Exactly

AU Trifecta

And again with AU. Now they say Rome can't talk about marriage.

“I am amazed that church officials would threaten to stop helping the disadvantaged because they are being asked to treat all citizens of the District fairly,” he continued. “They seem to have lost all perspective. How strong is their commitment to helping the poor if they’re willing to take this hardline stance?

It seems that everybody is required to take a break from any opinions that religious persons may have, but religious people don't have the same right of reprieve?

I think the "REV" in "Rev. Barry Lynn" stands for revisionista.

AU Speaks

So they want us to keep the church from advocating for conscience bound issues in healthcare, but it's okay for the Roman Church to lobby for healthcare in general? GIVE ME A BREAK!

Keep Religious Doctrine Out of the Law | Americans United

Jail Time If You Don't Buy Health Insurance

Wow. There is now proof that the 1098 page bill (which none of these starry-eyed legislators have actually read) contains a provision to SEND YOU TO JAIL IF YOU DON'T BUY HEALTH INSURANCE.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

What is this? Does anybody remember the STAMP ACT??? Let's not lose sight of the fact that Congress has no constitutional authority to make us buy their program. Government intervention is one of the biggest aggravating factors in this crisis, and more government intervention is not going to help.

The current health care disaster in America is not simply a problem of people refusing to buy health insurance; it's an issue of people not being able to afford to buy health insurance. When the annual insurance premium for a family of four is something above $13,000, that's a terrible financial burden that many Americans simply can't afford to pay -- especially when so many people have lost their jobs due to the faltering economy. Worse, the government says that health insurance companies can't compete across state lines for your business (and we all know that the best way to reign in costs while maintaining quality, is through market competition).

The brutal facts of the matter are inescapable: The American people are too broke to buy their own health insurance, and the American government is too broke to buy it for them. The whole nation is going bankrupt over runaway health care COSTS. Any measure claiming to be healthcare reform that does nothing to address the COSTS is completely bogus.

Marching Band Madness

And I thought our Aladdin gig was cool.

Thou Shalt Not Infect Others

Do you think the parish needs one of these?

ROME (Reuters) – An Italian inventor has combined faith and ingenuity to come up with a way to keep church traditions alive for the faithful without the fear of contracting swine flu -- an electronic holy water dispenser.

The terracotta dispenser, used in the northern town of Fornaci di Briosco, functions like an automatic soap dispenser in public washrooms -- a churchgoer waves his or her hand under a sensor and the machine spurts out holy water.

"It has been a bit of a novelty. People initially were a bit shocked by this technological innovation but then they welcomed it with great enthusiasm and joy. The members of this parish have got used to it," said Father Pierangelo Motta.

Catholics entering and leaving churches usually dip their hands into fonts full of holy water -- which has been blessed by a priest -- and make the sign of the cross.

But fear of contracting the H1N1 virus has led many in Italy -- where some 15 people have died of swine flu -- not to dip their hands in the communal water font.

"It's great," said worshipper Marta Caimm as she entered the church. "Thanks to this we are not worried about catching swine flu. It is the right thing for the times," she said.

Luciano Marabese, who invented the dispenser, said he did so out of concern that fear of swine flu was eroding traditions.

And he is now blessing himself all the way to the bank.

"After all the news that some churches, like Milan's cathedral, were suspending the use of holy water fonts as a measure against swine flu, demands for my invention shot to the stars. I have received orders from all over the world," he said.

(Reporting by Eleanor Biles; Writing by Philip Pullella; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Big news from Sydney

Over at the Parish Blog!

General Convention sermon worth reading

Posted at the Parish Blog.

How the Orthodox view the Anglican Communion

Christ’s invitation into communion is not answered when the only thing that’s mutual is our suspicion. Thus, I am deeply grateful for the work that Metropolitan Jonah is undertaking on behalf of all Orthodox Christians in re-establishing trustworthy common ground with those of us who walked the way of Orthodoxy within the realms of the Latin Rite estrangement.


By Archbishop Methodios Fouyas, 1972

As we try to see the Anglican Church with Orthodox eyes we must remember that clear-cut definitions are ruled out in advance where Anglicanism is concerned. Judged by the principles of the Orthodox Church, the Church of England had the right to proclaim itself self-governing and autonomous, provided that there were certain canonical principles, which in fact there were. The old Church of England went on without any breach in either its legal or its spiritual continuity.

It continued to profess the Catholic faith, which was once for all delivered to the Saints.

It preserved without any break the Apostolic Succession of its Ministry, 1 although 'many Anglicans maintain Apostolic succession primarily as a symbol and Bond of Unity.'2

Some Anglican theologians have considered Episcopacy to be not only of the bene esse of the Church, but part of its esse, as Canon Richardson says. 3 Consequently Orthodox theologians, influenced by the writings of Anglicans like Gore 4 and A. M. Ramsey, 5 have accepted that the Church of England means by Apostolic succession 'that grace is bestowed by our Lord, through the action of His whole Church. But certain actions in this work of grace are confined to Bishops, whereby the truth is taught that every local group or Church depends on the one life of the one Body.'6 We find a similar opinion to that of Archbishop Ramsey in G. W. Broomfield's book Revelation and Reunion, in which he writes: 'there seems to me to have been a general principle implicit in Apostolic practice, and underlying the evolution of Church order. This was that appointments to the official ministry are the business of those who themselves have received authority to make such appointments.'7

As Archbishop Ramsey has written recently:

Our Church has two aspects: On the one hand we claim to be a Church possessing Catholic Tradition and continuity from the ancient Church, and our Catholic Tradition and continuity includes the belief in the real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament; the order of Episcopacy and the Priesthood, including the Power of a priestly absolution. We possess various institutions belonging to Catholic Christendom like monastic orders for men and women. Our Anglican Tradition has another aspect as well. We are a Church which has been through the Reformation, and values many experiences derived from the Reformation, for instance, the Open Bible: great importance is attached to the authority of the Holy Scriptures, and to personal conviction and conversion through the work of the Holy Spirit.8

What we have said about the Orthodox attitude towards Rome applies to some extent also to the Orthodox attitude towards Anglicanism. The Orthodox belief that their Church is the one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church on earth, gives the impression that Orthodox theology is even more exclusive than Roman Catholic. But the Orthodox Church has shown some recognition of the sacraments of other churches. For instance, her practice of receiving converts from Rome or Anglicanism by Chrismation without Re-baptism (though this has not always been the case in the past) 'is a clear indication that the sacramental limits of the Church do not coincide with its ceremonial boundaries'.9

Orthodox theologians are divided as regards the character of the Anglican Church. Some see it from the exaggerated point of view which divides it into three parties, commonly known as High Church, Low Church, Broad Church. It is this idea that leads many, not only Orthodox, but Roman Catholics also, to think that the Church of England is a sort of confederation of three separated Churches, each with its own liturgy, its own doctrinal formularies and its own separate hierarchy. This is completely mistaken.

Dr. Ramsey says that

though there is High Church and Low Church, it is all the time One Church with a single life, and all the members of the Church of England share together in the Creeds, Holy Scriptures, the Sacraments, the rule of the Bishops and the Liturgy; so do not think of High Church and Low Church as utterly separate factions but as two aspects of the life of a Church which is all the time one.10

Some Orthodox theologians judge the Church of England from the Thirty-Nine Articles alone, which prevents them from having a true appreciation of this Church from an Orthodox point of view. 11

The Articles bear little relation to the present life of the Church, but are polemical principles long ago established. The Articles do not represent the whole Faith of this Church.

In these matters the Orthodox attitude towards the Anglican Church sometimes tends to be ill-informed. 12 When the Anglican Church and its tradition is more fully understood by the Orthodox, I am sure it will be recognized that Anglicanism represents a genuine spirit of Orthodoxy so developed as to be understood by modern thought.

Anglicanism is not a Protestant Church, but a reformed Catholic Church, which maintains its unity with the tradition of the ancient undivided Church.

Professor Comnenos, in his book on Anglican orders, wrote that 'very many of the lay and clerical members of the Anglican Church are inclined to be Orthodox in mind and would gladly enter into union with Orthodoxy, or otherwise fully communicate with it, if the non-recognition of their Priesthood did not stand before them as an insurmountable obstacle.'13 A leading Orthodox personality, Germanos, Archbishop of Thyateira, speaking at the Gloucester Diocesan Conference on I June 1923, said that 'the Orthodox Church has always considered the venerable Anglican Church as a branch, in many particulars, in continuous succession with the Ancient Church'.14

By a branch, Archbishop Germanos meant not one of the parts of Catholicism, according to the Branch Theory, but a Church especially representing the Catholic Church in England. Similarly Professor Bulgakov writes that 'Anglicanism in its tendency towards the restoration of the Ancient Church, as a reaction to Protestantism, is already becoming more and more Orthodox, and this process is naturally a way to its reunion with historic Orthodoxy.'15

____________________________

1 The Claims of the Church of England, Cyril Garbett (London, 1947), p. 15, 17, 55
2 The Second World Conference on Faith and Order (1938), p. 246. Such was the opinion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, cf. H. D'Espine, 'The Apostolic Succession as an Ecumenical issue. A Protestant View', E.R. iv (1952), pp. 154-155, and of William Temple, cf. F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, His Life and Letters (1948), p. 586.
3 C. C. Richardson, The Sacrament of Reunion (194.0). See G. K. A. Bell, Christian Unity: The Anglican Position. Okus Petri Lectures at Upsala University, October, 1946 (London, 1948), pp. 23-31. Appendix: Extracts from Anglican Writers on Episcopacy.
4 The Ministry of the Christian Church, pp. 65-109.
5 The Gospel and the Catholic Church, pp. 81-6, 216.
6 Cf. also Daniel Jenkins, in The Nature of Catholicity (1942), p. 54. Jenkins endorses Ramsey's opinion, although he thinks that such a claim comes with a shock of surprise to many modern Protestants.
7 G. W. Broomfield, Revelation and Reunion (1942), p. 185.
8 Catholic Herald, 17 Sept. 1965; cf. Gore, The Anglo-Catholic Movement, p. 7.
9 N. Zernov, H.E.M., p. 673. 10 Catholic Herald, loc. cit.
11 Such was the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Russo-Anglican discussions in Moscow, July 1956; cf. H. M. Waddams, Anglo-Russian Theological Conference, pp. 64-65. Cf. also Conferinta Romana Orthodoxa-Anglicana tinuta la Bucuresti y-Sjunie 1935 si Calatoria I.P.S. Patriarchului D. D. Dr Miron in Anglia 28junie-7 julie 1936. Bucharest, 1938.
12 e.g. Trembelas, The History of the Reformation in the Anglican Church, p. 124.
13 P. Comnenos, 'Anglican Ordinations', C.E. ii (1921), p. 113.
14 C.E. v (1924), p. 128.
15 S. Bulgakov, 'One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic', C.E. xii (1931), pp. 95-6. I do not ignore the Letter of Khomyakov to W. Palmer, where the Russian Orthodox thinker defines Anglicanism: 'It is a narrow ledge of dubious terra firma, beaten by the waves of Romanism and Protestantism, and crumbling on both sides into the mighty waters': quoted in W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, pp. 102-3. But this extreme idea on Anglicanism has never found acceptance amongst Orthodox theologians.

An Image

can say WAY MORE than 1,000 words.

Take that, iconoclasts!

There's still time to make plans for joining us tonight at 7PM at St. Stephen Anglican Church for Evening Prayer in remembrance of veterans and soldier-saints.

Bad Day for Church Councils

On this day, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council (the 12th "ecumenical council" for the West) began meeting. Canons presented to the Council included:

• Canon 1. Exposition of the faith; of the dogma of the Trinity, and of Transubstantiation

That meant that for the first time there was an official, scientific definition that required allegiance, instead of a biblical statement of the great eucharistic mystery. From that point onward, the sacrament that was meant for the unity of the church became her most scandalous division.

• Canon 3. Declared that heretics and schismatics were to be prosecuted as traitorous criminals under the civil law (i.e., torture and death).

This led to an abandonment of the pastoral call of the church to rescue those who fall into error.

• Canon 4. An exhortation to the Greek churches to come under absolute subjection to Rome in all matters of discipline.

This broke the synodical model of government by a parity of bishops, elevating the Roman See to universal supremacy of jurisdiction.

• Canon 5. Proclaimed papal primacy as established by divine will, and laid out the order of precedence of the patriarchal churches: after Rome, then Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

Again - this is a move AWAY FROM catholic doctrine. Before this time, the patriarchal sees were considered equal, though Rome had a dignity of place and an official role in presidency. From this time on, the Bishop of Rome would claim unilateral power to make doctrine.

• Canon 14. Requires celibacy on the part of the clergy

Again - a break with catholic order - the discipline of the Roman See, which held celibacy in highest regard, was made universally and immediately applicable. While it could be argued that centuries before this the episcopate had been reserved for celibate men, to make all Holy Orders celibate de officio instead of de potesta was an innovation on sacramental theology that is STILL wrecking havoc on the church and her unity.

Later canons of the same council prohibit Jews and Moslems from holding political office, and that they wear distinctive dress so as to be singled out for hardship.

Also, today in 1992, the General Synod of the Church of England voted to abandon catholic order and permit the ordination of women to the presbyterate. At the time, I was in high school. Having grown up pentecostal (which always allowed for women as pastors), I didn't see what the big deal was. In America, women had served as deacons, priests, and even bishops for years in the Episcopal Church. I now have a different view. (ooh...looks like someone somewhere is missing pieces of a white picket fence)

Whatever the cogency of the issue itself, the unilateral decision of a bishop in 1974 in America - and of a provincial synod in 1975 and subsequently - was a complete misuse of Authority and undermines the claim of the Anglican Communion to share a common ordained priesthood with the wider Catholic Church and destroyed the very raison d'etre which made it a viable alternative to submitting to the IV Lateran Council.

It undermined the witness to the fundamental claim that the Church of England was a part of the wider One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The genius of Anglicanism has always been that she is a Reformed and Evangelical Catholic Church. She is obedient to the claims of Scripture, and conscientious adherence to the universal practice of the church from her earliest days. Both of these mitigate against changing the doctrine of the ministry - thus safegaurding the foundations of our catholic unity with brothers & sisters from whom we are jurisdictionally separated.

Although duty-bound to do nothing which would jeopardize further that Unity which Christ wills and for which we are all to work and pray, the Church of England acted in accord with her own desires and thus committed the same over-reaching errors that Rome did in the Lateran Council. By her one action that day she demonstrated her true belief about these things and not least proclaimed that a 'local' Synod had the right and authority to change even the matter of the Sacraments which previously she had affirmed she shared with the wider Catholic Church. In the haunting words of Newman: 'the spell has been broken.' She continues to undermine her witness to biblical fidelity and catholic continuity by over-reaching to ordain women to the episcopate. Rome has called off further talks aimed at unity, and thus the Anglicanorum Coetibus.

The way Forward is not capitulation to Rome, which abandons the robust biblical faith rediscovered with such vitality in the 16th century. Nor is it to capitulate to the culture's false conceptions of egalitarianism. Rather, the way Forward is in the Faith of the Apostles delivered once for all.

Improvisation on National Anthem

God bless our native land;
Firm may she ever stand
Through storm and night:
When the wild tempests rave.
Ruler of wind and wave,
Do thou our country save
By thy great might.

For her our prayers shall rise
To God, above the skies;
On him we wait;
Thou who art ever nigh,
Guarding with watchful eye,
To thee aloud we cry,
God save the state!

Of many a race and birth
from utmost ends of earth,
God save us all!
Bid strife and hatred cease,
bid hope and joy increase,
spread universal peace:
God save us all!

(Oh...and GStQ!)

Still Waiting

AIM recently reported that "Catholic Bishops Help Pass Pelosicare."

On Saturday, after Catholic lobbyists had finalized a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most prominent Catholic in the U.S. Government, the Politico reported that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had "delivered a critical endorsement" to Pelosi "by signing off on late-night agreement to grant a vote on an amendment barring insurance companies that participate in the exchange from covering abortions."

The Hill newspaper reported that Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) had been trying to broker a deal and appealed to the Catholic Bishops. "I would like the [U.S. Conference of Catholic] Bishops, who as I understand it want a bill, to help us work out a plan where we don't have winners and losers," Waxman was quoted as saying. "Because the losers will make us lose the bill and the winners won't have won anything."

NBC's Doug Adams reported that the Catholic Bishops were "lobbying hard."

The shocking turn of events once again demonstrates the extreme left-wing drift of the Catholic Church, which is the nation's largest religious denomination with 67 million members and run by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But their role in passing Pelosicare is not the only evidence of such a turn. The Bishops poured more than $7.3 million of parishioners' money into the corrupt left-wing organization ACORN over the last decade before publicity over the organization's scandals forced suspension of the funding.

Anybody taking bets on whether or not Barry Lynn and the folks at Americans United for Separation of Church & State are going to sue? Or is their defamation only when they also politically oppose the "meddling"?

Saturday Morning Bachelor Dad Biscuits

The wife is outta town so I'm parenting without a net. Here's something to make it go better. Technically, these are more of a dinner biscuit (yes - Southerners have different biscuits for different occasions), but they're so good with butter or jelly that I can't resist!

1 cup flour
1 cup cake flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/3 cups cold heavy cream


1. Heat the oven to 400°F
2. Sift the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl. Set aside.
3. Using an electric mixer, beat the heavy cream in a medium-size bowl until it thickens, but not enough to hold soft peaks.
4. Make a well in the dry ingredients, then pour in the cream.
5. Stir briskly with a wooden spoon, just until the dough starts to stick together, making a dough like substance.
6. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface.
7. Knead the dough, with floured hands, 3 or 4 times, then pat 3/4 to 1 inch thick.
8. Bake the biscuits until light golden brown, about 15 to 17 minutes.
9. Transfer the biscuits to a cloth-lined basket and serve as soon as possible.

* Don't use a dark or nonstick sheet, or the biscuit bottoms will burn.
* Makes about 12 to 14 biscuits.
* Don't eat them right away. The biscuits will be hot right out of the oven and will continue to cook a little.
* Serve the biscuits right away. They get stale quickly.

Dew Lord O Dew Lord O Dew Remember Me!

From my hometown paper:

Jonesborough resident Jim Stevens admits he’s not a particularly religious person, but even he is awed by what he has seen nearly every morning for the last couple of weeks on the driver’s side window of his Isuzu pickup truck.

It was two weeks ago today that an image, resembling the face of Jesus, made its first appearance on the window. Stevens, who said he has a “bum shoulder,” was having friends from Rogersville help move some items. He entered his truck from the passenger’s side to put his drink inside the vehicle. He said when he went around the truck to the driver’s side, the image was there. Initially, Stevens said he figured the image would go away and that would be the end of it.

But since it first showed up, a morning dew has led to the appearance of the image. Later in the day, when the dew from the morning evaporates, Stevens said the image goes with it. However, when the dew returns the next morning so does the image on the window. Even rolling the window up and down has not stopped it from reappearing.

My bias is to be against the whole idea of apparitions in general. I know some Christians of a catholic bent live by them, but since they aren't something seen in all branches of Christendom, I treat them with some skepticism.

But from the picture, this looks like something that could be done using oil or a film of sorts.

Indiana Ιωάννης

I'll bet nobody else knew that the Well of Souls was right there in the sanctuary of St. Bradaslov's, either.

Diversity & Tolerance

Originally posted at the parish blog:

If you immediately condemn anyone who doesn’t quite believe the same as you do as forsaken by Christ’s Spirit, and consider anyone to be the enemy of truth who holds something false to be true, who, pray tell, can you still consider a brother? I for one have never met two people who believed exactly the same thing. This holds true in theology as well.

- Martin Bucer

To my friends who insist that AC-NA will spin apart because of evangelical and catholic and charismatic Anglicans coming together, I say: PHOOEY. How much more classically Anglican can you get than Martin Bucer, a man who started out as a Dominican priest and worked tirelessly to bringing conciliation among the leading lights of the Lutheran, Genevan/Swiss, & English Reformations?

Happy Bonfire Day!

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everybody!

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent

To blow up the King and Parli'ment.

Three-score barrels of powder below

To prove old England's overthrow;

By God's providence he was catch'd

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holla boys, Holla boys, let the bells ring.

Holla boys, Holla boys, God save the King! (Queen)

(Now that's some parliament funk!)

Here's to 492 years of the Gospel recovered, and 404 years of the Gospel in England providentially defended!

Christian Burial

I present this excellent article by Dr. Long on what it means to have a good funeral. So much of what is done in funerals - as in marriage - represents more our modern twisting of life rather than a Christian expression of life lived before the face of God.

The Good Funeral: Recovering Christian practices, by Dr. Tom Long
(taken from the Christian Century)

When Elizabeth Janzen died in a Minneapolis nursing home, the staff immediately notified the closest relative, her daughter Sarah in St. Louis. Sarah, who had faithfully visited her mother once a month, arranged for Elizabeth to be cremated, for the ashes to be sent to St. Louis and for an obituary to be placed in the Minneapolis newspaper. A month later, Sarah took the ashes to a lake in rural Minnesota, where Elizabeth and her family had often vacationed, and scattered them on the water.

A week later, a memorial service was held in the chapel of the Minneapolis church where Elizabeth had kept her membership, though her health had prevented her from attending for a number of years. On a table at the entrance to the chapel were placed several photographs of Elizabeth at various stages in her life, her Bible, a ceramic vase she had made, and a few other personal mementos.

At the service, Sarah read one of her mother's favorite poems, Elizabeth's younger sister told an amusing story about their childhood, the chaplain from the nursing home read Psalm 23 and prayed a brief prayer giving thanks for Elizabeth's life, and two of Elizabeth's former students (she had taught high school for more than 30 years) read fond reminiscences of her as a teacher. After a time of quiet reflection, during which they listened to a recording of Judy Collins's rendition of "Amazing Grace" (one of Elizabeth's favorite hymns), the small group in the chapel silently dispersed.

Elizabeth Janzen is fictitious, but the rituals marking her death represent a rapidly emerging trend in Christian funeral practices. With surprising swiftness and dramatic results, a significant segment of American Christians has over the past 50 years abandoned previously established funeral customs in favor of an entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead. This new pattern is not firmly fixed (indeed, variations, improvisations and personal customizations are marks of the new rituals) but it generally includes the following characteristics:

• a memorial service instead of a funeral (i.e., a service focused on remembering the deceased, often held many days after the death, with the body or the cremated remains of the deceased not present)

• a brief, simple, highly personalized and customized service, often involving several speakers (as opposed to the standard church funeral liturgies presided over primarily by clergy)

• a focus on the life of the deceased (often aided by a physical display of photos and other mementos)

• an emphasis on joy rather than sadness, a celebration of life rather than an observance of the somber reality of death

• a private disposition of the body, often done before the memorial service, with an increasing preference for cremation

The shift toward this new pattern has not happened everywhere, of course. It is most pronounced among white, suburban Protestants, and the older customs often still prevail in rural areas, among nonwhites and in many Catholic parishes. But these differences seem more a matter of lag time than anything else. The trend lines are clear, and it is apparent that funeral practices for all Christians, as a part of the larger culture, are moving at various rates of speed toward this new pattern.

A significant number of Christian clergy, especially those who are more progressive and better educated, applaud many of these changes. While they may be troubled somewhat by the open-mike atmosphere of these new services or by the inevitable banalities of some of the poems, songs, readings and other elements imported into them, they nevertheless find them preferable to the older, often depersonalized and more somber rituals of the past—primarily for two reasons.

First, the preference for memorial services, the emphasis on joy or even on laughter, the de-emphasis on the body of the deceased, and the celebration of the personal aspects of the life of the one who has died all seem more commensurate with the Christian witness to the resurrection. Second, the valuing of simpler, less formal services provides leverage for people to break loose from the stranglehold of showy, expensive and burdensome funeral practices so prized by the funeral industry.

These clergy are unquestionably well intentioned, and they are right to find some encouraging signs here, but I want to raise some basic theological questions about this emerging pattern of death practices. I would like to suggest that these newer rituals, for all of their virtues of freedom, simplicity and seeming festivity, are finally expressions of a corrupted understanding of the Christian view of death. These newer practices are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals. Contemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation.

In the early years of the Christian movement, Christians developed distinct funeral practices that, while woven from local customs, still reflected Christian theology. At the beginning of the third century, Tertullian could already speak of an "appointed office" for Christian burial in North Africa, and certainly by the late fourth century the contours of a distinct Christian funeral rite began to appear. This rite was composed of three movements: preparation, processional and burial.

In the preparation movement, the body was washed, anointed and clothed in garments representing baptism. In the processional phase, the body was carried to the grave, and sometimes the procession entered the church on the way for prayer and the reading of scripture. The burial phase took place at graveside and included the commendation of the deceased to God and the actual burial of the body. During each movement, the church prayed, chanted psalms and sang hymns of joy. Often a Eucharist was held, either in the church or at the grave.

The theme of the service was the completion of baptism, and the church accompanied a brother or sister to the place of union with God through the resurrection of Christ. Taken as a whole, the early Christian funeral was based on the conviction that the deceased was a saint, a child of God and a sister or brother of Christ, worthy to be honored and embraced with tender affection. The funeral itself was deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope.

In subsequent centuries, this basic funeral pattern sometimes struggled for visibility against cultural and theological changes. For example, the joyful Easter motif of the early Christian funeral was nearly submerged by a gloomy "Day of Wrath" theology of the late Middle Ages, and the Puritans, offended by what they saw as excesses in Anglican funerals, tried, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to get rid of funeral ceremony altogether. Nevertheless, the basic pattern and practices of Christian burial managed to weather the storms and continued to exert a strong force on Christian funerals until the late 19th century.

This review of the development of classic Christian funeral practices should make it evident that the pattern for funerals now appearing is not simply a modernization and adaptation of traditional customs but a radical, and finally diminished, replacement of Christian ritual.

For example, the current shift to a memorial service with the body absent means that Christian death practices are no longer metaphorical expressions of the journey of a saint to be with God. The saint is not even present, except as a spiritualized memory, a backdrop for the real action, which happens in the psyches of the mourners. The mourners are the only actors left, and the ritual now is really about them. Funerals are "for the living," as we are prone to say. Instead of the grand cosmic drama of the church marching to the edge of eternity with a fellow saint, singing songs of resurrection victory and sneering in the face of the final enemy, we now have a much smaller, more privatized psychodrama, albeit often couched in Christian language. If we take the plot of the typical memorial service at face value, the dead are not migrating to God; the living are moving from sorrow to stability.

How did the church shift from the understanding of a funeral as the joyful accompanying of a saint on "the last mile of the way" to a reflective, disembodied, quasi-Gnostic cluster of customs and ceremonies? What happened in the latter part of the 19th century?

Because this is precisely the time that embalming became widespread and the modern funeral parlor developed, it is almost irresistible to blame the newly minted funeral professionals for all the mischief. As the argument goes, undertakers reinvented themselves as funeral directors and rode the technological advances in embalming all the way to the bank. They first took the dead away from us in order to embalm them, and then they took the funeral itself away and turned it from a worship service into a vulgar display of conspicuous consumption.

The truth, however, is that a guild of embalming technicians could never have become directors of any sacred Christian ritual, could never have taken the funeral away, had not church and culture been more than ready to hand it over. Almost every developed society, even ancient Rome, has had "undertakers" who assist with the preparation of the dead, but even if 19th-century undertakers had hatched a plot to hijack the Christian funeral, it would have failed if our death rituals had been healthy and full of meaning.

If Christian funerals today are impoverished, we must look primarily to the church's own history and not look with scorn at the funeral director. The fact is that many educated Christians in the late 19th century, the forebears of today's white suburban Protestants, lost their eschatological nerve and their vibrant faith in the afterlife, and we are their theological and liturgical heirs. It was not, of course, as if the whole of 19th-century Christian society woke up one morning and suddenly found that they no longer believed in eternal life. The loss of conviction about the otherworld came slowly and gradually.

In the decades after the Civil War, the quite literal views of many American Christians regarding heaven, hell, the end of the world, the resurrection of the body and the second coming of Jesus began to ebb away. A recent study by Drew Gilpin Faust points out that the sheer devastation of the Civil War itself, the staggering number of dead, the violence and loss of life out of all proportion to the ability of most people to make meaning from it, accelerated the 19th century's already growing crisis of faith. She writes:

Civil War carnage transformed the mid-nineteenth century's growing sense of religious doubt into a crisis of belief that propelled many Americans to redefine or even reject their faith in a benevolent and responsive deity. But Civil War death and devastation also planted seeds of a more profound doubt about human ability to know and understand. . . . The Civil War compelled Americans to ask with intensified urgency, "What is Death?" and in answering to find themselves wondering why is death, what is life, and can we ever hope to know? We have continued to wonder ever since.

Part of the crisis of faith was about eschatology. In the 1840s, some Christians confidently calculated the exact date of Jesus' return, only to have their hopes, and for many of them their naive faith, crushed when Jesus did not come—a time that came to be called the Great Disappointment. Even less advent-minded Christians of the time had to reckon with the impact of the rising sciences, of Darwinism, and of the new skeptical philosophies imported from Europe. Consequently, the literalisms of the past came under severe stress. Pictures of Jesus coming in the clouds, of the dead rising bodily from the graves, of the saints arrayed in glory, became less and less imaginable, less and less plausible.

The notion of heaven was not altogether abandoned. Instead, it was revised and domesticated. Heaven was reimagined as a place very much like the best of earth, sometimes not a place at all but simply an intensification of earthly delights, and the idea of the resurrection of the body yielded to the more gentle and continuous notion of the immortality of the soul. One late-19th-century member of the clergy characteristically said, "To me, heaven means only myself with larger opportunity. It means this earth-life grown into perfection." Lucy Larcom, in a devotional essay characteristic of the period, wrote:

Surprises doubtless await us all, across the boundaries of this earthly existence. But none, perhaps, will be more surprised than those humble, faithful, self-sacrificing souls who have often almost dreaded the strange splendors that might open upon them beyond the gates of pearl, when they find that it is the same familiar sunshine in which they have been walking all their days, only clearer and serener. They will wonder that they have no new language to learn, no new habits to form, almost no new acquaintances to make. They will at last discover what their humility hid from them here, that while on earth, without knowing it, they had already been living in heaven.

No wonder the metaphor of journeying to be with God began to break apart at the seams. If people had "already been living in heaven," then there was, after all, nowhere for the dead to travel, and without letting go of the vocabulary of the otherworld, mainline Protestants in the late 19th century, long before John Lennon, could well "imagine there's no heaven."

A second significant development was the creation of rural cemeteries located some distance away from towns and villages. At first, cemeteries were separated from the living because of the notion that putrefying bodies produced miasmas, noxious gases that caused disease, but by the end of the 19th century, rural cemeteries were less about avoiding pollution and more about aesthetics. They were landscaped, gardenlike environments designed to encourage quiet and restful contemplation of nature, immortality and the meaning of life.

The more practical effect of these remote cemeteries, as Susan J. White has pointed out, was the division of the previously unified funeral ritual into two discrete parts: the funeral in the church and the burial in the distant cemetery. It was not long before this separation in distance became a separation in liturgical fact and in theological symbolism. The funeral was no longer a journey to the place of burial; it became a stationary event completely contained within the church building. The graveside ritual became a mere optional afterword. As White observes, "The removal of the gravesite to a location far away from the precincts of the church depletes a fund of theological and communal images and severely reduces the sense . . . that the living and the dead are part of one 'holy communion.'" So, with heaven gone and with the cemetery miles away, neither the dead nor the living had anywhere to go, and the metaphor of the journey to God collapsed.

Surely the task before the church now is to retrace our steps and to recover the grand liturgical theater in which Christians embrace their dead with tender affection, lift up their voices in hymns of resurrection and accompany the saints to the edge of mystery. This will not involve a mere repristinating of funeral practices or a rejection of cremation, but a recovery in our time and in contemporary forms of the governing symbols of the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the journey of Christian dead toward the life everlasting.

In the meantime, the seeds planted in the 19th century continue to bear weeds. Since literalistic views of heaven and the saintly journey are no longer plausible to us, and since we lack the theological imagination to grasp the poetic truth and power of these metaphors, dead Christians have nowhere to go but to evaporate into the spiritual ether and into our frail memory banks. With heaven domesticated, the soul morphed into an immortal gas, the corpse become a shell and the cemetery moved out of sight, it was almost inevitable that the dead with their embarrassing bodies would be banned from their own funerals and the living would be condemned to sit motionless, contemplating the meaning of it all and pretending to celebrate life as the nephew of the deceased sings "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Surely our culture will eventually weary of such liturgical and spiritual thinness and be ready for more depth, for more truth—for our sake and for the sake of those we love. When we are, the great drama of the journey to God will be there, beckoning us to join the procession of the saints. We will travel toward eternity with those we have loved, singing as we go and calling out to the distant shore in words of confident hope, like these from an ancient Coptic funeral prayer:

Let the shadows of darkness be full of light. Let the angels of light walk before him.
Let the gate of righteousness be opened to him. Let him join the heavenly choir.
Bring him into the paradise of delight. Feed him from the tree of life.
Let him rest in the bosom of our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in your kingdom.

This article is excerpted from Thomas G. Long's book Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, just published by Westminster John Knox.

Thomas G. Long is professor of preaching at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta and the author of Preaching from Memory to Hope (Westminster John Knox).

The Only Thing Worse Than Liturgical Dance

...is a Christian Dance Routine. (Just epic.)

If you want some lasting renewing of your mind, I suggest going to something a little more meaty.