legacy

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Cochise County to see the Sandhill Cranes. We drove south from Benson through Tombstone and then east into the Sulfur Springs Valley to Whitewater Draw. 

"I see a large bird."

"I see lots of large birds!"

"Wow!" 

We laughed in delight as we walked over to a shallow marsh where the birds were congregating like a crowd of cabbages, or lifting off and flying, circling or moving away high into the sky, always calling to each other. 

When we got back there was a message from a friend. He had looked up "sandhill cranes" and sent me a picture of two. I called them Abram and Sarai.

Then I sent him my own picture, of a multitude of cranes, with the caption, take two, multiply by ten thousand, then set them all a-flight.

In the evening Miles Green sent me a picture he'd just taken of the cranes resting again at sunset.

See for yourself at "cranes com" - https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/viewing/webcamlist/sandhillcrane/cranecam/)

Or go!

So the story of a man and a woman, of Abram and Sarai, now to be called Abraham and Sarah, becoming the blessed forebears of a multitude, and a source of blessing to all people, is not so alien to Arizonans. 

It can happen. 

We have seen it.

A season of promise becomes a heritage of blessing.

So the promise, Paul says, comes to the children of faith, and it is through faith that we inherit the blessing, that we become the children of the promise.

I'd been thinking of Lent as a season of preparation for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter.

But here it is founded in hope. Lent is a season of promise, fulfilled in Good Friday and Easter.

For Jesus' whole life was a testament to faithfulness. Even unto Death he did not fail.

And we share in his rectification, his glorification, his resurrection, as he is raised from the dead in triumph over Death, and his faith communicated through his first witnesses, and comes to us.

Witnesses - for witness is the basis of discipleship, of following Jesus - from Mary at the Tomb to his astonished Apostles, to -- us. We did not see but yet may Believe. 

It is said that one sign of his truth is the crowd of witnesses we have Become.

We have seen life transformed, we have seen hope in the midst of Despair, Joy in the middle of sorrow.

We have seen small become great, and we have seen the mighty overcome by the true.

Faithful adherents, to the promise, joining in the heritage that two small creatures began, that grew into a multitude, a crowd of witnesses like a cloud above us and circling around us, in which we delight, and at last share in peace.

witness

"Unique in the Church, the Camaldolese life is ordered to a three-fold good: solitude, community, and witness." 

-- The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality, Peter-Damian Belisle, O.S.B. Cam., Editor (Liturgical Press, 2002), publisher's description.

As I've been connected to a Camaldolese hermitage since college, I've been thinking about this - especially the third of the three goods. Witness.

In Latin, martyrium. 

It is also, in another guise, the third rail of liberal Protestantism: evangelism. 

And, in that guise - evangelism - that word is a challenge. 

It is the third of three themes of this triennium, the three-year period between General Conventions of the Episcopal Church. Not something I normally pay much heed to -- or even know about. But these three themes are also those chosen by the Episcopal diocese of Arizona as themes for three consecutive diocesan conventions. Those themes are: creation care, evangelism, and racial reconciliation. 

In some ways, ways we cannot expect, evangelism is likely to be the most challenging.

Especially when we recall that evangelism, proclaiming and spreading the good news, involves witness - martyrium - martyrdom.

This has been all too real throughout the history of the church throughout the world. Think of the twentieth-century martyrs, from Kaj Munk who stood up to Hitler to Janani Luwum who stood up to Idi Amin. Janani Luwum, a bishop of the church, which turned out to mean head martyr.  

The point is to proclaim the gospel - but sometimes that means following Jesus to the cross. That is what happened to those men and women, those martyrs, whose witness was relentless in the face of cruelty, ignorance, despair, violence, death - and who live in the resurrection.

We have (I hope) a simpler task: to face ridicule, belittling, silent opposition, resistance, anger, rush to judgment, when we say what we believe, or worse yet, act it out in the public arena.

What have we to gain but our souls?

And so as the institutional church, or churches, face the simple-seeming, happy-appearing, theme of evangelism - hoping perhaps for those young energetic generous families we all want to fill our pews, our collection plates, and our rosters for volunteer tasks - we might want to consider the cost. Not to them, the sad targets of our feeble desires, but them, the children Christ crucified has called to join us in the true church, the church of martyr as well as saint.

What have we to gain but our souls?

https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2016/03/11/making-reconciliation-and-evangelism-the-churchs-new-normal/

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/ministries/evangelism/