Jesus Revealing Himself in our Midst
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.”
The season of Epiphany has been all about God revealing himself to his people. In Advent we await the coming King. At Christmastide we stand awestruck as God enters our filth. In Epiphany we see the perfect revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Epiphany drives us to contemplate what it means for Divinity to fully intersect with fallen humanity. Jesus stands wrapped in common cloth with dirt-caked feet on a hill and yet reveals himself to glow brighter than the sun and converse with the prophets. Jesus crosses the surface of the waters like they are streets of glass only to enter a smelly fishing boat full of peasants.
Read more...Cron in Docker with Debian Slim
Recently, I needed to get cron working inside a Docker container running Debian Slim. It’s not difficult once you figure it out, but it did take a bit of research and learning to get everything to work.
First off, Debian Slim is real slim. There’s no cron nor is there a syslog when you want to debug things. Add apt-get install cron and rsyslog in your Dockerfile before you start anything else. With syslog installed, you can tail /var/log/syslog while you’re debugging your cron files, which is incredibly helpful.
Automated Weekly Sermon Podcast
Each Sunday at Church of the Epiphany we record our sermon using someone’s mobile phone. We started doing this back in September and, for the last three months, editing and uploading these sermons to our website has been a fairly manual process. Starting this month, however, with a combination of JustCast, Dropbox, Hazel, Squarespace, and Auphonic I’ve been able to mosty automate the process.
1. Download & Rename
Each week shortly after worship, Fr. Justin e-mails me the audio recording of his sermon from his phone. His Android phone defaults to .m4a for audio, so I’ve setup a simple Hazel rule to monitor my download folder for that extension so the file is quickly renamed and moved off to my external archive drive.
Seeking a Charitable Orthodoxy
Knowing and owning one’s theological lens is a good thing in pastoral ministry. Theological lenses, however, become problematic in chaplaincy and other ecumenical contexts. In my time as a chaplain at a nursing home and now in a jail, I have personally struggled with how to minister to those with differing theologies from mine while maintaining and affirming my own Anglican commitments. How can I “conform to the Doctrine, Discipline and Worship of Christ as this Church has received them” as the ordinal directs while also ministering within a non-Anglican context?1 How can I maintain the received theologies of the Catholic faith on ecclesiology, sacraments, and ordained ministry — which I wholeheartedly believe to be true and right — while also affirming the work of the Holy Spirit all around me?
Read more...Word to Markdown Conversion with Footnotes
Many of the essays on this site start their life in Microsoft Word or Scrivener. Early on, I would have to convert essays to Markdown for posting manually. This generally worked okay, but I lost my footnotes. I tried Word to Markdown for a brief while, but it didn’t work entirely as I’d like it to. Enter Pandoc. I’ve been using Pandoc to convert all of my Word documents — including footnotes — for the last two years. I’ve been delighted with the results.
Read more...Practical Guidance for Anglicans in Ecumenical Eucharistic Worship
This is part four of a four part project. The final project is here.
The genesis of this project starts with my confusion and unease communing at a Disciples of Christ led ecumenical Eucharist service inside a jail each week. Starting with the Chicago statement of Protestant Episcopal Church in 1886 and culminating with the great ecumenical work Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry coming out of Lima in 1984, much academic and theological work has been done within and outside the Anglican Christianity on the path towards visible unity in the Church. Unfortunately, outside of the guidance provided on intercommunion at Lambeth 1930 and the Intercommunion To-day coming out of the Archbishops’ Commission on Intercommunion of the Church of England very little clear, pragmatic direction has been given to laity and clergy.
Read more...Plene Esse, the Holy Spirit, & Intercommunion
This is part three of a four part project. The final project is here.
“For a long time the Conference on Faith and Order shied away from and avoided directly addressing this problem [ecumenical Eucharist]. It was the type of issue so loaded with emotional dynamite, that we feared it might with the first little thrust set off a spark that would explode our entire movement into pieces.” Dr. Leonard Hodgson.1
Read more...
Charitable Apostolicity
This is part two of a four part project. The final project is here.
As a chaplain, I find myself worshiping and serving during the week more often in contexts outside of my own tradition than I do within. Weekly I face the question of whether a non-catholic1 minister’s orders and, thus, the sacraments she or he presides over are valid — partially or otherwise. At the onset of this project, I described my main concern as finding a path towards a generous orthodoxy. A generous orthodoxy is a path that allows me to maintain my Anglican ecclesiology and theology in the context of the non-Anglican ministries I find myself a part of. Specifically, I sought to find a way of resolving my personal theological conflict with the sacramental validity of the ministers and chaplains I work alongside.
Read more...Seeking a Charitable Orthodoxy (Definition)
This is part one of a four part project. The final project is here.
My journey through Vanderbilt Divinity School (VDS) has been a difficult one. Deep within the inner workings of progressive Christian theology and politics, I quickly learned that traditional liberal values of tolerance, free speech, free thought, and civil debate were more easily affirmed — if even affirmed — than lived. In the words and deeds of many of those around me, it was made clear that there was little space for certain theological questions or viewpoints. In the early semesters of VDS there were many times I almost left. My sense of call and deep financial investment, however, kept me pressing forward.
Read more...Why Worship with a Book of Common Prayer?
The English Church, her descendants, and her colonial heirs worship with a common book of prayer for a few historical and theological reasons. It might come as a surprise to many North American Christians, but liturgical worship is by far the norm in contemporary Christianity and, prior to the Reformation, was the universal form of worship in the Church. Before the upheaval of the Reformation, East, West, Ethiopian, Syriac, and more all worshiped God using liturgies attributed to the saints and apostles.
Read more...The Bread of Life II (John 6:35, 41-51)
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
Last week we talked about Jesus being the bread of life. Jesus was trying to show those around him that they were working for the favor of others. The hole they felt — the sense of not belonging — could only be permanently filled by God’s love, the bread of life. This week, Jesus continues to explain to us what it means for him to be the bread of life. Like Jesus, I think we need to clarify and establish a few things before we can get into the meat of this.
Read more...The Bread of Life (John 6:24-35)
Let us pray, Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
On Sunday my priest preached a sermon from Ephesians 4 and something from that sermon has sat with me all week. I’d like to share it with you in the context of today’s gospel reading from St. John.
Ephesians 4 is all about unity in the Body of Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all…” St. Paul here is describing the perfect community of the Kingdom of God we are all called to live into in our baptism.
Read more...Beloved Sons Through Jesus Christ
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
It is easy sometimes to forget who — or even whose — we are. The messaging we get from those around us in society and sometimes even our families and friends is a constant stream of not being enough. We’re never cool enough, rich enough, attractive enough, smart enough, good enough, worth enough — the list goes on and on. It would seem we never have enough to merit attention.
Read more...East Nashville Antenna Television Update
Almost a year ago I blogged about my new antenna set-up here in East Nashville. All in all, I’m still happy with my decision to drop cable and switch to antenna and streaming services. The Tivo Rovio OTA has proven to be money well spent. The Tivo is extremely easy to use and seamlessly binds OTA recordings with Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. Because the Tivo supports Plex, I’ve also converted an old Mac Mini into a Plex server. Our TiVo-centered over the air setup is better than cable ever was!
Read more...Sea Walls: haud responsalis sed peccator
Recently I saw a call for more people in enterprise IT to start blogging. Following that call, I’ll offer some reflections.
The foundation of a healthy IT culture in the enterprise starts with IT leadership and, especially, front-line IT management focusing on building a great working environment for developers. If developers are overextended, overworked, are not able to innovate, and are not given the dedicated time needed to solve problems, there is no hope for the transformation of corporate IT.
Read more...
