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| http://www.jaredcramer.com
Current Post(s): On Shriven Faith
I used to blog here, but then moved my blog over to it's own domain. However, so that my Xanga friends who subscribed to this blog can know when I update my real blog, I'll update the time stamp on this post (almost) every time I write on the real one. Then, if you want to read the post, you can click on this link. If you don't want to, you don't have to.
Commenting is also easier on the real blog because you don't have to sign up for anything to do it.
Wow this is a hyperlink happy post.
Hmm, I wonder why I felt I needed to give such a detailed explanation.
Anywho, if you want to have your own DNS name and have an independently hosted blog, I highly recommend WebbleYou. It's only $4 a month and is well worth it. | | |
| Moving On
My blog is moving! From now on you can read it at:
http://www.jaredcramer.com
All my old posts will be over there and I won't post anything new here.
Come on over and visit me!
By the way, if I didn't include your blog in my links at the new site, it's not because I don't read your blog, but that I've limited those to blogs that I read regularly (which means, the person updates regularly).  | | |
| Free As a Bird
Yesterday my Grandpa and Grandma Stewart picked me up from Rochester and took me to their place in Corunna (about 30 minutes outside of Flint). We got up there and Grandma took a nap while Grandpa and I looked through a scrapbook my Aunt Lynn had put together for them about their whole life. After that I cooked them fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner, and then my Grandpa took me for a ride on his motorcycle.
 My Grandpa turned 80 just a few weeks ago and he's been riding a motorcycle for almost 40 years. He used to ride it cross country with my Grandma on the back. He has still put over 100 miles on it this year. It's an old Moto-Guzzi that Kevin and I will one day fist-fight over to see who gets.  I had never gone for a ride with my Grandpa (not that I remember) and so I had asked him earlier if he would take me. He said he would and after dinner we got on the bike and rode through the roads out in the rural area of Shiawassee county.
As we rode up and down the dark cement that wove it's way like a river through the woods and fields, and I felt the wind whipping at my face (with a grin two-feet wide), participating in what my Grandpa called the most fun and the most dangerous hobby, I felt happier than I'd been all week. Riding a motorcycle you reach this curious state of half detached from the world and half in love with it. One part of you feels utterly free and the other part of you feels your heart just might break for the beauty around you. As the evening sun set over the fields of Shiawassee county, I didn't want it to end. I wanted to cancel my plane flight back to Texas, ship my bags to Tyler, and ask my Grandpa to drive me to Texas on the motorcycle. I wanted to take the joy and kinship I felt with this 80 year old giant in my life and bottle it as the pure elixir of life that could heal any wound--no matter how deep. But instead I rode, and I sighed and, as my mom says, I wrote this memory on my heart.
I took my grandparents out for dinner a few weeks ago, when they were in Texas, for my Grandpa's birthday. We ate at Johnny Carino's and they both ate food they'd never tried before and drank Italian Soda and even indulged in Tiramisu. Afterwards, they both told me separately that they would remember that forever. I understand a little bit more what they meant, because I will remember that 40 minute ride with my Grandpa forever . . . and then some. | | |
| A Few Words on Preaching
Tomorrow I will preach to the first congregation that hired me to preach the gospel to them regularly. On Monday-Wednesday I will be a part of the Rochester College Sermon Seminar and spend three days learning about the craft of this calling I have received. That said, here are a few powerful words on preaching from the above book:
So the sermon hymn comes to a close with a somewhat unsteady amen, and the organist gestures the choir to sit down. Fresh from breakfast with his wife and children and a quick runthrough of the Sunday papers, the preacher climbs the steps to the pulpit with his sermon in his hand. He hikes his black robe up at the knee so he will not trip over it on the way up. His mouth is a little dry. He has cut himself shaving. He feels as if he has swallowed an anchor. If it weren't for the honor of the thing, he would just as soon be somewhere else.
In the front pews the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young lady slips her six year old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker. A college sophomore home for vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand. The vice-president of a bank who twice that week has seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack. A pregnant girl feels the life stir inside her. A high-school math teacher, who for twenty years has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even from himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee . . .
The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them.
Let him tell them the truth. | | |
| A Catholic Faith
From the above book, page 68-69, emphasis mine:
Of course, if Anglicans insist on statements of faith that all Christians hold, it is reasonable to ask what makes Anglicanism different, and the best answer is, "Nothing." A twentieth-century Anglican (J.V.L. Casserley) once entitles a book he had written No Faith of My Own as a way of pointing out that Anglicanism never intends to put forward new creeds or beliefs. We do not intend to believe anything that all Christians have not always believed. As Vincent of Lerins put it in the fifth century: the Catholic Church holds to "that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all." The very word "catholic," meaning "universal," implies exactly that: catholic faith is universal faith, faith accepted by the whole church in all times and places.
It must be admitted that there are very few things that have been so widely accepted in the church as to meet Vincent of Lerins's criterion. Beyond the Trinity and Incarnation, we might have to turn to beliefs that have been accepted in most places, at most times, by most people. But even that somewhat lower standard can give us guidance. We need to check our ideas against those of others; if I find that an idea of mine is inconsistent with what most other Christians have generally believed, I could not proclaim it as the faith of the church and I ought to be very cautious about commending it to others. | | |
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