Blue Cord

We had a traditional Lithuanian Christmas Eve with our neighbors downstairs.  In Lithuania, it is traditional on Christmas Eve to eat twelve dishes, none of which can contain meat or dairy products.  That is difficult for a culture that lives by pork and sour cream.  So we had a lot of fish, mushrooms, and beets.  I don’t know why beets haven’t caught on as a Christmas dish in America.  They are the perfect color for the season.

We also drank the traditional Christmas sludge.   I don’t know what this stuff is made off, but I do know potato starch is one of the main ingredients.  Some berries are in there somewhere.  Overall, this drink has the consistency of reindeer snot and a flavor that is somewhat disturbing.

But we had a great time with our neighbors, who are also our landlords.  They are LCC graduates, and the wife works at LCC as the director of admissions.  They have two children: Elsa (who is a month younger than Emma) and Titus (who is two).  We had a great time after dinner watching home movies and having the kids recite Christmas poems to us in Lithuanian.

Although the prophet Hosea would have had a fit with the synchrotism, an article in the New York Times about Jews celebrating Christmas is a quite enjoyable read. I wonder if this woman worries that Wal-Mart greeters are saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” The sentiments fit nicely with Tyler Williams Merry Kitchmas post.

This past week, two parishes in the Diocese of Virginian voted to leave the Episcopal church because of the issue of homosexuality. Jim West (on his blog of a thousand names) reported this fact and applauded those congregations for being willing to “stand up for what is right against the wrong spirited political correctness of their own denominational authorities.” He goes on to ask:

How can there be “godly union and concord” when one segment of the denomination has abandoned scripture?

Because I agree with Steve Cook that this is indeed a sad day for Episcopalians, I wanted to take the chance to respond to Jim.

The reason that there can be godly union and concord between two sides that disagree is based on Anglican polity, which goes back to the Elizabethan Settlement. Queen Elizabeth inherited an Anglican church that was split between a number of factions, including those who wanted to return the country to the Roman Catholic church. No one agreed on theology. Her solution, simply put, was that the church’s unity was based on its worship, not on its agreement on doctrinal matters. This was the idea championed by Richard Hooker, who is certainly foundational to any understanding of what it means to be Anglican. We are a church that lives and dies by its worship, not by its theology. Our unity consists in the one Lord we serve, not in our ideas about that Lord.

To me, those who are leaving the church over the issue of homosexuality should heed the words of Christ:

“You tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” (Matt 23:23-24)

As Steve has pointed out, there are things that are much more central to the Christian message than homosexuality.

This is not to say that doctrine is unimportant. Far from it! But the doctrines that are central are defined by the historic creeds of the church, not by the pet issue of the day. If the Episcopal church ever abandons the Nicene Creed, I will be at the front of the line to get out or lead the reformation. I have little doubt that Steve would be there as well (although I don’t want to presume to speak for him).

Part of the rhetoric that has made things so difficult in the current debate is that one side consistently accuses the other of abandoning the Scripture. It does not matter how many seminars I give in churches on homosexuality and the Bible. It does not matter how faithful I am to the doctrines of Scripture. It does not matter that I have devoted my life to the study of God’s word. The moment my stance on homosexuality is known, some people immediately say that I and others have abandoned Scripture.

The issue that is dividing the church right now is polity, not theology. Some cannot accept a polity where people who disagree on theology can still work and worship together. If that is the case, then they should join a church that holds to such a polity. There is nothing wrong with such a polity, but it is simply not Anglican.

How can there be godly union and concord between those who do not agree? Simple. The unity of the church is not something that is created by humans through their agreement on doctrine. The unity of the church is a gift of God. God has made us one. Our job is to live into that unity by living and worshiping together, seeking to reify the unity that is ours through the one Lord, Christ Jesus, whom we serve.

This does not mean that we paper over differences. There has been and will continue to be a lively debate within the Anglican Communion. But in true Anglican spirit, we should not cut the Gordian knot by ending debate and going off to be with those with whom we agree. We are a family, and families should not walk away just because they disagree. We need to find a way forward together.

This has not been a good couple of months for our car.

It all started at the beginning of November, when we were involved in an accident. We had just arrived in Vilnius from Kiev by plane. We were driving back to Klaipeda when we stopped at a gas station. As I got out of the car, another car came flying in off the highway, skidded on the snow, and hit our car at high speed. This caused sufficient damage to our car that it had to be in the shop for ten days.

We then took it for inspection, which we have to do once a year. It failed. They gave us a list of things that needed to be fixed. We just got the car back Friday. The bill came to $550. The same day, we received a notice from the missionary board of the Episcopal church saying that we had run out of funds. Apparently, not as many people donated to our work this year.

Today I was going in for a final exam. The car was not working well on propane, as it kept backfiring. So I switched over to gasoline. Whenever our car backfires, it pops out a sponge that blocks a hole in the cover of the air filter. When I got to school, I opened the hood to put to sponge back, I decided that instead of putting the sponge back I would put our the raging fire that was taking up about a third of the engine space.

Apparently, the backfiring had ignited the air filter, which in turn ignited the plastic air filter cover. I put the fire out and went into my office to call my wife. As the phone was ringing at home, I noticed out my window that the car had once again burst into flames. So I had to go back outside and put it out again. This time, it completely burned up the air filter cover, several of the wires in the vicinity, and burned a hole in the battery so that it was leaking acid.

Needless to say, I was a little late for the final exam.

If anyone is interested in supporting a missionary family teaching biblical studies in Lithuania, now would be a really great time to donate. We only have five more months in our three year contract and I would hate to have to cut short our work here. If you would like to support our work, please contact me at kwilson@LCC.lt.

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish a happy 100th birthday to my grandmother, Nora Edna Wilson. I just finished talking to her a few minutes ago and she sounds great. She is looking forward to her birthday celebration at the church in a few hours, when she will be joined by her one surviving son, her grandchildren, her great- grandchildren, and her great-great-grandchildren.

Edna was born in 1906 in Dysartsville, NC, literally in a log cabin. The picture to the right shows her parents with three of their children. Edna is the one on the far left. She grew up without running water or indoor plumbing. When she was fourteen years old, her family loaded everything they had in a cart and moved about 35 miles to Spindale. She took a job as a spinner in the local textile mill, a job she held until she got married at age 23 to Abraham Lincoln Wilson, a.k.a. “Red.”

They moved to Knoxville, TN, where Red took a job as a weaver. Their first son, Eugene, was born there. The picture to the left shows Red, Edna, and Gene. They moved back to Spindale when the plant closed. They lived with Edna’s parents until Boyce was born.They moved to Cramerton, NC, when Boyce was about five months old. They lived there ten years, with Red working in a mill, first as a weaver and then as a loom fixer. Edna also worked in the mill, combing out bad places in the cloth. Because she was the best woman working there, she was asked to do a man’s job when World War II started, but she refused because Red was tired of working third shift and wanted to find a new job. They moved to Shelby, NC, to work in another mill. My father Keith was born while they lived in Shelby.

When Keith was nine months old, they moved to Spindale on Ohio Street, the home she would live in until she was 99 years old. They bought the house and land for $1,200. For a while, Red still worked in Shelby, but of course they had trouble getting gas since this was during World War II. He then got a job at Stonecutter Mill as a loom fixer. The picture to the right shows my father Keith with Edna and Red during this period. Edna did not work from this point until after Red died, when she got a job in the cafeteria at Spindale Elementary School, a job she kept until she was 68 (mandatory retirement was 65, but they did not catch it at the time, so she kept working). Red died of a heart attack at age 52, which means Edna lived longer after he died that she did while they were married.

Edna has been the matriarch of the family since her father died at age 99. Edna was the second oldest of twelve children and the oldest girl. Two of her sisters died before they were two and one died at the age of four. The picture to the left shows her father (second from the left in the front) with his nine adult children. Edna is in the blue dress on the right. Only four of her siblings are still living. She has also outlived two of her sons. My father died in 1997 (in the same room as his father). Gene died a year and a half ago.

She has lived through World War I, World War II (in which her husband served), the Korean War (in which her sons Gene and Boyce served), the Vietnam War (in which her son Keith [my father] served), and both Iraq Wars. When she was born, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii were not states. She has seen the invention of the television, the computer, and the Internet, while television, cars, and airplanes became widespread during her life. She has lived through the Great Depression (the year she got married), the first space flight, the moon landings, and exploratory space craft being sent to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. She has seen five generations of her offspring, including my children, seen with her in the picture above.

Although Edna had to move into an assisted living facility earlier this year, she is still going strong. Her hearing is not what it once was, but her memory is still good and he mind is still fairly sharp. Somehow, I think she will bury the rest of us. I hope all of you will join me in wishing her a happy 100th!