one curse

During our years in theological seminary, one curse or course the bishops hex upon us as part of our process toward ordination is Clinical Pastoral Education. I think Fr Steve has talked about it before, and I may have too.

Clinical Pastoral Education: CPE for short. For many seminarians it’s a full time high stress nightmare that holds on to you, even shows up in your dreams, for years to come.

Generally, your CPE is the three-month summer vacation after your first year in seminary and before your second year - - working as a chaplain intern in a hospital. There are CPE Units in prisons, as prison chaplain intern, but most are hospitals, where, under a professional and licensed CPE Supervisor, you are one of a six-person team of chaplain interns. And it’s made into a stab in the back eternity of daily vicious criticism by your teammates - - critiquing each other’s performance as chaplain in sensitive and extremely high pressure situations of human life.

My CPE was at Hershey Medical Center, a teaching hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

The other chaplain interns in our six member unit were already ordained: two young men were Lutheran pastors; a woman ordained United Methodist pastor whose husband was Jewish; a young UMC pastor in his first assignment as what we would call a transitional deacon; a Jewish rabbi; and me, the one Episcopalian. 

First thing every morning, each of us chaplain interns assembled in the chaplain’s office to be given our individual assignments for the day: six or ten 3x5 cards with the room number and name of each patient we were to call on, making hospital chaplain visits that morning. We had the toughest medical cases imaginable, and frequent involvement with the patient’s family - - often situations that would tear your heart out, or humiliate you. 

The 3x5 card was to make notes on. After each visit and on your way to your next call, you would stop and make notes of the details of your visit: the situation, your words and actions, who was there, patient, nurses, doctors, patient’s family or friends. Because in the CPE team meeting every afternoon, you had to describe each hospital visit, sometimes verbatim, with an unforgiving and extremely critical gathering of your CPE colleagues and supervisor. 

We were all ministers, supposedly religious, so every afternoon critique session began with a Devotional that was led by a CPE team colleague: prayer, a Bible passage like one of this morning’s lectionary readings - - and then whoever led that day’s Devotional commented on the reading. Then during the long afternoon discussion that followed, your team members would rip you to shreds, not only for the stupid things you had said and done in your hospital room visits to patients that morning; but, if you had led the opening Devotional, it was open season on you for the Bible reading you had chosen and for your comments and your prayer. It may seem brutal (and it was, and it was meant to be), but it was training and exposure to the harsh situations and the anger, bitterness, ingratitude, and rudeness that every one of us encounters in ordained ministry. More than once in CPE, I was run out of the hospital room by a furious and brokenhearted family member following me down the hall cursing me and my God.

One day, the team member who was leading the Devotional was the young Methodist pastor. He had chosen a Gospel reading that included Jesus and Pharisees and Sadducees and the Summary of the Law (you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself). And then in his comments, he talked about the evil Pharisees and Sadducees with their constant criticism of Jesus, and he praised Jesus for giving us the Summary of the Law.

EXPLODING with Fury without waiting for him to finish, Rabbi Nason lit into him full force: Jesus did NOT give the Law love God, that’s Deuteronomy 6, Shema, the most ancient law and prayer of Judaism. And Love thy neighbor is Leviticus 19, Jesus did NOT bring that, the Lord gave that to Moses. 

The rabbi was serious, and angry. While the astonished young Methodist was wide mouthed sputtering and apologizing “Oh, I didn’t know that” (he ought have known, what the hell seminary did he go to, or was he dozing in OT class that day), Rabbi Nason blasted him with both barrels for his condemnation of Pharisees and Sadducees: Pharisees were devout holy men of Israel who devoted their lives to scrupulously carrying out acts of God’s law, not to "save themselves", but both to honor God and on behalf of all other Jewish people whose lives as parents and family, and occupations as workers in the community, kept them too busy to keep the more than six hundred Laws of Torah. The Pharisees kept these intricate and impossibly numerous laws for love of God, and to keep God’s law literally, and in gratitude for God’s giving the Law to Israel as his chosen people, and for love of Israel, and for love of God’s people the Jews. The Pharisees were NOT the evil that Christians believed from reading the gospels, they were Holy men of Israel. 

As for the Sadducees (who star in today’s gospel reading): Rabbi Nason said they were educated upper class Jews who did religious and administrative work, such as sacrifices and business management of the Temple, which was a building and institution as large as a city (as today the Vatican, Vatican City) with their own laws and their own administration and their own banking system and their own police, and so forth.

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And yes, it was an ongoing difference that Pharisees believed in resurrection into an after-life, while the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead and life after death. And so in today’s gospel story, the Sadducees’ confrontation with Jesus was their sarcastic exaggeration to the absurd of how life after death might work: whose wife she is and which of seven husbands gets to sleep with her, (and also, who is Paterfamilias, Head of the Family, now that grandpa is alive again up there in heaven, and his grandpa and his grandpa and his grandpa). But instead of playing into their game of sarcasm and ridicule, Jesus shuts them down by patiently explaining “You don’t understand. It’s not Marriage & Family all over again, we’ll be like angels”. And they went quiet.

Maybe you’ve thought and wondered about the afterlife. Sometimes, maybe more at this age, I contemplate the concluding line of our Nicene Creed, “We believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”, What’s that all about?! Our opening Collect for the Day says Jesus "came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life". And if, as a burial office prayer says, there’s “the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love” (BCP481), sure, I want that. But I want it with no family of origin issues, no parental authority or responsibility. In heaven I do not want my father telling me what to do, as he tried up until the week he died and I was 57 years old! I do not want a heaven where I’m courting again and Linda’s mother comes tearing out of her bedroom after midnight and down the hall shouting, “Linda, for the last time: come to bed and tell Carroll to go home.” 

It won’t be like that in heaven. Jesus says we’ll be like angels. I don’t know what angels are like or what angels do, but I like it, and I’m standing on the promises.

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Sermon or homily preached in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida on Sunday, 10 November 2019. The Rev Tom Weller. Proper 27 Year C, Luke 20:27-38: some Sadducees ask Jesus about the afterlife. 

Luke 20:27-38

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."


Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."

 39 Then some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” 40 For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

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Art pinched online. Spider web: Michael Podger. Clipart: artist as signed/printed. Apologies, no offense intended: I will remove the art if asked to do so. 

And why the lectionary framers left vss 39 & 40 out of today's gospel reading, I have no idea. Well, maybe ...

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