The Parsons' Cause

I've always been intrigued by the life events leading up to Patrick Henry's stirring words, "Give me liberty or give me death."  And also interested in the place of his speech.  It was from the pulpit of St. John's Church (now Episcopal) in Richmond, VA.  Virginia's Second Convention met there to avoid the King's "attention" as they chose delegates to the Second Continental Congress.  One could say the meeting was all about independence.

Henry's turn was the result of a fairly short and charismatic career as a lawyer.  His father was a judge and prominent member to Hanover county's powerful interests.  Henry did not do well managing the family's interests, including a tavern and after a brief, self directed reading was made a lawyer.

Also interesting to me was his participation in the events of the Parson's Cause.  Forgive me but here is as brief an account as I can find:

The droughts of the 1750s had led to a rise in the price of tobacco. Hard currency was scarce in Virginia, and salaries in the colony were often expressed in terms of pounds of tobacco. Prior to the drought, the price of tobacco had long been twopence per pound (0.45 kilograms) and in 1755 and 1758, the Virginia House of Burgesses, the elected lower house of the colonial legislature, passed Two Penny Acts, allowing debts expressed in tobacco to be paid at the rate of twopence per pound for a limited period. These payees included public officials, including Anglican clergy—[The Church of England] was then Virginia's established church, and several ministers petitioned the Board of Trade in London to overrule the Burgesses, which it did. Five clergymen then brought suit for back pay, cases known as the Parson's Cause; of them, only the Reverend James Maury was successful, and a jury was to be empaneled in Hanover County on December 1, 1763 to fix damages. Henry was engaged as counsel by Maury's parish vestry for this hearing. Patrick Henry's father, Colonel John Henry, was the presiding judge.^[*] Wikipedia - Patrick Henry

I'm relearning all these things that were buried in my 1972 Essex County, Virginia high school brain.  And as I'm relearning them I'm also reliving a long interest in what is now an even more difficult relationship between church and state.

My father pastored a Baptist church in Tappahannock just 50 miles from Henry's Hanover that worshipped in what had been the second courthouse of the county.  Built in 1728, it was renovated in 1875 to add a steeple to what was a featureless exterior.  The current Essex courthouse looks broad shouldered and more like a church than its predecessor.

Not only all this but through other moments of my upbringing I'm now, it seems always of a mind uneasily managing my place as a parish priest and a public citizen.  And I can't but hear Henry's famous words as full of a spirit that is more than patriotism.   But "custom" warrants more restraint than the freedom loving citizen in me can exercise sometimes.   Do we mean the same thing when we say liberty now? What is this thing we call Christian in the United States in 2019? How do we honor those like Henry now?

Easter Expansion

Some of you may be wondering how I'm still writing under the Easter . . . "umbrella."  Short answer, everything in our lives as Christians comes from Easter.  Remove the event of the resurrection of our Lord and we would be without the one thing that makes Jesus the Christ.  There's a longer answer to follow because I really want to write about how the Easter event becomes ours and how we are best equipped to share it in the way that Pentecost intends.

Pentecost is an Easter holiday.  As the last day of the special season of resurrection focus and celebration, Pentecost does not close down our observance but accelerates it, distributes it,  and shares it.

The story from Luke's Acts of the Apostles is that Jews returning to Jerusalem to observe the Festival of Weeks heard the languages they had learned living and growing up away from Jerusalem being spoken and the message was the same no matter the speaker.  Peter finished his acknowledgement of this shared amazement by quoting the Prophet Joel and closed with "Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Acts 2:21, NRSV)

Pretty simple, don't you think?  Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  Simple but apparently not easy.  I say apparently because so many of our modern day versions of being Christian are not "calling on the name . . ." but are more war-like or even worse more commercial.

So much of what we do is to preserve and protect a territory -- we call it "the church" -- or research and market a product and we call that holiness.  We recruit, we indoctrinate, we keep score like it's a zero sum game to be won.  Some Christians are worse than others but we are all guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses. 

When evangelism is done using the same metrics as advertising -- think "market share" -- the actions we take leave little room for our own calling on the name.  Instead we perfect "elevator speeches" and employ Harvard's best business models for things like purpose, message and feedback.

What Peter says is simpler but harder because it means telling the truth about ourselves first and from that ground to call.  And our calling sends a message that we understand something important about the one to whom we are speaking. When Peter repeats Joel's prophecy he is admitting that even as we have these new powers to utter praise in the languages of others we are acknowledging the greater power of the one to whom our cries ascend. 

That's because there's more to "the name" than an identification of the person.  Especially in this case Peter is talking power and authority, God's power, God's authority now known and demonstrated in Jesus who died and was raised. Hear the Easter echoes? 

Our salvation is NOT withheld until we reach a committee approved benchmark or until we have honed a skill down to a "bright brass" shine or dotted all our eyes and flawlessly crossed ourselves. 

God's help -- our salvation -- is always ready because everyday is Easter.  God's help will not be forced on us but only waits for our honesty, our confession, our respect and our gratitude. 

Easter Reprise

Most of you know of the untimely and tragic death of Rachel Held Evans. I've already written about her and will continue to in the months ahead.  She understood Easter as a lesson to be learned as it calls us to die to sin while we are still breathing and eating and sleeping and loving.  

One of the ways she "died" was to re-examine her understanding of scriptural authority.  In her identifying work  A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" (Thomas Nelson; October 30, 2012) she took seriously the commands that governed the lives of women.  She lived each one of them. She worked to understand them as antique but relevant in how they showed the ancient and faithful minds of those first believers.

She had to acknowledge that there was much that no longer needed practicing: social behaviors regarding menstruation, dress, leadership, teaching, etc.  Not just because we are no longer living biblically ourselves but because we have learned so much that was not known two thousand years ago.  And so she had to die to that teaching and find her way to living faithfully in the 21st century.  

To get there she had to admit something about all of us who take the bible seriously in the modern age.  Here's how she said it:

For those who count the Bible as sacred, the question when interpreting and applying the Bible to our lives is not, will we pick and choose? But rather how will we pick and choose? We are all selective in our reading of Scripture, and so the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? (295)

Are we reading with the prejudice of love?  Are we reading with a heart like the one Jesus showed his disciples in the upper room as he knelt before them -- including Judas -- and washed their feet?  Are we reading in "obedience to death" so the maddening cycle of scapegoats, sacrifices, and wars and walls and waste does not pass through us?  

How are we reading scripture when we leave out our public lives from its directions or only accept Jesus as our personal savior?  How are we reading scripture when we excuse poverty as a lack of initiative and will.  How are we reading scripture when we destroy aquifers with fracking for fossil fuels we will not need? How are we reading scripture when we only claim Jesus' judgement on our enemies so that we are the ones redeemed?  

Before Rachel's sad and painful passing she died to a bunch of unexamined beliefs that were masquerading as faith.  Easter's lesson,  still for us to learn and to which we must be obedient to our deaths is God is ready to raise us from a death of "the prejudices of judgement and power, self-interest and greed." 

Easter Rest

FrDann is resting this week on Jekyll Island.