Editorials

RATIONALITY AND IMAGINATION IN FRUITFUL EMBRACE
 
Some of you, as children, will have read the Narnia books, or had them read to you. In all likelihood, you are using those same books with your own children, and perhaps also the videos based on that series. There is no need to introduce C.S. Lewis to you. And no need to introduce him to science fiction (SF) fans who will know his space trilogy. In addition there was the recent, immensely popular, movie "Shadowlands", which brought him to the consciousness of many beyond both those two circles.

And yet I sense that, to many in the liberal churches, he is still a shadowy figure (if you will forgive the pun) as far as his contribution beyond the realms of children's and SF literature is concerned -- and beyond the life of Joy Davidman, whom late in life he took to be his wife. That part of his life which was the focus of the Shadowlands film. Instead of helping in this respect, the movie provided us with a sharply reductionist picture of his intellectual interests and contributions. He is portrayed as playing on only one string, the way God uses suffering to build character in us. The "message" of the movie is to show how inadequate this philosophy was when it came into collision with real-life suffering -- in this instance with the inexpressible grief of losing his beloved to cancer.

Reading Lewis's many books, however, is not like listening to a violin with one string but like listening to a string quartet, if not a symphony. His interests were wide; he reached a depth of scholarship attained by very few; his intellect was of the type that allowed for remarkably insightful syntheses of data; his imagination displayed outstanding fertility; and his skill in making difficult concepts accessible to non-experts was, and is, a pleasure to witness. Take as an example his little book The Four Loves. It was published in 1960, some years after Anders Nygren's fine work, Agape and Eros, appeared in English. Lewis's book never attained the fame in scholarly circles that Nygren's did, yet I think it better illumines the human condition and the Christian faith, even though it is written in a style accessible to most lay readers. I remember the day I first read those four brief chapters where Lewis touches upon Affection, Friendship, Eros and Agape (Charity). It made me realize that the two categories many of us worked with as a result of Nygren's influence were inadequate. They needed to be connected to, qualified and enriched by, a consideration of Affection and Friendship.
Almost forty years after his death, many of Lewis' titles are still in print. Books about him come off the presses every year, and this year conferences to mark the centenary of his birth were held all over the English-speaking world. United Church members might ask themselves if they have been missing something. We hope the article by Lewis that follows might whet the appetite.

-- A. M. W.

THE GRAND MIRACLE 1
by C.S. Lewis

One is very often asked at present whether we could not have a Christianity stripped, or, as people who ask it say, "freed" from its miraculous elements, a Christianity with the miraculous elements suppressed. Now, it seems to me that precisely the one religion in the world, or, at least, the only one I know, with which you could not do that is Christianity.

In a religion like Buddhism, if you took away the miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources, there would be no loss; in fact, the religion would get on very much better without them because in that case the miracles largely contradict the teaching. Or even in the case of a religion like Mohammedanism, nothing essential would be altered if you took away the miracles. You could have a great prophet preaching his dogmas without bringing in any miracles; they are only in the nature of a digression, or illuminated capitals.

But you cannot possibly do that with Christianity, because the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left. There may be many admirable human things which Christianity shares with all other systems in the world, but there would be nothing specifically Christian. Conversely, once you have accepted that, then you will see that all other well established Christian miracles -- because, of course, there are ill-established Christian
miracles; there are Christian legends just as much as there are heathen legends, or modern journalistic legends -- you will see that all the well-established Christian miracles are part of it, that they all either prepare for, or exhibit, or result from the Incarnation. Just as every natural event exhibits the total character of the natural universe at a particular point and space of time, so every miracle exhibits the character of the Incarnation.

Now, if one asks whether that central grand miracle in Christianity is itself probable or improbable, of course, quite clearly you cannot be applying Hume's kind of probability. You cannot mean a probability based on statistics according to which the more often a thing has happened, the more likely it is to happen again (the more often you get indigestion from eating a certain food, the more probable it is, if you eat it again, that you will again have indigestion). Certainly the Incarnation cannot be probable in that sense. It is of its very nature to have happened only once. But then it is of the very nature of the history of this world to have happened only once; and if the Incarnation happened at all, it is the central chapter of that history. It is improbable in the same way in which the whole of nature is improbable, because it is only there once, and will happen only once. So one must apply to it a quite different kind of standard.

I think we are rather in this position. Supposing you had before you a manuscript of some great work, either a symphony or a novel. Then there comes to you a person, saying, "Here is a new bit of the manuscript that I found; it is the central passage of that symphony, or the central chapter of that novel. The text is incomplete without it. I have got the missing passage which is really the center of the whole work." The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work, which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic. On the other hand, if it failed to do that, then, however attractive it was in itself, you would reject it.

Now, what is the missing chapter in this case, the chapter which Christians are offering? The story of the Incarnation is the story of a descent and resurrection. When I say "resurrection" here, I am not referring simply to the first few hours, or the first few weeks of the Resurrection. I am talking of this whole, huge pattern of descent, down, down, and then up again. What we ordinarily call the Resurrection being just, so to speak, the point at which it turns. Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do. One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea-bottom. One has a picture of a strong man trying to lift a very big, complicated burden. He stoops down and gets himself right under it so that he himself disappears; and then he straightens his back and moves off with the whole thing swaying on his shoulders. Or else one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe. That indeed is a point I cannot go into tonight, because it would take a whole sermon -- this connection between human nature and nature in general. It sounds startling, but I believe it can be fully justified.

Now as soon as you have thought of this, this pattern of the huge dive down to the bottom, into the depths of the universe and coming up again into the light, everyone will see at once how that is imitated and echoed by the principles of the natural world; the descent of the seed into the soil, and its rising again in the plants. There are also all sorts of things in our own spiritual life where a thing has to be killed, and broken, in order that it may then become bright and strong, and splendid. The analogy is obvious. In that sense the doctrine fits in very well, so well in fact that immediately there comes the suspicion. Is it not fitting in a great deal too well? In other word, does not the Christian story show this pattern of descent and re-ascent because that is part of all the nature religions of the world? We have read about it in The Golden Bough.⁽¹⁾ We all know about Adonis, and the stories of the rest of those rather tedious people; is not this one more instance of the same thing, "the dying God"?

Well, yes it is. That is what makes the question subtle. What the anthropological critic of Christianity is always saying is perfectly true. Christ is a figure of that sort. And here comes a very curious thing. When I first, after childhood, read the Gospels, I was full of that stuff about the dying God, The Golden Bough, and so on. It was to me then a very poetic, and mysterious, and quickening idea; and when I turned to the Gospels never will I forget my disappointment and repulsion at finding hardly anything about it at all. The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connexion occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament,⁽²⁾ and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extraordinary. You had a dying God, Who was always representative of the corn; you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand and saying, "This is my Body",⁽³⁾ and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realize what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connexion between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor, and still more, those about Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it in another way, why was it that the only case of the "dying God" which might conceivably have been historical occurred among a people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seemed to know nothing about it? Why is it among them the thing suddenly appears to happen?

The principal actor, humanly speaking, hardly seems to know of the repercussion. His words (and sufferings) would have in any pagan mind. Well, that is almost inexplicable, except on one hypothesis. How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent because here, at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here? The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of the supernatural reality; the thing dying, and coming to life again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself. Thus one is getting in behind the nature religions, and behind nature to Someone Who is not explained by, but explains, not, indeed, the nature religions directly, but that whole characteristic behaviour of nature on which nature religions were based. Well, that is one way in which it surprised me. It seemed to fit in a very peculiar way, showing me something about nature more fully than I had seen it before, while itself remaining quite outside and above the nature religions.

Then another thing. We, with out modern democratic and arithmetical presuppositions would so have liked and expected all people to start equal in their search for God. One has the picture of great centripetal roads coming from all directions, with well-disposed people, all meaning the same things, and getting closer and closer together. How shockingly opposite to that is the Christian story! One people picked out of the whole earth; that people purged and proved again and again. Some are lost in the desert before they reach Palestine; some stay in Babylon; some becoming indifferent. The whole thing narrows and narrows, until at last it comes down to a little point, small as the point of a spear -- a Jewish girl at her prayers. That is what the whole of human nature has narrowed to before the Incarnation takes place. Very unlike what we expected, but, of course, not in the least unlike what seems in general, as shown by nature, to be God's way of working. The universe is quite a shockingly selective, undemocratic place out of apparently infinite space, a relatively tiny proportion occupied by matter of any kind. Of the stars perhaps only one has planets; of the planets only one is at all likely to sustain organic life. Of the animals only one species is rational. Selection as seen in nature, and the appalling waste which it involves, appears a horrible and an unjust thing by human standards. But the selectiveness in the Christian story is not quite like that. The people who are selected are, in a sense, unfairly selected for a supreme honour; but it is also a supreme burden. The People of Israel come to realize that it is their woes which are saving the world. Even in human society, though, one sees that it furnishes an opportunity for some of the very best things we can think of -- humility and kindness, and the immense pleasures of admiration. (I cannot conceive how one would get through the boredom of a world in which you never met anyone more clever, or more beautiful, or stronger than yourself. The very crowds who go after the football celebrities and film-stars know better than to desire that kind of equality.) What the story of the Incarnation seems to be doing is to flash a new light on a principle in nature, and to show for the first time that this principle of inequality in nature is neither good nor bad. It is a common theme running through both the goodness and badness of the natural world, and I begin to see how it can survive as a supreme beauty in a redeemed universe.

And with that I have unconsciously passed over to the third point. I have said that the selectiveness was not unfair in the way in which we first suspect, because those selected for the great honour are also selected for the great sufferings, and their suffering heals others. In the Incarnation we get, of course, this idea of vicariousness of one person profiting by the earning of another person. In its highest form that is the very center of Christianity. And we also find this same vicariousness to be a characteristic, or, as the musician would put it, a leit-motif of nature. It is a law of the natural universe that no being can exist on its own resources. Everyone, everything, is hopelessly indebted to everyone and everything else. In the universe, as we now see it, this is the source of many of the greatest horrors: all the horrors of carnivorousness, and the worse horrors of the parasites, those horrible animals that live under the skin of other animals, and so on. And yet, suddenly seeing it in the light of the Christian story, one realizes that vicariousness is not in itself bad; that all these animals, and insects, and horrors are merely that principle of vicariousness twisted in one way. For when you think it out, nearly everything good in nature also comes from vicariousness. After all, the child, both before and after birth, lives on its mother, just as the parasite lives on its host, the one being a horror, the other being the source of almost every natural goodness in the world. It all depends upon what you do with this principle. So that I find in that third way also, that what is implied by the Incarnation just fits in exactly with what I have seen in nature, and (this is the important point) each time it gives it a new twist. If I accept this supposed missing chapter, the Incarnation, I find it begins to illuminate the whole of the rest of the manuscript. It lights up nature's pattern of death and rebirth; and, secondly, her selectiveness; and, thirdly, her vicariousness.

Now I notice a very odd point. All other religions in the world, as far as I know them, are either nature religions, or anti-nature religions. The nature religions are those of the old, simple pagan sort that you know about. You actually got drunk in the temple of Bacchus. You actually committed fornication in the temple of Aphrodite. The more modern form of nature religion would be the religion started, in a sense, by Bergson⁽⁴⁾ (but he repented, and died Christian), and carried out in a more popular form by Mr. Bernard Shaw. The anti-nature religions are those like Hinduism and Stoicism, where people say, I will starve my flesh. I care not whether I live or die." All natural things are to be set aside: the aim is Nirvana, apathy, negative spirituality. The nature religions simply affirm my natural desires. The anti-nature religions simply contradict them. The nature religions simply give a new sanction to what I already always thought about the universe in my moments of rude health and cheerful brutality. The anti-nature religions merely repeat what I always thought about it in my moods of lassitude, or delicacy, or compassion.

But here is something quite different. Here is something telling me -- well, what? Telling me that I must never, like the Stoics, say that death does no matter. Nothing is less Christian than that. Death which made Life Himself shed tears at the grave of Lazarus,⁽⁵⁾ and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane.⁽⁶⁾ This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity. (You remember Thomas Browne's splendid remark: "I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed of it.)⁽⁷⁾ And yet, somehow or other, infinitely good. Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death; it tells me something quite new about it. Again, it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people. On the other hand, it does not allow me to say, "Oh, Lord, won't there be a day when everyone will be as good as everyone else?" In the same way, about vicariousness. It will not, in any way, allow me to be an exploiter, to act as a parasite on other people; yet it will not allow me any dream of living on my own. It will teach me to accept with glad humility the enormous sacrifice that others make for me, as well as to make sacrifices for others.

That is why I think this Grand Miracle is the missing chapter in this novel, the chapter on which the whole plot turns; that is why I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on. 9 Christ has risen, and so we shall rise. St. Peter for a few seconds walked on the water; 10 and the day will come when there will be a re-made universe, infinitely obedient to the will of glorified and obedient people, when we can do all things, when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in Scripture. To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A person really ought to say, "The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago" in the same spirit in which they say : "I saw a crocus yesterday." Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those "high mid-summer pomps" in which our Leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.

____________________
 

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Editor's Afterword: Lewis expanded on the subject matter of this sermon in the latter half of his book Miracles, as we can see from the chapter headings: "The Grand Miracle", "Miracles of the Old Creation", "Miracles of the New Creation". That book is still in print in inexpensive paperback, and we encourage readers to look for it. The first half of the book, in which Lewis challenges the philosophy which holds that miracles are impossible, may be of less interest to Touchstone readers, but that part can easily be skipped. After all, the book costs only $6.95, and the final half is worth many times that.

Aside from the four children's books, under the general heading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and his space trilogy, which are all available in paperback, there are a number of Lewis's titles on theological/moral themes still in print, some of which are listed here. The first five are books following continuous themes:

A Grief Observed Bantam Books $7.99
Letters To Malcolm Harcourt Brace Harvest Book, on Prayer $12.95
Mere Christianity Fount: An Imprint of HarperCollins Special Centenary Edition, $14.00
Miracles Fount: An Imprint of Harper/Collins $6.95
The Four Loves Harcourt Brace Harvest Book, $13.50

The following books are collections of essays by Lewis on a number of themes.

Christian Reflections Fount, An Imprint of HarperCollins, $12.95
God in the Dock Eerdmans, $22.00

Then there are biographies. The one by Beatrice Gormley is well suited for a young person whose interest in Lewis has come through the children's stories.

Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper C.S. Lewis London & New York: Harcourt Brace Revised Harvest Edition, 1994, $18.95
George Sayer Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis Wheaton, Ill: Crossways Books, 1988 & 1994, $26.95
Beatrice Gormley C.S. Lewis: Christian and Storyteller Grand Rapids: Eerdmans For Young Readers, 1998, $11.75
Perry Bramlet C.S. Lewis: Life at the Centre Macon, Georgia: Peake Road Books, $14.45
Katherine Lindskoog Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C.S. Lewis Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, $21.75
 
1. Editor's Note: To mark the centenary of his birth we offer here a sermon C.S. Lewis preached in St. Jude on the Hill in London in the spring of 1945. It was published in a collection of Lewis' short pieces, God In The Dock, under the title of "The Grand Miracle". It is copyright C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd, 1970, and is here reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown, London.)
² By Sir James George Frazer.
³ John 10:24; I Corinthians 15:36.
⁴ Matthew 26: 26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; I Corinthians 11:24.
⁵ Henri Bergson (1859-1941). His "nature religion" is particularly evident in his Matière et Mémoire (1896) and L'Evolution Créatrice (1907).
⁶ John 11:35.
 ⁷ Luke 22:44.
⁸ Browne's actual words are, "I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof." Religio Medici, First Part, Section 40.
⁹ Romans 8:23; 11:16; 16:5; I Corinthians 15:20; James 1:18; Revelation 14:4.
¹⁰ Matthew 14:29.

A shift has taken place in the spirituality of the traditionally dominant denominations in North America. There has been "an explosion of solidarity"⁽¹⁾ in the Roman Catholic and traditional Protestant denominations. Members of these churches now routinely speak out on issues of social justice and environmental concern. The Saskatchewan Conference of the United Church of Canada -- the Conference of which I am a member -- has a long tradition of taking stands on social issues, a tradition of which it can be proud. In faithfulness to the Gospel, churches must speak out against social injustice and threats to the environment.

However, the complexity of modern industrial society is such that churches must carefully attend both to the evil they wish to correct and to the probable ramifications of the constructive actions they propose. Failure to do the latter often results in people of good will proposing solutions to social conflicts that unintentionally place the burden of their concern on the shoulders of others, perhaps on those who have only marginal status, power or privilege to begin with. It is my feeling that the way delegates voted on two petitions and one resolution regarding uranium mining and agriculture at the 73rd annual meeting of Saskatchewan Conference held at Weyburn May 29 to June 1, 1997 illustrates this.

The Debate Over Uranium Mining

Petition no. 2 and Resolution no. 2, presented to this meeting of the Conference, proposed a prophetic stand on the issue of uranium mining in Saskatchewan.⁽²⁾ The preamble to Petition no. 2 stated that the accumulation of nuclear waste "poses as hazard to the health of humans and the welfare of God's whole creation."⁽³⁾ The preamble of Resolution no. 2 linked this directly to uranium mined in Saskatchewan.⁽⁴⁾

A certain type of social analysis was employed here. The outcry was directed against an activity, the mining and exporting of uranium, which was seen to be part of a threat to the whole of God's creation. The responsibility for averting this was seen to be borne by the whole of society and its governing body.⁽⁵⁾ Here society was analysed as a unity and viewed in organic terms. The good of the whole requires a healthy environment in which life can flourish. The Church was seen as a prophetic community that should speak of society's ethical responsibility with regard to the way it jeopardizes its future through this activity.

This approach to social analysis is akin to that of theologian Douglas Hall, who focuses on the way modern forms of technology, and the dreams and visions bound up with them, threaten the future of God's creation.⁽⁶⁾ According to Hall, part of the Church's role as a prophetic community is to speak out against the dangers of advanced technology and present an alternative vision to society.⁽⁷⁾

In the sessional committee that studied the petition on uranium mining before it came to the floor of Conference, an amendment was proposed in which a different approach to social analysis began to emerge. To understand the reasoning behind it, one must know a little about the Saskatchewan economy.

Geographically, Saskatchewan is divided almost in half between the south, which is mostly prairie, and the north, which is forested. In the south, agriculture is a major source of income. North of Prince Albert, though, farming peters out and the main industries are pulp and paper, tourism and uranium mining. Though many people employed in uranium mining fly in from more southerly cities like Saskatoon, or work out of offices there, uranium mining has a far more immediate economic importance in northern Saskatchewan than it does in the south. In northern Saskatchewan the majority of the population are of aboriginal ancestry. Uranium mining is a major source of income for many of these people, and a source of hope for an economic future beyond welfare dependency.

In the sessional committee, an amendment was proposed recognizing the economic importance of uranium mining to northern Saskatchewan. In light of the petition and resolution calling for a phase-down of uranium mining, the amendment called for profit-sharing to offset the economic costs to northern communities that would follow from this.

Here we see a different form of social analysis. Whereas the original petition and resolution were content to view society as a unity, the amendment recognized that society is composed of various groups according to race, income and geography. If uranium mining is analysed in relation to society viewed abstractly as a whole, the great differences in the way the proposed phase-down of uranium mining might affect various communities would be overlooked.

The majority of United Church members in Saskatchewan live and work in the southern half of the province. Major sources of employment there such as agriculture and potash mining would continue unaffected. In the north though, and for the aboriginal people living there, the phasing down of uranium mining would mean the disappearance of a major source of employment and economic hope.

This type of social analysis resembles a Marxist or "conflict" sociology which focuses not on the type or mode of production, be it nuclear technology or whatever, but on whom it benefits economically; whose interests it serves and who controls it.⁽⁸⁾ It is similar to the approach to social analysis advocated by Marilyn Legge, who argues that conflicts in culture and society should be analysed in light of God's preferential option for the poor.⁽⁹⁾ Another way of viewing this would be to say that while the petition and resolution presented an analysis of uranium mining as part of a threat to the environment, they did not present an analysis of possible ramifications of the actions proposed.⁽¹⁰⁾

This perspective, which resembled a conflict social analysis and which attended to the probable ramifications of the proposed action, was presented more forcefully when the petition was debated on the floor of Conference. One delegate wondered if consideration had been given to the economic impact of the proposed phase-down of uranium mining on northern Saskatchewan. He suggested that in some aboriginal communities of northern Saskatchewan such a proposal would be considered racist. Another delegate recognized the validity of the concerns expressed in the petition and the good intentions of the amendment, but questioned the realism of the amendment on the grounds that profit-sharing from other enterprises could not hope to offset the economic impact of such a phase-down on northern communities.

Though representatives of this perspective spoke forcefully, they were few in number. Conference gave some acknowledgment to their concerns, but the amended petition passed by a clear majority. In fairness to the Conference, it must be said that it faced a dilemma, sometimes known as the red-green debate, that has become common since the rise of the environmental crisis. Concern for good jobs for those at the margins of the economy (the red side of the debate) and concern for the environment (the green side of the debate) can both be rooted in a passion for human well-being and faithfulness to the Gospel. In many situations, as here, there is a conflict between the two that can only be solved by some kind of temporary compromise. Solutions need to apply a norm of justice so that the burden of whatever action is taken is distributed proportionally amongst the various communities in the larger whole.⁽¹¹⁾

The Debate over Agriculture

Later that day Conference voted on Petition no. 9 on agriculture. The approach to social analysis in this petition was the same as in that on uranium mining. The preamble spoke of being called to "a covenant relationship with God and the land."⁽¹²⁾ It expressed a concern to promote the most environmentally sound means of grain transportation and asked the Church to call upon the government to support the Canadian Wheat Board, to promote research towards more co-operative, locally controlled and ecologically sustainable models of farming. Here again the concern was over how certain activities, such as transporting grain by truck rather than rail and "chemical-based, large-scale agribusiness"⁽¹³⁾ pose a threat to the common good by their impact on the environment and local communities.

Though the approach to social analysis was the same as that used in the petition on uranium mining, this time the issue was agriculture, which touches the pocketbook of many in the southern half of the province where the majority of United Church members in Saskatchewan live. When it was debated on the floor of Conference, concern for its possible ramifications quickly became the centre of attention. One delegate pointedly noted that the farming community itself was divided over whether or not to support the Wheat Board. Taking a stand on this might cause conflicts in rural congregations and alienate some people from the Church. Congregations might suffer a loss of membership that they could ill-afford.

In effect, her argument was that if it passed this petition, the Church would be taking a stand on agricultural practices about which there is "reasonable disagreement"⁽¹⁴⁾ within the farming community. Not all agree that the practices specified threaten the common good. Some even argue the contrary in good faith. Expressing a moral judgement against these practices might well alienate these people.

We see here how seeking to address a social issue about which there is perceived to be reasonable disagreement provokes a tension within the Church between what Gregory Baum calls "the logic of mission" and "the logic of maintenance". According to Baum, the logic of mission "is defined by the end and purpose for the sake of which the organization was created."⁽¹⁵⁾ The logic of maintenance, on the other hand, is defined... by the need of the organization to maintain itself. An organization must have a well-trained staff, adequate housing facilities, a sound financial basis; it must remain publicly credible. If an institution paid no attention to the logic of maintenance, it would disappear very quickly.⁽¹⁶⁾

If the analysis presented with Petition no. 9 is accurate (and I think it is), the logic of the Church's mission suggested that this concern be addressed. The logic of maintenance, concern for how speaking about farming practices this way could cost the Church members, suggested the petition be defeated.

The Vote on the Petition on Agriculture

In the past Saskatchewan Conference has not been afraid to take stands on issues that have cost it members. But membership in the United Church has been declining in recent years. The fear that passing the petition on agriculture might alienate some members of the community carried more weight at this meeting of Conference. As a result, Petition no. 9 on agriculture was strongly defeated.

It is my feeling that the vote was determined not by technical arguments regarding the pros and cons of the Wheat Board or rail transport, but by concern over how taking a stand on this issue might effect the membership of local congregations. In voting on the petition on agriculture, Conference prioritised the logic of maintenance over that of mission.

At this point it is interesting to note that uranium mining is also an issue about which there is reasonable disagreement. In northern and southern Saskatchewan, in aboriginal and in white communities, people are divided over whether uranium mining and nuclear power are environmentally safe or hazardous. Scientific evidence is marshalled on both sides. This was not raised as an issue in discussing the petition on uranium mining, perhaps because few United Church members live and work in the north. Taking a stand on uranium mining was not seen as likely to alienate many people from the Church. It did not threaten the Church as an institution in the way that taking a position on agriculture might have.

Conclusion

In the stand it took against uranium mining, Saskatchewan Conference expressed a willingness to risk the economic well-being of others for the sake of protecting the environment for all. In voting against a similar petition on agriculture, it showed it was not willing to ask its own members to take the same kind of risk for a similar cause. The issues were voted on separately, and there was no discussion linking the two. But at the end of the day, the combination of positions that the court took on these two issues inadvertently expresses a subtle imperialism towards the north. It asked the already economically marginalized to bear the economic burden of concern over the environment for the rest of society, when for the sake of maintaining its membership, it was not willing to ask its own members to bear the same kind of burden.

My purpose here is not to invite my Conference to a reconsideration of the 1997 debate, but to use it to illustrate a point the wider Church as a prophetic community must always be wary of. It is easy to propose ethical solutions which place the burden of concern on others. History provides many examples of this. For instance, in the wake of the Holocaust, the Christian world was moved to make restitution for its tradition of contempt for the Jews by creating the state of Israel. That may have been the right thing to do, but it inadvertently placed the burden of its concern upon a people who are largely Muslim.⁽¹⁷⁾

Reinhold Niebuhr touched on this when he wrote of how even the most sincere prophetic activity can be "ideologically tainted" by the self-interests of a social group.⁽¹⁸⁾ To guard against this tendency, the Church should analyse social problems and solutions not only in terms of how they affect society or creation as a whole, but also in terms of the probable ramifications for people who are not part of the decision-making group, especially those who lack the power to protect themselves. We need to ask, who will bear the burden of our prophetic concern?

The Tension Prophetic Ministry Provokes

This analysis of the voting on Petition no. 9 regarding agriculture raises another issue which deserves attention. When should the Church risk alienating members through taking a stand on an issue about which there is reasonable disagreement? Conversely, when should the Church avoid taking sides in such debates?

The Church must temper aspects of its mission on a regular basis in order to maintain itself as an institution. To fulfil its mission to care for people, the Church could liquidate all its assets in order to help feed those starving in a famine. But that would effectively dissolve it as an institution, leaving it unable to fulfil its mission in other areas or to help in other crises in the future.

This tension has led admirable leaders in the Church to temper their prophetic stance on occasions in ways that appear shameful when viewed in hindsight. The great New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) once altered one of his sermons, deleting the word "slavery" from a list of the conditions of bondage that Christ liberates us from, while other people were speaking out against it.⁽¹⁹⁾ While the Church must sometimes temper its drive to fulfil its mission for the sake of maintaining itself as an institution, this can lead to a betrayal of Christ. There are times when the Church must sacrifice its well-being as an institution for the sake of fulfilling its mission.

The Church celebrates prophets of the past, like Nellie McClung, whose views have come to be largely accepted over time. But when she was first arguing the cause of women's ordi-nation, she was looked upon by some as a disruptive radical. Prophetic ministry inevitably creates a high degree of tension within the Church between the logics of mission and mainte-nance, for it opposes one set of values against another. Are there guidelines as to when the Church should risk losing members in taking a prophetic stand on issues about which there is reason-able disagreement, and when it should tempter its voice for the sake of maintaining its membership? This deserves discussion. I know well that some of the discussion will be among members of Saskatchewan Conference who will feel that I have unfairly represented the motives at the 1997 annual meeting!

 1. Gregory Baum, Compassion and Solidarity: The Church for Others (New York: Paulist Press, 1990) p. 30, 13-30.
2. "The United Church of Canada Saskatchewan Conference Docket for the 73rd Annual Meeting", p. 2, 14.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Ibid., p. 14.
5.  Ibid., p. 2, 14.
6.  Douglas Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Berdmans, 1986) p. 12-13.
7. Douglas Hall, Thinking the Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989) p. 36-39.
8.  Gregory Baum, Theology and Society (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) p. 167-170.
9. Marilyn Legge, The Grace of Difference (Atlanta: Scholar's Press, 1992) p. 25.
10. I owe this insight to Dr. Terry Anderson. I would like to thank him for constructive comments he made on the second draft of this paper.
11. I owe this last point to Dr. Terry Anderson as well.
12. "The United Church of Canada Saskatchewan Conference Docket for the 73rd Annual Meeting", p. 9.
13. Ibid.
14. I owe this term to Dr. Chris Lind.
15. Gregory Baum, Compassion and Solidarity, p. 42.
16. Ibid. According to Baum, conflicts between these two logics occur in most organizations and "[o]n the whole, a lively conflict between the two logics is beneficial for the organization". Ibid.
17.  I owe this example to Gregory Baum. I would like to thank him for constructive comments he made on the first draft of this paper.
18. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. I: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964) p. 194.

A couple of years ago I volunteered to coach my son's minor level Little League baseball team. Over the previous four seasons games had been scheduled for a Sunday, but seldom on a Sunday morning, and when they had I simply absented myself for church commitments. Sometime I tried to include my son Eli in both the game and church, endeavouring to honour the purposes of both for both of us.

In the 1997 season, however, I became the head coach, and carried out the manager's duties as well, including tasks that another could not or would not do, on any particular game day. In advance of the season I felt assured that conflict between my Sunday ministerial roles and any games would be nil, as only the final play-off game was scheduled for Sunday morning. Even before the season started I assumed our team, the Cardinals, could not possibly win in the play-offs, and then compete for the final trophy game. Sure enough, by the end of the regular sixteen-game season we had won only one game, though we were given points for two rain-outs. In last place, we had to play for the semi-finals in a sudden death elimination game against the first-place team, the Rangers, a certain final contest for us.

For most of the season I had tried to ritualize a post-game circle, wherein each young player could add his/her comment on the game, some of this becoming the grist and grit for the next practice sessions. Towards the season's end, I let up on this circle, but in what I deemed had to be our last practice I asked, "What do you want to do?" The players vigorously recommended that we go over the fundamentals: catching, hitting (including bunting), base-running, and throwing. We did. It felt like the beginning of the season all over again.

When the game finally came we played like never before. We committed hardly an error, and the close plays were made; split-second throws and catches were executed; and calls in our favour were made by astounded umpires. For the play-off round our pitchers were allowed to go for a full six-inning game, rather than be limited to two innings. Thus, our one control pitcher, my son Eli, was able to try for the whole game. He did it. We acted and played as a team, and incredibly, we won! The league-leading Rangers were shocked and distressed, and friends on the Cards were consoling Ranger friends, during and after the game -- virtually apologizing!

I was suddenly faced with a situation I had considered to be an impossibility: a Sunday morning game for my team. I consulted with a few people on both sides of the issue: should I preside at the game, with my son as the pitcher, or should I be in my normal place presiding at the Longhouse service? Alas, these consultations seemed a draw. I couldn't identify an ethically sanctioned end-run to make. One lead elder, the volunteer minister of music, urged me to go to the game and show up at the Longhouse service as soon as I could after it was over -- after all it was also "Father's Day"! I consulted biblical passages. I read Sidney Carter's hymn "Lord of the Dance". And finally I sifted morsels in Abraham Heschel's collected writings on the Sabbath.

My conscience was uneasy. I couldn't simply go with either choice and act as if the decision was clean, or without mixed motives. I reminded myself of prior seasons when I stuck to "first things first" -- church services being a priority when in conflict with Sunday morning games -- if only to bear a modest witness, as a father every bit as much as coach's helper, to some scale of value. Yes? But this time I was emotionally immersed. Rationalizations and self-serving claimers popped up as fast as disclaimers for even considering sacrificing a church service for a game. And there was the manager's son waiting to pitch his heart out to try to win and vindicate an otherwise disastrous season!

What really matters? What values get top priority? How could I exercise integrity to my son and yet, at the same Sunday morning time, express integrity in my Sabbath commitments? Can I even employ the notion of "Sabbath" here, for myself, in light of only reserving the time for the morning service due to my regular role in it? Can I invoke a Saul Alinsky axiom qualifier, that "some ends justify some means"? I think pointedly of Dorothy Bass's concluding paragraph in her essay, "Sabbath, Our Good and the Good of All":

Rest and worship. One day a week -- not much, in a sense, but a good beginning. One day to resist the tyranny of too much or too little work and to celebrate with God and others, remembering thereby who we really are and what is really important. One day that, week after week, anchors a way of life that makes a difference every day.⁽²⁰⁾

The 139th Psalm attests to the gnawing questions of how far we will try to go to flee God's presence in and with our uneasy conscience. But as the psalmist hauntingly confesses there are no places where we can lose ourselves, where God is not. The "Hound of Heaven" pursues us relentlessly. It's not good enough for decision-making in the self-serving interests that prevail in competitive sports merely to confer with one's peers, as if they have a self-critical transcendent edge. The North American Little League pledge invokes God's presence and a loyalty to be shared with one's country and one's team, but such a dictum may last only as long as it takes to mutter it.

I called upon myself to re-read Heschel's Sabbath reflections.

The Sabbath is a day on which we are what we are, regardless of whether we are learned or not, or whether our career is a success or a failure; it is a day of independence of social conditions.... All week we may ponder and worry whether we are rich or poor, whether we succeed or fail in our occupation; whether we accomplish our goals⁽²¹⁾.... In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where man may enter a harbour and reclaim his dignity. The island is the seventh day, the Sabbath, a day of detachment from things, instruments, and practical affairs, as well as of attachment to the spirit.⁽²²⁾

There is certainly spirit in the sport world; indeed, the credo of the "winning spirit" had led most of us coaches to sacrifice the virtues and gifts of the Spirit on the altar of winning at virtually any cost. What idolatrous notes must I confess to and honestly lament? What addictive rhythms to discern as the very culture of baseball has been with me, within me, since I myself was nine years old?

Then there is the one-liner from Heschel, on the promise in Sabbath practise: "The seventh day is the exodus from tension." I wonder. How is it possible to be free from tension? Conflict-filled decisions spew forth with tensions, mixtures of good and ill. Oh, to be present to preside at both places! To be dutifully pleasing for both the championship game and the worship service, perhaps later to parley the former's outcome into the latter? My journal notes for that day express my feelings.

Play-off day; Father's Day; alas, Sabbath day.... This is the day which the Lord has made. Today. Wake up with the game on my mind and body; add, quickly, to spirit -- with three short morning prayers, or prayer affirmations: to open self to help around me; to meet my fears; and, for strength to do God's biddings -- for Eli and I, both, these prayers. Engage in an imaginary conversation with Cardinal's team, coaches and parents. Nervous? Indeed, I am. Nice nervousness. Full of anxious anticipations. Yesterday practices at Trout Lake Park were in the high heat of the day. Yet, needed. Left messages with two lay persons of the Longhouse Church re my dilemma on when to leave the game for the church service and would they cover for me? Eli and I viewed the Chariots of Fire video on Eric Liddell's 1920s dilemmas, too: whether to run competitively on his Sabbath, or not? Ponder differences. Hope and dread and wishes. Indeed, this is the day that the Lord has made! (June 15th, 1997)

I scrambled for worship on the heels of the Sunday morning game. I managed to take in the last quarter of the service, and yes, conveyed game aspects into the lectionary texts of that morning as well as in the prayer of confession! A team parent, Dave Cosco, brought Elie and his son, Tristan, to the closing moments of the service, with the league trophy held high.

No doubt I could have worked harder to discern spiritual values in the game of baseball. One could depict a ministry of coaching. There are resourceful scholars and critics from which to draw. But it is in the specifics that tension persists. Sabbath as the "exodus from tension" seems ever elusive. In doing both Sunday morning activities I tried to capture both promises of sport and worship, yet fell short in both. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. The creative tension between baseball as an honoured time for genuine play and worship as a traditional time away from work (and play's oft degeneration into another level of work) snapped.

I found these word by a veteran peace activist in The Other Side:

We must balance our personal lives with our "ministries", recognizing that the time and energy we pour into relationships around us are part of the work we are doing.... To maintain such balances, I have found two things helpful: first, good professional support.... And secondly, regular sabbaticals. I practise sabbatical moments in each day, a sabbatical day each week, a sabbatical week-end each month, and a sabbatical two weeks each year. Whether we ever get a longer sabbatical, if we are faithful to these mini-sabbaticals, we are more likely to remain faithful to Jesus' call to a life of prophetic peacemaking discipleship.⁽²³⁾

It remains to pinpoint how some of the above-mentioned theological voices contribute to the resolution of the cultural dilemma of organized sport's powerful presence and any semblance of Sabbath presence in one's own life and decision-making. The reverse is also worthy of restatement; the dilemma posed by the faint influences of one's own and community sabbathing, in the face of strong pressures to give sport's claims chief priority, for there is little significant support for rising above those all-encompassing pressures. Any Sabbathing presence, as a transcendent resource or habit perspective is muted if not dismissed.

Our garnered theological voices offer the capacity to shed light on the cultural dilemmas. It may well be that they will identify for us only some provisional resolutions, calling for approximations of the ultimately hopeful in light of the faithfully possible. Abraham Heschel's terse formulations on the meaning of the Sabbath bear continuous recalling. The whole notion of Sabbathing as "exodus from tension" serves a strong standard of hope for what the presence of the Sabbath in one's regular life can mean. That it cannot block off tension altogether does not undermine its powerful hope, that full immersion in the immediate excitement of sports (even the combined immersion of parenting and coaching in a championship game on Father's Day!) is not ever the full and final word. God's creation, and our modest interim place in it, is the final word. Meanwhile, with Paul, I admit to the dim mirror awaiting full clarity in God's time, and I am able to join in this litany:

Our souls are going thirsty, our souls are near exhaustion:
We have cancelled the 7th day.
Our agendas are ever-expanding, our calendars fill with demands:
We have cancelled the 7th day.
Our breath has no time for the catching, one has no time to respond:
We have cancelled the 7th day.
Our doing has gained all importance, our being has been put on hold:
We have cancelled the 7th day.
Our hearts desire nurture and balance, our God shapes a way to respond:
Let there be a 7th day.⁽²⁴⁾
 

19. Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723 ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 10, 618-19.
20. Practising Our Faith: A Way of Life For Searching People, ed., D.C. Bass (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) p. 89.
21. The Wisdom of Heschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Girous, 1986) p. 311
22. Ibid., p. 310.
23. "Peace Making Over The Long Haul" in The Other Side, July/August 1997, p. 50
24 Karl Wehlander, Joy is Our Banquet: Resources For Everyday Worship (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1996) p. 105.

When I was in my second year at seminary, a couple of friends asked me if I would help start an overnight chaplaincy program at a local inner city hospital. I thought of it as a great opportunity for mission work. The 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. hours would guarantee time to study, even sleep. I just had to be on site. The nurses would call if there was a crisis. I'd run in, proclaim God's Word, and allow the healing balm of the Gospel to bring relief -- or so I thought.

My vision of meaningful, humorous, reasoned, dialogues with the distressed and dying was soon demolished. On my first night I received a call: "Code Blue". I ran down to the proper hospital wing and looked for the room. The bustle told me which it was. I stood in the doorway. The doctors and nurses worked furiously to revive an elderly man. I had decided to stand in the door, but a nurse grabbed me by the arm and moved me to the head of the bed. "We've been waiting for you," she announced.

I was speechless and overwhelmed. The sights and sounds flooded my senses. I had never seen someone dying before. I searched my brain for an appropriate response. I placed my hand on the man's head, and said the only words which would come into my mind, "Our Father, who art in heaven..." As I spoke, I noticed others were praying too. As the "Amen" rang out, I continued the pattern I learned from praying the "suffrages" in church. "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth...." Around the room, lips moved in unison. Only the occasional doctor's order broke the liturgy of the unscheduled evening prayer. The room was no longer the valley of the shadow of death. It was the gate of heaven, through which, that night, a righteous man passed. "You did a nice job, thanks," someone said. At the time, I wasn't sure what I had done.

Time passed, and my experience grew. I began to learn the importance of the Church's prayer. Before, I thought of it as a Lutheran family heirloom. The liturgy seemed to be like grandmother's china. It was set out for family gatherings and special occasions. It wasn't for everyday use. Besides, it was so old; no one except the family could appreciate its beauty.

I was wrong. During those months of overnight chaplaincy, I would often be called to attend those who were in shock, unconscious, near death, critically injured. I was called in to speak to families during devastating trials. The work was always easier if they knew the liturgy -- and surprisingly many did. For some, the words were only the vague shadows from a childhood ritual. But they still were true. With others, I saw the time-ripened fruit of an ongoing relationship with God. I didn't have to teach them the words. They didn't have to struggle through their tears to understand. They knew the words, and the words brought hope. Christ crashed through their darkness and pain. They weren't alone.

In the emergency room one night, a nurse watched as a family gathered around their stricken father. I had learned to ask if they went to Church and where. With the answer, I knew how to proceed. "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." "Amen," "Lord have mercy..." "Our Father...." Christ was there in the words they had spoken with Him since childhood. The Church was there, as they spoke the same words they learned in the pew. I told the nurse what it meant. "I thought the room seemed crowded." she said, smiling. She was in Church the next Sunday, joining her prayer to theirs.

The scene was always much different with unbelievers. False hopes and worldly goals are little comfort when facing death or grave trauma. God's Word still brought hope, even created faith. But a deathbed is a hard place to teach the faith. It is much better learned day by day, week by week. In this way, the words of the liturgy make incremental deposits in our hearts and minds from which the fruits of hope are drawn in times of trial. The structure and timeless nature of the Church's worship calls order out of the chaos of a crisis. It perfectly provides pastoral care at the end of life, because the peace and hope it gives have been accruing for a lifetime. It is familiar, easily recalled, and theologically solid. The words revive a thousand moments in the presence of a merciful and loving Father, and bring us there again.

In the parish, I have found that this same truth holds. I have been the pastor of an Alzheimer's patient who struggled to remember even her daughter's name. But she could speak every word of the Divine Service. I witnessed her blessed relief as hope, faith, and peace-giving words broke through the hellish torment of a languishing mind. Christ had come to her. I was a gift from my predecessors. Because they had taught her the liturgy, she had the words to greet her God. When parishes cultivate a liturgical life, they arm their sons and daughters with words ingrained with the Gospel. They implant a resolute and joyous hope. Reinforced over a lifetime, they are unshakable, even by death.

Recently, a dear saint died. For thirty years she faithfully took her place behind the organ week after week. In her last decade, she couldn't leave her living room chair. During visits she recalled the Church with the coal-fired stove, and a foot-pumped organ, that graced the German settlement. The prayers and litany we spoke, and sometimes sang, she had learned as a girl. We prayed them through continued illness. We spoke them through tears when her only son was murdered. When I last saw her, she was in the hospital bed she would not leave alive. The last words I spoke to her were 3400 years older than she. Through three and a half millennia, these words had given what they promised. For nearly a century, they were the words with which her pastors had blessed her. "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace."

She knew He would. The last word I heard her say, I overheard her say to God: "Amen".

Scripture: Proverbs 8: 1 - 4, 22 - 31
Psalm 104
Acts 2: 1 - 21
John 15: 26 - 27; 16: 5 - 15

This is Trinity Sunday. It's always Trinity Sunday the week after Pentecost. We have finished the Christological half of the year.

We began it in Advent, with the Christian hope of the rule of the risen and glorified Christ. At Christmas, we looked at his incarnation and birth, and wondered all over again at the chosen humility of our God. In Epiphany, we saw him revealed as God's Holy One to an ever-widening circle. We listened to his teaching, and remembered again the major events of his ministry. We watched the storm clouds gather throughout Lent, as he pursued his collision course with the Temple and with Rome. Day by day in Holy Week we saw him wash the feet of his friends, and tell of his passion in the bread and cup. We watched through the long day of his dying, and waited through the day of nothingness, the Saturday of his tomb.

Easter Sunday we ran with the women to the tomb, only to find the stone rolled away. We listened to the news of the angels, "He is not here. He is risen." We struggled with Thomas to believe the unbelievable, and walked with him on the road to Emmaus. Our hearts burned within us. We watched him ascend into heaven, and finally, as he promised, we saw the air on fire with the presence of the Holy Spirit, and felt the breath of the Spirit's unstillable wind.

Year by year as we gather for praise, the Scriptures open for us the wondrous story, and year by year it works its magic, laying down pathways in our minds and souls. Those pathways are important. It matters that we lay them with care, and keep them strong as we immerse ourselves in the Scriptures. When the day comes that we can no longer walk anywhere else, when we cannot see other things, or hear the songs of this world clearly -- when the memories of tears and laughter, fairs and holidays, joys and terrors, have faded from us, there will still be these paths where we can move through the story once more. It is these wonders given to us in the Scriptures, that will sustain us as we die.

Because these things are so important in our common life as the body of Christ, we give half of each year to remembering the story of our salvation. But now we come to the other half. In these weeks, from Holy Trinity today to Christ the King next fall, we focus less on the story of Jesus as a story, and more on the deepening and enriching of the life of the Church and of the faithful.

And so it is that we come to today, and I want to introduce you to someone. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was in common use at the time of Christ, her name was Sophia. The word means "wisdom", and she is Lady Wisdom, and this is the second time she appears in the Book of Proverbs. In today's text, Sophia tells us abut herself. The verses we did not read in the middle of the text identify Wisdom from a human point of view. "My mouth will utter truth; there is nothing crooked or twisted in my words; my instruction and knowledge are better than silver and gold; I live with prudence, and attain knowledge and discretion; I have good advice and sound wisdom; I have insight; I have strength; those who seek me find me."

Then follow the verses we heard as part of our Scripture reading today, which identify Wisdom from a divine point of view, by exploring her birth and her relationship to God prior to creation. "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work." Sophia takes us on a trip through the creation week. She was created before the mountains and the hills, before the rivers and seas; before the soil and dry land, before the boundaries of earth and seas were set. She was there when God established the heavens, and drew the boundaries of the earth; when everything was chaos, and God's creative order had yet to be imposed. Sophia was there as a worker, bringing delight to the Lord God, and taking delight in the emerging creation and the human race.

The most important things, and the detail on which the whole chapter turns, is the distinction between Wisdom and creation. The work of creation described here is like most creation stories. Some of the societies around the people of Israel told stories clearly founded on other gods, but their details were all remarkably similar. In Babylon, the god Marduk fashions the world out of the watery body of Tiamit, the goddess of chaos. In Canaan, their neighbours' god Baal struggles with the sea god Yamm to make the creation.

The Israelite story has only one God, the Most High, but the process is the same. The one with the power to create is the one who can impose order and boundaries upon chaos, setting the foundations of the earth, confining the waters, laying a course for the stars. The important thing to note is that Wisdom is not one of the many components of this process of creation. She came into being before God started all this creative activity, and throughout the whole things, Wisdom was at God's side as a worker and a source of delight. The origin of Wisdom is told as a birth, rather than as a result of God's craft. "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work." The word that is translated here as "create" is a Hebrew word of procreation and birth. The verse suggests that God gave birth to Wisdom, as compared to various parts of the created world, which came into existence by God's activity, God's craft.

So Wisdom's relationship to God is very different from all the other powers in creation. When she states that she was with God as a master worker, there is a pun in Hebrew, so that at the same time the word can be translated to say she was with God as a beloved child. It is as child rather than worker, that Wisdom finds authority. Her authority does not come from her ability to make things, but from the fact that, as God's beloved child, she was present as the intricate miracle of creation unfolded. In this text, with pun and double entendre, difficult grammar and obscure meanings, the writer is probing the very limits of human ability to talk about God.

Wisdom, then, is the one who knows all the hidden secrets that are buried in the fabric of the universe, and hidden in the workings of creation. All those questions that drive scientists and philosophers, all those nameless feelings called forth by spectacular beauty like the sunset, or incredible force, like last year's floods or last week's tornadoes -- these are secrets already known by Sophia, because she found them out as she and God were creating the universe. And there is no one else who knows these secrets. That's an impressive claim. But not so far-fetched really. At least, not for those of us who have already believed.

Wisdom, Sophia, is the Holy Spirit; the same one we find in Genesis brooding over the face of the waters at the beginning of creation. The writer of Genesis does not identify the Spsirit, or explain the Spirit's presence. But the writer of Proverbs does. The Holy Spirit is God, not just another part of the creation. Just as the Christ as the begotten Son is God, so the Spirit proceeds from God directly, is God, and is not created. And they three are one.

So do we find this three-fold God hanging around the reaches of the universe, enjoying the benefits of perfection and absolute community? Not at all. This God offers an outpouring of love that is focussed on us. We already have met God at the work of creation, shaping and moulding a world for us to share. And we know the story of Jesus Christ, how the Son set aside his own glory to come and be one of us, and loved us all the way to death so that we could live. Well, we need to remember the beginning of today's lesson to understand how Wisdom belongs in that same picture. The story of Wisdom's coming is not murmured to the vast heavens, or shouted from a remote mountain. Sophia is there, where we are. This personality, who played with God before creation, is standing in the marketplace, at the crossroads at rush hour, before the city gates, calling to those who pass by, to let her tell them the secrets of creation. That is the wonder of this text. Wisdom is not only able to bridge the gap between the between the secrets of the universe and the finite mind, between mortals and God, but she is out in the marketplace and the streets, trying to give away God's secrets.

In the eyes of God, God is One. In human understanding, God is holy Trinity, because that is as close as our minds can come to even beginning to grasp the reality of God. The gift of God is that in this life, Wisdom comes to tell us, Jesus the Christ comes to show us, and in the next life the triune God comes in glory and fulness to meet us.

(Words in bold may be said by the congregation.)
 
 

Prayers of Approach

1. Holy God, whose word creates us,
and whose love is our redeeming,
awaken us, your people,
that we may rise with Christ,
and all our song be alleluia.
Move among us, Holy Spirit.
Move, and brood over us.
Weave into holiness and wholeness
the tangle of needs and desires,
motives and confusions,
we carry in our souls,
and fashion the fabric of our praise
into a garment fitting for Christ,
the seamless One.
So may our prayers be lifted
from honest hearts,
And our voices put to the uses of joy. Amen.

2. O Loving Lady Wisdom,
born before the hills in order stood
or earth received her frame,
from long ago you bring your teaching
and each new day we wait for your word.
Teach us when to be silent this day,
and when to speak;
and when we speak,
guide our words.
Be in our struggle to communicate
with each other.
Lift us in our times of tiredness
and frustration,
and give us a solid sense
of who and whose we are.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the facing of this hour;
for the facing of this hour. Amen.

Prayers of Gathering for the Meeting of a Church Court

1. Let us ask God's blessing on this day,
that we not miss its unanticipated joys,
nor doubt God's love throughout its hours.
Let us pray
that our manner toward each other
reflect the grace we have received;
that we be cautious in our demands,
and boundless in our hope;
slow to cast judgment,
and quick to offer help.
Blessed and blessing One,
gather us in Christ
in whom all things hold together,
lest chaos come again
and darkness cover us as at the first.
This day
let Christ be the light by which we see;
may the Spirit be wisdom in our speaking. Amen.

2. God of sparrows,
of stars, of song
and of silence,
We your creatures sing Praise;
We your children shout Joy;
We your people cry Yes.
For you have come to us,
Bright Morning Star;
You have chased away
the sorrows of the night
and promised your Presence
for this new day.
Prepare us, through its hours,
for Pentecostal splendours,
and call us to gather as one
in the fire, light and peace
of the Spirit. Amen.

Confessions

1. God of justice, God of grace;
because no darkness,
nor despair,
nor gloom of sin
can eclipse the white light of your Christ,
nor anything in all creation
tear us from your heart
or make your love decay,
only because with you,
and with you alone,
our trust is secure,
we dare open our hearts,
and speak of our sin,
our sorrow,
our suffering.
We have given ourselves to shadows;
we have lost our way in darkness,
exhausted our souls,
smothered our freedom.
O turn us again to the mystery
of your compassion.
Stir us mightily
with the freeing gift of forgiveness.
Awaken us in our depths.
Guide us again
onto paths of faithfulness and simplicity.
This we ask because of our need.
This we ask because of your promise. Amen

Assurance

If God heals us, we are healed indeed.
Lift up your hearts.
Because of Jesus Christ,
our healing and our salvation
are certain and secure.
Thanks be to God! Amen.
 

2. Holy God,
loving Mother, loving Father,
in love you have made us,
through love you have kept us,
by love you would make us whole.

We confess that we have not loved you
with all our heart...
and soul...
and mind...
and strength...
nor have we loved one another
as Christ has loved us.
We have been unsteady in our faith;
we have resisted your Spirit.
Look on us, we pray,
as those claimed by the Crucified;
for the sake of that boundless love,
forgive us,
and from beneath the shelter
of her covering wings,
let Holy Spirit release us
to be your people once more,
forgiven, faithful, and free. Amen

Assurance

Receive the mercy of God's forgiveness;
and let the costly love of Christ for us
be the measure
of our love for one another.
Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Collect Twenty-fourth after Pentecost

Proper 28 Year C

Isaiah 65: 17 - 25 II Thess. 3: 6 - 13
Isaiah 12: 1a - 6 (resp) Luke 21: 5 - 19

Holy God, from whose wells of salvation
we draw with joy, (Isaiah 12)
grant us so to drink of your word and wisdom (Luke 21)
that our faith may increase,
that we not grow weary
in doing what is right (II Thess)
nor in making known your deeds (Isaiah 12)
and the new heavens and earth
you are creating. (Isaiah 65)
We pray in the Name of Christ our Redeemer. Amen.

Intercession

Fond and faithful God,
we who have lost your address... now pray to you.
We whose prayers peter out
like streams in the desert... now pray to you.
We who feel occasional good works
are better service
than occasional prayers...... now pray to you.
If we find you close, Holy Spirit,
then come, join our prayers.
But if still distant,
then let the wings of the Church's prayer
carry us where we cannot fly alone.
Not for ourselves only we pray, not for ourselves only,
but for all,
and especially for those who are finding life hard going.
We would make our own the hurt of the disappointed;
ours the grief of those over whose hearts
the chill wind of bereavement has blown;
ours the damaged lives and dreams
of those torn by abuse, by betrayal,
by sickness, by war.
O Healing Spirit, heal us for the sake of those whose hurt we carry.
We pray for our nation: for those whose decisions affect
our well-being and our peace.
Wise Spirit, grant wisdom for the sake of our country.
We pray for your Church here and everywhere,
for our Moderator, our President,
for our presbyteries and congregations.
Warm, bright Spirit,
grant fire and light
that our pulpits offer saving words,
our tables offer living Bread,
our songs tell out your worthy praise,
our hands extend in love and peace. Amen

Beginning in 1888, readers of the Canadian Methodist Missionary Outlook were thrilled to read reports of the Chinese Rescue Home in Victoria, British Columbia. The project was established by the Woman's Missionary Society for the rescue of Chinese prostitutes during an era in which the Chinese population of British Columbia was overwhelmingly male. The first matron of the Home was Annie Leake, and an 1891 report illustrates the drama of her work. A young Chinese man came to the Home seeking help because his wife's father had become violent toward her and her sister (known also as Annie).

Miss Leake snatched her hat and ran. At the first crossing the tramcar stopped and the Rev. Mr. White stepped off. Miss Leake said: "There's a Chinaman beating his daughter; come with me." They were in too great a hurry to explain. The brave woman sped on through the alleys, and up the stairs, and walked in the house without asking .... She simply said to Annie, "Come with me," and the girl was following, when the father threw himself in front of the door with arms spread out, saying, "No, no!" She would have fought her own way through, but Mr. White took him by the wrist and wheeled him round, flourished his cane and talked policeman. The Chinaman believed he was a policeman. Annie shrank back from the men on the stairs, but Miss Leake took her by the arm and encouraged her. The men stood back, and they passed as quietly and as quickly as they came.

Annie Leake had travelled a long distance from the farm in Nova Scotia, where she had grown up. During her five years at the Rescue Home, she dealt with procurers and slave-owners, with lawyers and judges, and with the girls and young women under her care -- all very far from her early experience. Late in her life, Annie -- by then Annie Leake Tuttle -- wrote an autobiography for the benefit of her nieces. It shows that she had much earlier developed the strength, the independence, and the trust in God that served her so well in Victoria and during the rest of her days.

Annie was a missionary for only five years, but she saw all of her life as a journey of discovering and following the plan which God had for her. She viewed mission work as an extraordinary part of this plan, but her teaching career, her late marriage and many ordinary parts of her life also appeared to her as God's intention. In her autobiography, she openly described quite her religious experience and, in one period of her life, her lack of religious experience! Thus hers is the story of an extraordinary missionary pioneer, but it also shows much about the spirituality of an ordinary woman of her day and place.

Nova Scotia Childhood

Annie Leake was born August 3, 1839, on a farm at Crossroads, two miles north of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, the fourth child of Thomas Leake and Olevia Lockhart. Her father's family was from Yorkshire. They emigrated in 1819, when he was ten, in hopes of finding a better life across the ocean. What they found instead was a succession of trials, including shipwreck off the coast of Ireland and the death there of Thomas's mother. The family broke up soon after they landed at Buctouche, New Brunswick. Thomas first worked as a cook in a lumber camp; then he apprenticed as a carriage maker. In 1833 he married Olevia Lockhart.

Olevia's ancestors had come from the United States in the late eighteenth century, some leaving the colonies when they saw the revolution heating up, others coming to Nova Scotia as Loyalists following the war. Her father, John Lockhart, was a farmer living in Crossroads. He was an active Methodist, an "exhorter" who led two or three prayer meetings each Sunday in various parts of Cumberland County.

Annie's parents established a farm and carpenter's shop near the home of Olevia's father. Although the land was beautiful, it offered no easy livelihood for what became a family of thirteen children. All the family members had responsibilities. Annie learned to knit at such a young age that she could not remember learning, and when her older sisters married and left the family home, Annie did much to clothe her younger sisters and brothers. She also helped with the livestock, worked in the garden, gathered wild fruit and nuts, and turned her father's lathe in the carpenter shop.

Yet even with all family members doing their part, times were difficult. And so, early in 1850, Annie's childhood on her beloved farm came to an end, as she left to work outside her own home circle. Her first move was to the nearby household of her mother's brother and his wife, so it did not take her far from her family. Then, however, another uncle came with a request entailing a much bigger change in Annie's life. Christopher Lockhart was a Methodist minister stationed in Chatham, New Brunswick. Would Annie come and help his wife? Recognizing her parents' difficulty supporting their growing family, and feeling that she needed to be useful, Annie agreed. In January, 1851, the eleven-year-old made the four-day journey with her uncle to her new home.

During the next five years, Annie moved between two homes, that of her uncle and that of her parents. Though she felt great affection for Christopher, she found his wife demanding and unappreciative, and she suffered from homesickness, so twice she insisted on returning to Parrsboro for a time, and then rejoined her uncle's family which moved to Aylesford, Nova Scotia, and then to Barrington. Finally in 1856, Annie returned to Parrsboro, distressed that she did not know what she would do with herself, but unwilling to act any longer as an unpaid servant.

Turning Points

Annie and a younger brother and sister had been baptized by a Methodist minister when Annie was about six. As she remembered it, "Oh! what fervent prayers at that time went up to God, that we might be led into the Kingdom of Christ and lead useful lives. I was stood upon a chair, and the water and the Preacher's hand was placed upon my head." She also treasured the memory of her first trip to Sunday School. She longed to go but had no shoes, so her mother's wedding slippers were made over that Annie might have some. Yet when the day came, it rained. Annie's disappointment was so great that her father carried her to Sunday School in his arms.

Baptism and Christian nurture were important, but for an evangelical Christian of Annie's day, something more was expected. He grandmother Leake was one of John Wesley's Yorkshire converts, her grandfather Lockhart had been converted in a Wesleyan revival after he had come to the Parrsboro area, and her father had undergone a dramatic conversion. Everyone, including Annie herself, assumed that in order to enter fully into a mature Christian faith, she, too, would some day have a decisive experience of conversion. Yet, when she returned to Parrsboro shortly before her seventeenth birthday, Annie was still unconverted.

Annie had been taken to revival services while she lived in Chatham, but to no effect. She wrote, "I was not an emotional nature. I could not weep as I saw others doing, indeed, I never shed a tear in my life for my sins, I could not say I was sorry, for my sins, and therefore, I would not, and did not, go forward among the seekers."

Again in Aylesford she attended special services. This time she was among the seekers, but the great change she anticipated did not take place. In Barrington, "again I made an attempt to get converted but failed although I was counted among the converts and joined the Church." Following this, she joined a Class, which was one of John Wesley's innovations. Members met regularly under the supervision of a Class Leader for examination and support in their religious lives. The sharing of religious experience was an important feature of Class Meetings, and since Annie had no experience to which she could testify, she found it "far from a pleasure" to attend.

Back in Parrsboro in February, 1857, Annie attended yet another series of services. This time she had a vision which left her certain of pardon and filled her with peace. At first she was unable to speak about her experience, but a few days later she received "the baptism of the Holy Spirit". From the time of Wesley, it was common for Methodists to claim an experience beyond conversion, though names for it varied, and this was what Annie experienced. Then she felt empowered to testify. After this, when her grandfather led prayer meetings, he often took Annie with him so that she might share her testimony.

Annie's conversion, however, did not solve her practical problem: what was she going to do with herself? Then, a little more than a year after her conversion, she attended a lecture by Dr. Alexander Forrester, principal of the Normal School in Truro. His speech gave Annie an answer. She wrote, "I ... had the way set before me, whereby I could secure the coveted education and self support, if I could only become a school teacher. Oh! how I listened and daresay prayed for help."

It was a bold prayer, for up to this time Annie had attended school for perhaps three years. She had gone to work for her uncle in part because he promised better educational opportunities than she had at home, but her hopes were bitterly disappointed. Sometimes there were no schools near where he was stationed, but more often she was, as she put it, "too good a nurse girl, to get to school over much", as the family kept her at home to look after the children.

A Teacher and a Teacher of Teachers

It took another year before the dream became reality, but in May, 1858, Annie had her first school, set up in the home of her eldest sister Rebecca and her brother-in-law. Annie's next eight years were a dizzying succession of teaching in order to earn money to study in order to learn to teach. She taught in seven different places and studied twice at the Normal School under Dr. Forrester. New educational methods and new standards of teacher training had recently come to Nova Scotia, and Annie was part of the early generation of teachers who were trained to work according to these new methods.

During this time Annie experienced the one romance of her life, when she met Milledge Tuttle of Pugwash. He was three years older than Annie, "fine in form, pleasing in expression, and thought he was looking for a wife." Letters passed between them, and on one visit Milledge pointed out where he thought he would build their home. But during the following school year, he stopped writing. Annie did not know why, and "was too proud to ask" when, some months later, she sat beside him on the drive to a family wedding. She continued teaching, and after this she could never "put off the old love and put on the new".

Hoping to prepare herself for a position in a graded school that was being built in Amherst, Annie spent a year at the Ladies College in Sackville. When she was offered the Amherst post, however, the salary was so low that she boldly rejected it. Immediately she wrote to enlist Forrester's help in finding another position. To her amazement, he invited her to take charge of the Primary Department of the Model School connected with the Normal School in Truro! As she described it, "This was far above my highest dreams at the time, and I think my highest move in writing all this down is to show the wonderful Providence of 'Our Father' in thus helping me on from Step to Step in the work He wished me to do."

Annie taught in Truro ten years, and then another opportunity came unbidden. The Methodist Academy in St. John's had built an elementary school, and Annie was asked to take charge of training the "Pupil Teachers." And so, near Christmas of 1876, she left for Newfoundland. Faculty members at the Academy were English, and disdained a "Provincial Teacher" from Nova Scotia. Annie found expenses high and the job difficult; nevertheless, she explained, "'Our Father' helped me wonderfully to overcome, and gave me success and I remained ten years, and was always glad I did."

During most summers, Annie returned to Parrsboro. In 1886, she found that her father's health had deteriorated. She felt that "after bringing up twelve children", it did seem too bad that not one of them could be with the parents in their time of need", and so when she returned to St. John's, she resigned from her position, and sailed from Newfoundland for the last time on New Year's Day of 1887.

Thomas Leake died the following June. By then, Annie had arranged for Rebecca and her husband to move onto the farm, and her mother was comfortably settled in one part of the house. Annie's responsibilities were at an end, and once more she faced the question of what to do. She wrote that she "had tired of the school room having had twenty-seven years of service. My heart turned to Mission Work of some kind. So I wrote letters here and there and waited and prayed."

At the Chinese Rescue Home

One of the friends to whom she wrote had an idea. A year earlier, a man in Victoria had begun rescuing Chinese prostitutes and also "slave girls" who appeared destined for prostitution. He appealed for help, and in 1887, the Methodist Woman's Missionary Society decided to support a Chinese Rescue Home. Annie's friend was an officer in the society, and she recognized in Annie someone who had the necessary personal and professional qualifications for this difficult work. She put Annie's name forward, and Annie was offered the post. In December 1887, she started across the continent by train. She made a side trip to North Dakota, where three of her brothers had settled, but then, continuing her journey, she arrived in Victoria shortly before Christmas.

On New Year's Eve, Annie Leake was taken to the house where the nine rescued girls were living. She found them 'rude, rough, ragged, [and] dirty", but "They are bright and intelligent, and I really like them, and when I once get them started at school I hope to interest them. It will be uphill work I know, but with God's blessing I believe a good work can be done."

It was indeed uphill work. Annie's first task was to move the residents to more suitable accommodation, but that was an easy job compared to her daily struggle against barriers of language and culture. Gradually, through a combination of signs and broken English, the girls told her their stories -- how one was seized and smuggled in a trunk, then sold for $900, another sold by her mother to pay her father's funeral expenses. Hearing their horrific tales, Annie was eager for the rescue of other women and girls, but there were residents in Chinatown who strongly resisted the loss of those whom they considered their property. The work sometimes took Annie to homes like the one to which she sped with the Rev. Mr. White, but even if a friend of the Rescue Home brought a grateful girl to Annie, there was no assurance that the newcomer would remain in her custody. The mission had to be named guardian, and Annie sat through long courtroom proceedings only to see a girl wooed back to her old life, or a judgment go against the Home.

Most of Annie's work, however, was in the Home which she could not leave unless someone came in to stay while she was away. She quickly taught the girls to knit stockings for themselves, and soon set them to sewing, as well. She procured a blackboard, slates and books, and reported, "sometimes I have real pleasure in teaching, at others they are full of whims; but I have seen just such children before in my life." The girls also cooked and cleaned, as Annie attempted to reproduce as closely as possible the family life of her ideal Christian home. Often the residents became cross, and pouted and scolded, but Annie used her background "in governing as well as teaching", and she prevailed.

Religious training was, of course, Annie's highest priority. She had taught Sabbath-School for many years, and now she met with a more challenging class each Sunday morning. She also held family prayer twice a day, and soon found that when she returned home after an evening away, the girls got out of bed and requested, "Mamma talk to Jesus". During her second year, Annie rejoiced over their conversions, and saw their changed conduct as a token of the genuine nature of their experience. They began to hold little prayer meetings among themselves, and told Annie what they did: "Me talk Jesus, help good school; no cross you."

It was Annie's hope, and that of the other WMS women that converted residents might return to China as missionary helpers, and Annie wrote many letters attempting to find out how that might be arranged. Finally, however, it became clear that such a thing was not possible. The practical goal was for the girls to marry suitable partners, and to establish Christian homes that would become beacon lights in Chinatown. Thus the Home became the site of the wedding of Katie and Ah Lou. According to a report in the Daily Colonist, "Rev. J.E. Starr tied the happy knot, according to the rules of the Methodist Church", and Annie gave away the bride; the couple's new home was "a cosy little five-roomed cottage on Quadra street... well furnished in European style". This was but the first of a succession of marriages as some women moved out into the community while new residents came to spend time in the Home.

Annie completed her five-year term and then left the Home, which came to be recognized as the most difficult of the WMS missions. Matrons who followed Annie shared her frustration over the difficulty of rescues, and the Home never sheltered as many prostitutes and slave girls as its founders had hoped. Instead it found other ways to serve the Chinese and Japanese of the area, providing a refuge for abused women, a temporary home for "picture brides", a shelter for women needing medical care, and a home and school for children without parents able to care for them. It remained open until the 1940s, its work built upon the pioneering labours of Annie Leake.

After Annie left British Columbia, she made her way to North Dakota. There she found that the wife of her brother Albert was dying of consumption. Again Annie stepped in to fill the needs of her family, and cared for the two children. After Albert's wife died, his doctor recommended that he leave North Dakota, and he

departed to establish a home in Arizona. Three months later he sent for Annie and the children, who made a five-day journey by rail to join him.

In Phoenix, however, Annie became ill, and so she headed north, recovering as she went. All Annie's brothers were part of the out-migration from Nova Scotia in the latter part of the nineteenth century, each living for a time, at least, in the United States. Thus Annie visited a brother in Oklahoma, and then returned to North Dakota to see the two remaining there. Finally she returned to her native province, and spent her fifty-fifth birthday with cousins in Pugwash.

Wife and Widow

"Milledge Tuttle was now a widower of one year only, and had a family of nine children, six daughters and three sons," wrote Annie.

One morning soon after my arrival in Pugwash he called with his eldest daughter, at cousin William's to see me, and to invite us all down to the old Tuttle home for tea, Cousin William & wife & myself. I soon knew, without being told, and it was not so long before I was told, that the position of Stepmother

would be offered to me.... I accepted the position feeling that it was what "Our Father" wanted me to do next.... He had given me hard positions to fill before in life and He had wonderfully carried me through them all, and in this position He was better to me than my fears.

Annie finally learned what had ended their earlier romance: Milledge's "family had other plans for him and had interfered with our lovemaking." On January 17, 1895, Annie and Milledge were married in Parrsboro. Compared to the poignance of her earlier tale, the matter-of-fact tone of Annie's report is surprising, but she explained: "I suppose the romance of getting married had pretty well died out of my naturally practical temperament. I think Mr. Tuttle was more elated over the event than I was."

Milledge had practical reasons for rejoicing because at the time of their wedding, seven of his children were still at home. They ranged from eight to twenty-seven years of age. One of the daughters was away teaching, and the eldest son, Aubrey, had left home to enter the Methodist ministry.⁽¹⁾ As the older daughters departed to marry or work, Annie took over their various "departments of work", as she called them. Yet she must have felt something of an interloper in this well-established household, and she turned to reflecting on her own family history, writing down the story of the Leakes and the Lockharts.

Seven years after they married, Milledge died. Annie was welcome to remain in the Tuttle home, but she did not wish to: "I felt that I was free again to do for myself. But what! that was the question."

The next five years were anxious ones, as she lived with relatives and friends. She was active in the Woman's Missionary Society, and went once as a delegate to its national meeting. She also attended an international convention of the WCTU, held in Boston. But her life was lonely. During this time she wrote to her niece Edna Nix, "It is not a very comfortable situation to be homeless in one's old age but I am trying to live just 'one day at a time' trusting 'Our Father' to teach me what next to do." During this difficult period, Annie began to write the story of her life, claiming her identity at a time when she was without home or occupation.

In 1907, she sought admittance into the Old

Ladies' Home in Halifax, stating on her application that she "was not disabled in any way", but "needed a Home". During her first decade in the Home, she remained remarkably active, travelling as District Organizer for the Woman's Missionary Society and visiting friends and relatives. She held offices in the Brunswick Street Church WMS, and visited jails on behalf of the WCTU.

Gradually, declining health limited her activities, yet she continued to show her interest in her family and in the world around her. In 1921 she was among the women who used their first

opportunity to vote in a national election. She read the papers, and carried on an extensive correspondence with friends and family. She lamented deeply when these activities became too difficult. In 1926, she wrote to her niece Edna,

I am replying at once while I am able to scribble a few lines. My days of letter writing are over, I am sorry to say. What ever length of day there is in store for me it is as an invalid, and to me that is not desirable. I would love to slip away as mother did, near her 80th year, but know I must wait my time, and I do have to pray often for patience. ... 'I dread the grave, as little as my bed' but I fear I am some what of a coward at invalidism. Oh! to be idle, just to sit and wait. But I have the Promises the Precious Promises.

She died eight years later, on December 17, 1934, and was buried in the cemetery at Crossroads, near the graves of her parents and grandparents. She had set aside money to pay for her burial, and she had given instructions that whatever balance remained was to go to the Woman's Missionary Society. Annie Leake Tuttle died as she had lived, attempting to go from Step to Step in the work God wished her to do.

The words of Annie Leake Tuttle are found in her autobiography and letters, which are in the possession of Rev. J. Ernest Nix of Mississauga, Ontario, who has generously given me access to them.

M.F.W.

1.  Continuing her autobiography c. 1911, Annie referred to him as "a very successful Preacher in the Alberta Conference". She did not live to see him become Moderator of the United Church of Canada in 1940.

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, $40.75

Don't let the short title fool you into thinking this is a book for Southern Baptist tel-evangelists. And don't let the sub-title lead you to think it is a tome for academia. This is an exciting, provocative study which uncovers the groundwork of one of the more promising move-ments in the contemporary theo-logical scene, the so-called "Yale School". It points to new rela-tionships among theology, sermon and Church community which might help the Church out of the stagnant waters of liberalism and into some fresh currents.

Not all readers of this journal will know of the "Yale School", and only a few are likely to have read George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine, which laid out the intellectual undergirding for the movement. But many will know the writings of some of its most articulate practitioners, like William Willimon, Stanley Hauerwas, and Walter Brueg-gemann. Campbell focuses upon the originating figure of the movement, Hans Frei. By doing so he both illumines the foun-dations of the movement and provides a much-needed frame-work for others to join in.

Strongly influenced by Karl Barth, Frei attempted to break away from liberalism without turning to dogmatism. Liber-alism is primarily apologetics, claimed Frei, where the Gospel story is translated into the world view of contemporary culture. Theological content becomes little more than talk about human needs and possibilities, with Jesus being a cipher for human existence.

Frei emphasized the centrality of the Christian narrative. The goal of theology is not to find meaning within or behind the Christian story, but is to elucidate the story so that it "absorbs the world". The story is meant to provide the framework and language which gives rise to the new community seeking to embody the Gospel story -- the Church. Stories about Jesus are stories about a very specific figure and not general truths about human existence. In Campbell's words, they are about "Jesus' unique, unsubstitutable identity". And this identity, as rendered in the Gospel narrative, takes precedence over his mean-ingfulness for us, which is the very reverse of the approach in liberalism.

With liberalism the Church is often identified as a gathering of open-minded people searching for meaning, and trying to provide answers to human problems. The Church receives a different significance in Frei's framework. There it is primarily a community which is formed by the Gospel narrative, not by trying to use the early Church as a model but by living the Gospel in today's world.

Paul Tillich gave those of us in the liberal churches our most potent model for seeing the Christian faith as offering an-swers to the fundamental human questions and problems of the age -- his famous method of corre-lation. One result is that the language of the questions (i.e. of the world) largely determine the language of the answers. Following Frei, Campbell sees the Church and its preaching differently. Preaching helps the congregation understand and become fluent with the Christian language. "Sermons become a means through which the Christian community enters more deeply into its own distinctive speech, so that Christian ideas, beliefs, and experience become possible" (p. 234). Where liberal preaching tries to translate scriptural language into modern concepts, the preaching Campbell is holding up tries to speak about the world in the language of the Gospel. The main goal of preaching is not to help people cope with the world as it is, but to build up a community of disciples who speak and live the distinctive life of the Gospel.

Campbell's book is not without flaws. Based on his doctoral dissertation, it needed far more aggressive editing to remove the repetition and argumentation which is expected in a thesis but becomes aggra-vating in a book. By focusing on Frei alone, Campbell also does not leave himself sufficient freedom to explore the directions those inspired by the Yale School might take. And Frei himself, in relying almost solely upon the Gospels and the identity of Jesus, left a large percentage of the Bible in limbo, without any clear sense of how it, too, serves as scripture for the Church.

Preaching Jesus, never-theless, is an important book. Readable yet scholarly, the many components of a post-liberal theology begin to fall into place. Campbell's next book, once he escapes the restrictions of his doctoral thesis, just might become a classic.

-- Douglas Goodwin
 

Series Editor: Peter Vardy Triumph, Missouri, 1997. $16.50 each

The titles so far published in this series are Kierkegaard by Peter Vardy; Augustine by Richard Price; Francis and Bonaventure by Paul Rout; John of the Cross by Wilfrid McGreal; Thomas More by Anne Murphy; Simone Weil by Stephen Plant. A series on Christian thinkers without Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bonhöffer...? The editor must be an Anglican with a penchant for the mystical (John of the Cross), the platonic (Simone Weil), the ascetic (Francis), the catholic (Thomas More), the foundational (Augustine). Oh well, Kierkegaard is included, and it's obviously a good thing to learn about these others.

Richard Price is especially helpful in sketching the historical context in which Christendom's doctor of grace hammered out his hugely influential doctrines. We see how Augustine comes up with the sacramental notion of ex opera operato (i.e. the sacrament accomplishes its purpose apart from the spiritual condition of the presider or the congregation) after battling the puritanical Donatists who were outlawing from the community anybody who had been baptized by a morally compromised (by the Donatists' measure) presider. We also see how Augustine was driven to embrace the radical doctrine of Original Sin, with all its negative sexual overtones, by way of defending the freedom of God's grace over and against the perfectionistic, works-oriented Pelagians.

Simone Weil is also best understood by keeping her life context in mind. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, a haunted, traumatized woman living through haunted, traumatized times (the Second World War), and dying when she was only thirty-four, Weil's theology is often impressionistic and quixotic. She refused baptism, for example, in order to identify with the God who, through the Cross, identifies with the outcast. Weil's pithy probings can't help but intrigue. Brilliant herself, her fine distaste for intelligence alone led her to liken the preening intellectual to a condemned prisoner showing off the size of his cell!

More plodding, even pedantic at times, are the books on Thomas More (16th century), Francis and Bonaventure (13th century) (I know, I know, I should be jumping with joy, but this was supposed to be a series on thought), and John of the Cross (16th century), whose poetry, we're told (and we can only believe it) is better in Spanish.

Still, there's Kierkegaard, a choice assignment the editor reserves for himself. Vardy writes lucidly about Kierke-gaard's tragic life and convoluted but nutritious works, spelling out the central christological impor-tance of the Absolute Paradox. Space allows for only one mouthwatering quotation from the great Dane's writing on the eternal. It's presence, he says ...

is like the murmuring of a brook. If you go buried in your own thoughts, if you are busy, then you do not notice it at all in passing. You are not aware that this murmuring exists. But if you stand still, then you discover it. And if you have discovered it, then you must stand still. And when you stand still, then it persuades you. And when it has persuaded you, then you must stoop and listen to it attentively. And when you have stooped to listen to it, then it captures you... -- John McTavish

Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. 336 pp $29.99

For nearly thirty years contemporary theology has lived with two contrasting insights, both of which are essential for critical theology. In the line of thought shaped by Karl Barth the attempt of liberal theology to harmonize the Christian message with modern thought was rejected. The fusion of Christian faith with German culture, and thus of the Protestant churches remaining loyal to Hitler, was perceived to be a prime example of what can happen when such a harmonization is attempted, though the cultural captivity of the liberal Protestant churches in North America was also cited.

On the other hand, a central insight of liberal, black and feminist theologies is that the Gospel always comes to expression in some cultural form. If it is not expressed in terms of the culture of the oppressed or marginalized groups, it will have an alienating effect on them, contrary to the Gospel's liberating intent. To be true to its salvific purpose, the Gospel must be expressed in terms of a people's own cultural heritage, and their experience of sin and salvation. Christians should seek to understand Christ in terms of their own cultural experience.

One of the important contributions of this book by Miroslav Volf is that he brings these insights together. Writing out of his experience in Croatia during the Balkan conflict, Volf poses the question, "How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators? (p. 9) He argues that the ethnic and cultural conflicts that give rise to this question are part of a larger problem of identity and otherness.

Sifting through analyses of the politics of identity, he finds in people an inherent tendency towards violence: in the encounter with someone of a different cultural and social identity, "instead of reconfiguring myself to make space for the other, I seek to reshape the other into who I want her to be, in order that in relation to her I may be who I want to be" (p. 91). Volf draws on Moltmann's eschatology and the theology of the cross to respond to this.

The tendency of a self-enclosed identity towards violence can be overcome by finding in the crucified Christ an identity able to embrace someone radically different while allowing them to be themselves. For this to happen the Gospel must be related to one's own experience and expressed in terms of it. Yet in becoming a Christian one also becomes marginal to one's own culture. Christian hope is such that Christians should stand with one foot in their culture and the other outside of it in the future God will bring. Augustine's idea of Christians as citizens of the City of God, with no abiding home in any human city finds renewed expression here. This distance from one's own culture, "born out of allegiance to God and God's future... creates space in us to receive the other" (p. 51).

Volf goes on to argue that Jesus' call to repentance is directed to both the oppressors and the victims of oppression, though in different ways. Oppressors are to repent of their violence, victims of their dreams of revenge. The struggle for justice must be carried on, but it must be guided by the vision that sees it as the path leading towards the embrace of former enemies.

Although Volf doesn't mention H. Richard Niebuhr's classic work, Christ and Culture, he shows how Niebuhr's favoured type, Christ the Transformer of Culture, is applicable to all cultures, though with different emphases. He also echoes themes of the universality of sin and the need for repentance that were central to Reinhold Niebuhr's criticism of modern liberal culture. But whereas Niebuhr focuses on issues of power and self-interest, Volf is more attuned to issues of identity and status, and how the Gospel can help effect reconciliation between peoples.

This is a profound and exciting book. It unpacks the meaning of the cross in relation to the kinds of questions raised by the cultural conflicts present in Canadian society, such as how aboriginals and whites, francophones and anglo-phones, women and men can live together in light of the history of oppression that lies between them. I believe Volf's insights could also help conservatives, liberals and radicals live together in the same Church.

-- Don Schweitzer
 

Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996 189 pp $26.75

"Even the most casual perusal of the table of contents will reveal that there is something very odd about this book" (p. 11). So begins Laurence Stookey's Calendar. What is odd about the book is its organization. Instead of doing what is often done in books about the liturgical year, the author explores the calendar using a theological theme rather than a chronological one. More about this later.

This is the third volume in Laurence Stookey's trilogy of liturgical and sacramental books. The earlier volumes are Baptism: Christ's Act in the Church and Eucharist: Christ's Feast with the Church. The author writes in this current book with the same ease and clarity as are evidenced in the earlier volumes. Indeed, there is in the author's style a straightforwardness and, perhaps, a gentleness that are almost endearing. And though surely a scholar of note, he writes primarily as a faithful Christian, addressing others of the same kind, and writing so as to inform and influence lives of faith.

Written for clergy and laity alike, the author intends to explore the Church Year as an instrument of theological expres-sion, another means by which the Gospel is announced and enacted, alongside preaching and the celebration of the sacraments. In so doing, he is both apologist for the use of the liturgical year and exegete of its meaning. He assumes a readership at least familiar with the calendar and likely also familiar with the common lectionary. He also assumes that hymn texts, his most frequent thematic source, will be a formative ingredient in the spiritual inventory of his readers.

To get back to the "odd" business reported at the beginning, Stookey begins his treatment of the calendar with a brief look at timekeeping and the role that calendars play in ordering human affairs and human equilibrium. Then he addresses what, from his rec-koning, is the cornerstone of the calendar, namely, Sunday. He writes:

No observance that occurs only once a year [he has Easter in mind here] can connote the continuing work of God in daily life. Therefore the chief festival occurs weekly, and from it all else is derived, including those annual festivals that may be more visible and certainly are the more popular occasions. (p. 44).

It follows that the yearly festival of the first rank should be that which most closely in tone reflects the weekly observance. There-fore, of the annual obser-vances of the church, Easter has pre-eminence (p. 49).

It is not Easter that establishes Sunday, but rather Sunday that establishes Easter.

Consequently, the book is ordered thus: from Sunday the discussion moves to Easter (understood here as a season of fifty days proceeding to Ascen-sion and ending with Pentecost) and its preparation, Lent; then Christmas (understood here as a season of twelve days ending with Epiphany) and its preparation, Advent; then Ordi-nary time (understood here as those Sundays in the seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost which carry ordinal numbers); and lastly, the cycle of saintly observances. By this ordering, the three cycles of the year, Easter/Pentecost, Christmas/Epi-phany and the Sanctoral cycle, are all accounted for.

The flavour of the book can be conveyed in the following snippets. Writing about the fact that liturgical participation is characteristic of the Christian life, he writes: "The church, not the individual, is the irreducible unit of Christianity" (p. 76). Advo-cating the full indulgence of the church in the Holy Thursday-Good Friday-Easter Vigil cycle (the "Triduum", "a single service that stretches across three days" (p. 91), the author says, "That the very anointed One of God should die and rise on behalf of us who wilfully cried 'Crucify!' is a thing at which we must marvel slowly..." (p. 92).

Near the end of this very good book, Laurence Stookey writes:

The sacred calendar is no magical formula; it cannot protect us from all spiritual dryness and misdirection. Nevertheless, this calendar enables us to live -- and to die -- more readily as the pe-

ople of God. By observing Christ's time for the church, year in and year out, we make our pilgrim story -- not as if walking circles on the same plot of ground, but as if ascending a spiral staircase. (pp. 150f)

The concluding notes, appendix, reading list and index are unusually strong, and an added blessing to an already worthy volume. The notes are very useful and one of the appendices, the one called, "Forgetting What You Were Always Taught (or, This Book in a Nutshell)" is a splendid synopsis of what the author is up to. This book will be valued by virtually any reader, and each reader will rightly thank Laurence Stookey for his solid and gracious work.

-- William Seth Adams
 

THE DIETS OF FAITH by Dr. Mel Praktis

Given the interest in traditional medicines and in diet, we thought we might examine some of the diets of the traditional peoples of faith.

Vegetarian

One of the first diets mentioned in the Bible is the vegetarian diet of Cain. But it seems that his line of veggie burgers, known as McCain's, was a flop (though a successful vegetable processing empire carries on the name). Perhaps it was the lack of red meat proteins, but try as he might to curry God's favour, he just wasn't Abel.

Wanderers

While travelling through the desert, the people of Israel fantasized about their former diet in Egyptian bondage, which seems to have consisted largely of "onions, leeks and garlic". Though this menu may contain a certain "get up and go" quality to it, it also may help to explain why it took forty years of airing out in the desert before they found a home with tolerant neighbours.

Manna

Since manna self-destructed after meals, its chief advantage was in never having to eat leftovers. Many also found it helpful to the waistline, there being no possibility of midnight snacks. The chief disadvantage was that it was about all there was to eat. Some scholars speculate that this monotony gave rise to the Mann-nite school of cuisine, with their three popular recipe books: Manna That Really Schmecks, the sequel Manna That Almost Schmecks, and finally the best-selling Memories of the Flesh Pots.
 
Protestant Diet

As Marie Antoinette discovered, the role of diet can have profound historical implication, for placating the masses, or for inciting dissent. For example, many historians agree that the Protestant Reformation probably would have been inconceivable without the now famous Diet of Worms. And speaking of worms, I want to share with you a portion of a sermon that my friend Alban Stole preached on Earth Day.

More Worms Please

At a recent seminar a theologian made the remark "We will have no more worm theology", by which she seemed to mean no more theology in which people refer to themselves as worms. At first her declaration sounded good, but as I thought about it, I realized that this was nothing but a form of species-ism, an expression of an arrogant anthropocentrism which considers non-human parts of creation to be of lesser value.

Consider the worm. Unlike homo sapiens, these gentle creatures have never mounted campaigns of genocide against other races. On the contrary, they have accepted the lowly, thankless vocation of cleaning up the waste of others. They have redemptively embraced the earth, taking its refuse into themselves and transforming it.

Are they celebrated for this vital service? No! While whales and seal pups ignite human passion, have you ever seen glossy posters of nematode young, or bumper-sticker campaigns to "Save the Worm"? Casting aside pride, and eschewing the limelight, these healers of the earth have made it their business to know only humus (the root word of humility). Of all creatures great and small, it is the worm who truly deserves the title Co-Creator, one of the few creatures who truly leaves the earth a more wholesome place for having graced it. As such, we should aspire to wormhood. Let us not have less worm theology, but more of it. After all, worms are people too.

William Seth Adams is professor of Liturgics and Anglican Studies at The Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

Douglas Goodwin is minister at Omineca Pastoral Charge, Vanderhoof, British Columbia.

John McTavish is minister at Trinity United Church in Hunstville, Ontario.

Lynette Miller is a minister in Agassiz Presbytery, Manitoba.

Barry Morris is minister at the Longhouse Ministry in Vancouver.

Don Ross is a retired minister living in Winnipeg.

Donald Schweitzer is minister at Wesley United Church, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Laurie Simpson is minister at St. Andrew's United Church, Manitou, Manitoba.

Marilyn Färdig Whiteley lives in Guelph, Ontario, and is an independent scholar writing on women in the Church.

Robert Zagore is pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Niles, Michigan.
 
 

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