Hi friends,
I'm writing to let you know that I'm shutting down my blogger blog after having ported CSC over to Wordpress. Check out www.kyleoliver.net for an expanded site, including all past blog content (and new posts, of course) at http://www.kyleoliver.net/blog/. Needless to say, it's a work in progress, but I think it's starting to look alright. The feed is available at http://www.kyleoliver.net/feed/.
I'm very sorry to break this link and this feed, but it needed to happen for technical reasons and for my continued professional development.
Cheers,
Kyle
03 December 2012
Shutting down blogger blog, moving to WordPress
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 10:28 AM 0 comments
05 November 2012
Gathering with the Saints: A sermon for All Saints Sunday
* I am indebted here to Paul L. Hammer’s article on “Inheritance” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992): 415–417.
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 4:09 PM 0 comments
09 October 2012
"Talking to folks — not organizing them"
I'm feeling inspired today by a recent blog post by my friend Gary Manning, who's obviously been thinking about the same kinds of things I've been thinking about ever since returning from the Episcopal Evangelism Network's Mission Development Conference a couple weeks back.
Here's a taste:
But the people who live near our churches aren’t generalizations. They are very specific! They have specific histories, specific challenges, specific disappointments and specific dreams. Many of them are our friends. We like them and they like us. It would seem these folks could give us some first person insight as to how a community of faith might engage them or be beneficial in their lives. Through such conversations we might better understand how we could more effectively serve our neighbors — you know, the ones Jesus called us to love?
Now if we actively engaged such a project, here’s what I’m pretty sure will not happen. We will not see a dramatic increase in Sunday worship attendance. We will not see the annual operating budget balanced. We will not suddenly be flush with volunteer labor to do all the church chores that have multiplied, like dandelions, in local congregations through the years. So if we’re not going to get more people, more money or more volunteers, what would happen if we risked talking to our neighbors?
To be honest, I’m not sure, but I’ve decided I’ve got to try and find out. It’s time for me to get out of the office and into the field. It’s time for me to start asking questions and spend time listening to what people have to say (even if some of what they say may not be easy to hear). I don’t expect such an experiment will come easily. There’s always plenty of e-mails to answer, books to read, meetings to attend and blog posts to write. Somehow, though, I will have to break the gravitational choke-hold of busy-ness and get on with the business of Jesus, which seemed to include a fair amount of talking to folks — not organizing them. From time to time I’ll post an update about what I learn. For all of the uncertainty I have around this project, I am, becoming clearer and clearer about one thing.
We church types can no longer simply be content with talking to ourselves.
Check out the whole thing here.
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 8:24 AM 0 comments
07 October 2012
Bohr Doodle Googlers: Welcome
I've written in the past that one of the best things I ever did for my blog's traffic was to name it after a Latin expression that folks occasionally have reason to look up. For the kind of traffic I'm used to, today is a significant day for this phenomenon. That's because the phrase "contraria sunt complementa" is mentioned in at least one of the write-ups for today's Google Doodle send-up of Niels Bohr.
So if you've found this blog because of the Doodle and your curiosity about this lovely expression, let me just say welcome to you. Although I started this blog when I resided mostly on the latter end of the "letters and science" spectrum (I was a graduate student in nuclear engineering), I've now moved closer to the middle with a technology-heavy ministry job in the Episcopal Church. I remain committed to the idea that opposites are indeed complementary, and I might in particular direct you to an online course I developed about the relationship between science and theology, which course discusses some of the modern physics issues that Bohr had such keen insight into.
Anyway, I'm glad you're here, and I'm glad you're interested in one of my major role models. Here's to Niels Bohr on what would have been his 127th birthday! Enjoy.
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 3:06 PM 0 comments
20 August 2012
Sermon on Proverbs 9 from Sunday, August 19: "The voice of Wisdom where we are"
PDF | Audio | Text:
Proverbs 9:1-6 (Proper 15, Year B, RCL)
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 9:35 PM 0 comments
23 July 2012
Sermon on Mark 6 from Sunday, July 22: "Discipleship when life happens"
I've recently started work as a part-time assistant for pastoral care at St. Paul's Parish on K Street in Washington, DC. As I say in this sermon, "life happened" (and also death) early Friday morning in Aurora, CO. So my first sermon in this new position took an unexpected turn. Please continue to pray for all those affected by Friday's shootings.
PDF | Audio | Text:
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 (Proper 11, Year B, RCL)
Our gospel passage this morning is more than a little confusing. I think our first task has to be just figuring out what’s going on. The gospel writer Mark can be hard enough to follow, and today the job is made more difficult by the designers of the lectionary. So take a deep breath and think back with me, if you can, to our readings from the last two weeks. Recall that Jesus had sent out the twelve two by two, to cast out spirits, heal the sick, and proclaim repentance. Next came last week’s strange interlude about John the Baptist, Herodius, the dance, and the head on the platter. And then, just like that, we’re back to the apostles without a word of warning. So the first thing to remember is that the apostles have “gathered around Jesus,” as we heard in the first verse today, because they’ve returned from their journey and want to tell him how it went.
They give what must have been a rather fabulous report, considering the nature of the work Jesus empowered them to do. And then Jesus says this: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” It must have been like music to their ears. After all, they’d traveled days or maybe weeks with no supplies. So imagine the disciples’ surprise and frustration when they arrive and find that a crowd had seen them going and rushed ahead to their formerly deserted place. They’d been promised a retreat alone, and they ended up hemmed in by a crowd full of sheep without a shepherd. But filled with compassion and apparently tireless, their master rolls up his sleeves and begins to teach them many things.
So how did the disciples handle it? And what did Jesus teach the crowd? Here’s where things get really confusing. The next line we heard this morning was this: “When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat.” What? First they get out of the boat and watch Jesus start teaching, and now they’ve crossed over to the other side of the lake? Notice that we’re missing almost twenty verses here. At first it seemed to me that whoever chopped this story up got a little overzealous. Indeed, the part they removed was hardly insignificant: it’s the feeding of the five thousand followed immediately by Jesus walking on water. These are important details that help us understand the flow of the story, however familiar they are to us and however long they would take to read, or chant.
So why the huge jump? I thought. How could the designers of the lectionary screw up a Sunday reading so badly? Surely it’s not too much to ask that the story make sense. But then I read on ahead from the line about having crossed over: “When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized [Jesus], and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. …[They] begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.” Now this is sounding familiar. I think we’re starting to hear a theme of faithful service amid frustration and fatigue. Part of what the lectionary emphasizes, it seems to me, is that after having their retreat interrupted, Jesus and his disciples attended to the needs of those who interrupted it. And then, yes, they headed off somewhere else to attend to still more people in need.
Disciples, I am sorry to say, are always on call. The apostles weren’t told, “Put down your nets and follow me, except on weekends, federal holidays, and three personal days that do not carry over to the following year.” No, our baptismal promises do not come with blackout dates, and the needs of the world are stubbornly indifferent to how much overtime we’ve put in lately.
Those of you who are parents probably understand this reality better than anybody, and those of us who remember or are still living what we put our parents through can probably come to a second-hand understanding. I’m thinking in particular of a summer afternoon when my family pulled into our Florida home after two days on I-95 returning from a trip to New York. I was seven, and my sister was four, if that gives you some idea of what kind of days these had been. But despite the terrible timing, I chose that day to throw an absolute fit about wanting to go see our local minor league baseball team. For reasons I still do not fully understand, my father relented. Now that’s a pretty tame example, but you parents can all name much more inconvenient or even desperate instances of when, as they say, “life happened.” You can’t control when your child gets sick, fails a test at school, breaks up with that first boyfriend or girlfriend, wrecks the car, or worse. Life happens, and you respond the best way you know how whenver you have to, because that’s what it means to be a parent.
Maybe that’s the lesson Jesus teaches his disciples in this morning’s piecemeal passage and that its addled editors are trying to teach us. The twelve got into that boat with every intention of caring for themselves for a while, but they got out knowing that Jesus and they had a job to do and that the grace of God and the presence of their master would carry them along. Life happened, and they responded as well as they could, because that’s what it means to be a disciple.
I was with a group of St. Paul’s parishioners this week who have learned this lesson far better than I have, learned it over years of faithful, Christ-centered service. Reflecting on the shape of their ministry, they named the frustrations of DC metro traffic, the difficulty of finding volunteers for certain work, and the sense we all get that the ministry Jesus calls us to is simply unrelenting: “no respite” was a common refrain. But they also spoke of the ways they were refreshed by “seeing delight in others,” by “the opportunity to stimulate excitement,” and by “watching others grow and develop” in faith and service. The abundant grace of God is such that sometimes the Holy Spirit breaks into our dreariest moments of tedium and exhaustion and helps us find peace and light among it all.
Now, none of this is to say that the disciples in today’s lesson didn’t genuinely need that retreat time. They did, and we do. But our call, it seems to me, is to be open and discerning when life happens. Sometimes, we really do need to push that boat back from the shore and find a new, genuinely deserted place to recharge our batteries. There may be no blackout dates for disciples, but there are some days when we won’t be of much use anyway. At other times, though, the need is so overwhelming that we can feel the risen Christ walking beside us, nudging us into service as his strong hands and compassionate heart in desperate times.
Yesterday morning, I visited the website of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Aurora, CO. “Summer time and the living is easy,” the home page read. You better believe that’s because the people of St. Martin’s have more pressing things to do right now than update the parish website. Congregations throughout the area have thrown open their doors to those whose shock and grief at Friday’s murders have drawn them out to stand vigil with their neighbors. The wounds to their community, and to the whole human family, are deep. We will all be tending to those wounds for some time, especially Coloradans, who have also been battered by the recent wildfires and who still carry scars from killings all too similar in Littleton in 1999. The images of smoke and gunfire, the harrowing stories of fortunate survivors, and the laments of the bereaved are painfully familiar. No, the living won’t be easy in Colorado for quite some time, regardless of what the calendar says, regardless of who is on vacation.
Where do they find the strength, and where will we, in the face of this senseless act, and in the face of the more mundane changes and chances that threaten each day to sap our energy and hope in God’s promises? Well, we’ll find it in each other, to be sure, which is why we heard over and over again this weekend that mental health workers, pastoral caregivers, and concerned citizens everywhere are reaching out to those who need it. During another recent crisis, my seminary Hebrew teacher used this expression to describe what we do in our most desperate times: “we huddle.” I hope you’ll take some time this afternoon to huddle with anyone you think might be particularly confused, hurt, or frightened by Friday morning’s terrible, sickening attack. If you’re one of those people, please know that you are not alone and that your response is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to be taken lightly. Please don’t be afraid to ask for the help you need. We’ll all find strength in each other.
But we Christians witness to another power stronger still, and it’s what brought many of us here this morning. As one pastor, who happens to be speaking right now to a congregation in Colorado, said Friday, “Obviously, the affected families don’t need a theological treatise right now; they desperately need the very real presence of Jesus in their lives, and that’s what our church and many others are helping them experience.” When life and death happen in the worst ways, we huddle with each other, and we huddle around Christ. “The apostles gathered around Jesus,” Mark tells us, and so should we. We huddle in this familiar place, we bring our sadness and confusion, we pray, we break bread.” In so doing, we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives, allowing the living Christ to breath his life into us anew. We reach out and touch not his cloak but his very body, and we receive in some way the healing power that flows from him. Gathering around Jesus is how the apostles received the strength and courage to keep on getting out of that boat despite fatigue and frustration. And it’s how the grace of God will get us through these times and worse. If you don’t believe me, look around you in this holy huddle. There are people in this church who have been to hell and back. Life and death happened to them at the worst possible times, and they are disciples still, serving the Lord of Life who heals and strengthens all of us, come what may.
So pray for the people of Aurora this week. Pray for James Holmes. Pray for each other. And pray for the church whose mission is to bind up the broken-hearted and help share the healing love of Christ with everyone who waits for him on the shore.
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 12:46 PM 0 comments
Labels: Aurora CO, Discipleship, Mark 6, Pastoral Care, Sermons
27 March 2012
Yoder Prize Submission -- "Love Together: A moral-theological reflection"
VTS Dean and President Ian Markham wrote in his commentary today that "The Ronnie A. Yoder Scholarship was established ... as an invitation for VTS seminarians to reflect on the significance and centrality of love as the center for Christian theology, life, preaching, and practice, which can be a theme that unites the major world religions."
Posted by Kyle Matthew Oliver at 8:39 PM 0 comments
Labels: Love, Scholarship Applications Converted To Blog Posts, Writing
08 March 2012
Sermon on Glory and Mercy, 2 Lent
Between field ed, the VTS chapel, and class, I have preached seven times in the last six weeks. That's all in six weeks' work for the average parish priest, but this seminarian is definitely ready for the break ahead. In the meantime, here's my final effort, from Sunday's readings (and collect!).
“O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy …”1 So begins the collect for this, the second Sunday in Lent. It’s characteristic of our liturgical tradition that such a profound insight into the Christian faith and life—and indeed into the divine life—be relegated to the role of dependent clause in one of our common prayers. But perhaps that’s the charm and power of sticking our best theology in as asides in the sacred syntax, because it allows us to be surprised in the Spirit when we do stumble across them. That’s what happened to me this week when I read those words: “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy.”
I was surprised because glory and mercy are two words we use a lot in church but seldom use together. Let’s spend a few minutes thinking about what they might mean. When I hear the former word, I think immediately of something like “fame and glory,” the glory of renown, of being thought of highly by others, of possessing admirable and perhaps enviable fortunes. Plenty of God’s servants possess this kind of glory in our Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the great kings David and Solomon. Of course, the biblical witness also speaks to the spiritual danger that accompanies such glory: the temptation to forget that we can possess it only partially. We learn, sometimes the hard way, that whatever glory we may come into should ultimately be ascribed to God, the source of all good gifts. The kings of Israel lost touch with that important truth, to their own detriment and, we are told, to their nation’s.
So there’s a second, related sense of glory for us to consider then: God’s own glory, to which Solomon’s temple and our modern-day cathedrals and basilicas are meant merely to point. Indeed, the image of God being worshiped for all eternity in the heavenly temple by choirs of angels and the communion of saints is the ultimate expression of this idea. We need “sounding trumpets’ melodies”2 to wrap our hearts around this idea of glory, plus the best poetry we can muster. My fallback association, perhaps somewhat modest by St. Paul’s standards, is Calvin Hampton’s shimmering setting of Canticle 18, a text that reads, in part:
Splendor and honor and kingly power
are yours by right, O Lord our God, …
And so, to [you] who sit[] upon the throne, …
Be worship and praise, dominion and splendor,
for ever and for evermore.
Another song of God’s glory is the well-known hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.
Hopefully one of these associations puts a glorious melody in your head. If not, rumor has it there’s a music lover or two in this parish, and perhaps they can help you out with another possibility. But they might hesitate if you asked for their help today, wouldn’t they? These aren’t exactly Lenten melodies we’re talking about. Surely this notion of glory is the stuff of Easter and Ascension. In our current season of examination and repentance, we’re not too likely to sing anything triumphantly, jubilantly, or—here’s my favorite, from a poem by Edward Taylor—“seraphic-wise.” It somehow wouldn’t feel quite right, all that glory. Not right now.
Mercy, on the other hand, is never far from our thoughts this time of year. We heard of it in Genesis and Romans this morning. Though Sarah’s womb was barren and Abraham’s body “already good as dead,”3 these two great ancestors nevertheless “hop[ed] against hope”4 for the mercy of God’s deliverance. And God, in turn, promises them bounty beyond their wildest dreams. Part of Paul’s point in our reading from Romans is that Abraham and Sarah’s story is our story too. By God’s mercy, we Christians too claim an inheritance in God’s promises of covenant loyalty. Of each of us, then, can it be said, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”5
Of course, the mercy we receive from our Lord is wider by far than just this sense of deliverance from need and despair. Probably the aspect of God’s mercy that is most with us in this season is mercy as regards our guilt from “dust and sin.”6 And more often than not, we reflect on our state in a minor key, and the emotional tone of our reflection is the humility of a “troubled spirit” and a “broken and contrite heart.”7
In that vein, I’m grateful again for the musical witness of Calvin Hampton in a different composition. He re-set a profound meditation on God’s mercy with a dignity of melody and tempo that better matches the emotional character of Lent than the more well-known tune it replaces:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;
there’s a kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good;
there is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.
If you know it, you know it’s an almost haunting tune, insistent but understated. And indeed, mercy as the gospels understand it is a very humble thing, seemingly disconnected from the grandeur and the splendor and the trumpets. Quietness and trust are the name of the game in this forty-day celebration of God’s loving mercy. Perhaps most of all, the saying that springs unbidden to my mind on the subject of mercy is from the calling of Matthew. The disciples are taking some flack for Jesus’s habit of associating with tax collectors and other riff-raff, but Jesus overhears them and says this: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’’’8
Go and learn what this means. It’s an odd thing, really, telling them to go when the best place for them to learn the lesson would seem to be that very meal, with those very sinners, from the very man who said, “Blessed are the merciful.” But maybe his telling them to go has a different meaning. That’s the sense I get from our gospel reading today, on this day when we celebrate the God whose glory it is always to have mercy. The story comes from the great pivot point of Mark’s gospel. Immediately before our passage from today, we hear Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah. And so the curtain falls on Mark’s Act I, because finally even the thick-skulled disciples get it. When the curtain comes up today, we first hear this: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”9
It is simply not in Jesus’s vocation to hang around reveling in the glory of messiahship. Once the disciples understand that he is the Christ, he strikes out toward Jerusalem on his final journey, his great errand of mercy. In case we don’t get the point, Mark says practically the same thing again in the next chapter in the story of the transfiguration. “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings.”10 No, Jesus says, it is not yet time for me to reign in glory. Or, if you prefer, from today’s lesson: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”11
You can’t understand glory until you understand mercy. That’s what Jesus says to us again and again and again. And so he tells us to “go and learn what this means,” just like he went and showed us for himself. I love trumpets and temples and the transfiguration, but I am also convinced that the glory of the Almighty and Everliving God cannot exist apart from the humility of the ever-merciful one who became obedient to the point of helplessness and death.12 And so at the heart of Mark’s gospel lies the paradoxical truth that is at the heart of our faith and the heart of our God: blessed are the merciful, exalted are the humble, worthy is the lamb. We can’t understand glory until we understand mercy because there is no greater glory than to have mercy. This Lent, as we follow Jesus on the road to complete his glorious act of mercy, may we listen to his charge: “Go, and learn what this means.”
1Book of Common Prayer, 166.
2Edward Taylor, “Meditation Twenty,” Sacramental Meditations. See also the stunning Gerald Finzi choral setting.
3Romans 4:19.
4Romans 4:18.
51 Peter 2:10.
6George Herbert, “Love,” The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
7Psalm 51:18.
8Matthew 9:12–13.
9Mark 8:31.
10Mark 9:5.
11Mark 8:33.
12See Philippians 2:6–8.