Six Dollar Champagne

What the NRSV leaves out

In the parish where I worship, our "official" Bible translation is the NRSV,  that is, the Lectionary, which contains all the readings for the Liturgy, uses the NRSV, a version in which the translators go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using "he, him, his." Today's gospel reading,  Matthew 10:40-42, is a good example. A close translation of verse 42 would be, "And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold [water] in the name of a disciple [i.e., because s/he is a disciple], truly I tell you, will not miss his [autou] reward." In contrast, the NRSV declines to translate autou  (which unambiguously means "his" in Greek) in the final clause, since a masculine-souding pronoun would then appear in the text.  The conclusion of verse 42 in the NRSV instead reads, "... -- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward," which alters the wording, substantially changing what the text actually says.

Taking my Greek Testament to church on Sunday mornings, just to see how much the NRSV translators changed or left out, has been a revelation. There are two types of translations on the market, I think: those that aim at accuracy, and those, like the NRSV and TNIV, that don't.

A wonderful liturgy on Pentecost

The Liturgy for Pentecost was magnificent. The processional was "Hail thee, festival day," a marvelous hymn set to an expansive melody by Vaughn Williams. We also got to sing "Come down, O Love divine," and the recessional was a hymn we know very well, "O Zion, haste." The choirmaster for Grace is especially skilled at selecting hymns that echo the themes in the scripture readings during a given liturgy, and Pentecost was no exception. This was one of the most inspiring liturgies I have seen in the parish since the Rector's Institution; Canon H. has been our priest for nearly a year now.

The sermon addressed the fact that, after receiving the gift of the Spirit, those believers gathered in Jerusalem, began to talk to crowds of other people, a detail that has significance for us today.

At Grace, every Pentecost, people who know foreign languages, and Episcopalians are a very cosmopolitan bunch of folks, gather in the center aisle, from which the Rector proclaims the Gospel for the feast, and read the same gospel text in the languages they know. That in itself is impressive and memorable. This year, something new was added: we had two female drummers, corresponding, I suppose, to a detail in the reading from Acts, that " ... suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2), and the sound they made, drumming before the Pentecost gospel was read, filled the church "like the rush of a mighty wind." A splendid liturgy!

A beautiful sunset on Harris Avenue

Harris Avenue, the road I take to go downtown and then home again, is a deserted former industrial area, just at the entrance to Olneyville. Olneyville itself is very interesting. Before my time, Eagle Square was a thriving industrial site, with factories and nearby housing for the workers, who were able to walk  home, to have lunch with their families.

Harris Avenue is a near-perfect east-west axis, and today, after hanging out at the mall, I walked home just as the sun was setting. The sky had alternating blue and pink cloud bands, the blue from the cloudy day which was ending, and the pink back-lit by the sunset, with the whole panorama slowly drifting away, as the sky darkened and I looked on. It was quite beautiful.

I have been down Harris Avenue so many times now, after a friend discovered it and showed me where it was, that it is no longer eerie when I am walking there by myself, of an evening, even though there is very little traffic, and many times I do not even see another soul. I don't know exactly when industry died and everything became service sector, but one of the saddest sights I can think of was a nearby square, with a row of magnificent old buildings now used as flea markets. What a terrible fate; look how far we have fallen!

Barbara Pym and trash bags

We are three guys sharing an apartment; consequently, we generate a lot of garbage. Fortunately, we live just up a hill from a cutrate supermarket, whose plastic grocery bags make excellent trash bags. (As I type this, I recall a slogan that says plastic is forever, but then I remember that plastic is one of the materials that we  recycle every Wednesday morning. I live in a town, where, if you do not put out the recycle bins, they do not pick up your garbage.) This morning, we appeared to have run out of those ersatz trash bags. As I was sorting through our collection of plastic bags for recycling or reuse, I thought of a Barbara Pym novel that I read at least three decades ago, in which an elderly lady spends the first day of her retirement going through her own collection of plastic bags, arranging them by size, which, in effect, was what I was doing, putting the largest bags on top of the pile, for future use in our 8 gallon garbage cans.

Grace Today, April 3, 2011

A lovely Eucharist this morning, the Fourth Sunday of Lent. The celebrant and homilist was from All Saints, across the highway, as the Rector said, the nearest parish to ours; he had been a chaplain at Brown and also previously associated with Grace. Back in 1969, he related, there was a demolition next door to Grace, and a wrecking ball came through the ceiling of the church, which meant that for the next year, worship had to take place in the downstairs hall.

The reading from the OT was about God's choosing David over all his brothers; the scriptural tradition praises David's appearance; I do not remember a similar description of the appearance of any other character in the OT, except that 2 Samuel says about Absalom, David's son, who died tragically, that "in all Israel there was no one to be praised so much for his beauty as Absalom" (2 Samuel 14:25), and in Genesis, Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar,  was called "a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him" (Genesis 16.12). Having typed the Genesis description of Ishmael, I realize it is not actually pertinent to the topic of this paragraph, but I just like the expression, "a wild ass of a man," someone who may have been challenged by getting along with other people.

The NT reading was a long story from the Fourth Gospel, about the healing of a blind man. It had plenty of back and forth between the once blind man and the "Jews," possibly Pharisees, who are the heavies in a number of stories from the Fourth Gospel. That expression, oi ioudaioi, "the Jews," probably refers to the religious leaders, since they have the authority to expel people from the synagogues (John 9:22) , which were centers of  community life, as well as religious centers. That expression, "the Jews," is not used in the same negative sense in the first three Gospels. In the Fourth Gospel, it is used at least a couple of dozen times to describe the enemies of Jesus, the religious establishment of his time, not the members of Jesus' own ethnic group. There are plenty of stories in the Gospels to the effect that ordinary people of Jesus' time and place heard him gladly and believed, like the once blind man himself.

Interestingly, the NRSV (New RSV), the translation used in Episcopal lectionaries (which goes to great lengths to exclude masculine pronouns where they are present in the Greek original, so the NRSV translators are not allergic to making certain changes in the text), in John, chapter 9, the story of the healing of the blind man, translates oi ioudaioi simply as "the Jews," where some further explanation is needed for the benefit of readers, in my opinion. My point is that the Fourth Gospel does not indict the entire Jewish people, either then or now, for hostility to Jesus. That would be a misreading, and there ought to be some footnote, somewhere in John, to explain the special use of the phrase, "the Jews," in that Gospel, but it is lacking in the NRSV (and, of course, the reading out loud of a lectionary text during a liturgy would probably not include any footnotes).

*  *  *

A sunny day, so one could appreciate the beauty of the stained glass windows.The weather was beautiful today.

Afterwards, at the library, I found a book by Sarah Maitland, whom I actually met at St. John's, Bowdoin Street, in Boston, a couple of decades ago. She wrote a slender tome on theology, which I look forward to reading. I doubt I will agree with her conclusions, but she is a gifted writer, who produced A Map of the New Country, which is about women and change in religion. That is a book from the 1980's, I think.

How it looks tonight

Though it will be April in an hour and a half, now we have a very nice, snowy evening. With the hoodie on, it feels just like winter, instead of having spring waiting impatiently on the doorstep. The lawns and streets are coated white, and even from our dining room, with its spectacular view of the city skyline on a sunny day, tonight one cannot see beyond Blessed Sacrament, the beautifully decorated, yet sparsely attended, parish church two blocks below us, one of four large Roman churches only a short walk away. It is as if the city and the East Side had disappeared, taking their wealth and mansions with them. Glimpsed from the top of our hill, it looks like we stand at the edge of the known world, beyond us, only clouds, at best. If we really are alone now, it is a very good thing there are so many churches nearby.

Waiting for sunrise

The moon hangs over the south-east, a beautiful white crescent with distinct horns, open to the right, with the unknown red planet at 7 o'clock, some distance beneath it. The reddish band just on the eastern horizon is turning pink, in anticipation of sunrise. The truck for the recyclables, with its two-man crew, has come and gone. The gigantic green truck with the massive claw, that raises several city-owned large trash bins at once, will not be here for a few hours. Today the parish church near the best bookstore in town, which only sells remainders, is open to visitors for a few hours, the only downtown church that stays open for any length of time during the week. As the sky lightens, the planet becomes a mere white speck, and the lunar crescent appears to shrink. And now, looking due east, one can see the sun rise, very quickly. With any luck, we will see a hawk today. Q: Why is there something rather than nothing? A: So that we can enjoy the beauty of creation.

 

The Rector's Installation

I have just come from the first Installation/Celebration of New Ministry service I ever attended, and it was a glorious occasion; the church was filled, even more crowded than I remember at Christmas Eve, and the music and ceremonial were breathtaking, the Parish at its best. We got to sing "Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation," (to the expansive composition, "Westminster Abbey") as the processional, as well as "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones," for the recessional. The parish choir was in fine voice, and I got to see the Diocesan Bishop, who is famous among Epicopalians as one of the Bishops in whose Diocese gay weddings will not be celebrated.

The congregation sang out; the music was loud enough for all of us to feel that we had permission to let our voices be heard on the joyous occasion. The procession included Father Twelves, the interim Rector until shortly before the permanent Rector arrived last summer, and numerous other diocesan and Protestant clergy. The Bishop celebrated the Eucharist in a splendid red chasuble. I just realized that I had never typed the word chasuble before, which leads to a different train of thought: our first Interim Rector always wore the chasuble, while the Rector only wears one on great feasts. I considered asking the Rector, "How much would I have to pledge to get you to wear the chasuble more often,"  but I doubt that I have that kind of money. 

Grace is very much a wonderful place to worship, with a bunch of friendly people.

Grace Today, September 26, 2010

It has been a little over a year since I started worshiping at Grace Church. August 2009 was a terrible month for us; our good friend, Zeus the friendly Rottweiler, was desperately ill and then left us. I sought some solace by attending a Unitarian parish on the East Side, and I discovered that Unitarian worship, without theism, is a singularly sterile exercise.

One Sunday, I happened to walk home via Westminster, my favorite street,  and I got a look inside Grace Church, a gem of a building. On a subsequent Sunday, I worshiped there. As I remember, it was the first Sunday in September, which was also the first Sunday that the Interim Rector was there. He had a unique approach to that Sunday's Liturgy, talking us through all three readings, so that the worship began with the Offertory. That only happened once; for nearly a year afterward, the Interim Rector wowed us with his sermons, by speaking, without notes, from behind the altar. His preaching was eloquent and theologically informed; he set a very high standard.

This morning, we heard the story of Lazarus and the rich man. The Rector began by asking how we can base this life on life in the next world, as the parable of Lazarus and Dives suggests. The homilist continued by pointing out that fear of punishment in the afterlife, the fate of the rich man Dives who ignored the plight of poor Lazarus at his doorstep, is only one reason to be generous; generosity is good for us, in this life and in the next. Money may well not bring us greater happiness, and experience shows that we are not expert at predicting what will make us happy.  Writing in 1 Timothy,  Paul exhorts us to "lay hold of the life that is truly life," which, according to the homilist, is a meaningful life in the here and now, characterized by godliness, contentment, and generosity. 

Grace Today, Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Rector preached a very fine sermon on a difficult pericope, Luke 16:1-13, with its perplexing logion, "And I tell you,make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes." A summary of the homily follows:

Is money "the root of all evil"? In today's parable, a manager is about to be fired, so he cuts deals with his friend's debtors. Jesus says we cannot serve God and wealth, "mammon." In 1 Timothy, Paul wrote that money is the root of all kinds of evil, and that in their eagerness to be rich, some have pierced themselves with all kinds of suffering.

The Rector said that the problem with money is that it tempts us to idolatry. We can only have one master. There is a commercial slogan about a brand of crockery, "Only Spode is Spode." Just so, only God is God, and all those other things are useful insofar as they serve to further God's kingdom. Money is particularly tempting. To quote the Rector, "Sex and power may take the bronze and silver, but only money takes the gold." 

In fact, what we do with money reflects our priorities; our use of money tells the story of who we are. We must master money, instead of being mastered by it and use it for God's kingdom.

Jesus is impressed with the ingenuity and drive of the children of this age. The final logion means that we should deal carefully with money and put it to good use, so that we bring people to the gospel and the gospel to people, who will welcome us into the heavenly mansions.

The sermon was a convincing explanation of a difficult stretch of scripture, and it is a tribute to the preacher's grasp of the meaning of the sacred text.