Grace for Our Days

The idea that the year begins in early December instead of January 1 suits me just fine. I’m just contrarian enough to enjoy upsetting the calendar. You see, calendars do more than help us show up on the right day for the dentist; at a deeper level they reflect a world view, even a way of longing for the good life and the right end to things. They are somewhat arbitrary and can be changed, indeed have been. So the Christian calendar is not just different, it contains a contrary vision of the good life from the one that governs so much of our daily life. As Fleming Rutledge—an  Episcopal priest and writer—puts it, it’s a Means of Grace (Eerdmans, 2021). 

Early December. It is the first Sunday in Advent. What a way to start the year, longing for Jesus. Rutledge begins her collection of devotions with one on Mark 13:33. What? Wait! It seems we’re still waiting. Mark is telling us one of Jesus’ parables, about a doorkeeper. The household was established by a master. He is away, but coming back. Meantime, it is dark and crazy around the house while they wait; and also out there in the neighborhood. You might say, the TV and the papers and the online gossip are full of bad news; with a doubtful end in sight.

The master was there; he’s away; he’s coming back. Jesus has come; Jesus is away; he’s coming back. We’re in between the comings, the Advents. Rutledge writes:

        It is the Advent clock that tells the church what time it is. The church that keeps Advent is the            church that is most truly herself. The church is not supposed to be prosperous and comfortable         and established. It is Advent—it is dark and lonely and cold, and the master is away from home.         Yet he will come. Keep awake. (5)

Rutledge goes on like this with a devotion for each Sunday in the year; challenging the accepted wisdom of this age and offering the wisdom of the good news of Jesus. She does it by following the church’s liturgical calendar and its big days: Advent, Nativity, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. She uses the schedule of readings that takes the church through the year, forming people’s loves and visions. Instead of national holidays and Hallmark holidays and their vision of the good life (they can show up if they’ll behave).

The clocks and the calendars: which ones can you trust as you make your way past covid (maybe); which ones will nurture your longings and loves? I’m with Rutledge and the church’s calendar.

—Larry Sibley

Enriching Our Prayers

 If your prayers seem thin and dull, or a bit too frenzied and infrequent, LeAnne Hardy has just the book for you. Honey from the Comb: A Guide for Focused Prayer Using the Scriptures (Birch Island Books) is the fruit of a lifetime of praying, experimenting and searching; seeking a better way to talk to God.

She writes, “it is easy to focus on the problems instead of the one who is able to  calm the storm.” She recommends enriching prayer by refocusing on who God is, what he is like, before rushing in to make requests or demands. And, adding thanksgiving and confession to the mix: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. ACTS. As another writer put it, a full diet of prayer.

Hardy’s book does not contain prayers, but hundreds of Bible verses that she has collected over the years, organized around the four aspects of prayer. For Adoration, for instance, she lists more than 40 aspects of God’s character and actions with verses for contemplation that later can turn to prayer (almost 100 pages worth!).  

After watching the evening news—all that suffering and chaos—she recommends turning to the section on the Almighty and focusing on “Is anything to hard for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14) and “He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed.” (Job 8:10); rephrasing each verse and praying it back to God in adoration, before asking God to help that devastated family or to protect your own.

I’ve been focusing on enriching my use of the Lord’s Prayer, especially the first phrase, “Our Father.” With Hardy’s book in hand, I found a verse in Adoration on God as Father: “I am Israel’s father” in Jeremiah 39:1 that echoes Exodus 4:22, “Israel is my son, my firstborn. Let my people go.” God is coming to claim his son. In the section on Confession, I found “Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Gal 5:21) And did some self examination—working back through the previous verses—to see where I fall short and confessed it. In Thanksgiving, I found “In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship” (Eph 1:5) and thanked God for taking me in. Then, in Supplication I found “Be openhanded and freely lend.” (Deut 15:8) Adoption is into a kingdom that is a family, and family members need help—and I need help in being generous. That menu makes quite a meal for one day!

I first met LeAnne Hardy about 50 years ago and have enjoyed praying for her and her husband Steve as they served in six countries around the world. So, get yourself a copy and enrich your prayers, expand your menu.

—Larry Sibley

Lines from a New Hampshire farm

I love to rummage around in a used bookstore. You never know what you’ll find. One year, Lois
and I took a book and plant vacation. We roamed around Vermont and New Hampshire, visiting
used bookstores and gardens that sold plants. We filled up the back of the car with new treasures
for our bookshelves and gardens as we traveled. Years later, we’re still enjoying them. A
substitute would be a library book/plant sale, less travel but the same hunt.

Last fall I was scanning the tables at a local theological library and found
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006; sixty
years and 414 pages of Donald Hall’s creativity (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
What was Hall doing amid all those volumes of spiritual advice and
commentaries? Who knows who bequeathed it; but it didn’t make into the
library collection and I took it home. Have been slowly working my way
through the years of poems.

Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, a few years before my family
moved next door to New Haven. His father’s dairy, Brock Hall, delivered
milk to our doorstep. By the time I first discovered his small chapbooks of
poems, he was living with his wife, Jane Kenyon (another poet), in his
grandparents’ farmhouse by a pond in New Hampshire, the same house where he spent summers helping his grandparents. The more I read the poems, the more I travel back to times of helping my Massachusetts grandfather with haying for his one cow, or sugaring on Saturdays with another farmer during my high school years in Vermont.

But, now to sample the poems. One section is headed, “Root Cellar.” Usually a small room

carved out of the sidewall of a dirt-floored cellar where vegetables and apples would keep through the winter. Many of these poems appeared earlier in Kicking the Leaves (1978), so they are like old friends come to visit. For instance, “I remember/coming to the farm in March/in sugaring time, as a small boy./He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart/buckets, dangling from each end/of a wooden yoke/that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them/into a vat in the saphouse/where fires burned day and night/for a week.” When I worked with Will on his Vermont hill farm, we didn’t have a yoke, but carried the buckets, one in each hand, from the trees to the gathering tank on the scoot while the horses waited patiently. Then it was off with a whoop, sometimes over a partly snowed-in stone wall, to more trees.

Or, this one from the next section: “On Ragged Mountain birches twist from rifts in granite/Great
ledges show gray though sugarbush. Brown bears/doze all winter under granite outcroppings or in
cellarholes/the first settlers walled with fieldstone./Granite markers recline in high abandoned
graveyards.” The small town in New Hampshire where I went to a one-room school had such a
mountain in view. My father and I would hike it and see all these things Hall saw, especially the
granite outcroppings where there might have been bears in winter—imagine a first grader’s
imagination.

—Larry Sibley

Hearing Echoes. . .

When I was a small boy, my parents used to take us to Echo Lake, near Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. We’d stand on the shore and shout. . .then wait for the echo to come back. Endless fascination. I couldn’t get the same result in our back yard, or at a nearby lake.

I’m still hearing echoes, now when someone reads Scripture on Sunday
mornings. Something in Luke sounds like something from Isaiah; the reader speaks and across time the echo comes back. Brian Estelle’s Echoes of Exodus: Tracing a Biblical Motif (www.ivpacademic.com) probes this phenomenon within the Old Testament—begun during the account of the Exodus in Moses and followed in the Psalms, Isaiah, during the exile and return. Then he shows us how echoes of that paradigmatic event are used in the Gospels, Acts, Paul, Peter, and the Apocalypse to tell the good news of the kingdom.

Richard Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 1989) was an early pioneer in noticing
these echoes—not direct quotations, or even a more obvious allusions to another/earlier part of
the big story of Scripture, but brief glimpses or echoes that resonate for a hearer who knows the
broad sweep of the story. He likens it to watching a play with brief snatches of earlier history
projected on a back screen. You just barely see them, but they trigger a response: “This play is
about something else.” He has a big word for this: metalepsis, meaning that the brief snatch brings
the larger original context with it and the hearer senses/remembers that. For instance, how can
you hear “holy, holy, holy” without remembering Isaiah’s vision, or the hymn and when you sang
it on some memorable occasion? As he begins the book, Estelle interacts with Hays for a few
pages, taking what he’s learned into his kit bag.

As Estelle moves into Luke’s writings, especially the gospel, he focuses on a few passages: Luke
3:2-6 that he calls Luke’s framing discourse—clues Luke gives the hearer about how to
listen—and the “End of Exile,” where he establishes the role of the Exodus in the gospel; Luke 4,
the temptation and the sermon at Nazareth about liberation/exodus; Luke 9, the transfiguration;
Luke 9:51–19:44, Luke’s unique travel narrative, the journey to Jerusalem; and Luke 24, hearing
the Old Testament as a story about Jesus. In each of these he develops the ways in which the
exodus theme emerges. I’ll be consulting this chapter as my local church listens to Luke’s gospel
this summer and fall. Estelle’s writing is academic and demanding, but worth the effort and even
re-reading a section to see more deeply into the biblical text.

Estelle notes that Augustine viewed the complexity of Scripture, all those human authors making
intentional and unintentional allusions and echoes, in the light of the divine author behind the
scenes, composing the various books “like an ineffably gifted artist combining movements into a
sung poem.” At one level, Scripture is more like a symphony than a systematic theology.

—Larry Sibley, guest contributor (husband of Lois, he also moonlights as a teacher and writer).

They asked for a paper. . .

With apologies to C. S. Lewis (They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), let me tell you about some papers, read at two conferences. I have learned much from papers written for and read at a conference. Including those from Wheaton College Theology Conferences over the years. Each year, a topic is chosen and people invited. They convene and read to each other, discuss endlessly in session and in between; often far into the night.

First up: Come, Let Us Eat Together: Sacraments and Christian Unity , (www.ivpacademic.com), from 2017. A remarkably diverse, baker’s dozen scholars gathered to discuss the Lord’s Supper. Contributions from the Orthodox East, from Rome in the middle (geographically, perhaps theologically), some Anglicans, and various American Protestants. For a sample, let’s listen as Matthew Levering (University of St. Mary of the Lake) reads his paper, “The Eucharist, the Risen Lord, and the Road to Emmaus.” In Luke 24, “By teaching Cleopas and his companion how to read the Old Testament so as to recognize the necessity that the Messiah should suffer and then rise from the dead, the risen Jesus shows later believers one path for comprehending the truth of his resurrection: reading and understanding the Old Testament. In this essay, however, I will focus on a second path to which the risen Jesus directs believers: ‘the breaking of bread.’ ” (Lk 24:35)
After a careful exploration of Luke’s road to Emmaus story, interacting with other writers, as he comes to the conclusion of his essay, Levering turns to Christian unity and reads, “If the unity of Christians is to increase, who better to increase it than the risen Christ himself? And where could it be more fitting for this unity to be increased than in the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, whose effect is to deepen the baptismal unity of ‘all the faithful in one body—the Church’ “?

One would love to have been in the room as others responded to Levering, eavesdropping on the
conversation. Would they have welcomed his enthusiasm for the unifying effect of the meal? Or,
would some still have reservations, shoring up walls instead of building bridges? A little of both
from what I see in the other essays. Luke 24 has become one of my favorite passages in teaching
about the meal. Levering’s treatment has given me added insights to share with my friends and
students.

In 2018 the gathering turned to Marilynne Robinson and her fiction centered in the fictional Iowa town of Gilead and its pastor, John Ames; along with her essay collections. Including nine other writers, Robinson was there and joined the discussion. The resulting book is Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson (www.ivpacademic.com).

I’ve read several of her books, both fiction and essays. The fiction embodies ideas that she finds important as she contemplates our culture; much like Wendell Berry’s fiction embodies his concerns for the environment. Since the book arrived, I’ve been reading the essays. Here’s what I found.

Robinson has been clear about her appreciation for John Calvin—a rarity among mainstream writers (a Pulitzer for her novel Gilead). So, of course this attracted some attention in Wheaton; a 22 page essay by Timothy George (Beeson Divinity School), a brief interchange in Robinson’s interview with Wheaton president Philip Ryken, and scattered comments in several other essays.

George focuses his essay on Robinson’s project of rescuing Calvin’s reputation. Robinson discovered Calvinism when she was assigned one of Jonathan Edwards’ writings in college. That turned her around and she started digging further into the tradition, back to Calvin, discovering along the way that the Geneva reformer is often slandered by scholars who haven’t read enough Calvin to know him. Now, Calvin shows up not only in her essays and lectures, but also in the protagonist in her fiction, the Rev. John Ames.

For instance, George quotes from Pastor Ames: “I fell to thinking of the passage in the Institutes
where it says the image of the Lord in anyone is more than reason enough to love him, and that
the Lord stands ready to take our enemies’ sins upon Himself It is a rejection of grace to hold our
enemy at fault. . . .I have probably preached on that a hundred times.” (Gilead, 189) George notes
that Robinson “acknowledges that Calvin teaches both. . .an exalted view of human beings made
in the image of God and the radicality of sin. Still, she concludes, ‘it is a grander thing altogether
to be a Calvinist sinner than a Freudian neurotic.’ ” (Balm in Gilead, 57)

Well, I’d better get back to reading the rest of the essays: “Thinking about preaching with
Marilynne Robinson” by Lauren Winter (Duke Divinity School); “Beyond Goodness: Gilead and
the Discovery of the Connections of Grace,” by Rowan Williams (Magdalen College, Cambridge)
among them.

—Larry Sibley, guest writer

Luther, Cranmer, Calvin, and much more

Thomas Cranmer wanted to get the major reformers of his today together in one room to form a consensus about doctrine and worship. It never happened. But when you’re a couple of 21st century editors, you can do it. Just get their liturgies—17 of them from the 16th century—together between two covers, freshly translated into contemporary English; add some introductory comments to each—including charts showing the shape of each—and some general essays and it’s done! It’s called Reformation Worship: Liturgies from the Past for the Present edited by Jonathan Gibson and Mark Earngey (www.newgrowthpress.com ). Although you can see some differences (ones Cranmer hoped to resolve), you mostly notice the similarities. Lots of examples here for the 21st century church.

When Lois and I opened the package from the mail, we sat around and discussed it as we read. Listen in.

Lois: Wow, this is a heavy book (688 pages)! It begins with a Foreword by Sinclair Ferguson, who calls the reader to return to the Bible and the Reformation. The liturgies were written and shared by religious leaders from many countries and theologians, and Ferguson calls readers to use this collection “wisely and well,” even as a “benediction to the church.”

Larry: One of my favorites is John Calvin’s Form of Prayers that he used as a pastor in Geneva from 1542 until he died in 1664. The translation here is accessible for public reading of the exhortations, prayers, etc. Calvin’s sentences and paragraphs can be long and complex, but I think the average congregation would not get lost, especially if they had the text—adapted to fit the contemporary situation—in front of them and became familiar with it, almost memorize it from use. This is what gets the words “into the bone,” as they say, so that they can form the spiritual life of the believer. Calvin’s extended paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer is especially good for shaping the prayer life of the worshiper. With Martin Luther’s Form of the Mass (1523) and German Mass (1526), the editors have included the music for chanting the Gospel and other standard texts, like the Sursum Corda; a definite plus!

Lois: I liked seeing Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552) and comparing it with the 1979 revision that I often use. In 1979, some people were eager for a contemporary version and others wanted to keep the 1928 form. I like to imagine what it would have been like in 1549 when the first BCP was introduced. How would the people have adjusted to the prayers in English, instead of Latin? How long would it have taken for them to relax and enjoy the service?

Larry: I think it needs one more chapter. It’s great to have all these resources, but I wonder about how useful it would be for a busy pastor or a worship committee of lay folks without some hints about how to use it. For instance, if you’re Presbyterian, I’d take “what we’ve always done” and compare it with Calvin’s Form of Prayers. I’d look at the shape, the sequence of items, and notice how they fit together, play off each other to make a powerful and helpful guide for the congregation. Why did he place the intercessory prayer after the reading and preaching of the Word? What would happen if we did that instead of our usual placement earlier in the service? Would it be better as a response to the Word? Go one by one through the elements and ask similar questions compared to what you’re doing. Move slowly so that people can adjust and understand why. One congregation I know took 20 years to revamp their liturgy along Calvin’s lines. A chapter that leads the reader through this process step by step would be very helpful.

—Lois and Larry Sibley

Questions, Questions, and More Questions

(Lois invited Larry to contribute a review this time, here’s what he has to say.)

I lead a Bible Study Group most Sunday mornings, except during the summer. The group loves questions. After I finish with my questions, they start in with theirs and we go from there.

How about God asking the questions? Could they handle that? I’m about to find out next January when, with some of the same folks, I’ll use Dale and Sandy Larsen’s Questions God Asks, exploring nine questions God asks of characters in the Old Testament (www.ivpress.com). The Larsens write, “While each question is only one verse, the study unfolds the larger context of the question, including immediate circumstances, background, identity of the person being questioned, the person’s response, and the apparent results.”

 For instance, God asks Adam and Eve “Where are you?” They’re hiding as you will remember. Do folks hide from God today? Why? And does he come asking?

Or Jonah, in a fit because God is so merciful, hears “Is it right for you to be angry?” Well. . . . We too might get angry at God; perhaps.

This goes on with questions for Moses—“What’s that in your hand?;” Israel at the Red Sea—“Why are you crying out to me?;” Joshua—“What are you doing down on your face?;” Elijah—“What are you doing here?;” Israel again, now called Jacob in Isaiah—“Why do you complain, Jacob?;” Ezekiel—“Can these bones live?;” and Israel again, after the exile—God asks, “What about that nice house you live in while mine is in ruins?”

Come January, I’ll put some of these questions to the group and listen to their reactions—and get some questions back, no doubt. God’s questions cut to the quick, designed to help with self examination and spiritual renewal.

By the way, go back through this review and count the question marks. See how often we need to ask (and hear) questions?

—Larry Sibley