Rector's Study December 2010

There are some good things about the possibility that Christianity and faith in God are now less the cultural norms than they once were, as recently as fifty years ago. It means that Christianity is increasingly a counter-culture. It means that faiths in God, and in God’s goodness in Christ Jesus, are counter-cultural. Christians don’t find today the cultural supports and validations that perhaps Christians did in an early time. It means that Christian faith and practice are no longer the cultural assumptions that they once might have been, so Christians today must increasingly be Christians because they mean to be.

One of the truly counter-cultural aspects of Christian faith is the anticipation that Christians have around the coming of Christ. Yes, the secularized culture of apathy toward questions about God will, of course, has similar disinterest in Christ Jesus and his coming into the world. Still further, though, still more counter-cultural, is the presence of anticipation at all.

Rector's Study November 2010

Rector’s Study ~

I recently read the suggestion that one thing that all people have in common with one another is the universal capacity for God. I like this idea. Bernard of Clairvaux , 12^th century monastic and theologian, wrote frequently of humanity’s capacity for love and of how any increase in this capacity is purely a gift from God. Bernard nearly equates love with God. Bernard is credited with introducing the idea of humanity’s capacity for love, and so is credited also with introducing the concept of humanity’s capacity for God.

His theory was that awe in wonder, pain in need, and joy in abundance or victory were all potential avenues by which people can meet and know God. The sudden need for God in a distressing situation, or the meeting of God in speechless awe can move a person to transcend himself or herself. In this moment, the person finds the inner capacity for God and for loving God is increased. It is in these moments, in these events, hat people are able to love others, and even to love themselves either in ways that are new to them or in ways that they have forgotten.

Rector's Study October 2010

From the Rector's Study ~

Relationship is what it’s all about. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles describes the zealous and explosive birth of the Church; the Book of the Revelation describes the early Church’s fear of demise in the face of tremendous challenge. I’ve been reading through and studying both of these rather concurrently, and I come to the conclusion that opportunity for relationship with fellow followers of Christ is what gives birth to the Church and is also the source of energy that sustains it. Relationship with God in Jesus and in the body of Christ, the Church, is what Christianity all about.

One of my favorite reflections on God’s creation is the suggestion that before creates anything – stars, seas, sun, moon, plants, animals, people – God first creates a void which is not filled with God’s presence. God deliberately makes room for that which is not God, even before that which is not God is brought into existence. God chooses not to crowd out the possibility of anything else. Instead, God opts to create a space that creation and creatures can fill. It is a grace that people seldom ponder, the grace that God chooses to bring into being something other than God’s self.

Rector's Study September 2010

From the Rector’s Study ~

I think everyone will agree that our responsibility and desire is to be the people of God in the way we can best do so. For our community here at ECR, our collective vocation is the do this as best we can as this particular community in this particular place and time. Just yesterday I met with our bishop, the Rt. Rev. Andy Doyle, to discuss in detail our desire and intention to do so. He agrees that all of this involves our campus makeover project; and that it involves far more, as well.

I’m pleased to find that the bishop is highly supportive of our intentions, and very impressed with the commitment that we are bringing to its accomplishment. And again, this involves far more than the installation of additional parking lots and driveways, and the erection of a new Family Life Center, as important as these are. We need to be ever vigilant and ever honest about where our expression of God’s Love for all needs to be improved so that we can be ourselves at our best.

Rector's Study August 2010

At the basis of humanity’s engagement with religion is humanity’s experience of God. It may seem an absurdly simple observation. It describes the plain fact that an aesthetic experience of God is determinative of a people’s or a person’s relationship with God. Yet, it is, I suggest a powerful insight. It indicates that for all the attempts at rational proofs for God’s existence, an endeavor stimulated by the intellectual and philosophical developments that characterize the period in western history known as the Enlightenment, are not determinatively persuasive on their own.

Western culture, of which our own is a part, overtly claims to assign definitive authority to rational thought and intellectual reason; however, in practice the collective culture can be found rather superstitiously idolizing the systems and the persons upon whom it projects its cultural valuations of reason and rational thought. In a sense, professors, physicians, and attorneys are the modern era’s shaman, wizards, and priests. Envy does not lie at the root of this observation; rather inspiration does.

Rector's Study July 2010

With Fr. Jim away for vacation, this edition of the Radiant Cross provides a good opportunity to help our members and friends know a little more about our rector. Here is an updated biography of Fr. Jim.

Fr. Jim and his wife Lee Elena are recently celebrating their twenty-second year together. They met in St. Louis, Missouri where Jim was born and raised, and near Lee Elena’s hometown of Monticello, Illinois. Lee Elena is a Nurse Practitioner working at a clinic in Elgin. Their three children are Valerie, soon to be 20, Emily, 18, and Melanie, 15. Fr. Jim attended a Lutheran elementary school and credits his early education in this Christian environment as formative of his faith in God. It was there that he began to sense a vocation from God to Holy Orders.

Before attending college, Jim worked variously as a self-defense instructor (earning a black belt in Chinese Kenpo), as a carpenter building custom homes, then as a laborer and/or department supervisor at a variety of manufacturing companies. Responding to a re-emerging sense of call, Fr. Jim returned to church life in his mid-twenties. Having drifted from the Lutheran Church of his childhood, he looked up “Church” in the white pages of the phone book. There he found a local Church of Christ congregation listed and began attending worship services. It was at this congregation that he was blessed to meet Lee Elena Mathis, his wife-to-be.

Rector's Study June 2010

From the Rector's Study ~

As a season in the cycle of the Church’s annual life, Pentecost reminds Christians that we are living in a distinct era. Different from the age in which people lived in hope and anticipation of a promised, but not yet arrived, Messiah; different from the short period of time when Jesus lived among the people of Galilee and Judean; ours is the era of post-resurrection and post ascension. To understand this era as well as possible in body, mind, and spirit is to give this era fuller meaning for us. To understand this era as fully as possible helps us to appreciate more fully both the blessing and the responsibility of living in it.

Some refer to Pentecost as the birth of the Church. On Pentecost Sunday, someone wished me ‘Happy Birthday’ as a reminder of this fact. The Spirit is God become present to humanity more intimately than any could ask or imagine. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost certainly makes this ‘the age of the Holy Spirit.’ “The Spirit of Jesus indwells Christian consciousness. It animates the community of faith and leads to a deeper appreciation of the life and message of Jesus. That is clear.” So observes author and theologian Anthony H. Kelly in his book The Resurrection Effect: Transforming Christian Life and Thought. And while this is a fine concept, I find that I still have reservations that we Christians tend to move rather more quickly than we ought past Jesus’ resurrection. Author Kelly has his own reservations, noting that “the event of the resurrection as something happening to him [i.e. to Jesus] can be bypassed, a more or less mythic expression of the origin of a new spiritual awareness.”

Rector's Study May 2010

From the Rector’s Study ~

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder” as the familiar saying goes. One misses a friend or loved one all the more when that person is not present. Sometimes, we don’t even realize how much the other person means to us until we experience his or her absence. This is important for you and me to recognize and is especially important for the community of Christians, for this community of ECR. When you are here, it may seem on rare occasion that the rest of us are taking for granted that fact that you are present. However, you need to know that when you are not here, you are missed, missed very much. And there’s something also that you yourself are missing in being away, in not being here at ECR.

I am here every Sunday. True, someone may say, I get paid to be here. But it’s also true that when I’m away on vacation, I miss being here and my heart grows fonder for you and all this community. It’s also true that when a parishioner is missing from worship and fellowship, especially on Sunday mornings, his or absence makes a difference in the lives of many people. It’s not just my presence as rector that makes ECR the community that it is. In fact, my presence cannot determine this community. Yours can. Yours does. And so does the presence or absence of every other person of this community. So, I’m inviting and urging all of us at ECR to make a decided commitment to being here on Sunday’s regularly even more than usual; to be here ‘religiously!’

Rector's Study April 2010

From the Rector’s Study ~
Following a season of introspection come this season of Easter. It is a season as well as a day. And it is a way of life as well as a season. Scholar and author John MacQuarrie observes in his book The Faith of the People of God that, “Most important of all the events in the life Christ was its end – his sufferings and death.” He rightly notes that, “All the Gospels devote much of their space to a detailed account of his last days and hours.” But he goes on to observe that, “The death of Jesus is an impressive and significant event, but according to the testimony of the Gospels, it was not the end of the story. They go on to tell of the resurrection of Christ. This last event…differs from the preceding ones because it is much more difficult to say what the historical fact was.” Whatever those facts may be, as MacQuarrie notes, “it does seem quite certain that there never would have been any rise of the people of God [i.e. Christians] if that people has not been convinced that Jesus was risen.”

Rector's Study March 2010

From the Rector’s Study ~

I pray each of us here at ECR has an enjoyable Lent. The progress of Jesus through his time of trial is consonant with the journey through relationship with God. A Christian’s relationship with God and with the community of his or her fellow Christians cannot be a static thing. Yes, these relationships may be stable and steadfast. However, they also grow and change. This is what makes them like a journey. The focus of the season of Lent is a reflection of this journey, particularly the journey inward.

The journey is an inward examination, but not so much an examination of oneself per se. Otherwise, we can find ourselves on a needlessly narcissistic and circuitous journey to nowhere. Rather, the inward Lenten journey is an examination of the relationship that exists between oneself and God and of the relationship between oneself and the Church. It is a journey of prayer, reflection, study, and labor. Its goal is to discern more clearly one’s place and one’s role as they are this time and in this place. It is to rediscover the fact that even these most holy relationships are evolving, and the fact that this evolution is itself a gift of God.

Rector's Study February 2010

Rector’s Annual Report for 2009
The Rev. James V. Stockton
Annual Meeting January 17, 2010

Our community rediscovered our strength last year. ECR was blessed last year with the gift of stability in a larger social context of uncertainty while this community continued to look forward to our future. We enjoyed this blessed combination gifts, and we shared these with the wider community and world around us. Here at ECR, as the saying has it, ‘life goes on.’ ‘In the sure and certain hope of the eternity of life, we bid loving farewell last year to James Baker, Evelyn Welborn, Tommy Stinson, Mike Stout, and Jim Webb. Each of these saints brought his or her gifts to the community of ECR over our collective history. Each will be appreciated into the future here. We grow from the nurture to our worship of God and fellowship in Christ that each entrusts to us all. We who were blessed to work with Tommy and with Mike over the many years of service that each provided will sense, I think, that their passing marks a particular era in our history. It will, of course, require more time for us to appreciate fully the impact that their lives had, and that their deaths in startlingly quick succession last year, had on our community. I invite you to browse by the video memorial that has been set up in the southeast corner of the hall today.

Rector's Study January 2010

From the Rector’s Study ~

Manifesting God’s Love – this is the meaning behind our celebration of this season called Epiphany. If Advent recalls humanity’s anticipation of the coming in of God’s presence, Epiphany recognizes the fulfillment of that anticipation. What comes into our lives, what God manifests before us in the birth of Christ, God incarnate, is the Love of God.

God’s Love is not necessarily what people are anticipating when they look forward to the drawing near of God. If there is some fear, some bit of worry, Epiphany recognizes that God is not to be feared but loved, that God’s presence is a loving one, and only people who fear divine love for humanity need have fear toward God. Whether it is what we anticipated or not, what is manifest before us as God comes to us in person is the Love of God for all.

Rector's Study December 2009

From the Rector’s Study ~

“He was made man that we might be made God.” It is a statement about Jesus well-known in theological circles, enthusiastically endorsed by some, suspiciously scrutinized by others. It was written by the Bishop of the Egyptian city of Alexandria in his thesis Of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Athanasius was bishop at a time when the Church was struggling to understand for itself some central tenets of the faith and wrestling with how to communicate these meaningfully to a skeptical world around it. Tradition holds that Athanasius is the author of the creed that bears his name, and which we find in our Book of Common Prayer beginning at page 864. One reads in the fine detail of this statement of faith the subtle distinction between what Athanasius intends to say and what he decidedly means not to say. When Athanasius claims that Jesus ‘was made man that we might be made God,’ he means exactly what he writes.

Rector's Study November 2009

This month begins with a celebration of saints and saintliness and concludes with a celebration of both all that we have for which we can be thankful and the phenomenon of thankfulness itself. This month also marks the end of one liturgical year and the beginning of the next. The convergence of all these events reminds us of a basic truth of Christian life: relationship with God is oriented around gratitude. Thankfulness toward God for all that makes up our lives is the guide to and the product of being saintly.

“The original sin of Adam and Eve, the prototype of all sin, is presented as a failure to be receptive and grateful.” So writes theologian and author Ronald Rolheiser in his recent book, The Shattered Lantern: rediscovering a felt presence of God. He explains: “God makes Adam and Eve and places them in the garden and showers them goodness and life. They are given gift beyond measure and are promised that life will continue in this rich and good way on one condition – they are not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.” He goes on, “The condition God places on them is not an arbitrary or petty test…God has told Adam and Eve that they may receive life as gift, but they may not take life as if it were theirs by right.”

Rector's Study October 2009

From the Rector's Study ~

“Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless. …death was something similar to recycling.” So writes author Douglas Coupland in his novel Life After God. Fiction though it is, it is autobiographically reflective. He continues, “Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers – life after God – a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt. ”

Few authors have expressed as well as this the spiritual life of many of the people emerging into adulthood in the wider community all around us here at ECR. Few authors have so well articulated the deep need among people today for a community like ours here at ECR, and for the good news about God that has made us who we are. Few communities like our own so well express God’s Love and so wonderfully celebrate the opportunity to connect other people with it, as do we.

Biography

With Fr. Jim away for vacation, this edition of the Radiant Cross provides a good opportunity to help our members and friends know a little more about our rector. Here is an updated biography of Fr. Jim.

Fr. Jim and his wife Lee Elena recently celebrated their twenty-first year together. They met in St. Louis, Missouri where Jim was born and raised, and near Lee Elena’s hometown of Monticello, Illinois. Lee Elena is a Nurse Practitioner working at a clinic in Giddings, an area designated by the state as under-served. Their three children are Valerie, 19, Emily, 17, and Melanie, 14. Fr. Jim attended a Lutheran elementary school and credits his early education in this Christian environment as formative of his faith in God. It was there that he began to sense a vocation from God to Holy Orders.

Before attending college, Jim worked variously as a self-defense instructor (earning a black belt in Chinese Kenpo), as a carpenter building custom homes, then as a laborer and/or department supervisor at a variety of manufacturing companies. Responding to a re-emerging sense of call, Fr. Jim returned to church life in his mid-twenties. Having drifted from the Lutheran Church of his childhood, he looked up “Church” in the white pages of the phone book. There he found a local Church of Christ congregation listed and began attending worship services. It was at this congregation that he was blessed to meet Lee Elena Mathis, his wife-to-be.

Rector's Study July 2009

From the Rector’s Study ~

Do you ever think about the ‘service area’ of ECR? Do you ever suppose that ECR serves certain areas, certain peoples, but not others. I doubt it.

“Across traditions, the ultimate focus is God – often represented as God’ sovereignty and God’s glory – as this extends to include the well-being of all life.” So notes theologian and author Paula M. Cooey in her book Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire. She continues, “Christians are called to love God and to love their neighbors as themselves. Nevertheless, conversion [to Christ and Christianity] focuses the energy on the making of the Christian subject or agent. This sustained, often all-consuming, focus…makes it all too easy to lose sight once again of the radical orientation to others of the Christian life and ethics.” Cooey reminds the reader that, “This focus on the other, apprehended in Jesus’ identification as the other in need, should collect and sustain the desire to will the good for all creation. Making people pure through the forgiveness of sins, and holy through their subsequent actions, is in this respect a by-product , a means, to a further end, and at best a secondary concern.” Her point is that, “When concern for one’s purity and holiness becomes the central force driving human life and action,…it subordinates God’s will for the good of all,…to the desires of one’s ego. This subordination,” she suggest, “constitutes a form of religious or spiritual narcissism.”

Rector’s Study - June 2009

From the Rector’s Study~ June 2009

Order is a gift of God. Long ago, when I was in seminary, a fine priest of much experience enlightened me to an important he fact of life. “For many of the people in our churches,” he said, “the one thing that they can count on in any given week is the familiarity of the service of worship service in their parish church on Sunday.” If change was something attractive to us neophytes who were about to graduate and then ‘fix’ all the faults of the Church, regular order was a tremendous blessing to all those whom we hoped to serve.

In the messy zeal of the first decades of the Church, Christians needed to know this. For example, the city of Corinth was, at the time, a center of cosmopolitan chaos. The Christians there were accustomed to it. The Apostle Paul, himself familiar with some exciting events in the lives of the communities of the Church that he had helped to nurture, recognized that, for the Corinthians, community life and worship had become not only exciting, but also competitive and even contentious. So Paul reminded them that “…God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33) and that “…all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40). These first-generation Christians needed to know that order is a gift from God. Christians today need to know it, too.

Rector's Study May 2009

From the Rector's Study ~

A beautiful future is unfolding before us, this community of ECR. Our own Pentecost experience is happening right here in our midst. Not with the same sensational rush of a mighty wind, yet the same Holy Spirit, the same igniting of God’s Love and Power, the same blessing of surprise that accompanied the first Pentecost for Jesus’ first disciples are manifesting for us even now. The Episcopal Church of the Resurrection is welcoming a wider variety of voices, speaking of God’s Good News from a wider variety of backgrounds, each proclaiming the Gospel as only he or she can put it into action, can put it into words. Christ was raised for all, and here at the Church of his Resurrection, we are putting this miracle into action. This is part of how we got here:

In April of 2005, the Vestry and Ministry Leaders of ECR identified a need and claimed the desire to expand our campus with additional parking capacity and an additional building to provide more space for ministries, education, and fellowship. It has always been a priority with me as rector that our parish community would understand the reasons for such expansion, and to know that expansion for its own sake was not reason enough. This priority continues today and I am happy to note that it is a priority also amongst our Vestry and Ministry Leaders.

Rector's Study April 2009

From the Rector's Study ~

“Live!” says God to the world. “Live! You are free, so live!” That inward journey upon which we entered some forty plus days ago has a destination. While we may rightly understand that we never really arrive there, yet it’s also true that the end point of our journey is always with us. Christ is alive, and so we too arrive at life. We live. Jesus has been raised beyond the finality of death itself. This Jesus Christ has made a journey from the glories of divinity to the struggles and joys of his own life among us as one of us. Christ’s journey has been always toward you and me and all humanity.

As trying as our forty days’ journey through Lent may have been, and as rewarding, Christ’s own journey has been far longer, far more challenging, and surely far more richly gratifying in the end. Our journey has taught us again that the journey inward to ourselves is a journey upward to God, for the more closely we draw to our true selves and to one another, the more closely we draw to God. Any soul-searching solitude, whether at Lent or any other time in our lives, will reveal to us that God is with us more surely than we’d ever supposed. Christ is raised from death and from everything that whispers of it.