Defending the Faith

This is a follow up to Post-Kantian “Reality”, which in some ways, I found enormously disconcerting. Many Christians today find themselves overwhelmingly discouraged; they are not alone. Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, (1692-1752) was quoted as saying,

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much a subject for enquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.

– Advertisement for Analogy of Religion

Unbeknownst to Bishop Butler a revival of rarely seen proportions was about to break out in Scotland and northern England (the location of the Diocese of Durham). The Cambuslang Revival resulted in such large-scale conversion that by 1751 in Glasgow, for example, one out of every three people was a regular participant in church life. Just when, as a contemporary of the Cambuslang Revival wrote:

Many Christians were tempted to think that the Holy Spirit’s mighty operations upon the souls of men, by the preaching of the gospel, belonged only to the first ages of Christianity.[1]

the Lord broke out amongst His people (maranatha!!!) and stayed the tide of Deism which had previously seemed to be inexorably advancing.

Just so, when it seems there is no hope of the Church embracing Christ’s truth as it often does these days, we must cling to the reality that God and His Church have been here before.

It is helpful to remember that this is not the first time the Church has faced a situation where people embraced a fluid view of gender. It was a key tenet of ancient Gnosticism—that mystical blending of ideas from various backgrounds into an aspiration for secret knowledge and enlightenment….

The response of Irenaeus in the second century was to write his book Against Heresies. In this he outlined different parts of Gnostic belief in detail, and countered them by laying out the big picture plot-line of the Bible….

Irenaeus was aware, more so than any of his predecessors, that the plot-line of the Bible has a cumulative weight of persuasiveness. All views of the universe which differ from the Bible are implicitly telling a different story—it just so happened that Gnostics were literally rewriting and editing versions of the Bible to fit their philosophies. A vital part of our response to Queer theory must be to take every opportunity to educate people in the plot-line of the Bible. This means not only giving people Bible overviews, but also helping them see how each part relates to the whole—and how the exercise of so understanding scripture actually has real life implications for issues such as gender, sexuality and identity.[2]

I find it exhilarating that there truly is no new heresy. God has responded to these same old attacks before. Their new dress is no obstacle for the Architect of the Cosmos.

What needs to be done? We must re-learn the narrative of the Bible; it is the meta-narrative of the world. We must be captured by and formed by the story that is God’s redemptive action in the world.

There is much that Christians ministers can learn from engaging with Queer writers. We ought to be humbled by the scale of their achievements in the face of considerable opposition. Queer writers have persistently campaigned politically and sacrificially for the furtherance of their visions. Foucault modeled this. When speaking to a homosexual group he returned the 2,000 Francs payment saying, ‘A gay man does not need payment to speak to other gays.’ The immense cultural impact of Queer theory is testimony to the practical and social changes that can be wrought by academic work. The insight of gay/lesbian activists in perceiving their need for intellectual underpinnings to their political ventures is one Christians would do well to learn from. We once had a similar tradition, which like Queer theory, saw all of life as a unified reality to be seen through a common lens.[3]

We must unlearn our idolatrous perceptions of God. We must be willing to face persecution to insist on the truth. We must be willing to lean on God’s sovereignty to direct the course of history. The resistance we will find most discouraging will come from within the Church itself.

…I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

- Matthew 16:18b

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[1] Arthur Fawcett, The Cambusland Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1971)

[2] Peter Sanlon, Plastic People: How Queer Theory is Changing Us (London: The Latimer Trust, 2010), 36-37

[3] Ibid, 35.

Post-Kantian “Reality”

There is probably a remarkably small audience interested in what I’m about to post, but the importance of this information cannot be overemphasized.

Few people have read the writings of [Immanuel] Kant; nonetheless his philosophical views underpin much of modern culture’s discourse. Not only does this background help explain Judith Butler’s presentation of gender as performative linguistic discourse, it also explains why her writing (and that of other Queer theorists and the gay/lesbian movement generally) is so reluctant to make appeals to ontological realities.

That is, Butler represents a narrative in which traditional Christian gender ethics is portrayed as naive and unintelligible because it bases itself upon some sort of appeal to an ontological reality e.g. A man ought not to seek to become a woman because he was born a physical man; or homosexual acts are immoral because God designed sex to function between a male and female. Both of the preceding statements are making an appeal to some sort of ontological reality, from which implications are then drawn. Such ontological based claims are resisted by Queer writers such as Butler. They are presented as totalising, enslaving and heterosexist frameworks of thought.

Rather than appealing to ontology, Queer theorists prefer to utilise the rhetoric of autonomy, slavery and freedom. They identify their movement with other groups who have sought freedom from repression, such as women or slaves. Most gay/lesbian activists are so resistant to ontological claims, that even when one comes along which may be a support to their cause, they will feel uncomfortable with it and eventually reject it. The most notable example of this was the ‘gay gene’ theory. Many Queer writers now say that even were a ‘gay gene’ demonstrated, they would not want to use it as par of their defence of their lifestyle. It would limit their freedom too much, and conflict with a presentation of homosexuality as a free choice….

The influence of Kant together with the remarkable political and cultural success of apparently non-ontologically based appeals to freedom, has made many Christians doubt the validity of their more ontologically grounded ethics system. Certainly, presenting ontologically based claims, to a person gripped by a system of thought which is influenced by Kant, will be ineffective. This is surely part of the reason that clear and frequent re-statement of traditional Christian teaching on gender related issues tends to not result in many people actually changing their views. Rather than giving up on our ontologically based ethics, or merely repeating our views ineffectually, we ought to expose the fact that writers such as Judith Butler are in fact themselves making ontologically based arguments.[1]

Some readers may need a refresher on what “ontological” means…ontology is the study of that which exists; the study of being. If something is “ontological” it is an evident reality, a tangible truth. The fact that I am is an ontological reality; that I own a Honda Accord is an ontological reality. I was born male; I have brown hair; these are ontological realities.

Consider this:

Prior to Kant [1704-1824] philosophers sought continually to push back the boundaries of that which is known about the world. After Kant, what is known is merely the categories of our own thinking….

An often overlooked point is that both pre- and post-Kantian philosophy was human-centred; the difference was that while each pre-Kantian thinker put himself as the centre of the world, each post-Kantian thinker put himself at the centre of his or her own world. Before Kant, knowledge was assumed to lead to an appreciation of ontological realities. After Kant, with the mind hermetically sealed off from reality, the suggestion that something previously thought to be ontological (like gender), was actually merely linguistic or a category of thought, began to make sense.[2]

If the reality that simply is can be questioned than there truly is no absolute truth, but simply that which is your truth. The irony of all this is that the homosexual agenda’s search for freedom to exercise a perception of reality that justifies their chosen behavior simultaneously prevents those of a different opinion from exercising a freedom to disagree!

Irving’s parody is prescient [referring to a scene from John Irving’s The Cider House Rules]. It captures the oppressive sensation that Butler’s ideology creates in those who are heterosexual. She favours freedom for homosexuality, but frames her argument in such a way as to deny heterosexual identity real dignity. She is claiming to have a better, more accurate knowledge of what goes on inside a person than anybody who says they are not homosexual. In Butler’s world of genders formed by discourse, the homosexual discourse reigns. We see the cultural outworking of this in television shows where the gay man is thought to have some valuable insight into a topic, simply because he is gay. Homosexuality is not only given preferential treatment as a lifestyle; it is though to flow from deeper, more accurate self-understanding than heterosexuality.

In the end, Butler’s conception of freedom is an absolute freedom which forces itself upon people who may not want it, or may not realise they want it. As such it is a freedom which enslaves…. Butler builds on half-truths, and plays with concepts in a way that aims to subvert what she sees as the heterosexist oppressive regime of modern society…. The vision for society Butler offers is precisely the kind of oppressive system which she so passionately speaks against. She has Queered freedom into a system of thought which equates to freedom for all who agree with her, but how will the dissenters be viewed?[3]

The frightening reality is that this innate human longing for freedom is being misused by several powerful propagandist movements today. I will move from the homosexual agenda to other causes in a subsequent post.

But before we leave this particular topic, a final comment from Peter Sanlon is warranted:

The remarkable thing is that the argumentation made thereafter by Butler is identical in form to that put by traditional Christians. The only substantive difference is that the ontological reality she bases her argument upon is an unstable repressed homosexual desire, and the Christian bases their argument upon God’s physical creation of a gendered person.

Thus Judith Butler’s vision of gender is only as convincing as Freud’s view of melancholic gender….

Christians have no reason to fear using arguments which make appeals to a basis in ontology. Not only do Queer writers such as Judith Butler do so, the ontological realities appealed to by Christians are far more verifiable than Freud’s theories. In a post-Kantian word, we would do well to point these things out to those who portray traditional Christian appeals to ontological realities as repressive or philosophically passé.[4]

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[1] Peter Sanlon, Plastic People: How Queer Theory is Changing Us (London: The Latimer Trust, 2010) pp 25-27.

[2] Ibid, 25.

[3] Ibid, 24.

[4] Ibid, 28.

Mature Christianity

J.I. Packer comments on mature evangelicals, but in many ways his comments apply more broadly to Christians in general.

Immature evangelicals have sometimes settled for a euphoric, man-centred pietism, concerned only with possessing and spreading the peace and joy of ‘knowing Christ as my personal Saviour’ (sadly, these precious words are nowadays a cant phrase), and never appreciating God’s revealed concern for truth and righteousness in church and community. Maturer evangelicals, however, have always recognized that though personal conversion is the starting-point, Christians must learn a biblical God-centredness and seek after ‘holiness to the Lord’ in all departments of the church’s worship, witness and work and in every activity and relationship of human life.*

Would that this understanding would permeate American churches!

*J.I. Packer, “A Kind of Noah’s Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness” (1981) in J.I. Packer & N.T. Wright, Anglican Evangelical Identity: Yesterday and Today (London: The Latimer Trust, 2008) p. 126.

Doing a Double-take

Have you ever been reading a book, and all of a sudden you stop short and think, “Whoah, wait…what did that just say?!” Well, I had one of those moments this morning, I was reading a book by Taylor Marshall titled The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origin of Catholic Christianity, when screeech, on went the brakes, and I jammed my eye transmission in reverse:

Just after that, I recognized someone in the waiting room. It was Mr. Smith from St. Andrew’s. Now I understood why I had been called upon to pray with a Jewish woman–she was married to an Episcopalian. Up until now, I had not known that his wife was Jewish. He was nervous about her surgery and we talked for a while until the rabbi returned to the waiting room. Mr. Smith formally introduced me to the rabbi, and we shared an interesting conversation about how some Jews bend their knees and raise up on their toes when they pray.
    Then the rabbi asked Mr. Smith a very unusual question. "What is the Hebrew name of Joanna’s mother?"
    The husband thought about it for a moment. "Gee, I don’t know. Why do you ask?"
    "Well, I was going to ask Joanna the name of her mother, but she was already asleep by the time I found her."
    "Why would you need to know her mother’s name?" asked her husband.
        The rabbi explained, "We Jews believe that if someone is suffering and you invoke the name of his or her mother in prayer, God will be more merciful in granting your prayer for that person."

Now what about that! I’m not exactly sure what to do with this. Has anyone else out there heard of this from the Jewish side of things, or have a source for where this practice originated?

Semper Reformanda

You may have heard the phrase “reformed and always reforming” or perhaps just “always reforming,” the english translation of semper reformanda. This phrase comes from a book by Dutch Reformer Jodocus van Lodenstein, who in his 1674 devotional wrote:

The church is reformed and always [in need of] being reformed according to the Word of God.

Note however, that the verb is passive—the church is always being reformed, not always reforming—there’s a big difference. Who is the source of action? The Church or God?

If the Church is reforming we’ll get revisionist policies placed upon us by individually motivated malcontents wanting humanism rather than biblical values. If the Church is being reformed by God and His Word, this is an entirely different thing.

I recently posted another quote from N.T. Wright relating to how we ought to respect but not canonize tradition, and the following is a suitable follow up, reflecting the need to, as Rob Bell says, “repaint the Christian faith” for each generation.

In writing as I have, I have been aware of one great need and one great danger. The need…is for the Biblical Gospel to be rethought creatively by every generation of Christians, not to undercut what we already know (though we too need to be semper reformanda) but to develop and mature our understanding of it. God has yet more light—much more—to break out of his holy word. When we find ourselves in an Identity Problem perhaps the most appropriate thing to do is to pray, and work, for that fresh light: to read the Bible as a new book with new things to say – which will at the same time be to go back to its original meaning, to re-emphasize old truths, basic certainties, but often with delicate nuances and emphases we had missed because we had ignored them, which will challenge us to reform ourselves afresh, as we traditionally insist that every one else should do.

The danger, to which Dr. Packer alludes, is that we should apparently add to the Gospel and so in fact subtract from it.[1]

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[1] N.T. Wright, “The Evangelical Anglican Identity: The Connection Between Bible, Gospel & Church” in J.I. Packer & N.T. Wright, Anglican Evangelical Identity: Yesterday and Today (London: The Latimer Trust, 2008), 116.

The Psychology of Little Girls

(not a technical analysis)

Elorah brought me a hairband today and asked if I would put her hair in a ponytail. After doing so, she proceeded to prance around the house saying,

I’m a girl, I’m a girl, woo-hoo, I’m a g-i-r-r-l!

Ethan, on the other hand, would run around the house—full-tilt—proclaiming:

I’m a ninja! I’m a ninja!

Tradition ~ It Must Live & Breathe

This is the kind of thing I love about the Anglican way:

After all, the great Confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were hardly the product of leisured academics, saying their prayers and thinking through issues in an abstract way, without a care in the world. Those were turbulent, dangerous and violent times, and the Westminster Confession on the one hand, the Thirty-Nine Articles of my own church on the other, and many more besides, emerged from the titanic struggle to preach the gospel, to order the church, and to let both have their proper impact on the political and social world of the day, while avoiding the all too obvious mistakes of large parts of medieval Catholicism (equally obvious, it should be said, to many Roman Catholics then and now). When people in that situation are eager to make their point, they are likely to overstate it, just as we are today. Wise later readers will honor them, but not canonize them, by thinking through their statements afresh in the light of Scripture itself.

- N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision

An excellent description of the way that tradition works in the three-legged stool of Scripture, Reason & Tradition.

Condoms for elementary students?

When the public (public: open to or concerning the people as a whole) system stops considering itself accountable to the people, it has stopped being a service and become a form of dictatorship.

Video – Condoms for elementary students?

Devastating Consequences of Promiscuity: Real & Imagined

“In 1934 Cambridge anthropologist Dr. J. D. Unwin published Sex and Culture. In it he examined 86 cultures spanning 5,000 years with regard to the effects of both sexual restraint and sexual abandon. His perspective was strictly secular, and his findings were not based in moralistic dogma. He found, without exception, that cultures that practiced strict monogamy in marital bonds exhibited what he called creative social energy, and reached the zenith of production. Cultures that had no restraint on sexuality, without exception, deteriorated into mediocrity and chaos. In Houposia: The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society, published posthumously, he summarized:

In human records, there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence. . . . The evidence is that in the past a class has risen to a position of political dominance because of its great energy and that at the period of its rising, its sexual regulations have always been strict. It has retained its energy and dominated the society so long as its sexual regulations have demanded both pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence. . . .

I know of no exceptions to these rules.

…

Indeed, Unwin’s research, conducted from a secular perspective, demonstrated that all advanced societies studied, when at their cultural and productive apices, built temples to whatever gods they worshiped. It was in this subjugation of the secular to the sacred, of the limbic to the lobe, that they peaked in their self-control and, therefore, in their self-determination. Will Durant, who described himself as agnostic, also found that “there is no moral substitute” for religion in providing this tempering of the limbic.”

This entire post, up until this paragraph was excerpted from “Slave Master: How Pornography Drugs & Changes Your Brain” by Donald L. Hilton, Jr. in Salvo 13, Summer 2010. To understand the entire significance of this post’s title, please read the complete article! If you’re up to seriously exploring issues of sexual ethics, societal decay, promiscuity, addictive behaviors as illicit attempts to assuage life’s wounds, and the truth behind the facade of the homosexual agenda I would recommend not only the preceding article, but also the excellent collections of essays titled God, Gays & the Church: Human Sexuality in Christian Thinking , published by and available from the Latimer Trust.

Evangelical Identity

In 1981 J.I. Packer wrote a booklet for the Latimer Trust titled A Kind of Noah’s Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness. It was Latimer Study 10, and referenced, among other things, a short list of the Evangelical Anglican Identifiers Packer first outlined in his 1978 monograph, The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem. Both of these essays, along with one by N.T. Wright have been republished by The Latimer Trust in one volume as Anglican Evangelical Identity: Yesterday and Today (ISBN 9780946307951).

From the back cover of the new volume, published in 2008:

What does it mean to be both an Evangelical and an Anglican? Can these two theological identities be held together with integrity? How should Evangelical Anglicans relate to the rest of the Anglican Church? Thirty years ago two influential Evangelical thinkers, Jim Packer and Tom Wright, addressed these questions in short and provocative Latimer Studies. Their work remains stimulating and important, and is republished here for a new generation, with fresh prefaces reflecting on recent developments.

The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem (Packer, 1978) asks what it means to be an Evangelical Anglican.

Evangelical Anglican Identity: The Connection Between Bible, Gospel & Church (Wright, 1980) builds upon Packer’s study, addressing Evangelical attitudes to the church.

A Kind of Noah’s Ark? (Packer, 1981) questions [and answers] how it is possible to be a consistent Evangelical in the Church of England.

Anyway, I would highly recommend the small book (172 pages) as worthwhile for anyone considering the Anglican Tradition, but what I’ve been aiming at was sharing the identifiers that Packer outlines and explores.

In my earlier study I noted as chief among the truths of which evangelicals are trustees:

1. the supremacy of Scripture as God-given instruction, a sufficient, self-interpreting guide in all matters of faith and action;
2. the majesty of Jesus Christ our sin-bearing divine Saviour and glorified King, by faith in whom we are justified;
3. the lordship of the Holy Spirit, giver of spiritual life by animating, assuring, empowering and transforming the saints;
4. the necessity of conversion, not as a stereotyped experience but as a regenerate condition, a state of faith in Christ evidenced by repentance and practical godliness;
5. the priority of evangelism in the church’s agenda;
6. the fellowship of believers (the faith-full) as the essence of the church’s life.[1]

I’d say that’s a pretty good list of essentials. One, in fact, which might serve well as a basis of ecumenical agreement. For those of you wondering why the Anglican focus on this evangelical identity thing…well, another quote from Packer would probably be the best answer here:

I am an Anglican not so much by sentiment or affection as by conviction….I cannot say that I ever particularly liked the Church of England as I found it, but I remain an Anglican out of conviction that here is the right place, for here I possess the truest, wisest and potentially richest heritage in all Christendom. One factor which holds me steady at this point is my veneration (the word is not too strong) for the Thirty-nine Articles, which seem to me not only to catch the substance and spirit of biblical Christianity superbly well, but also to provide as apt a model of the way to confess the faith in a divided Christendom as the world has yet seen.[2]

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[1] J.I. Packer, “A Kind of Noah’s Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness” (1981) in Anglican Evangelical Identity: Yesterday and Today by J.I. Packer & N.T. Wright (The Latimer Trust: London, 2008), 125-26.

[2] J.I. Packer & R.T. Beckwith, The Thirty-nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today (The Latimer Trust: London, 2006), p.1. “Preface to the First Edition” (1984).

The Centrality of Discipleship

Christianity centers upon Jesus Christ the Lord who, today and every day through the Holy Spirit, confronts everyone to whom the Gospel comes, summoning us to recognize and respond to him. He calls on us, not just to acknowledge his reality and the salient facts about him, but to exercise faith in him–that is, on the basis of the facts, to trust him–for the forgiveness of our sins; to repent–that is, to leave behind our present natural life of sin-driven bondage, and enter a new life of Christ-led freedom; and to become disciples–persons, that is, who conscientiously, as our life projects, walk with him, learn from him, worship him and the Father through him, and maintain obedience to him, conforming ourselves to his recorded attitudes and example up to the limit of the Holy Spirit’s enabling.

- Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Kindle Edition) by Gary Parrett and J.I. Packer., location 118-28.

A Mother’s Ministry

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. – Revelation 3:20

Has it ever struck you before that Jesus promises to come in and eat with you? I think this refers to the Eucharist, to the fellowship meal of thanksgiving that we share with Christ by virtue of His sacrificial gift. It makes me think also of Exodus 24:8-11:

And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.” [c.f. Matthew 26:27,28] Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.

So reads the first record of communion in Scripture. But what does this have to do with a mother’s ministry? I read this account of a daughter’s memories this morning:

When I thought of approaching the table of the Lord, I related it to the experience my mother had provided me day after day at supper: it was homecoming after the battles of the day; it was a celebration of one another; it was a love feast served with beauty and grace. – Kimberly Hahn

Typing that out just now brought to mind another moment from a fictional book—the phrase “it was a celebration of one another,” in particular, brought to mind the passage from William P. Young’s book, The Shack, where God (Papa), Jesus, the Holy Spirit (Sarayu), and Mack engage in “devotion” around the dinner table.

“Well spoken, Sarayu,” said Papa, her face beaming with pride. “I’ll take care of the dishes later. But first, I would like to have a time of devotion.”

Mack had to suppress a snicker at the thought of God having devotions. Images of family devotions from his childhood came spilling into his mind, not exactly good memories. Often, it was a tedious and boring exercise in coming up with the right answers, or rather, the same old answers to the same old Bible story questions, and then trying to stay awake during his father’s excruciatingly long prayers…. He half expected Jesus to pull out a huge, old King James Bible.

Instead, Jesus reached across the table and took Papa’s hands in his, scars now clearly visible on his wrists. Mack sat transfixed as he watched Jesus kiss his father’s hands and then look deep into his father’s eyes and finally say, “Papa, I loved watching you today, as you made yourself fully available to take Mack’s pain into yourself, and then give him space to choose his own timing. You honored him, and you honored me. To listen to you whisper love and calm into his heart was truly incredible. What a joy to watch? I love being your son.” (p. 107)

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a moment I’d like to be part of! Two things strike me; first, along with all that came about as a result of the Reformation, evangelical Protestants have largely lost this concept of the Lord’s Table as an intimate, family meal. One thinks of those fellowship offerings in the Tabernacle days when a family brought their sacrifice, the father and sons butchered the animal, the priest caught the blood, and placed a portion of the offering upon the altar, then the priest and his family and the worshiping family gathered together around the table in front of their offering to the Lord upon the altar and dined together in the presence of their Lord, Who was, after a fashion, consuming meat along with them. While the whole sacrifice part sounds foreign and perhaps even revolting to us, the idea of that intimate family dinner sounds great. However, that brings me to the second thought.

Many of us have no memory of family dinners around the table, and even more of us are not providing that experience for our children. How then are our children to have any concept of pleasant fellowship to associate with the Lord’s Table? How are they to think of “devotion” to God and to one another?

This then is the awesome opportunity of a mother’s ministry. Mother, consider yourself like a Levite ministering in the Dwelling Place of the Lord, laboring throughout the day to prepare a table fit for a King and his friends to dine together. Consider setting an extra chair to be Jesus’ place, and fill it as often as possible:

Then the King will say…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’  (Matthew 25:34-40)

May we all embrace the experience of the Lord’s Table with a renewed sense of passion, with an invigorated intentionality, and with renewed delight. May wives and mother’s embrace the great ministry of service that God has blessed them with, and in so doing shape forever the lives of their offspring; may mother’s see in their service an opportunity to mold the spiritual lives and experience of their children.

Husbands and Fathers, sons and daughters, cherish your mother’s constant gifts: they can cost her dearly; though she offer them with gladness, it may be at the cost of her dreams. May a multitude rise up and call their mothers blessed this Erev Shabbat! (Sabbath Eve)