A Missional Kingdom (Sermon)

“A Missional Kingdom”

John 18:33-38a

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/22/15

         Folks who spend more time with John’s gospel than I do are not of one mind about Pilate’s mind. Is he a tragic-comic figure, hustling anxiously back and forth, wavering between the rabid crowd outside and the calm, inscrutable Jesus inside? Would he really prefer let Jesus go?

         Or is Pilate a devious despot, manipulating emotions in order to get what he wants while making the masses think they are getting what they want?

         Regardless of Pilate’s intentions, John wants to make it clear that the Roman governor is outmatched. With the wisdom of a serpent and the innocence of a dove (Matthew 10:16), Jesus controls this situation.

         Why do your own people want you dead? Pilate asks. Are you some kind of king?

         “If you say so,” answers Jesus. 

         How frustrating is that? It is like Moses standing at the burning bush and asking for some name to drop when he confronts Pharaoh.

         ‘Just tell them that I AM WHO I AM sent you,’ says Yahweh.

         I imagine Moses thinking, ‘Gee. Thanks. That’s really gonna spook the old boy, isn’t it?’

         Pilate asks a direct question, and when Jesus could claim and proclaim his Lordship, he gets all mysterious. How does that help him? How does that further the work of his kingdom?

         The very idea of a kingdom creates problems. When I hear the word king, iconic images come to mind – over-the-top displays of power and wealth, castles, feasts, robes, and such. And these things were defended not just by armies of knights but by the principle of the divine right of kings, as well. Many believed that kings held their offices by God’s decree and with God’s blessing. So, they could do no wrong. Power funded by fear can keep even large groups of people in check – at least for a time.

         Maybe that is the truth Pilate does not want to hear. A new kind of king, one who leads by grace, one who not only has but who consistently leads with a heart for the people governed, will, in the long run, have far greater power than a king who leads by threat of violence. I think this truth points to the eternal heart of our humanity. Truth grounded in creative Love is the kind of truth on which sustainable, holy community depends. And for Caesar, Pharaoh, and other violence-dependent rulers, such truth escapes understanding.

         Jesus understands it, though. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he says. If it were, he adds, “my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.”

         Jesus’ kingdom cannot be established and maintained through the means of worldly kingdoms – through sword, and shield, rifle and bomb, pride and fear. Indeed, trying to force Jesus’ kingdom on anyone inevitably destroys their desire to enter it. One enters Jesus’ kingdom, the here-and-now kingdom of God, by intentionally of living for the well-being of neighbor and earth.

         Kingdom living is a day-to-day thing, moment-to-moment even. We can live in Love for God’s creation one minute and cast stones at a neighbor the next. That is the challenge and the beauty of the Kingdom: It is not subject to our whims. We cannot rule it or change it. We can only live in it or outside it. And all of us constantly slip in and out of it. And even when we have been out of it for some time, it is always as close as our next act of compassion toward another.

         Jesus began his ministry where he is now ending it – with a proclamation of and an invitation to the kingdom of God. After his baptism and trials in the wilderness, Jesus reappears preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

         Turn, he says, and see your neighbor and the earth through my eyes. See through the eyes of fear-shattering Love, and you will live a different life, because you will inhabit an altogether different place. It is right here. It is within you, within the people around you, and within the good earth itself.

         A small group of us are reading Brian McLaren’s book, A Generous Orthodoxy. In the early chapters of the book McLaren separates himself from every mode of Christianity that accommodates itself to Caesar. Last Sunday night we looked at the first chapter of McLaren’s positive, Why I Am… chapters. It is entitled, “Why I Am Missional.” All of us found ideas in that chapter that excited us. To me, the most compelling sentence in that chapter, and in the book so far, comes from one of McLaren mentors, whom he does not name. This person defines “missional” this way: “Remember, in a pluralistic world, a religion is valued based on the benefit it brings to its nonadherents.”¹

         Abraham is called to a dynamically missional life. God says to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:1-3)

         Inasmuch as God’s creatures, wherever and whoever we are, regardless of the particulars of doctrine, strive to live as blessings on the rest of the creation, we inhabit and reveal the kingdom of God. This is what it means for us to live under the reign of Christ the King.

         Do you see the irony at play here? While we do not find our true home in any worldly kingdom, finding our home in the kingdom of God does indeed happen in this world. It happens, as we have acknowledged, in our everyday relationships with the creation – relationships in which we choose to live as blessings.

         This Thursday we celebrate Thanksgiving. Giving thanks is only half of recognizing and receiving blessings from God. The other half of full-fledged gratitude is sharing the benefits of God’s goodness with God’s good creation.

         For our Christian proclamation to be whole, for us to experience the full potential of gratitude, for our other-worldly path to ring true in this world, it seems to me that we have to embrace the missional nature of our Christian faith and community. A missional church lives for the sake of others and the earth. And to live missionally is to live under the gracious, trustworthy, eternal Reign of Christ.

¹A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, p. 121.

Endings and Beginnings (Sermon)

“Endings and Beginnings”

Mark 13:1-8

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/15/15

         The Jerusalem temple makes a lasting impression on an impressionable disciple. With a kind of quaint, Gomer Pyle innocence, he says, ‘Gaw-lee, Jesus. Just look at all them big ol’ rocks, and them big ol’ buildin’s!’

         ‘Bless your heart,’ says Jesus. ‘Yeah, they’re big all right, but enjoy them while you can. They won’t last forever.’

         Mark, like Luke, precedes Jesus’ teaching about the destruction of the temple with the story of the widow’s two-cent gift to the temple. I feel a deep disconnect at work in the pairing of these stories. In one breath Jesus commends a widow for her financial sacrifice, and in the next breath he says that the temple’s days are numbered. The woman’s tiny gift toward that large but condemned budget seems indefensible. Why doesn’t Jesus just slip up to the woman and say quietly, ‘Ma’am, keep your money. You’ll need it more than the temple will.’

         Shortly after Jesus reveals the stunning news about the fall of the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew come to Jesus in private and ask when all of this will happen. And Jesus opens up about would-be messiahs, about wars and military posturing, about tensions between nations, and about earthquakes and famines.

         I do not know about you, but had I been with those disciples and heard Jesus’ predictions, I would have been thoroughly underwhelmed. Think about it, all Jesus does is to describe life on planet earth as it has pretty much always been. When has the world ever been free of misguided prophets claiming divine authority? When has the world ever known even a day without war and international tension? When has the world ever had even a moment when someone somewhere was not experiencing some sort of devastating storm, drought, or seismic upheaval?

         Doomsdayers, and particularly Christian doomsdayers (“Christian doomsdayers” – shouldn’t that be an oxymoron for resurrection people?) thrive on predictions of utter and final destruction. I can speak only for myself, but if I were to preach such things, I would be ascribing to God my own shallow fears and judgments. I would be confessing my utter and final lack of faith in God to redeem the creation. Most insidiously, I would be trying, with all my terrified might, to take as many people down with me as I could.

         Jesus has a little surprise in store. After he predicts the fall of the temple, and after he speaks of “wars and rumors of wars,” Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”

         That subtle phrase sits in a grim shadow. But it sits there as a kind of ember, and Jesus is the ruach, the pneuma, the Holy Spirit of God. His life, his words and actions, are the very Breath of God on that smoldering, two-cent ember of hope.

         What gives a poor widow and God’s disenfranchised Messiah faith to give their all to an institution and, indeed, to a creation that appear on the verge of implosion? Trusting that an ending is simply a God-initiated beginning, and then living that trust, takes spirited and creative vision. It takes determined optimism. It requires us to join in the fearless confession of Paul who says, “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 2:17b)

         Identifying and moving toward God’s new thing throws us into the very birthpang-turmoil Jesus portends. It awakens in us the awareness that the “wars and rumors of wars” themselves are not our first concern. When we turn heart, soul, mind, and strength toward the root causes of all the threatening and frightening realities around us, what appear to be signs of catastrophic endings have the potential to become birthpangs of a new and unimagined future.

         Fear usually feels like a sure thing, but it is the sterile delivery room of reasonable despair, and of every selfish idolatry.

         Faith is the stable, the compost-rich barn of God’s new creation.

         Jesus demonstrates perfect trust in God. And it seems to me that he trusts God to be a verb rather than some static, bearded, white-robed noun. I think it healthier for us to imagine God as more than a “Being,” more than simply the “One” who oversees all the comings and goings of fresh and constructive change. I think we get a truer sense of God by beholding God as the very energy behind, before, and within all things. God is the very activity of creation and re-creation at work in the universe.

         As creatures we will never really understand that Energy and Activity. We cannot “harness” it, not even for good. What understanding we gain, we gain of ourselves – of the God-work within us. What good we do, we do for our neighbors and for the earth. But as we deepen in self-understanding, and as we tend to and build up our neighbors, we begin to realize that we are in relationship with so much more than meets the eye. We are in dynamic relationship with that creative Energy and mysterious Activity we call God.

         “God is love,” says First John (1John 4:8b) God is not a stagnant thing. God is the flow of the river, the rush of the wind, the sound of the laugh, the fall of the tear.

         In his essay, “Another Turn of the Crank,” Wendell Berry writes, “I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe,” says Berry, “that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement…with God.”¹

         Love allows even the holiest institutions to crumble like sand castles at high tide. But they fall because their familiar, comfortable ways, as sound and as constructive as they have been, now do more to conceal than to reveal a new, emerging God-work.

         Marianne and I both have wonderful families whom we enjoy. And as happens in all families, the parents around whom we have revolved for more than a half-century are now beginning to revolve around our siblings and us. The strong and gracious gravity by which they have held us is shifting into our hands. The new thing happening in our lives has happened for eons, of course. And in the shift itself, in the fall of the old and the rise of the new – that is where we dance the dance of gratitude, and grief, and awestruck hope.

         God is not simply in that dance. God is that dance.

         Love is most nearly itself, writes T.S. Eliot,

         When here and now cease to matter.

         Old men ought to be explorers

         Here or there does not matter

         We must be still and still moving

         Into another intensity

         For a further union, a deeper communion

         Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

         The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

         Of the petrel and the porpoise.

                  In my end is my beginning.²

¹http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=e3b49ff9-9ba0-4b63-8716-d78c8e3c02db&c=c98d6b50-eefa-11e3-853a-d4ae52754b78&ch=ca496850-eefa-11e3-8596-d4ae52754b78

²These are the closing lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets (II, 5); http://www.philoctetes.org/documents/Eliot%20Poems.pdf

Hannah's Prayer (Sermon)

“Hannah’s Prayer”

1 Samuel 1:1-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

11/8/15

         Some years ago I listened to an iconographer – a painter of religious icons – talk about his art. The most interesting thing I learned was that iconographers do not pick their own subjects. They have a very specific canon of images. These artists simply create new expressions of the ancient visual texts. One of the most popular icons to artists and beholders alike is The Madonna and Child.

         As with any work of art, what one sees and experiences while viewing a religious icon is purely subjective. But a visual representation of the gaze between mother and child can take us where words cannot. To me, the vortex of Love, wonder, gratitude, and hope that surrounds so many mothers and newborns creates its own gravity. In the meeting of their eyes, the rest of us have the opportunity to get pulled into the love-at-first-sight experience of God looking upon the shimmering stillness of a new creation and saying, ‘Oh, this is good.’

         Many theologians, Christian and otherwise, regard the creation as God’s most personal self-revelation. This is certainly the view within the ancient Celtic tradition. Through the centuries, a host of thinkers, writers, and mystics have made similar associations. Few have been as direct as Julian of Norwich who, after years of prayer, service and ecstatic visions came to the conclusion that the creation is not simply made by God, [but] made of God.

         When human beings create, they participate in the divine act of becoming a fully God-imaged creatures. And the desire to create can be understood as God within us seeking relationship, seeking to be known, loved, and shared. Acting on that desire and creating something new – a painting, a garden, music, children, laughter, community, pound cake (there are as many ways to create as there are people) – is to open oneself up to exciting transformation and terrifying vulnerability. To create something that will have a life of its own, something we will freely turn loose of for the sake of the creation, this is the excruciating euphoria of God’s incarnation in Jesus. And in her heart of hearts, this is the experience Hannah desires.

         Hannah is married to Elkanah. He is a nice guy. He is stable, dependable, church-going. He keeps his grass mowed, pays his bills, tithes, and drives the kids to soccer practice and swimming lessons when Mom cannot. The story tells us very little about Elkanah, but he seems creative enough, even if in a rather artificially-flavored-vanilla kind of way.

         Peninnah, Hannah’s wife-in-law, has the capacity for physiological creativity. But because Elkanah loves Hannah, Peninnah treats her children like trophies on a shelf. She rubs Hannah’s nose in them. Personifying selfishness, and congested by envy, Peninnah may never even desire the kind of relationship with her children that creates transforming blessing for everyone. She may never learn to live gratefully and generously.

         Hannah is different. Her barrenness becomes openness, openness to a fullness that Elkanah’s second helpings cannot fill, and to a hope that Peninnah’s cruelty cannot extinguish.

         “Lord of hosts,” she prays, ‘if you’ll give me a son, he will be yours. Let me give birth to him. Let me nurse him. Let the two of us gaze into each other’s eyes. That’s all I want. I want my life changed by a child, and when he’s old enough, I’ll turn him loose. He’ll be yours.’

         Hannah moves us with her prayer. The creation process includes, and perhaps necessarily so, the anguish of emptiness. Like a painter staring at a blank canvas, like a gardener standing over unbroken ground, Hannah bargains with the primordial source of the very desire to create. She wrestles with the teeming emptiness inside her.

         One problem with tapping that deeply into our creativity is that some folks may think we are completely nuts, or at least under the influence of something. As a priest, Eli should know better, but when he sees Hannah on the ground, lip-synching to some inaudible song, he sneers at her.

         ‘Sober up,’ he says. ‘You look pitiful.’

         ‘I’m not drunk,’ says Hannah. ‘I’m down here duking it out with Yahweh. Like Jacob at the Jabbok. So bless me or leave me alone.’

         A stunned Eli says, ‘Peace be with you. Bless your heart…and the rest of you, as well.’

         I have never met a mom who would give up her child as Hannah does. But every parent worth their salt knows that no child finally belongs to them any more than they want to belong to their parents. All human beings need to be raised, of course. We must be loved and cared for, educated and empowered. And we must be appropriately disciplined and affirmed.

         But first, we must be gazed upon in speechless, grateful awe.

         Hannah’s story does not promise that God will answer all of our prayers in happy accord with all of our wants. Her story does give us courage to pray as ferociously as a psalmist, to wrestle the angels like Jacob, and to implore God as Jesus does in his Thursday night garden. Hannah dares us to discover our fullness by plumbing the depths of our emptiness. And through such life-altering labor we often deliver into the world some new expression of God’s presence, Love, and purpose for all creation.

         A human being is a stunning, sacred, God-revealing work of art. You are such a work of art. So are the people next to you. So is the candidate you cannot stomach, and the terrorist you fear – all of us are stunning, sacred, God-revealing works of art. And as co-creators with God, we are capable of adding to the beauty and the wonder of God’s creation in some way, even if only by recognizing, calling attention to, and giving thanks for all of the feral beauty that still shines through the smog of human idolatries.

         I think the Church’s legacy of evangelism has, in many ways, borne greater witness to idols than to God. We have elevated conformity to static doctrines above a dynamic relationship with a living God. In so doing, the Church has shifted its gaze from the vortex of Love, wonder, gratitude, and hope to sterilizing screens of selfishness, fear, and despair.

         This is a somewhat simple thing, but look at these prayer shawls.*

         I have a stack of them in my study. I take them to folks who are in the hospital or confined to home. The knitters and quilters who create these shawls occasionally ask for help in purchasing materials, but they do not ask to be paid. God only knows how many years all their collective minutes of labor would make. Behind and within these shawls live the artists’ desires – desires for people who are sick, grieving, and lonely to remember that they are remembered. They want them to feel the warm, embracing love of this congregation.

         But first, these Hannahs gather around their new creations, and gaze upon them. They hold them in their hands and pray over them.

         Then they turn them loose – for the sake of others.

*Regretably, the pictures of the prayer shawls would not load onto blog.
**For a little more on the holy gaze, and for a couple of references, see Fr. Richard Rohr’s mediation from August 10, 2014: http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Mirroring.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=RQDkCmXdGwQ

Here and Now (Newsletter)

         Looking back, most of my growing-up Thanksgivings seemed pretty much the same. There was, however, the time that Dad’s schedule forced us, at the last moment, to cancel our usual trip to Montgomery, AL. We stayed in Augusta. Mom broiled some steak. I’m not complaining about steak, but we missed Grandmother’s turkey and dressing, her mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans (with fatback), apple pie, and poppy seed cake.

We didn’t get to go feral with our Montgomery cousins, either. We didn’t climb the sprawling pecan tree in my grandparents’ back yard. We didn’t step back in time by sifting through treasures in Granddaddy’s shed – his old Black&Decker electric mowers, thumb-pump oil cans, ancient leather gloves coarse and stiff as tree bark, and wooden tool boxes with handles smoother than the armrests of his rocking chair.

Our family Thanksgivings have changed significantly in recent years. I give thanks for change, though. Nostalgia tends to gloss over the painful realities of yesteryear. It would have us judge the past as idyllic and the future as hellish nightmare. Either way we fall into despair, and despair prevents us from engaging the Here and Now with gratitude and Love. And Here and Now is where creation-relevant human beings inhabit the Kingdom of God.

It seems to me that a truly memorable Thanksgiving involves acknowledging that we live, and move, and have our being in the relentless progress of time. Our lives become touchstones of a past we can only interpret and a future we can only imagine. To live gratefully and hopefully, we live Here and Now, generously present to each other, and fully aware of the world in all of its withering anguish and restoring beauty.

So give thanks. And may you find reason to live gratefully and hopefully each day of your precious, gifted, fleeting lives.

Peace,

         Allen

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past.

         You sweep them away;

         they are like a dream,

         like grass that is renewed in the morning;

         in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;

         in the evening it fades and withers.

The days of our life are seventy years,

or perhaps eighty,

if we are strong;

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,

so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

                           (Psalm 90 Selected Verses)

Prophetic Stewardship (Sermon)

“Prophetic Stewardship”

Luke 21:1-4

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

Consecration Sunday: 11/1/15

         Consecration Sunday. I imagine that some pastors like it. I have yet to meet one, though. It feels too much like meddling. We know that not everyone makes a formal pledge, and that that those who do usually prefer to pledge the same way that Jesus urges us to pray: In private. That is not the way of Christian stewardship, though.

         What we do today is a defining act of communal and sacramental faith. One of our role models is a nameless widow who makes a four-verse appearance in Luke and the same in Mark. As a widow in first century Jerusalem, this woman’s presence in the temple stirs the air about as much as a falling leaf. But she wades into the clutter and ruckus of Passover, and whispers her two-cent blessing.

         Giving out of poverty is very different from giving out of abundance. All-too-often, giving out of abundance becomes a conspicuous display, but giving out of poverty is a prophetic act. It expresses a purer sense of gratitude, and a more humble trust in a generous God who says, “my word…shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.” (Isaiah 55:11)

         The widow’s story is thick with irony. Two cents will mean little against the temple’s budget. And if temple leaders are faithful stewards, they will commit a large portion of their resources to caring for people in need. Like widows!

         The story is tragedy, as well. Over time, the religious community has developed a rapacious appetite for wealth and power. Its leaders will collude with worldly power and its violent ways to protect their hold on privilege. So instead of caring for those who are vulnerable, the temple uses its considerable influence to make people feel vulnerable. It wields an angry god in order to exist, rather than existing by the grace of God’s Love, compassion, and justice.

         How very Lukan. In this story, the one whom the community is supposed to protect and care for becomes the one who teaches the teachers about the nature of true gratitude and generosity. Jesus makes an enduring example of a woman who gives all she has to a broken institution, an institution who ignores her.

         ‘Look at this poor widow,’ says Jesus. ‘She gives all she has to the temple in spite of its failures. She offers all she has to the community, not because of their faithfulness to God, but because of God’s faithfulness to us.’

         While the widow gives out of the scarcity of her pocketbook, even more does she give out out of the abundance of her hope. Through some uncommon grace, she sees the presence of holiness in the creation, and in spite of human failures, she can give with prophetic generosity because she does not give up on God.

         Another compelling thing about this story is that Jesus sees his own life reflected in the actions of the widow. Her gift to the temple anticipates Jesus’ gift to the creation.¹ You and I, and our church can all be as selfish, power-hungry, and hurtful to one another as the Pharisees and the temple are to first century Jews. But for them and for us – a broken and beloved humanity – Jesus drops the two cents of his life into the offering plate of time. Knowing that even those closest to him will abandon him, Jesus does not withhold his fullness. He empties himself in praise of God and out of love for God’s creation. And this is the work not only of the cross. His entire life is an act of prophetic stewardship.

         Jesus and the widow invite us to pledge our entire lives to that same prophetic adventure. To live in their grace is to live an “in spite of faith.” In spite of all that is broken about us and about our church, we live and give in such a way as to proclaim God trustworthy and holiness possible. Jesus even declares this “in spite of” poverty to be our true wealth: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he says, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

         The great teacher and preacher Fred Craddock tells a story about his father, a man who saw nothing interesting, much less redeeming about the church. Fred’s mother saw that he and his siblings went to church. Whenever the pastor came to the house, Fred’s father kept him at arm’s length insisting that all the church wanted was more names on the roll and more money in the bank.

“‘Another name and another pledge.’ I guess I heard it a thousand times,” said Craddock.

         “One time he didn’t say it. He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds. They’d taken out his throat, and said, ‘It’s too late.’ They put in a metal tube, and X rays burned him to pieces. I flew in to see him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I looked around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed…And…every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups in the church.

         “He saw me read a card. He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare. If he had not written this line,” says Craddock, “I would not tell you this story. He wrote, ‘In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.’

         “I said, ‘What is your story, Daddy?’

         “And he wrote, ‘I was wrong.’”²

         It didn’t matter how selfishly old man Craddock had reacted against the brokenness of the church. What mattered was how much God loved old man Craddock. In the end, the church managed a prophetic stewardship of Love, and it made a difference. 

         The Session is not asking anyone to respond to all that is right with Jonesborough Presbyterian Church, or to react against all that is not so right about it. We are trying to encourage all of us to live prophetic lives, lives that proclaim the holy “in spite of” of faith.

         Whatever you pledge today, may you pledge it bold, generous, and prophetic hope, to the broken people next to you, to the broken church around you, and to the faithful God within us all.

¹Pete Peery, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol. 4, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. “Homiletical Perspective,” pp.  285-289.

²Craddock Stories, Fred B. Craddock, eds. Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, Chalice Press, St. Louis, MO, 2001. Pg.14.