 St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Monday, June 6, 2022 The Day After –  This week all the Red will disappear.The banners will come down. The flowers will come off the processional crosses. The Paschal (Easter) candle will return to its place by the baptismal font. The whole place will go back to “normal” for the first time since Ash Wednesday. Unlike Lent and Easter, Pentecost is a single day – not a season.  You may know that the Jewish feast of Shavuot, which occurs 50 days after Passover, also happened yesterday. It is a celebration of God’s goodness in giving the Torah to God’s people. It happened once. But Jewish understanding affirms that God continues to “give” the Torah to the same people again and again – freshly, so that every year God’s people receive it again. That implies, also, that the gift doesn’t always look or sound or even “mean” the same thing in 21st century USA as it did in ancient Israel. The word given to Moses is eternal, and binding, but it isn’t rigidly fixed. This is hard for some people to grasp. There are “originalists” in religion as well as in politics, after all! You probably know some. Maybe you are one. In the same way, the “new law” the “law of the Spirit” was given to us once on the Day of Pentecost. But we also, in 2022, expect to be led by that same Holy Spirit into all – and ever new – understanding. When we are “reminded of all Jesus said”, we expect to hear those words freshly – in our own context – because we do not live in 1st century Jerusalem. And the Holy Sprit is not trapped there. And we do not live in the England of Henry or Elizabeth I; or even in the colonial and early United States, either. We ought to expect that things nobody mentioned in those early accounts of the work of the Spirit, will be heard in them – and still be vital and real and true. It takes discernment. It takes quiet, It takes a great deal of study. It takes openness. The General Convention this summer has several debates on its plate. One is a resolution that the Holy Communion belongs to all the people of God – which is too say all people – if they wish to participate; an originalist response is to reaffirm the traditional view that only the baptized ought to receive. A great deal of virtual ink is currently being spilled over this, but mostly in a friendly manner. It is true that baptism is normative for Christians. It is the act of inclusion, of belonging, of being welcomed into the family of the Church. But it is also true that there are believers who are not baptized, and among us, especially, children of Christians who grew up in other traditions, who want their children to “remember” their baptisms as they recall their own. It would be unthinkable to me to exclude those children from the table. And I do not much like the baptistic pressure to get children to confess faith early, so they can be baptized, before they really can have much conceptual sense of what that means just so they are eligible” to receive communion. And I am also aware that children whose parents delay baptism until they “want” it, sometimes never come to the water due to shyness or awkward hesitation. It is complex.. We do “believe in” and practice infant baptism, not because we don’t want our children to make a formal commitment to the Lord, or because we don’t think they need to, but simply because they belong from the very beginning. We want to mark that, to give them that identity, by baptism. We want them to grow up as belongers. We want them never to know a time when they weren’t fully part of the body. We don’t want them to remember when they couldn’t eat the food that is given to the people of God. At the same time, I am willing to wait until new people, new Episcopalians from other parts of the Church gain that understanding; but I won’t wait to give their little ones who are so eager – the gifts of God which are for the people of God. Some pictures from yesterday  Matt Whatley and Cora   Lexi Walker and Lindsey   Mother Cathy and RBThree Birthdays In the first week of June we celebrate three birthdays: Jon Woosley on June 2 Lily Shepard on June 6 and Matt Whatley on June 7 O God, our times are in your hand: Look with favor, we pray, on your servants Jon, Lily and Matt, as they begin another year. Grant that they may grow in wisdom and grace, and strengthen their trust in your goodness all the days of their lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen  |
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