunteer nurse. He would read passages from the scriptures to dying soldiers, one of whom inquired whether he was a religious man. He replied: "Probably not, my dear, in the way you mean." Then he kissed the dying man.

Similarly, the best religious films, TV shows and novels I've seen and read are not religious in the way that phrase is commonly understood.

Have you ever identified a spiritually astute scene you came across in a movie or TV show … or a novel? One that invited reflection both from those of us who may think of ourselves as religious or spiritual, and those of us who may not. I suspect it was probably not from a film with a specifically religious theme, one that would not appeal to mass audiences because it seemed like an illustrated sermon, or, in the case of a book, simply a lengthy sermon.

If you have one in mind, I'd appreciate a note about it. Send an email note to [email protected]. You may find it in a future column.
I am haunted by screens.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], an Episcopal priest, retired since 2010, served on the bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

Communicate … Your Ministry, by Bill Lewellis

[This is a copyrighted work in progress.]

Introduction
Bill's Communication Biases

I have worked in the general areas of communication-evangelism and media relations for two dioceses and with four bishops for nearly 45 years: first for 15 years in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown (150 congregations and 260,000 communicants) on the staff of the founding bishop of that diocese, then for the past 30 years for the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, with Bishop Mark Dyer, Bishop Paul Marshall and Bishop Sean Rowe.

During the course of this experience, I have developed “biases” that I continually critique. Using that construct, I hope to offer with some directness and clarity what I have learned about the theology, ministry and practice of communication in a church context and how I have appropriated this experience, emphasizing what has made sense to me and what has worked for me.

The following may serve initially as both an introduction and a hint of content to come. I intend to revise and expand this to be both a table of contents and a summary of the topics.

1. Christian communication is about proclaiming the gospel. (Communicate … your ministry. You are neither an independent journalist nor a house organist, but rather a communication-evangelist.

2. Every church is a small church that needs to extend its pulpit. (The church exists for those who do not belong to it.)

3. Don’t confuse evangelism with publicity. (Why do you want media coverage?)

4. Think not how/program but what/content… (There’s no “s” in communication. Communications is generally about tactics and a multiplicity of media. Communication, no “s,” is about content and strategy.)

5. The media are not out to get you. (Establish and maintain credibility, take advantage of opportunities, create opportunities, and be of some use to your media contacts.)

6. Over the long haul, the coverage you get from the media for what you’d like to accomplish will generally be in inverse proportion to the control you attempt to retain over the story.

7. God uses many media of self-disclosure.

8. You don’t have to be a technician to use technology. If you don’t know your way around online, however, you’ll soon be out of the information and communication flow.

9. Communication builds community. (Gather the folks. Tell the stories/mystery/secrets. Break the Bread. … as in Acts. 2:42)

Part 1
Communication-Evangelism

Christian communication is about proclaiming the gospel. A communication ministry that does not proclaim the gospel, however sophisticated it may be, is not a Christian communication ministry. If gospel proclamation is not the reason for our communication efforts, what in the world are we communicating?

Communication as a church ministry makes no sense unless it supports evangelism, putting God’s good news before people, what God is doing in our world … putting that before people in such a way that they are invited to deal with the discipleship imperative: Follow me.

Church communicators and editors of most if not all denominations, dioceses and judicatories have often found themselves trapped in one of two paradigms. Each is problematic. Some define themselves as independent journalists. Some allow themselves to be defined as house organists.

Many talented professionals have labored under the illusion that they could divorce their concerns from the concerns of the church. Similarly gifted individuals have labored in the shadow of institutional power as promoters of the institution.

In an attempt to think outside of those boxes, I have tried to be a communication-evangelist. I’d love to find a term that trips more easily off the tongue.

I have tried to lift up three realities: (1) Church communication ministry is about proclaiming the gospel. The communication minister’s mission statement is: tell secrets. More about that later. (2) Communication is the basic ministry of every baptized person. It’s about the Word continuing to become flesh. (3) Even the largest churches are not big enough spaces in which to publish glad tidings. Because the church exists for those who do not belong to it, we need to find creative ways to tell our stories and to extend our pulpits.

With that in mind, I have worked over the years to develop, in addition to our diocesan newspaper, a few ministries that may be unique.

Several newspapers in various parts of our diocese, sometimes as many as seven, published monthly columns written by our bishop. The combined circulation of those newspapers that published the column regularly is 300,000. When all seven published the column, it’s about half a million. That last for about 12 years.

Several newspapers readily accepted and published columns, op-eds and letters to the editor that I wotte.

The largest regional daily newspaper in our diocese developed and nurtured regular consultation with the local interfaith community. Because I have outlasted several generations of editors and journalists at the paper as well as the churches, synagogues and mosques of people now involved, most people no longer know that this evolved from a presentation I made to editors and the interfaith community during the early 1990s.

Cable systems that reached into some 200,000 northeastern Pennsylvania homes had, at my request, carried live Episcopal teleconferences, including the Trinity Institute. The largest system produced and aired some of our events, including ordinations.

Several cable systems that reach into some 400,000 northeastern Pennsylvania homes carried on a weekly basis an “Interfaith TV” hour for which I selected and provided the tapes. The hour usually consisted of two half-hour programs professionally produced at national, regional and local levels by various denominations and independent producers.

Communication as a church ministry is about telling secrets.

Whenever we talk about God, we’re in the realm of mystery and sacrament, secret and sign, hidden yet revealed… a presence to be encountered in our relationships and in the signs of our worship. The Greek word, musterion, from which we get our word mystery (something hidden) was translated into Latin as sacramentum, (sacrament, sign, something visible).

Christian thinkers used both words to refer to the hidden presence of the real — the partially veiled and partially unveiled presence of God — to refer to visible signs (persons, loved ones, the church, bread and wine) that communicate something of God’s hidden presence.

When rightly used in religion, mystery describes “a reality, something visible, that suggests the hidden presence of God.” (Hold that thought.)

I once knew a preacher who punctuated with whispers.

When he was about to say something he really wanted you to hear, he leaned forward and lowered his voice. It was wonderfully effective. He leaned forward to whisper; people leaned forward to hear.

“Bob preaches like he’s telling secrets,” someone once quipped.

Each of us encounters God in God’s mysterion. We walk frequently along the edges of the divine mystery. If we listen closely, as we live God’s love, we hear secrets. And we “tell secrets” of God’s visitation… of how we were blinded by the light, of how the Christ within us recognized himself under the world’s disguises.

I once heard a Maryknoll missionary say something like this. “Many years ago when I came to work with the people in this faraway land. I came with the intent to bring God to them. I soon discovered that God was here before me.” He told them that secret, again and again.

“Of this gospel,” Paul says in Ephesians (3:7-10), “I have become a servant according to the gift of God’s grace … given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known …”

“The aim of communication for Christians,” William Fore wrote in his excellent book on television and religion, “is to help people interpret their existence in the light of what God has done for them as manifest in Jesus Christ.”

He went on to say that the Christian communicator does not ask, “How can I communicate the gospel in such a way that others will accept it?”  He characterizes that as “the public relations question, the manipulative question.”

“Rather, our task is to put the gospel before people in such a way that it is so clear to them that they can accept it, or reject it — but always for the right reasons. Our objective should be to present the gospel in ways so clear and self-evident that the recipient will have an “Aha!” experience, so that the good news will make complete sense to his or her own inner world, so that the recipient will say, in effect, ‘I already knew that!’”

God is there before we get there. Communication-evangelism helps people discover the God who is already in their hearts... and then gets out of God’s way.

Years ago in Bethlehem, we had a large, movable satellite dish installed on the four-story bell tower of our Cathedral. I invited the local newspaper to send a photographer. He took the photo as a crane had lifted the dish seemed suspended from the sky and the cross on the roof of the adjoining cathedral church was visible through the mesh of the dish.

As I crossed a bridge into South Bethlehem, just before getting to Diocesan House, a version of that image continued to intrigue me. I used it to get focused, to get centered. It was a juxtaposition in search of a theology of communication. From the bridge, both the cross on the roof of the cathedral and the satellite dish on the bell tower came into view. Glancing at one, then at the other… I remembered the moment when one was seen through the other.

The cross of the Mediator, Jesus Christ, is a window into the heart of God. The satellite dish is symbolic of the many and various other media of God’s self-disclosure. “Long ago,” the Letter to the Hebrews begins, “God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways...” God still uses many media of self disclosure.

Where will God show up today? For whom might I be a clue? To whom might I tell a secret?.

A friend once said to me, “I think each of us preaches one sermon over and over: with words, by how we live our lives and by how we nurture our relationships.”

One story/image I discovered frequently replays in my head and in my heart. Because it’s open-ended, it’s ever fresh. It helps me also to recognize what’s happening when we do “tell secrets” of God’s visitation.

A little boy wandered into a sculptor’s studio and watched a master sculptor work with hammer and chisel on a large piece of marble. Marble chips flew.. It wasn’t enough to hold the interest of a little child very long. Months later he returned and, to his surprise, where once stood only a large block of marble there now stood a majestic and power Aslan-like lion. “How did you know,” he asked the sculptor, “there was a lion in the marble?” “I knew,” the sculptor replied, “because I saw the lion first in my heart. The real secret, though, is that it was the lion in my heart who recognized himself in the marble.”

Where I first read this story of the Christ within who recognizes himself unformed in the disguises of the world, it was used to illustrate the relationship between spirituality and ministry, between contemplation and action, between prayer and mission.

It suggests to me also the relationship between communication and evangelism … and that, for each of us as Christian disciples, our basic ministry is communication. It’s about God’s word becoming flesh. Incarnation continues. So, not only is communication in the church about proclaiming the gospel. Communication is also your ministry. Communicate … Your Ministry.

All rights reserved
Bill Lewellis, Diocese of Bethlehem, retired
Communication Minister/Editor (1986-2010), Canon Theologian (1998-)
newSpin weekly: www.diobeth.typepad.com; Email: [email protected]; (c)610-393-1833
Be attentive. Be intelligent. Be reasonable. Be responsible.
Be in Love. And, if necessary, change. [Bernard Lonergan]

 

 

 

 

 

 9.      Communication builds community. (Gather the folks. Tell the secrets. Break the Bread … as in Acts. 2:42)

Let your experience pray

Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, Sept. 13, 2014

Three of many experiences have helped me discover the prayer known as contemplation.

At a traffic light, years ago, I sensed the backseat passenger in a car on my left looking my way. He buzzed his window down and leaned toward me. I buzzed my window down and looked toward him.

“I feel like I should be asking you if you have any Grey Poupon,” he said. I returned his smile, acknowledging his allusion to the 1985 TV commercial. He continued, “But we’re looking for Route 22.”

Common ground at that moment was a whimsical commercial for mustard. How little it takes. Were it not for traffic and schedules, we might have entered into conversation. Perhaps the beginning of a good relationship.

You may think I have made this next incident up. Not so.

Until my 2009 retirement, I drove to work for some 25 years from Whitehall to Bethlehem. MacArthur Road to Route 22 East to the Spur Route across the Hill-to-Hill Bridge to the office of the Bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem.

One day, at a point where I should have merged onto 22 East to make it to Diocesan House in time for Morning Prayer, I continued south on MacArthur to Dunkin’ Donuts. I told myself I needed coffee and a donut more than Morning Prayer.

As I sat at the counter previewing my day, a car crashed through the plate glass wall. I spun on my stool and touched its hood. No one was hurt. Not the driver, not I, not those who continued to drink coffee with me until the police came and ushered us out. Later that day, I found in my jacket pocket a handful of pebbles from the tempered glass.

Finally, many years ago, I arranged for the installation of a large, movable satellite dish on the bell tower of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

The Morning Call took photos. The published photo had been taken at an opportune moment. As the crane had lifted the dish three-quarters of the way, the cross at the peak of the facade of the church was clearly visible through the dish.

For years, those experiences became my prayer on my drive to work. I considered first connection, relationships. Then, mortality. Finally, as I began to cross the bridge where traffic slows and the Cathedral Church comes into view, I looked for the cross and the satellite dish.

The cross, you know, is a window into the heart of God, far beyond the limited imagination of any of us.

The satellite dish, barely visible from the bridge, seemed to me to search heaven and earth for the many other media of God’s self-disclosure where God is still speaking. Where will God show up today? Is God counting on me to show up, to mediate God’s love.

The goal of prayer, Father Richard Rohr writes in his most recent book, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation, is not to manipulate God or change God’s mind but “to give you access to God and to allow you to listen to God and to actually hear God, if that does not seem presumptuous. But mostly, prayer is to allow you to experience the indwelling Presence yourself. You are finally not praying, but prayer is happening through you, and you are just the allower and enjoyer.”

Consider your experience. Allow your experience to pray.

Rohr suggests elsewhere in this book that the ancient, the traditional understanding of prayer was contemplation. Only when “saying prayers,” in public or private, became the common way did prayer as contemplation become something rare, only for the “holy.”

All of us have had experience we can contemplate. In our experience, we can dwell with God. We will discover there true prayer.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

Calculating God, by Bill Lewellis

Calculating God
The root of Christian living: Be who you are
Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, May 17, 2014

My son Matt makes me wonder what I'm missing by disinterest in science fiction and fantasy literature. I try occasionally to discover what that might be.

I stayed recently with a 2000 Robert Sawyer science fiction novel, Calculating God, because part of it surfaced my bias that theology, specifically moral theology in this instance, is more art than science. More intuitive than analytical and deductive.

So much of what is right and wrong is difficult to determine. That’s from the book, but it’s also the experience of many who try to live good lives and do good in the process.

In Calculating God, an extra-terrestrial, Hollus, who believes in God, told a Canadian paleontologist, Thomas Jericho, who does not, about the extra-terrestrial Wreeds whom math confounds just as "philosophical questions about the meaning of life, ethics and morality confound us.”

Though we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, Hollus said, every theory of morality we come up with fails because we tend toward reducing morality to logic. Mathematical morality. The longer we live, experience suggests we can’t.  

“We attempt to apply mathematics –– something we are good at –– to ethics, something we are not good at,” Hollus tells Jericho. Such attempts always fail us. Intuitive morality, the more complex the question, defies mathematical logic.

I have written sermons and columns for some 50 years. Lately, I’ve focused on those who take their doubts more seriously than themselves, who find comfort, not anxiety, in questions.

I was fortunate to have teachers in the ‘60s who had one foot in classical theology which tended to be analytical and another in intuitive creativity where God is still speaking.

A German Jesuit, Father Joseph Fuchs, who taught at the Gregorian University in Rome, informed my first experience of truly Christian moral theology.

I was expecting to study the law… God’s law, church law, case studies. Math become morality.

I was primed for answers.

During the first few weeks of class, however, Josef Fuchs read and commented on passages from St. Paul’s letters. Hello, I thought. Was this the moral theology class? There’s someone here reading from the bible.

So at odds with my expectations, Josef Fuchs gleaned from St. Paul’s writings those passages where he says we have been changed, transformed, reborn. In Christ.

He suggested again and again that in that change, in that transformation, in that rebirth — in Christ — we discover the defining moment for Christian living: that the answer to “What must I do?” is contained in the question, “Who am I?” and that the Christian moral imperative is rooted not in law but in Jesus Christ and in the person I have become in Christ.

Paul often follows “You are a new creation,” Josef Fuchs pointed out, with “Therefore, BE (who you are)!” This sequence, Fuchs said, was Paul’s moral theology.” You are a new creation in Christ. You are mystery. Let the mystery unfold. Let the secret be told. Be reconciled. Be glad. Be thankful. Be compassionate. Be who you are. Be that new creation in Christ.

That, he suggested, was the heart of Christian morality: Jesus Christ and the new creation we have become in Christ. Josef Fuchs called it the Pauline Indicative-Imperative: You are a new creation in Christ. Therefore, be…

Yes, I do miss something crucial by disinterest in science fiction and fantasy literature. I miss that God touches our hearts and imaginations as much if not more than God reaches us through cold and artless logic. I miss the unlimited artful scope of intuition.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus wrestled with God about a better way

Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call
January 25, 2014

A strange phrase found in the gospels is that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

“Lead us not into temptation,” we pray in the traditional version of the “Our Father,” though in the contemporary version we pray, “Save us from the time of trial.”

Some criticize the traditional version, saying God would not lead us into temptation. Considering the strange phrase in the gospels, however, though I am not a biblical literalist, one might not be so quick to dismiss the metaphor. Neither version is right or wrong.

Many, as I, pray both versions. I consider that as narcissism tempted Jesus in the desert, he wrestled not with the devil but with God.

Years past for which I yearn at times, two of my sons took on the personae of the Olympic track stars they watched on television. They held their own Olympics in the house. Matthew, then four, always crossed the finish line first. He raised his arms in victory: “I won, I won.” Stephen, 2, trailing behind, took a cue from his older brother. Was celebrating part of the ritual? He too raised his arms high: “I lost, I lost.”

Consider this conversation Nikos Kazantzakis gives us. “Father Makarios, do you still wrestle with the devil?” “Not any longer,” said the saintly monk. “I have grown old and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength. I wrestle with God.” “With God? And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose,” Makarios said.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to wrestle with God.

The temptation story of Jesus, told in three gospels, comes right after his baptism by John at the River Jordan. There, Jesus hears God’s call: “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

My beloved. My chosen one. There’s an undertone of the suffering servant of the Book of Isaiah in that call, in that identification. A call to the cross.

What is it that Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof? “If this is how you treat your chosen friends, God, no wonder you have so few.”

What Jesus heard troubled him as he “was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” where he was presented with an easier, attractive and efficient Plan B. And the wrestling began, not with the devil but with God, about what it might mean to be God’s beloved, God’s chosen one, God’s suffering servant? There must be a better way?

“Allow me to suggest a better way,” the devil said. “What about a miracle, some magic, smoke and mirrors. After all, isn’t that what people want?”

In the wilderness, Jesus struggled within himself and wrestled with God. He recognized the lies he heard in the desert. Then, going to his hometown synagogue, he owned God’s call.

He read from Isaiah. (A bishop I once worked with quipped that in the Christian scriptures Jesus was the first lay reader.) “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he read. “He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free… Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The true story happened anew.

When you wrestle with God about good inspirations you may have been resisting, one of two things can happen. Winning isn’t one. Either you walk away from the relationship, or you wrestle until you lose. When God wins, you have reason to celebrate. “I lost! I lost!”

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

Sermon by Bill Lewellis at Bishop Paul's retirement

God-baked, God-broken, God-made
Bishop Paul’s Retirement
St. Stephen's Pro-Cathedral, W-B
Sermon by Bill Lewellis, Dec. 15, 2013
Ezekiel 34:11-16; 2Timothy 4:1-8; John 21:15-19

Love is a word
"Do you love me?" Yes, Lord, I love you. Then what?

"Do you love me, Paul, Diana, Anne, Howard, Andrew?” Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Love is a word. Then what? 

Even God's Word became flesh.

When Bishop Paul heard this passage read also at his 1996 consecration, as today, this passage about loving God and being taken to difficult places, he must have suspected that God's love leads far beyond what we might naively expect.

"Do you love me?" Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Well, not so fast. Then what? "When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go." Will you love me then? Will you love me when you're 64?

About a month ago, I asked Paul: Is there anything you’d like me to say during the sermon. Only two things, he said without missing a beat. (1) Say that whatever has been done these past 17 years, we all did it together. (2) Tell the truth.

Seems like an easy assignment, except that there’s just too much truth to tell. But, I’ll do my best.

Sudan 2006/New Hope
Upon returning from a 2005 mission trip to southern Sudan, Paul Marshall told this story: “At the end of a week in that bomb-torn country, Diana and I baked in a bus for 14 hours.

"Finally you give up wiping your face. As we became increasingly caked with red dirt, and the overcrowded bus grew hotter and hotter, I found myself baking in a creative and holy sense: I knew God wanted my attention. 

"Genesis says humans began our existence as kind of mud pies, and the red dust of the earth baking into my pores helped me have a new beginning of insight: Here were sisters and brothers with almost nothing to their names trying to build a life and a country — how could I go on as usual?

"In addition to altering how I live personally, I have had to abandon some of my bricks-and-mortar dreams for our own diocese in order to see what God would have us do for others. The question that intrigued me was, Could we dare to have a capital fund drive where we didn’t get the money?”

Do you love me? Yes, Lord, I love you. Then what?

From those African mud pies and red dust, the New Hope Campaign was created for the people of our companion Diocese of Kajo Keji and for the needy among us. With his leadership, we did dare. The New Hope Campaign – a capital fund drive for others – has been eminently successful.

Six years earlier, in 1999, with proactive encouragement from the bishop, the diocesan World Mission Committee began to focus the attention of the diocesan community on conditions in developing countries. “Our deeper attachment to brothers and sisters in the third World can only mean good things,” Bishop Paul said at that time. “I’d like to see the day when people from our diocese go to Third World countries to do various kinds of ministry.” And we did. 

Bishop Paul had previously asked Charlie Barebo to help spearhead a capital campaign to develop a diocesan camp and conference center. “A funny thing happened on the way,” said Charlie, “I woke up one morning in the Sudan. It was a life-changing event that has deepened my faith and altered my outlook on this world.”

Do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Then what? Love is a word.

During that 2005 visit, Bishop Paul ordained 37 Africans, including a woman. He and Diana – attorney, registered nurse and Mama Diana in the Sudan – addressed 17 gatherings during the weeklong visit. During one gathering, laying the foundation stone of the Mothers Union Training Center in Kajo Keji, Mama Diana observed that the church in the United States is grateful to have heard the wisdom of African men, but that the African witness will be fully present in Anglicanism when women’s wisdom is celebrated and revered by all. “It is time to hear the voices of African women,” she said.

Over the past year, we have begun to hear of African women bishops.

Headshot
"Would you send me a headshot," I emailed Dr. Paul Marshall back in 1995 while he was teaching at Yale when he became one of five nominees from which we would choose our next bishop. You'll have to use your graphic imagination to appreciate what I received by return email. Picture the ivy-covered buildings and walls of Yale. Paul stood in front of a building but behind a head-high wall. Only his head was visible, as though mounted on the ivy-covered wall. No body, not even a neck. Only a head. A headshot. John the Baptist's head on a platter.

We've got a live one, I thought. I hope he keeps me on staff if he's elected.

Easy mark
In December of 1995, during our Diocesan Convention when he was elected bishop, however, despite my great appreciation of his wit, I neither rooted for nor voted for Paul Marshall.

He soon found out. The tell was that I had prepared a news template with Rosemari Sullivan's name and address, the nominee from Virginia. When the electors voted Bishop Paul in, I substituted his name. In my haste, however, I did not delete Rosemari's address.

He did keep me, but he never let me forget. There were many strategic instances of "You didn't vote for me. I know" – or, to others, "You know, Bill didn't vote for me." I was an easy mark for his wit ... for years ... and years. 

Bulletproof vest
Move forward. Seven months.

July 29, 1996. In this church ... when Paul Marshall was to be consecrated the 919th bishop in the Episcopal succession and eighth bishop of Bethlehem. I understand that four burly men stationed themselves at strategic parts of the church. Many mistook them for ushers. They were police. I didn't know it at the time. 

Edmund Browning was then presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. He would ordinarily have been the principal consecrator. He wasn't present, because he had received death threats. The late Bishop Robert Rowley stood in his place ... wearing a bulletproof vest. 

Bishop Paul, that was some beginning!

All because you invited the late Walter Righter, retired Bishop of Iowa, to be a co-consecrator. 

Six years earlier, Bishop Righter had ordained an openly gay man to the order of deacon. Two months earlier, he was cleared of charges of heresy brought by ten of his brother bishops. Thus the death threats and the security.

Bishop Righter took this essentially political charge in good humor. He got a vanity plate for his Subaru Legacy: HRETIC. Being accused became for him a mark of honor.

Bakerwoman God
During her homily at the consecration Eucharist, Bishop Cathy Roskam read a poem by Alla Renee Bozarth-Campbell. I think you will want to hear it. For some of us, hear it again.

Bakerwoman God,
I am your living bread.
Strong, brown, Bakerwoman God,
I am your low, soft and being-shaped loaf.

I am your rising bread,
well-kneaded by some divine
and knotty pair of knuckles,
by your warm earth-hands.
I am bread well-kneaded.

Put me in your fire, Bakerwoman God,
put me in your own bright fire.
I am warm, warm as you from fire.
I am white and gold, soft and hard,
brown and round.
I am so warm from fire.

Break me, Bakerwoman God.
I am broken under your caring Word.

Drop me in your special juice in pieces.
Drop me in your blood.
Drunken me in the great red blood.
Self-giving chalice, swallow me.
My skin shines in the divine wine.
My face is cup-covered and I drown.

I fall up
in a red pool,
in a gold world
where your warm
sunskin hand
is there to catch
and hold me.

Bakerwoman God,
remake me.

"When we put ourselves in God's hands to be bread,” Bishop Roskam said, “God keeps messing around in our lives … The process is dynamic, creative, intimate and sometimes painful.”

It's not easy being bread. But, it seems to me to be a bishop's occupational hazard ... and call.

Paul's ministry among us
From my unique perspective, over the past 28 years, on both Bishop Mark Dyer's and Bishop Paul's staff – I saw how broad and deep Bishop Paul's ministry and dedication among us has been ... well-kneaded, God-baked, God-broken and God-made: teacher, pastor, preacher, administrator, author, advocate and participant in ministry with people in the developing world, children and youth, the poor and the marginalized, advocate and reconciler with those within the church who consider themselves progressive as well as those who consider themselves traditionalists, interpreter of family systems theory, communicator within and beyond the diocesan community, a leader who consults with colleagues, and a person whose ministry as bishop proceeds from prayer and a contemplative vision of God's kingdom.

From my unique perspective, I saw not only how broad and deep was Bishop Paul’s ministry among us, but also how deep was his suffering and how en-fleshed was his love.  

Messages in the Mall
During his first year with us, Bishop Paul decided to write a monthly column and offer it to dailies and weeklies that circulated to some 400,000 homes in our 14-county diocese, and a bit beyond, over the next 13 years. It was a unique ministry that no other bishop in the U.S., episcopal or other, could claim, then or now.

He meant the column to engage the secular culture and to bring the church's message to the culture by commenting on the realities of the human condition and on issues of general interest. With dry and gentle wit, deep compassion and, sometimes, anger, he wrote about topics from the tragic Columbine school shootings to the spiritual ramifications of the TV series The Sopranos.

Doing the column, he told me, was a monthly agony, but it was a way he had ... to reach the most people.

In Learning From What Jesus Did Not Do, he wrote that Jesus "did not give in to his disciples' desire to have more power than others, did not force anyone to believe in him, did not condemn those who were pushed to the edges of life ... The ministry of not condemning was one of the most radical things Jesus did."

One of my favorites, from a column subtitled Don't Confuse Being Valuable with Being Right: "We don't maintain the unity of Christ's Church by being right. The late Rabbi Edwin Friedman said in his lectures on family systems that no aquarium survives unless some fish is willing to eat the garbage.”

Many people beyond the Episcopal Church got to know Bishop Paul through those columns. 

Permit me a commercial. Messages in the Mall -- Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less (Seabury, 2008) is a compilation of some 90 selected columns from those years. I recommend it to you for entertaining ... and spiritual ... reading ... and to get to know this man better. It's even available for Kindle.

The Dance
“We are a curious lot, we who serve the church in whatever capacity,” Bishop Paul wrote in one of four sermons he preached during the summer of 2012 when he served as conference preacher during a gathering in Philadelphia of the Anglican Association of Musicians.

Paul's sermons, not only these four, are among the best I've ever read or heard. But, of course: in his 1991 book on preaching he wrote, “I have a rather pragmatic view of preaching. If it doesn’t help people live, then it’s probably a waste of their time.”

Those who visit our newSpin blog or read my online notes may have wondered why I very recently posted those sermons: Because Bishop Paul told me only recently that he wrote them at a time he thought he was soon to die. 

With that in mind, I searched those sermons for a perceived “soon-to-die” passage. Allow me to quote, in slightly edited form, a passage from the first.

He noted that Gustav Mahler, when asked why he never composed a mass, said it was because there was a creed in it.

“For the orthodox Christianity of Mahler’s day, the creed was for the most part data, not a song. So perceived, it ultimately reduced God to an object, capable of study, dissection, and definition, the fuel for debate and even persecution. Such talk of a domesticated and definable God does not invite the ecstasy of music.

“Beliefs, including our own,” Paul preached, “are motivated, by many things going on inside of us in our deepest unconscious. Not all of us believe with words.

“The creed has gotten more musical of late. The revival of Trinitarian theology in the last two generations has been, at its heart, the rediscovery by western Christians that what the ancient church chose to say about God is not in the first place data; it is doxology (praise).

“Doxology comes from reflection on both practical and ecstatic experience, and Trinitarian doxology comes to the conclusion that God is, in God’s deepest self, in relationship, from before time and forever. 

“Many have observed that the Greek word for that relationship is very like (but not identical to) the word for dance: Three distinct persons in one eternal Dance. Delicate, rhythmic, supple, inviting.

“What we call the heresies often moved theology from the mystical dance to something like bad PowerPoint.

“So to the part of us that resonates strongly with Mahler and other spiritually rich composers who balked at dogma perhaps because of its unmusicality, there come two words.

“The first is that our God worshiped with the creed is not worshiped as a datum, but is adored as the eternal dynamic relationship; we perceive that very God inviting us to join the dance.

“The second word is that if I try to figure God out rather than relax and adore the mystery, and lose myself in it, I condemn myself to theological tone-deafness and will not get to dance.”

I said earlier that, when Paul asked me to tell the truth, I thought that there were too many truths to tell. One of the truths is how deeply he touched many with his writing and his sermons. We’ll never know.

As one who is well into the last quarter of life, I can tell you that Bishop Paul has touched me deeply with a tune that’s easy to dance to.

Will you love me when you’re 64?
Bishop Paul, may the bakerwoman God continue to bake, break and remake you. You’re not too old. God meddling in our lives is good even for bodies he has molded more than once. May Christ, the bread of life, feed and sustain you.

"Do you love me?" Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Then what? 

"When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go."

Will you love me then? Will you love me when you're 64?

# # # # # # # # # # # # # #

I love this pope, by Bill Lewellis

I love this Pope
Pope Francis engages with an atheist
Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, October 12, 2013
http://www.mcall.com/features/religion/mc-faith-lewellis-pope-francis-atheist-20131011,0,4442500.story#tugs_story_display

Eugenio Scalfari, an outspoken atheist, is the founder of Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper. He recently sought an interview with Pope Francis.

Francis agreed, with an impromptu telephone call.

They joked during the interview about converting each other.

“Convert you?” Francis said. “Proselytism is solemn nonsense. You have to meet people and listen to them.”

I love this Pope. Eight popes have spanned my life in the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches. I’ve given all appropriate respect. I loved three, and Francis is now at the top of that trinity. The other two are John XXIII and John Paul I.

A quote from the interview: “Those most affected by narcissism – actually a kind of mental disorder – are people who have a lot of power,” Francis said. “Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers.”

Don’t you love this Pope?

Thinking about Pope Francis and two remarkable interviews he gave over the past few weeks led me way back into my past.

Josef Fuchs, a German Jesuit who taught at the Gregorian University in Rome during the 1960s, informed my first experience of Christian moral theology. It was not what I was expecting.

I was expecting to study the law. God’s law, church law, case studies, morality and legality. Answers. I was primed for clear and sure answers. Rules for life.

Several years earlier, in college seminary, I had begun collecting answers. On 3x5 index cards.

On the upper right corner of each card, I wrote topical words and phrases. From my reading, I’d make notes on the cards. “The Catholic’s ready answer,” a quip used by a Roman Catholic bishop on whose staff I later worked. Answers for my ministry as a priest.

Only once did I question my system. Three-by-five cards did not accommodate complexity. I upgraded with 5x7 cards. Ya gotta love a linear thinker.

Armed with 5x7 index cards, I was ready for the clear answers I’d discover in Father Fuchs’ moral theology class.

During the first few days or weeks – I don’t remember – he read and talked about passages from St. Paul’s letters. “Hello,” I thought. Was this the moral theology class? Someone’s reading from the Bible. So at odds with my expectations, Josef Fuchs walked his students through passages where Paul says we have been changed, transformed, reborn. In Christ.

He suggested again and again that in this rebirth, we discover the defining moment for Christian living: that the answer to “What must I do?” is contained in the question, “Who am I?” and that the Christian moral imperative is rooted not in law but in Jesus Christ and in the person I have become in Christ. An early version of WWJD?

Paul soon follows “You are a new creation,” Fuchs pointed out, with “Therefore, BE (who you are)!” This sequence was Paul’s moral theology. You are a new creation in Christ. You are mystery. Let the mystery unfold. Let the secret be told. Be reconciled. Be glad. Be thankful. Be compassionate. Be a new creation.

That, Father Fuchs suggested, was the heart of Christian morality: Jesus Christ and the new creation we have become in Christ. He called it the Pauline Indicative-Imperative: You are a new creation in Christ. Therefore, be…

It’s crucial to recognize the priority of the Indicative. Reversing the order, putting the imperative before the indicative, can lead to frustration and despair, even some hypocrisy. That we are a new creation has to be first. Only then, can we be or do with integrity.

The Pauline Indicative-Imperative is the basis for the priority of prayer and worship in our lives.

I eventually tore up my index cards.

Pope Francis, it seems, is rewriting the papal user’s guide.

“From the way you talk and from what I understand,” Scalfari told Francis, “you are and will be a revolutionary pope.” 

I love this Pope.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

'This is my Jesus,' the stranger said

By Bill Lewellis
July 17, 2012

A few weeks ago, Monica and I dined with three close friends. We sat three on one side and two on the other of a rectangular table in a crowded Italian restaurant. I was at the end where no one was directly across from me. A 50-something couple at a small table to my left was within arms reach, closer to me than my friends at the other end of our table. 

Occupied with our conversation, the gentleman at that table frequently stared our way. Turning toward him was my first mistake.

Faith is golden – Beliefs are overrated

By Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, May 26, 2012

Faith is golden. Beliefs are overrated. As are works.

When one reduces religion to either beliefs or good works, both are overrated. Reductionism (think "nothing but") usually destroys anything it attempts to explain, as in religion is nothing but belief or religion is nothing but morality.

Morality itself has for many been reduced to nothing but sexual morality. It is so much more, embracing personal, business and community relationships. And faith is so much more than belief, as in “I set my heart on” God rather than purely intellectual acts of belief.
 
Belief and good works are overrated especially when we think of them as prerequisites to being befriended by God.
 
Some 50 years ago, I sat in a university classroom in Rome when a professor introduced his course on the theology of revelation –– what we know about God because God told us –– with this image.

In a large lecture hall, accommodating several hundred students from perhaps 50 countries, he paced, slowly, along a raised platform.

He pressed one white dot with chalk on an enormous blackboard. After a dramatic pause, he said, in French-accented Latin, “The white is what we know about God. The black is what we don’t. What we know is little. But the little God has given us to know is precious.”

Among that precious little are two biblical themes: Be not afraid and you are loved.

A few years ago, as Monica and I walked through a subway corridor in New York City’s Port Authority, we passed a woman hawking literature near a table laden with posters proclaiming that judgment was at hand. Bold strokes. “Be afraid.”

I was embarrassed that anyone might think she and I were colleagues. As we passed her, to allay my anger within, I smiled and slowly shook my head.

She screamed. Threats of God’s wrath. God would get me. She followed us, proclaiming her caricature of God to everyone within earshot along hundreds of feet of subway corridor. Thirty seconds seemed like five minutes.

The irony is that versions of “Be not afraid” and “You are loved” appear throughout the Bible, the same Bible the tormented woman had deconstructed because she thought people had to be frightened into repentance before an angry and vengeful God.

Our scriptures, Jewish and Christian, tell the story of God’s love in many ways… from the Exodus story of deliverance from slavery to freedom to the Paschal Mystery of God in Jesus Christ demonstrating his love on a cross to God raising Jesus. In between are many stories of God’s love and our freedom to respond.

Those stories abound, I think, because the single, most difficult Christian belief is not belief in God as Trinity, nor that God became one of us in Jesus Christ, nor that God raised Jesus from the dead, nor that God continues to live in us through the Holy Spirit, nor that we too will be raised. It’s none of those. It is that God forgives and loves us even before we repent.

God’s Good News, as I understand it, is threefold. First: we’re all sinners. We stand in a long biblical line of negative role models.

Second: we’re all forgiven and loved by God. “You can’t conceive, nor can I,” wrote Graham Greene, “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Third: we’re all forgiven and loved by God not because we’ve been repentant. We’re repentant and transformed because we’ve been forgiven and loved.

God’s relentless love will last. I promise you. I set my heart on God's incredible love. I do not rely on beliefs or works.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that.]

Churches remain relevant despite decline in membership

Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call
Your View column, May 4, 2012

Declining numbers in churches of whatever flavor have become a truism, probably since the halcyon I-Like-Ike 50s but especially over the past few decades. Wednesday's Page One story detailed the past decade's local decline.

Declining numbers often mean church closings. Witness the closing of Roman Catholic churches over the past few years. They received remarkable publicity because they were done wholesale and drew controversy. There have been many others, somewhat under the radar.

Is there positive spin we might give to this phenomenon of changing churches?

Decades ago, a wire service religion editor used to say that the Episcopal Church has an influence far beyond its numbers. (Did I say he was an Episcopalian?) The Episcopal Church has a lot of experience at being a small yet effective church. There are probably more Muslims in the U. S. than there are Episcopalians.

Some of our churches with an average Sunday attendance of 50 serve the poor, the homeless, the marginalized in ways far beyond what such numbers might suggest. Some of our large churches serve the poor better than the cities in which they are located. Not only Episcopal congregations. You may be a member of a congregation like that in another denomination. It's all about the members and the leadership.

Five fewer or five more people in a congregation of 50 make a significant difference for the mission of the congregation. For that reason, among others, every person is a treasure.

Hear me. If you are not now a member of a church, talk to your local priest or minister. Tell him or her why you are not. Hear what he or she has to say. Perhaps you can't get your head around or have an incredibly bizarre notion of what you'd have to believe. People have acted themselves into believing the basics by taking part in the mission of the church. "Come and see," Jesus said. Faith is not about doctrinal purity. It is so much more, including paying attention to the hope that is within you, attending intensely to what is within and beyond.

If you can't find someone to talk with or if you are not treated as a treasure, resort to me. I'd love to hear from you.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, a retired Episcopal priest, served on the bishop's staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the bishop's staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that. His email is [email protected]]

Mary could get you out of jail – and put you in

Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, Feb. 18, 2012

When I was growing up in a small town in Schuylkill County, a strong woman was my hero. Before folks heard the word, Mary was a feminist in the Forties.

She kept Port Carbon, except for a few contrarians, Republican. In nearby Pottsville, she had a patronage job, matron at the county courthouse. I never had the nerve to ask her what the matron did.

She knew every judge, lawyer, bureaucrat, policeman and politician in the county. And they knew her. In Port Carbon, Mary was your network. She could get you out of jail quicker than a lawyer could.

Mary had a big heart. She and Vince had no children of their own, but they raised a few. None bore their name. Billy came to live with them when he was eleven after appearing in juvenile court on a petty theft charge. Mary happened to be sitting in the courtroom. Billy’s parents told the judge they couldn’t handle him. The judge said he’d have to send Billy away. They called it “reform school,” in those days.

“Judge, you can’t do that to this nice boy,” Mary said. “What can I do?” the judge replied. “I’ll take him home,” she said. She did. She and Vince raised Billy until he enlisted in the service.

That would have been enough to make Mary my hero; but she also did something for the women of Port Carbon that no man could have done.

My parents operated a neighborhood tavern in Port Carbon for some 35 years. That’s where I got the scoop. After I was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, my mother quipped that she may have already heard more confessions than I ever will.

Domestic violence, wife battering, may have been every small town’s dirty secret. The word in town, however, was that if a woman was abused by her husband she should call Mary. Mary went to the house, She’d go jaw to jaw with any man, confronting the abusive husband for the jerk he was. Her language was vivid. I’d love to supply samples. The confrontation often ended with the husband spending the night in jail. Mary could get you out of jail – but she could also put you in.

Some women didn’t call Mary. Some felt they had no economic alternative. Some feared that something worse might happen to them later. Some stayed in the “relationship” for what they called religious reasons. It was difficult to convince some that God did not want them to be abused.

One of my favorite readings is from the Book of Isaiah: Thus says the Lord who created you, who formed you: [Hear this word the Lord speaks to each one of us.] Be not afraid, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God… You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you… Be not afraid, for I am with you…

Hear this word of the Lord… hear it in your mind and heart: You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that. He has written hundreds of columns for newspapers and collaborated with Jenifer Gamber in the 2009 book, Your Faith Your Life: An Invitation to the Episcopal Church.]

Christopher Hitchens dead at 62 – Is he still an atheist?

By Bill Lewellis

Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed during the spring of 2010 with stage-four metastasized esophageal cancer. He may may have been our best known and most bitter atheist – author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Reviewing the book in the Washington Post, Boston College professor Stephen Prothero wrote that he had “never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject.” Hitchens went after easy targets. Most would be on my list of “bad religion.”

During the next few months, he wrote three brutally honest pieces for Vanity Fair on his experience of “the unfamiliar country” of people undergoing treatment for cancer. The same critic who panned Hitchens’ knowledge of religion wrote that Hitchens' reflections ranked up there with the best writing he knows on the topic of cancer. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be,” Hitchens wrote in VF, “I have very abruptly become a finalist. Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down."

Then he lost his voice. "Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs ... I wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

The oncology bargain, he wrote, is that "in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head." 

During his battle with cancer, there were people who told him in hard, hard copy or online that God is punishing him, especially with the loss of his voice, for his "blasphemies" against God and religion. I could not understand such people. Because Hitchens was an atheist, they wanted him to agonize in his illness and then go to hell rather than discover our compassionate God in the undiscovered country of death and what lies beyond.

Read articles in the NYTimes and the Daily Beast.

Thanks,
Bill

Bill Lewellis, Diocese of Bethlehem, retired
Communication Minister/Editor (1986-2010), Canon Theologian (1998)
newSpin blog, Email (c)610-393-1833
Be attentive. Be intelligent. Be reasonable. Be responsible.
Be in Love. And, if necessary, change. [Bernard Lonergan]

Diocesan Life for December 2011/January 2012

Open publication - Free publishing - More floods

You can download a .pdf of the file here: Download DECEMBER2011_DiocesanLife_SMALL

A kind-of Thanksgiving column

Savin’ up for the things money can’t buy
Bill Lewellis
The Morning Call, Nov. 19, 2011

In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides writes of two 1982 Brown University graduates backpacking through Europe. They part when Mitchell, on a religion quest, goes to India to serve at a guest house for the dying.

Working for a week within his comfort zone, Mitchell is challenged by an older man to color outside his lines.

The older man removes a dying man’s bandages, revealing putrid sores. Pouring water on the man, he says, “This is the body of Christ.” Not finding God there, Mitchell leaves Calcutta with a different prayer on his lips: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner.”

I am thankful for God’s mercy on me, a sinner.

Doris died last week. A longtime editor with a difficult ministry in the onetime reactionary Diocese of San Joaquin, she wrote this to a colleague a week earlier.

“I have rather suddenly become filled with cancer of just about everything. This week is my last week of lucidity, then it's off to la-la land and eventually to heaven.

“You know how much Episcopal Communicators [a national organization] has meant to me all these years, and I am going to count on you to pass on the information and all of my thanks for everything everyone has done for me. Don [spouse] will let you know when I am gone. Doris.”

I am thankful for those who teach me to die with gratitude and trust in my heart.

Margaret, a onetime colleague, shared a nightly practice suggested in the book, Simple Abundance. “Every night, before going to bed,” she said, “I jot down five things about that day for which I am thankful.” Later, she told me how this practice changed her perspective on so many things, how it gave every day greater validity.

I’m thankful for all the blessings of this life.

"For the beauty and wonder of your creation, in earth and sky and sea, we thank you, Lord. For our daily food and drink, our homes and families, and our friends ... For minds to thik, and hearts to love, and hands to serve ... For the brave and courageous, who are patient in suffering and faithful in adversity ... For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty and justice ... we thank you, Lord." {From A Litany of Thanksgiving in The Book of Common Prayer)

I once sat at the coffee counter of a local Dunkin’ Donuts. A glass-shattering crash spun me around. I touched the hood of a car that had burst through the plate glass window. No one was hurt, not even the elderly driver who had accidentally hit the accelerator rather than the brake. Later that day, my eyes widened as I pulled a handful of glass pebbles from my jacket pocket.
I’m reminded to be thankful when I drive by a Dunkin’ Donuts, to be thankful for accidents where no one is hurt.

Onetime UPI religion editor Lou Cassels was syndicated in 400 newspapers. He died in 1974. A fellow journalist, perhaps at Lou’s funeral, said he wrote three columns and one sermon every month. I looked forward to reading all four.

I thank God for Lou Cassels.

Sermons may be found at times today in films and on TV; also in songs by Bono and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

Try on this refrain from a Springsteen song: You’d better start savin’ up for the things that money can’t buy.

I am thankful for sermons that catch me by surprise.

[Canon Bill Lewellis, [email protected], a retired Episcopal priest, served on the Bishop’s staff of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem for 24 years and on the Bishop’s staff of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allentown for 13 years before that. He has written hundreds of columns for newspapers and collaborated with Jenifer Gamber on the 2009 book, Your Faith Your Life: An Invitation to the Episcopal Church.]

Movie – "The Tree of Life"

Canon Bill Lewellis

I recommend this 138-minute film from director Terrence Malick (Jessica Chastain, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn), now available on DVD. It could be the centerpiece of a fruitful two-day retreat. Having viewed it twice (easy for a retired guy to say), I'd recommend a first viewing prior to consulting any reviews. Don't seek meaning, just let the film flow into you. If you have already read reviews, do what you can to prescind from them. Let the film – the imagery, the music and the narrative – simply flow into you. Then (1) bask in what you've seen, and (2) read a few reviews. There are many. Here are five: Spirituality and Practice, NYTimes, Roger Ebert, The Guardian, Wikipedia. On the second day, or some later day, view the film again. Enjoy again while seeking your own meaning, not what the director's meaning may be but what you seem to be taking from it. Make liberal use of the pause button for contemplation. Says Roger Ebert at the conclusion of his review, "It all happens in this blink of a lifetime, surrounded by the realms of unimaginable time and space." Warning: It requires concentrated viewing. If you are in any way distracted while watching The Tree of Life, if you watch it with anything else on your mind, you will neither enjoy the film nor solve your distractions.