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Thomas Bray

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Thomas Bray was born in 1656, England was under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell.  The theaters were closed, public entertainment was severely limited, and church-going was mandatory.  Much of the public was still illiterate, and national and political news mostly came from the pulpit.  Clergy had a privileged place in society.  They were among the most educated, well-informed, and politically astute members of the British public.  However, there were very few of them on the continent of North America.

Bray was educated at All Soul’s College, Oxford, and graduated from there in 1678, eighteen years after Oliver Cromwell died and Charles II was restored to the throne of England.  This was an age of preferment, when one’s career as a priest depended on family connections and personal influence.  Bray had enough influence to become a country curate and chaplain, and eventually to obtain the rectorship of Sheldon, Warwickshire.  It was there, in 1690, that he wrote his Catechetical Lectures, a book of instructions for teaching the catechism.  It was a successful book, and brought Bray to the attention of the Bishop of London, who appointed him the Ecclesiastical Commissary for Maryland.  The colonies had no bishops of their own, and these Ecclesiastical Commissaries were the closest they would get until after the revolution.  They could do everything that a bishop could do, except perform confirmations and ordinations.

Maryland’s first settlers were English Catholics, led by Leonard Calvert, and although Protestant settlers soon followed, the colony was predominantly Roman Catholic through much of the 17th century.  A good number of Quakers settled there.  In 1649 the colony passed the Maryland Toleration Act, which protected Catholics and Quakers from Anglican discrimination, and which lent some of its language to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution more than one hundred and fifty years later.  But the law was repealed in 1692, after the Glorious Revolution pushed the Catholic James II off of the throne of England and brought in the Protestant supported William and Mary.  This is somewhat ironic, since William was a champion of toleration, but Maryland’s new governor, Francis Nicholson, was not.  In 1696, Nicholson led the colonial assembly in the passage of a law that would establish Anglicanism as the state religion of the colony.  It was the passage of this law that prompted the Bishop of London to offer Thomas Bray the appointment of Ecclesiastical Commissary.

But the law had a problem.  It was obnoxious to both Quakers and Catholics, and the Quakers could block it’s ratification in England.  The law required that every citizen of Maryland pay forty pounds of tobacco per year as a tax that would support the Anglican church.  It also required a pledge of loyalty to the church.  Quakers refused to make this pledge, and their refusal barred them from holding political office or representing themselves in court.  But since King William was a strong advocate of toleration, they were able to use their influence in England to keep the law from being enacted in Maryland.

This meant that for the first three years of his appointment, Thomas Bray had nothing to do.  However, he was one of the most dauntless men in the world.  Rather than sitting on his hands, he set about studying and predicting the challenges he would face when he reached Maryland.  The major challenge was that there were very few priests in the colony.  In 1694 there were only three, and although this number increased a little every year, it was obvious that the Anglican congregations were underserved.  Parishes were usually geographically large, and priests found themselves having to travel twenty or thirty miles to visit sick parishioners.  To do this, they had to own a horse or two, which was expensive, particularly since they didn’t get paid much and had to supplement their incomes by working plantations of their own.  They usually left their families back in England, and the hardship and loneliness must have been severe. Needless to say, not many priests were eager to go to the colonies, and those who went usually did so because they had no other choice.  Lacking a church in England, and any influence that could help them obtain a church, their options were severely limited.  The priests who did go to Maryland were sometimes men who had lost their preferment by their own fault, and they arrived in the colony with a reputation for scandalous behavior and every intention of continuing in that behavior in their new home.

Bray wanted to correct these problems, and he put his faith in education as the means of correction.  During the three years he spent waiting to finally go to Maryland, he established the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK).  His plan was to establish libraries in every parish in Maryland.  His society grew and gathered money, and was open to some criticism.  Why, people asked, were they collecting money to establish parish libraries in the colonies, when many parishes in England didn’t have libraries, and had clergy as ignorant and disreputable as any colonial parson?  Bray accepted this critique and made sure that the SPCK’s work also benefitted people at home.  His grand vision was of having at least one good library per rural deanery, where the clergy could gather to read and discuss the books, and support each other in their ministries.

In 1699, at the age of 43, Bray finally got tired of waiting and left for Maryland, where he hoped to hurry along the process of revising the Act of Establishment so that it would meet with King William’s approval.  On his way out of the country, he stopped at three seaport towns, establishing libraries as he went.  His luggage must have been comprised mostly of books, because when he arrived in Maryland he presented a library to each of the thirty-one parishes that then existed.  He found seventeen clergy waiting for him, and a Colonial Assembly that was more than willing to accept his help in revising the law.  He set to work, meeting with the governor and the assemblymen, visiting parishes, and taking his own census of the number of Anglicans, Quakers, and Catholics in the colony.  On the political front, he found speedy success.  On the parochial front, he sometimes had to be quite severe with his priests, especially one who was a known polygamist.  The political and the parochial worlds were deeply intertwined, because the Act of Establishment concerned itself with the nitty gritty of parish life, dictating how many times vestries must meet, how clergy could be chosen, and other internal matters of the parishes.  One provision of the law was for insuring the morality of clergymen by appointing committees to meet each incoming ship that carried a clergyman and interview the captain and other passengers to ascertain the appropriateness of the clergyman’s behavior while he was on board.  Bray also established the first missionary effort of the colony, but it wasn’t for the benefit of the Native Americans or African slaves.  Missionaries were supposed to go into Pennsylvania and convert the Quakers.

By the summer of 1700, Bray had the new law neatly in hand and took ship to England, where he could use his influence to get it ratified by parliament.  His experiences in the colony had convinced him that the spread of Anglicanism required people as well as books, and he established a new organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.  This group became the backbone for Anglican missionary efforts throughout the world.  The English system of engaging in missionary activity was wholly different from the French or the Spanish.  Many of the English colonies had been established as business ventures.  The people who put up the capital for these ventures saw no need to supply priests, or to worry about missionary activity.  Ferdinand and Isabella might send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but the English trading companies failed to see how it would benefit the bottom line.  If missionary activity was to succeed, it wouldn’t be because it was instigated by the crown, but by confederations of individuals like Bray and his supporters.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was tremendously successful, but the revised law to establish Anglicanism as the religion of Maryland was not.  Once again, Quaker interests blocked its ratification, and it had to be revised for a third time by the Maryland Assembly.  Finally, in 1702, a version that tolerated Quakerism was past, and was accepted by King William and his parliament.  He died that year, and his wife Mary’s younger sister, Anne, became Queen.

Bray never went back to Maryland.  Once the law was finally past, he found a worthy successor and settled down in London, accepting the living of Saint Botolph without Aldgate in 1707.  He lived there until his death in 1730, working with feverish and committed energy in his parish and in the wider church.  He continued to be interested in libraries, and in 1724 created the Dr. Bray Associates, a group dedicated to founding clerical libraries.  The Church of England remained as the established church in Maryland until 1776.

But Bray’s real legacy wasn’t the establishment of Anglicanism as a state religion in one of England’s colonies.  It was the culture that he brought to that colony, and to the seedbed of the future United States, when he went about establishing his libraries.  At a time when few people could read, it became part of the clergy’s care of souls to educate their parishioners, to make them aware of the important political and cultural issues of the time, and to bind them together into a citizenry by propagating a common culture.  It was also a way of honoring the inherent intelligence of the illiterate colonists, who could come and discuss important ideas with their clergymen, and argue points from books that they couldn’t read, but that a good, caring priest would willingly read for them.

Sources

Klingberg, Frank Joseph. Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York,. Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940. Print.

Click to access bray.pdf

Samuel Clyde McCulloch. Dr. Thomas Bray’s Trip to Maryland: A Study in Militant Anglican Humanitarianism. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1945), pp. 15–32

The Leper in Galilee

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

Lately, when I find myself getting ready to preach on a passage that I’ve preached on many times before, I’ve been asking myself one basic question to get around the dispiriting feeling that I’ve run out of things to say.  The question is this: who is the most interesting person in this story (barring Jesus, that is)?  Obviously, for Mark 1:40-45, that person is the leper.  What I usually say is something about the unfairness of the leper’s social exclusion, because he almost certainly doesn’t have Hansen’s disease (what we think of as leprosy), and probably has something no more worrisome than psoriasis.  But this is a cop-out, and lazy to boot.  It may be true, but the text gives us many more clues to the leper’s story than that.  I’m going to do something rare here, and take it line by line, commenting as I go.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”

Let’s start by thinking about the conditions of this man’s life.  When his skin disease first became apparent, he would have gone to the priest to have it examined, as dictated by Leviticus 13.  Here were priests who also acted as physicians, or at least diagnosticians.  I imagine that this examination took place in some annex to the temple, maybe in a bare antechamber, with sunlight pouring through a high window and the priest turning the man in the light so that the whiteness of his diseased skin was totally exposed.  Maybe the priest made some sound – an intake of breath, a murmur – that told the man that the patch of flaky white skin implied a coming life of isolation and neglect.  Maybe the man felt the angel of death pass over him, since leprosy was viewed as a living death (this is detailed in Peter Bolt’s Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers, pp. 100-101).

The man would be sent away from the priest to spend seven days in isolation, and then the priest would examine him again, to see if his skin had cleared up or if his condition had worsened.  Imagine what the man must have felt like during those seven days.  Most of us, most of the people sitting in the pews, have had that experience of having to wait for test results, of having to wake up every day worrying and knowing there was nothing they could do but wait.  This worry in itself is isolating – we wake up worrying but the world goes on in ignorance of our worry.  How much more isolating must it have been for the potential leper, who didn’t even have the casual routines of a normal life to mask his worry?

After those seven days, and a return visit to the priest, the man would know that he was a leper.  This meant that he would remain isolated from the people around him, although he would be accepted into the community of lepers.  He would spend his days with people who, like him, were all grieving over their separation from home and family. Worse, he would spend his days labeled a sinner.  The outer corruption of the body was understood to be a sign of the inner corruption of the soul.  And he probably agreed with this diagnosis – he had no reason to think of his condition as anything other than the result of sin.  So he must have spent his days going over all of his past actions, looking for the sin that led to his condition.  It would probably behoove all of us to make a fearless moral inventory from time to time, but every day, and without hope of redemption?

Moved with pity (anger), Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose.  Be made clean!

I put the “anger” in parenthesis because some of the ancient authorities read anger rather than pity.  Anger might be a more interesting possibility here, because it could be directed at several things, whereas pity probably only means pity for the man’s plight.  Jesus’ anger could be directed at the whole system of religious purity that would leave this man an outcast – but that reading is complicated by the following verses.  His anger could be a general anger at the forces of disease and illness – certainly an anger that anyone who has been ill or seen a loved one fall seriously ill can understand.  His anger could be directed at the man himself.  If I was the man, and saw Jesus angry, I would assume that the anger was directed at me.  What an odd encounter, then, to come begging on your knees and be met with anger.  In that instance, the man must have thought that he was doomed.  He must have seen himself as a worse outcast than a demonic.  Jesus was angry at him for daring to approach, for bringing his uncleanliness into the sphere of the clean.  How shocking Jesus’ next words must have sounded, then.  “I do choose.  Be made clean!”  And maybe that’s part of the point.  We go along with our little uncleanlinesses, hiding and festering within us, and we’re afraid that when we expose them to the light, we will be met by a priest who will carefully examine us and send us out into an isolated life as outcasts.  But when we realize how deeply we’re forgiven, it comes as a complete shock.  I see the man’s eyes widening, there in the dust of the road.  He realizes that the anger is aimed, not at him, but at the world around him, which has shriveled him in this way.
Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.
This, of course, is not just a story about a person being restored to religious or even existential cleanliness.  It’s a story about a man’s sores actually clearing up and disappearing.  All of this talk about isolation and being outcast can lessen the fact that this is a miracle story, with a physical healing.  It’s easier to talk about this story in an existential way – to say that we all have our hidden leprosies, our little portion of death that we carry around with us, which would make us outcast if people knew about it.  But the meat of the story isn’t existential.  It’s physical.  The man is physically made well.
After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
In healing the man, Jesus did not act outside of the regular norms of Judaism.  This isn’t a story about Jesus sticking it to the priests.  His anger may have been directed at the system of religious purity, but if so, why would he bother engaging with that system by sending the man back to it.  Maybe he does so for the man’s sake.  The man is still a Jew, in a Jewish world, and he’ll need to follow the rules and proscriptions to be accepted back into the company of his fellow Jews.  But let me proffer another idea.  As I said, Jesus’ anger may have been directed at the world of sickness and disease in general.  If that’s the case, then the priests of the temple are his colleagues when it comes to encountering that world of sickness and disease.  The purity laws weren’t arbitrary.  If you read Leviticus 13, you see how careful it is.  The system for diagnosing leprosy gave a lot of opportunities for the leprosy to go away or start to get better.  Turning someone into an outcast was a last resort.  And it wasn’t done out of cruelty.  It may have been cruel to the individual who was made outcast, but it was meant to protect the whole community from dangerous diseases, and in some cases it probably did.  Hansen’s disease (what we know as leprosy) came from China, and it doesn’t show up in fossil records in the west until the second century B.C.  Even after that early evidence, it’s very hard to find other evidence of the disease until the fourth century A.D. (as detailed in Robert Ian Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250, p. 44).  So we can say that the priests’ system, and other ancient systems of dealing with potentially communicable diseases, worked very well.  This is why I think it makes more sense to think of Jesus’ anger as directed at disease in general, and to assume that when he wants the leprous man to go to the priest, he is in earnest.  It’s not just a favor to the man.  It’s a sign to the whole community that they can rest from their fears, that the death and disease that Jesus hates has been stopped in this one instance.
It is also a message to the priests.  Jesus tells the man to tell no one what has happened to him, because he can imagine word getting to the priests and the priests feeling threatened by Jesus’ ministry (as, in fact, happens).  But this isn’t what Jesus wants.  He wants the priests to think of him as a friend and a helper in their work.  He sends the man as a message, a way of telling the priests that they’re not alone as they struggle with death and disease and the grinding worries of a whole society.
But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

Jesus’ political gesture of goodwill towards the priests doesn’t work.  The man’s enthusiasm is such that he runs rampant.  Which brings us back to the character of this formerly leprous man.  He isn’t attuned to Jesus’ delicate negotiations with the priests.  He doesn’t understand that Jesus wants him to go the priests because this will render Jesus himself less of a threat in their eyes.  And maybe he has residual resentment and anger towards the priests, who made him an outcast in the first place.  So he goes running all over town, spreading the word.  It’s joyful, but was it right?  What did this man think when he heard that Jesus had been arrested, and then crucified?  Maybe it built further resentment towards the priests in his soul.  Maybe it angered and enraged him.  But if so, he would end up as much of an outcast as before, an outcast by choice, someone who wanted nothing to do with the priests or the whole religious system.  I doubt he would ever understand his own culpability in this process of alienation. Jesus wants him to go to the priests so this process of alienation can be nipped in the bud.

As we come to know Jesus, as we feel ourselves freed of our ills and ailments and restored to ourselves, it is easy to give in to temptation in the way that the formerly leprous man did.  Experiencing a new reality, we denigrate our pasts.  It never occurs to us that Jesus wants us to bring words of comfort to our old reality, as well.  Jesus wants us reconciled with our pasts, and the world around us.  Whatever our own priests are – those seemingly officious, cautious, careful forces that led in some way to our isolation – he wants us to start up a conversation with them, so that we can all be redeemed.

The Demoniac at the Synagogue in Capernaum

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

Mark 1:21-28

It’s surprising that the demoniac was in the synagogue at all.  Here’s a quintessentially impure person in the middle of a Jewish worship service where, I assume, much of the talk was about purity.  After Jesus teaches in the synagogue, the people there express surprise that his preaching is not like the preaching of the temple scribes, which gives some merit to my assumption.  What would temple scribes be preaching about other than the law and how to uphold it?  And since so much of the law has to do with purity, I imagine the people of Capernaum sitting through sermon after sermon about how to be pure.  This must have been a deadly bore.  More than that, it was ineffective.  We know nothing about the demoniac, except that he hasn’t been shunned from the synagogue and no one seems very surprised to find him there.  So maybe he’s a regular attender.  He comes in and sits and listens to long talks about purity, and maybe nods his head and goes away.  But how could this be if the demon in him was raging and fulminating as other demons do in Mark’s gospel.  He’s not exactly living among the tombs and thrashing himself with chains.  He’s just an ordinary guy.  Which leads me to the conclusion that he doesn’t know that he has a demon inside of him.  He doesn’t know it until Jesus starts to speak.

There are all sorts of places to go with this insight.  Could it be that many of us are carrying around our own demonic defenses and intentions, like hidden cancers?  Why is it that the demon only unveils itself when Jesus comes near?  Is this unveiling a response to Jesus’s person, or his message?  If it’s a response to his person, then we can tell a story about people who feel a hidden evil rise up within them when they come into contact with the very good.  Surely this is a common human experience, to encounter the good and feel judged by it and therefore to attack and ridicule it.  Not a very happy insight into our nature, but there nonetheless.  But what if it’s a response to his message?  Mark is unclear about what that message is.  He doesn’t tell us what Jesus says in that synagogue in Capernaum.  The main hint that we get comes earlier in the chapter:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

So Jesus is teaching about the Kingdom of God.  Why would this cause such a reaction in the demoniac?

The best answer to this I could find is in Rodney Werline’s essay “The Experience of Prayer and Resistance to Demonic Powers in the Gospel of Mark,” which can be found in Inquiry Into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity (you can read it on Google Books by clicking here).

According to Werline, ancient jews saw the world as a spiritual battlefield between the demonic and heavenly powers.  The demonic powers could be made manifest in the chaos of the sea at night or in the violence of a Roman soldier in his interactions with an ordinary Jew on the street.  Or they could be made manifest in individuals, like the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum.  All of the brutality of first century Palestinian life, the violence of the Roman occupation, the internecine struggles among different factions of resisters, the closeness of sickness and death, the threat of starvation, and the religious burden of purity laws that didn’t seem to make things any better – all of these pressures could concentrate in one person and speak out as a demonic voice raging from a human mouth.  Our poor demoniac, there in the synagogue, is taken over, infested, by the hatreds and fears of the world that whirl around him.

But like many of us, he’s become accustomed to these hatreds and fears.  They define who he is to himself.  He can’t imagine living without them.  So when Jesus proclaims the coming of the Kingdom of God, he cries out against the very vision of peace and restoration that other people might long for.

Werline’s essay is mostly about prayer.  Prayer as an active force, a spiritual battlefield, where people resist the demonic powers.  We can assume that the demoniac in the synagogue is not very good at prayer.  But the truth is, neither am I.  I’ve never thought of it as a spiritual battlefield before, or a place of resistance.  I’m reading Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters right now, and have just finished the section about the Montgomery bus boycott.  About six months into the boycott, the city brought indictments against all of the boycott leaders.  The leaders first thought to hide when the police came to arrest them.  But, following the advise of Bayard Rustin, they instead marched to the police station to be fingerprinted and make bail.  After this act of confidence and courage, they transformed the nightly mass meetings that had sustained the boycott to that point into services of prayer and thanksgiving.  They used prayer as a way of vanquishing the demonic.

Which leads me to the hermeneutic question: what are the demonic powers in our world today, and how can we, through pray, oppose them?

Jonah

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

In collecting resources for preaching about Jonah, I found the following:

See Jonah Run: Comic Narrative in the Book of Jonah by Beverly Beem.

A very good survey of Jewish midrash surrounding the book of Jonah can be found in A biblical text and its afterlives: the survival of Jonah in western culture by Yvonne Sherwood.

A few questions from the reading – why did God want Nineveh to be spared?  Later in the Bible Nineveh rears its ugly head again as a threat to the Israelites.  The Assyrians, the people whose capital is Nineveh, attack and destroy Israel and Samaria and invade Judah, besieging Jerusalem.  Did God spare Nineveh so that the Assyrians could later be a scourge to the Israelites, or was it a real politick temporary measure in order to deter the Assyrians from attacking Israel during Jonah’s time, or was it that God extended mercy to Nineveh, and like most of us, the city took God up on the offer for a short period of time and then, later, changed its mind.  I know that the last option is the most preach-able, and probably the most coherent, since if God is merciful to Nineveh why wouldn’t God be merciful to Israel and try to stop them from being scourged by the Assyrian whip?  But then again, being a little suspicious of God’s motives is a way of penetrating Jonah’s own psychology, because what is he if not suspicious of God’s motives?

Something in Sherwood suggests another part of Jonah’s motivations – if the evil Ninevites repent and the people of Israel don’t, won’t that make the chosen people look awfully bad?  Jonah is a prophet, which means that he must represent God to the people and the people to God.  In this instance, his interest is in representing the people to God, and he wants them to appear in the best possible light.  But they won’t look very good if the blood-thirty Assyrians start acting all righteous and they don’t.