"NOTHING ON EARTH THAT WE SHARE"

In the musical Les Miserables the Police Inspector Javert sings about his nemesis, the story's hero Jean Valjean:  "There is nothing on earth that we share:  it is either Valjean or Javert."  In theological terms, what he means is that the Law (represented by Javert) and Grace (represented by Valjean) are as irreconcilable as oil and water.  The tragedy is that Javert has just been granted his life by Valjean, who really had every right to kill Javert.  Javert, who has lived his life on the principle of an eye for an eye, is literally unable to understand grace and accept it.  Indeed Valjean's forgiveness offends him, so that when he says "there is nothing on earth that we share"he really means it, and his immediate suicide moves us all the more.

St. Paul' Epistle to the Galatians is arguably the most difficult book of the Bible because of the Apostle’s forceful argument about the Christian’s need to live by grace through faith as opposed to the principle of law:  "evertheless what saith the scripture:  Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman." Galatians 4:30  What he means is that those who live by the Law can never know the joy of what it means to "tand fast in the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free, and  [not entangled] in the yoke of bondage." Galatians 5:1

St. Paul, in attempting to explain his thinking, could point to Inspector Javert as the perfect example of a slave to the principle of Law.  The Law can and does show many of us how sinful we are, as none of us is able to live up to it perfectly.  And yet anyone who thinks he really does abide by it perfectly (as Javert), will ultimately extinguish every breath of life from himself.  Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert thoroughly embody the impossibility of reconciling the Gospel of Grace and the Gospel of Law, not just in their behavior, but right down to the contradictory sound of their names.  Again, when Javert says, "there is noting on earth that we share," he tells us truth.

The point of living by Grace, is to make one's adherence to the Law a thing of joy rather than a chore.  One of our collects directs us to pray:  "That we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command."  The Law can tell us what to do and what not to do, but it cannot make us love doing it.  It’s like a doctor who can diagnose an illness but is unable to prescribe anything for a cure.

Again the point of this is not to denigrate any concept of Law, but to encourage us to cast ourselves on the Grace and Mercy of God.  St. Paul would have us understand that the goodness we manage is not the result of ourselves, but of Christ working in us and through us.  In one of our hymns we ask God to "...only look on us as we are found in [Christ]"  Granted this means we have to work constantly to die to ourselves so that Jesus might live in us.  Having our egos burst may not be initially pleasing, but the alternative is so much more tragic.  To live by the Law will make us a slave to the Law and eventually a victim of the Law.  Living by Grace will give us the freedom to love God not for what He can do for us, but to love Him simply because He is God.

Perhaps most important, if we live by grace we can more readily say and believe that there is no health in us and that we truly are miserable sinners, and consequently open our hearts even more to accept God’s blessings.  His Grace then becomes a far greater gift, Jesus' broken body and spilled blood the more valuable. 

The unspeakably wonderful outcome, is that true Christians understand that
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8)  That’s an astounding statement, one which our 17th century Anglican poets understood so well:  no condemnation for those in Christ.  How tragic that his preoccupation with Law would not only blind Javert to this wonderful fact, but lead him to take his own life.  Once again, for Law and Grace:  "There is nothing on earth that they share."  FAB

OFFICE CLOSING

The office will be closed Friday and Monday (July 4 and 7) in observance of Independence Day.                Clay Sewell, Senior Warden

TIME OFF

Fr. McQueen will be on vacation July 20 to August 4.  Nikki Scott will be away the week of July 28.

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."  St. Matthew 25:40

One of the greatest opportunities we have in this life is to do something good for our fellow man.  We need only glance around, and recognize the profound needs and wants in our community.  Not a week goes by when someone stops by the church office in hopes of assistance with groceries, medication, gasoline, rent, or utilities.  Whenever possible, we provide some level of assistance in hopes that our gift might partially alleviate some of the anxiety, uncertainty, or dejection that these people are experiencing.  It is also an occasion to hear their story, rather than simply pass them off with a food voucher, or gas money. 

Our EYC has just completed a week of work with Hands on Thomas County participating in Project IMPACT.  This is a week long series of projects within our community geared specifically for High School students.  Our youth worked with Habitat for Humanity; bundled food for the Food Bank and Senior Center; assisted at the Androcles Society and the Humane Society; went bowling with a group from the Thomas-Grady Service Center; played games, painted, and did arts-and-crafts with the patients at Southwestern -- Rose Haven, and throughout it all, they had fun doing it.  This week was also an opportunity to form new friendships, and strengthen existing ones in a unique context.  While the first two days were more physically challenging, Wednesday was by far the most mentally challenging and clearly took our group out of its comfort zone.  I believe that everyone exited the buses with butterflies because of the uncertainty that comes from working with people quite different from us.  It did not take long for those apprehensive feelings to subside when people began to see the joy and excitement from those we were helping.  It was an honor to be with our youth, and my prayer for the week was that we all might recognize that what we did was attempt to be the hands, feet, ears, and mouth of Christ in our community.  Our youth did just that, and did so admirably.

Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35).  The blessing comes in the giving with no strings attached, rather than giving when we expect to receive something in return.  After all, the grace of God is just like that.  The grace that He gives comes with only one caveat, that we accept it as the free gift that it truly is.  This is not cheap grace, for the grace that God gives was quite costly.  However, God gives it out His love for us -His creation; we must acknowledge it for what it is.  "Freely ye have received, freely give" (St. Matthew 10:8). 

Our week with Hands on Thomas County was an exercise in freely giving, and the theme for the week at Project IMPACT was the title of Robert Frost's poem, The Road Less Traveled.  Throughout our work, we saw that the road of service toward our fellow man does not show signs of tremendous wear, but rather, is the less traveled path.  It is not a path un-traveled, because there were signs of those who had gone before us, and the fruit of their work was evident.  When we ventured down that "less traveled" road, we saw that the journey required more work, but in the end "[it] has made all the difference."  In choosing "the road less traveled" we saw that true blessing came when we gave freely of ourselves.   WNM

USHERS FOR JULY

July 6      

John Hand
Doug Harper

July 13

Bob Jackson
Courtney Houston

July 20      
John Kavouklis     
Bill Ladson     

July 27

Denny Lewin
Bernie Lanigan

Save the date
Convocation Picnic at All Saints'
Saturday, October 25, 2008

SUMMER READING SUGGESTIONS

Same Kind of Different as Me
 by Ron Hall

Suite Francaise
 by Irene Neimrovsky

Losing Julia
 by Jonathan Hull

Half a Yellow Sun
 by C.N. Adichie

A Thousand Splendid Suns
 by Khalad Hosseini

The Last Lecture
 by Randy Pausch

The Unexpected George Washington, His Private Life and Lafayette
 by H.G. Unger

Fools Cap
 by Mike Malone

House Made of Dawn
 by N. Scott Momaday

   -- Compiled by Nancy McCollum

 
TRANSITIONS:

Happy Birthday in the month of July to:

Lois E. Mason    7-1-88
Emma Hutton Daniel   7-7-05
Michael Mirocha   7-21-91
Madeline Claire Bruhn   7-22-98
Andrew Raney McMullian  7-26.07
Henry Simmons Ladson   7-30-02

Happy Birthday in the month of August to:

Chadwick Kelly   8-1-93
Parker Hayden McCollum  8-7-04
Jacob A. Bruhn    8-21-96
Haven Shea    8-26-88
Lily Bradford Jackson   8-30-02

THE PARISH REGISTER

Baptism

Jackson Pearce Husbands received the sacrament of
Holy Baptism on June 15, 2008.

 
THE HOLINESS OF BEAUTY: 
THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE

In seminary we learned a great deal about the evolution of the Book of Common Prayer, but very little about the King James Bible (KJV).  The seminary faculty had for years, preferred for the chapel the Revised Standard Version which appeared in this country in 1952.  Based upon more ancient and authoritative Hebrew and Greek texts, it is a more accurate translation than the KJV; but what it makes up for in terms of accuracy, it loses all the more in beauty - although one Old Testament professor admitted that regarding accuracy, the KJV surpasses the RSV in much of the Old Testament.

Aristotle wrote that "poetry is more philosophical than prose," that is, poetry can convey truth in a more powerful way than prose - a concept which many modern translators seem to forget.  A phrase such as "...the days were accomplished that she should be delivered..." is decimated in one new version to "...the time came for Mary to have her baby."  The Psalter in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer abounds in similar examples.  No one can argue that "Praise Him in the sound of the trumpet" (Psalm 150) is more accurate than "Praise Him with the blast of the ram's horn," but the former easily conveys more of the Majesty and Glory of God.

To read Adam Nicholson's wonderful book God’s Secretaries:  the Making of the King James Bible (Harper Collins), is to discover a new friend.  The author does not purport to be "scholarly", although I cannot imagine many real scholars finding much if any problem with it.  Written for the layman, the book comprises about 250 pages of very readable prose, which at times approaches the poetic.  Gratefully, Nicholson loves his subject.

Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon about the KJV is that this splendid pinnacle of the English tongue is the work of a committee - forty eight men divided into six groups of eight with each group assigned to a particular portion of the Old Testament, New Testament, or Apocrypha.  Individual members of each "company" received the same portion to translate privately; the results were compared and honed, and then those results passed to the next company to be further critiqued.

The two gentlemen who receive the bulk of Nicholson's attention are King James himself and Lancelot Andrewes.  James came to the English throne in 1603 at the death of Elizabeth.  Having been king of Scotland, he had been privy to much of the Protestant Calvinist bickering regarding the "overly catholic" Book of Common Prayer.  Upon ascending the English throne, he yearned to provide some sense of unity between the Protestants of Scotland and the Anglo-Catholics of England, and the writing of the KJV was done in part to achieve this goal.

As such, and unlike the drafting of the most recent Book of Common Prayer, two opposing groups were given a shared mission.  Thus the committee was composed of the finest protestant and catholic minds of the day.  One can't help but recall that during the creation of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church either failed or refused to employ the services of a single English major, or any professional writer, much less anyone who loved the traditional book.

The King instructed the committee to make ample use of three current translations so as not to disregard the achievements of their ancestors:  the Geneva Bible, ca 1550, written by and for Calvinists with numerous marginal notes, and the Elizabethan Bible of 1568, "a Bible of the hierarchy and not of the people".  These two respectively reflected "the demands for freedom of the individual conscience and the need for order and an imposed inheritance; between monarchy and democracy; between extremism and toleration." The third source would be William Tyndale’s immensely important and influential translation ca 1525.  Indeed, Tyndale provided the bulk of what was to become the KJV New Testament.

The committee took thousands of phrases, and with something as simple as reversing the order of two words, turned them into unforgettable passages.  For I Kings 19: 12, Tyndale had written, "And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire, a small still voice."  The KJV committee left the verse as is, but changed "small still voice" to "still small voice."  How many millions of churchmen have since sung about the "still small voice of God"?  The companys' attention to detail was simply astounding.

Lancelot Andrewes became the chairman of the committee, and went on to become Dean of Westminster Abbey.  He would later compose one of the most beautiful and widely read books of private devotions the world would ever know.   Interestingly, the outbreak of plague in 1603 provided a further impetus for the new Bible translation.  Many thought the plague to be the result of God’s wrath, and that a new Bible might provide some spiritual protection.  In a sobering bit of history, Andrewes abandoned his congregation to flee the disease, yet was devout enough to spend hours each morning on his knees in prayer and tears, lamenting his unworthiness.  How similar to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who while standing at the stake, made sure that the part of him to burn first would be the hand by which he had recanted his protestant beliefs.  Nicholson allows us to see a world of very great but vulnerable men and women.

The most telling of James' instructions to his committee in terms of the KJV's longevity was his insistence that they strive not so much for literal accuracy, but for beauty and mystery.  To be sure, he wanted to go the distance to bring two warring factions of the Church together, and if a word could be rendered in a manner acceptable to both, such instances were to be welcomed. 

More important however, would be the power of poetry over the pedantry of prose.  "The flattening of language," Nicholson writes, "is a flattening of meaning.  Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires."  If such language is shaped by "an anxiety not to bore or intimidate," then "it has, in short, lost all authority."  Writing of the New English Bible, its translators (unlike the KJV team) "had somehow forgotten that ordinariness is not the Bible's subject."

Jonathan Yardley states in the Washington Post, "That it [the KJV] has been replaced in most English-speaking Christian congregations by 'modern' translations of surpassing mediocrity is one of the outrages of the age, and one that says all too much about itself."

If you're looking for a summer read with a little more substance, you will not fail to be instructed as well as moved by God's Secretaries. FAB