Entangled States

A Favorite Christmas Sermon

I'm not preaching here at the Cathedral tonight; Bishop Smith will do the honors. So instead of posting the sermon I would have preached tonight, I'm posting one of my favorite Christmas sermons that I did preach - back in 2003.

God who made all things, the Heavens and the Earth, the Galaxies, the Stars, Planets, Moons, Comets, the fires of space and the music of the spheres, literally shares the very breath we breathe – as we all share together in the existence that God undergirds with Agape love.

The meaning of the Incarnation is that there can be no artificial divorce between the heavenly and the earthly. It reminds us that the Greeks were wrong when they thought that the only way to find the divine was to reject the earthly. Instead, because of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, God with Us, Immanuel, we know that there is no place in our lives upon this planet Earth that we can not encounter God and God’s redemptive love.

Read the full sermon below.

Rowan Williams on Barth's Christmas Message heard today

An extraordinary meditation on Christmas by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Telegraph today.

Some pieces of the longer essay motivated by looking for lessons for our day in Barth's 1931 Christmas Sermon:

"What Barth saw beginning to take its grip on Germany in 1931 was a system of 'principle' that worked quite consistently once you accepted that quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn't. As the nightmare decade unfolded, the implications of this became clearer and clearer. And what he was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a 'cause' which was essentially about 'me and people like me'. It's about the danger of my agenda, our needs, the programme of this particular group, its safety and prosperity.

And Christmas is supremely the story of a God who is not interested in telling us about principles. First comes the action – God beginning to live a human life. Then comes the appeal: do you love and trust what you see in this human life, the life of Jesus? Then the implication: everyone is capable of saying yes to this appeal, so no one is dispensable. You don't and can't know where the boundary will lie between people who belong and people who don't belong.

[...]The God of the Christmas story (and the rest of the Gospels) doesn't relate to us on the basis of any theory. but on the basis of unconditional love and welcome. That act of free love towards the entire human race changed things – even for those who didn't and don't share all the beliefs and doctrines of Christianity. And for those who do share those convictions, loving God and one another is a defiance of all programmes and principles designed to preserve only the wellbeing of people like us.

All of us, Christians most definitely included, have problems living up to this. But that's one reason why we tell this story repeatedly, the story of the 'unprincipled' God who values what others don't notice, who relates to people we'd all rather forget, whose appeal is to everyone because he has made everyone capable of loving response."

Read the full article here.

So is Peak Oil still a problem?

Oil prices have fallen back to a level they were at nearly four years ago. They're about 1/3 the level they were at this summer.

So does this mean Peak Oil and the idea that we're running out of petroleum was just so much hype and hand-wringing?

Probably not. It's much like Global Warming. The fact that the Earth's average temperature is being seen to rise doesn't mean that every temperature on earth is automatically bumped up a couple of degrees with local highs a bit higher and local lows also a bit lower. Global warming drives global climate change. And global climate change is change - in some places things get much warmer, in other places things get colder. That's because the connection between global warming and local climate is not linear, it's non-linear. And non-linear relationships don't have easy solutions. They strongly tend to the chaotic, which means you are very limited in being able to predict the localized behavior in a global system.

The wild price swings in Peak Oil appear to be a sign that our Oil supply has stopped being "smooth" or laminar i.e. linear. It's become turbulent, chaotic or "non-linear". Or, in the language I prefer, the petroleum economy has become brittle. It can no longer smoothly respond to inputs - small perturbations in the chain create large responses.

There's an article up on the Oil Drum that points out the similarity between oil prices and queueing theory:

"One of my first dives into the Peak Oil world was with Kenneth Deffeyes' book Beyond Oil. In it, the Princeton Professor explains how resources' prices go through chaotic periods in face of scarce supply. Without knowing it, he derived an expression to explain movements like spot Natural Gas prices in the US after 2002, that was equivalent to Queueing Theory. This made immediate sense to me, after studying this theory in my formative years at the University.

Let me try to explain briefly what this theory is. Imagine a supermarket with a certain number of points-of-sale (POS), to which a certain number of costumers arrive per hour. Queueing Theory allows one to derive information like the average queue length at each POS and the average waiting time each costumer spends in the queue. This information is not only useful for supermarket managers but also in other fields like transport and tele-communications.

Queueing Theory shows also provides another important result: if the load on the system goes above a certain threshold, it becomes impossible to predict queue lengths or waiting times, and the system goes into chaos. Going back to the supermarket, imagine that for some reason the flow of costumers increases several-fold over its normal rhythm (e.g. Black Friday in the US). At first, lengthy queues form at each POS, waiting periods then go beyond costumers' patience, and they simply start quitting the queue and leaving the supermarket without shopping. The dissatisfaction is such that costumers quit entering the supermarket altogether and the manager is eventually forced to close down some POS. But this is Black Friday, the avalanche of costumers eventually returns and it starts all over again. During this chaotic period a random sample of queue length at any given POS can result in any possible number and becomes effectively impossible to predict."

Read the full article here.

A smooth and gradual drop in prices would have indicated that Peak Oil was still far in our future. But this rapid deflation of prices probably signifies something much more ominous.

I'm glad the new President and the new Vice-President like trains.

The New Digital Divide, Sojourners Magazine

Andrew Sears charges in a new article that the online Christian world is becoming just as segregated and divided as the real world - at least in terms of which type of Christians other Christians will associate with online.

There are websites for liberal Christians with full networks of links and websites for conservative Christians, with separate and mostly orthogonal sets of links. Comments are made only within the appropriate network, and each network creates it's own in-crowd jargon.

Sears writes:

"[A]s more people get online, they are encountering another type of digital divide: the online segregation of Christians. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, ‘Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.’ Most Christians are friends with and worship largely with people of their own racial background. We are segregated not only by race, but also by social class and income. As a result of injustice, the average income and wealth of African-American and Latino Christians are lower than that of white Christians.

As the recent book Divided by Faith points out, the segregation of the church results in a separation between rich and poor communities, which in turn perpetuates injustice. For example, a church member in a very re sourced church who is looking for a job may get 10 referrals from friends in the church, whereas someone in a church where half of the attendees are unemployed might not get any referrals.

You can see a similar segregation reflected in profiles of Christians on online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace; most people will have friends with backgrounds similar to their own. If everyone links to people they know, the result is that a disproportionate number of resourced individuals and ministries will link to each other, while ministries serving under-resourced communities are stuck in a virtual ghetto. The rich link to the rich, while the poor link to the poor."

Read the full article here.

The frustrating thing is that this is so obviously true within even denominations of supposedly like-minded believers. If you look at the link lists of most Episcopal websites you'll see that there's very little cross listing of "enemy" websites. Instead people will list only the sites they agree with and try to steer readers into staying within the acceptable online neighborhoods. (Kendall Harmon's site is a notable exception. And in my own small way I've tried to do the same thing.)

The danger here is that we end up only talking and listening to people we agree with. Rather than having opinions and stances robustly challenged, we're more likely merely to have our preconceived notions confirmed and perhaps our rapier-like bon mots sharpened.

In online parlance this is called "the echo chamber". And its deadly to communities that fall into the trap.

You see it on tech sites all the time. Windows sites won't actively engage the sites of other operating systems. Macintosh sites won't do anything but snipe at windows users. And Linux users just look down their noses at everyone.

You'd think that Christians would be able to avoid this. Or at least you'd expect that Anglicans - who were formed to be as comprehensive as possible - would be alert at least to the dangers. But no.

I do think the one slightly optimistic point though is that it's worse in my experience in the online world than it is in real life. Most parishes are likely to contain a pretty wide diversity of opinion. That's because in real life we see each other's full personhood and tend to have more context about the people in our community. Online we can only know what a person shares about themselves, and that only in as much as we take the time to digest the totality of the sharing.

Because we're more likely to see each other as two-dimensional cut-out characters online rather than the fully three-dimenisional people, it's just so much easier and faster to associate with those with whom we agree rather than take the time and make the effort to get to know those whom we are convinced are irredeemably wrong.

It takes real and perhaps more self-discipline to be able to see another online person (or avatar) as a living breathing human being with the same fears and emotional scars as we have.

Perhaps what's needed is a new set of virtues for the online denizens of the web. Maybe like the virtue of online empathy and the application of the hermeneutic of charity.

It would be a start...

A word to Brad Drell from Jan Nunley

You almost have to be an Episcopal Church insider to understand the context of these words by my friend Jan Nunley which are written in response to another person (who I like to think of as a possible friend) Brad Drell.

Brad's original post calls out folks in the Episcopal Church for putting too much emphasis on political and cultural success and not enough emphasis and focus on Jesus.

Jan, a priest in a life-long same-gender marriage writes in response:

"I did not ask to be who and what I am, and neither who or what I am is defined by any single aspect of my life, save one: I am defined for eternity solely by what I have chosen to be--and that is a follower of the risen Jesus Christ.

I thank God that in mercy I was born in a time and place where I can be the beneficiary of the wrestling of faithful Christians with the perspectives and interpretations of other faithful Christians in ages past. Truly, 'we feebly struggle, they in glory shine/But all are one in thee, for all are thine/Alleluia!'

Because I stand at an empty tomb, every other thing is relative to that fact. It is to the Risen Lord that I cling, not to particular dogmas or doctrines, creeds, canons or constitutions. These are guidelines, and in the main they are good ones: I study them gladly, and I follow them gratefully. But like you, Brad, I call on the Lord at every turn for guidance, and that may put me on a road less traveled by the rest of the world--and by you. My call is to be faithful; I leave it to God to be right.

I did not join the Episcopal Church out of rebellion, but in gratitude for the Anglican Way as I received it at a time when I most needed it: a Communion catholic, reformed and always reforming in the light which God gives her for the times...a place of common prayer and uncommon grace...a place where head and heart may be gladly joined, where 'our selves, our souls and bodies' are offered daily for service, to the end that God's reign of justice and peace for all creation may be established 'on earth as it is in heaven.'"

Read the full article here.

Knowing Jan as I do, I can say unequivocally that she is writing truly about her personal relationship with Jesus and it is out of that relationship that her ministry both in a parish and as a communications specialist has always flowed.

Head's UP: Return of the Leonids

One of the most moving experiences I had teaching Astronomy at Lehigh was the year I took both my classes and their friends (nearly 150 people showed up) out to watch the Leonids at the end of the Fall Semester.

We had tunes, hot chocolate and crowds all gathered just before dawn to see what turned out to be the closest thing to a meteor storm that I'm ever likely to see.

So I was excited to read this announcement:

"Astronomers from Caltech and NASA say a strong shower of Leonid meteors is coming in 2009. Their prediction follows an outburst on Nov. 17, 2008, that broke several years of 'Leonid quiet' and heralds even more intense activity next November."

Fromhere.

If you want to see something amazing, even if it doesn't reach the level of a meteor storm next year, it's worth putting the date on your calendar. The Leonid meteors tend to the large fire-ball category and the coolest thing is watch them skip across the sky (like a rock on a pond) as they enter the Earth's atmosphere.