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Rector's Blog
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Alright. That's enough already. Make it stop.
Sara, our parish administrator, sent me a news item the other day. Are you sitting down? The headline reads: "Couple Sells Candles That Smell Like Jesus."
Ever since the 1970s when the now defunct American Motors Corporation produced and sold cars like "The Matador" and "The Grimlin" I have always known there was a market in America for tasteless products. In a land that has lost its soul, credulous consumers buy anything.
The scented candle market has always been suspect.
We live in an age when the family dinner table is, for the most part, a thing of the past. Restaurants that used to cater to special occasions now deliver our daily bread. Yet our houses (can it be called a home where the hearth lies dark and cold?) still come outfitted with kitchens. But they are not the work-a-day, three meal a day, hurry up you are late for school, kind a kitchens reminiscent of the time before McBreakfast.
They are uber-kitchens, equipped for a five star restaurant. But who ever uses it but the occasional caterer who warms up foreign flavored food for parties? Thank God for scented candles. In a cold dark kitchen, when you rush home with your Boston Market meal on plastic platters, who can light up a scented candle: "Fresh Baked Bread." "Apple and Cinnamon." "Vanilla Dream." Why cook when you can light up a candle and make the kitchen smell like you have been cooking all day long?
And now, God help us, scented candles that smell like Jesus, just $18.00. The product is called, I wish I was making this up, His Essence. The product is disturbing enough. It consists of herbs described in a "messianic psalm." So now, instead of engaging the reality of the resurrected Christ, I can just light a candle.
Listen to what the earnest marketer of Jesus candles has to say about the product.
"We see it as a ministry, " he says.
"We wanted people to be able to experience Christ in new ways and to be able to read a bible and have that scent and that candle as a reminder that he is with us all the time."
"You can't see him and you can't touch him. This is a situation where you may be able to sense him by smelling. And it provides a really new dimension to one's experience with Jesus."
The whole Jesus-candle-thing goes off the rails on so many levels. Here are just two observations.
It is not a ministry. It is selling a candle. Perhaps by selling the candle the erstwhile peddler of wax may be able to feed his family. That is a ministry.
You can't see Jesus. You can't touch Jesus. And, I'm sorry it has to be said, you can't smell Jesus. The failure of this whole deal is the general failure of much of what passes for American religion. It is not a personal experience at all. You do not have an experience with Jesus. The invitation of faith is the hope of encountering Jesus as you give yourself in service to other people.
You can't experience Jesus by smelling a candle. You can't experience Jesus by reading the Bible. You can't even experience Jesus by smelling a candle while you are reading the Bible. The only way to experience Jesus is to respond to his call beckoning you to find new life, in pushing beyond your comfort zone and entering more deeply into relationships of spiritual intimacy with other people. If you can feed them, clothe them, and give them something to drink while sharing your life with them, so much the better.
In other words, if you want to follow Jesus blow out the dadgum candle, take up your cross and follow him.
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Tuesday, March 01, 2005
As our parishioners focus this Lent on developing their rule of life and because my own Rule of Life is well established, I am reading The Rule of St. Benedict as my own personal Lenten Discipline. This week I have been meditating on chapter four of the Rule, unussual material for meditation.
It is a list. A long list. A list of 73 different disciplines, or behaviors, or practices, or values, or priorities that Benedict calls "Instruments of Good Works."
I value the rich Catholic heritage of my Anglican tradition. I try to drink deeply from the well. But I am basically a good, old fashioned reform-minded Protestant in my essential spirituality. I am saved by grace through faith, every bit as much as Martin Luther.
The notion of "good works" was, for Luther, a trap set by the devil. He wanted to cut the Book of James out of the New Testament -- mostly for one unfortunate verse: James 2:17, "Faith without works is dead." He called it "a gospel of straw," a biblical reference to the firey furnace in which the frail impurities of the human condition lost in sin are burned away like dross leaving the pure gold of God's imputed righteousness.
I don't know about you, but when I look deep in my heart, its not pretty picture. Now some who read this may not buy into the notion of humn sin. If you are one of those, well, God bless you. You may be one of the perfect people alive on the planet today. There is an old Jewish tradition that says 10 holy people are alive on the planet at all times. This prevents God from destroying the Earth in his wrath. You may be one of those. (Although you may want to check that out with your spouse.)
Me? Despite God's great love for me, and the fact that I am created in God's image and that I reflect divine glory and that I am blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, I am pretty much a disappointment to my mother and a trial to my wife. And although my son Jonathon (three years old) still worships the ground I walk on, my daughter Claire (age 12 in a couple of weeks) is about to reach that age when she will become a magnifying glass for my shortcomings.
I pretty much cry out out with Paul in the Book of Roman (7:24-25), "Oh wretched man that I am! Who will deliever me from this body of death?! I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
And so I come to chapter 4 of Benedict's Rule predisposed to save some time and hang on to my grace through faith and let others invest time in "instruments of good works." After all, 73 items is a lot to remember. A lot of people have trouble just remembering enough to thank God for the sun coming up this morning.
But wait a minute. There is good stuff here.
The first item on the list:
"Love the Lord God with the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole strength."
This is very quickly followed by:
"Love one's neighbor as one's self."
This is of course a reference to Jesus' conversation with a lawyer about "the first and great commandment." Faith includes not only a vertical deminsion, but a horizontal deminsion as well. If, despite Luther's rejection of the Book of James, faith without works is indeed dead, loving God and neighbor as the first expression of faith seems to be the right place to start.
At least Jesus thought so.
Okay. So I am going to start working hard on the first two items this morning.
Damn! It's already 6:45 a.m. and I was supposed to wake Claire up at 6:30 a.m. so she could get up and dressed in time for choir practice at 7:30. Holly is going to clobber me! I'm not even done praying yet and already I'm in the dog house with the two women in the world who love me most.
Thank God for grace. Only 71 instruments of grace to go.
I will try to tackle the rest tomorrow.
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