• To listen to the audio from the workshop, simply click the arrow

Here’s a bit of information on the three artists:

Helen Lyons is a Winnipeg-based visual artist, inveterate student and life-long learner. She has been a part of saint benedict’s table from its earliest days, and her series of prints of the Stations of the Cross were published in our Lenten book, Toward What We Can Scarcely Imagine and Scarcely Refuse. Helen lives with her husband Martin in a house filled with art, books and life.

Jodi Penner has been active in saint benedict’s table since 2004, taking an active role both in our music and our art ministries. She finds both traditional stained glass and glass mosaic to be colourful mediums that express the emotion and spirituality she seeks to convey in her art. Her mosaic piece “Anamnesis” – a meditation on the meaning of communion – has become a fixture beside the communion table at worship.

Jaylene Johnson is a singer/songwriter who lives in Winnipeg. Her work has been widely recognized with various nominations and awards, as well as placements on various popular television shows. Described as an artist who will make you “listen more closely,” she infuses hope into her songs while taking an honest look at the human condition. We are delighted that Jaylene recently joined our staff as the ministry coordinator.

Helen Lyons' print from her series of Stations of the Cross

Helen Lyons' print from her series of Stations of the Cross

Jodi Penner's "The Ascent of Adam Penner"

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n May 2011, Seattle-based Image Journal brought a bit of a roadshow to Winnipeg’s West End Cultural Centre, to celebrate the connections between faith and the arts.  Hosted by the journal’s founder and editor-in-chief, Gregory Wolfe, the evening featured a set by the renowned neo-folk artists Over the Rhine, and a panel discussion between artists in a variety of creative fields, sharing their thoughts on art, faith, and integrity in the public square. Hosted by Gregory Wolfe, the panel included Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine, Jamie Howison of saint benedict’s table, Karen Sunabacka of Providence College, and the painter Christian Worthington.

We are pleased to offer this podcast of the evening’s panel discussion, and to be able to incorporate a few samples of the evening’s music. If you like what you hear of the music, please consider yourself a patron of the arts and order yourself a copy of the band’s latest album, The Long Surrender, which the Los Angeles Times called “exquisitely beautiful.”

A word of thanks to all who helped to make this event happen, and especially to the panel participants. An additional word of thanks to Karen and Lindford, for sharing of both their music and their ideas.

And thanks to Tim Plett, for the wonderful photographs…

To hear this podcast, simply click the arrow.

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t first glance it may seem as though those who formed the lectionary did not get the memo that we are still in the Epiphany season.  We seem to be moving pretty fast away from the themes of incarnation to focus on a theology of the cross.  Paul invites us to ponder the cross, not being called away from the revealing of the Epiphany, but invited deeper into it’s mystery.

T. S. Eliot in his poem called The Journey of the Magi has the wise men asking,  “were we led all that way for Birth or Death? Some would say ‘Yes’ to that, but it goes on…There was a Birth, certainly, we had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.”  They were no longer at ease with the way things were, this birth had brought the flavour of death with it. I don’t imagine that any of them expected a death on a cross.  A cross was a gruesome piece of capital punishment reserved for the most disreputable individuals, used to suppress subversion, keep the little man down and in his place.

There are two ways to hear this sermon:

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So for the guy who came to change everything it does not fit for those who wanted signs and wisdom, it is offensive to Jewish sensibilities and idiotic to Gentile intelligence, he was not supposed to be the little man, he was supposed to be the big gun.

Throughout first Corinthians, Paul is confronting various forms of social, theological, and spiritual elitism which have fractured the church. His appeal is for a unified perspective and purpose among those living there. By opening his letter to them with this unrelenting focus on the cross, Paul does two things; undercuts elitist perspectives and undergirds the foundation of Christian unity.  He has been pretty clear that Christian discipleship is not the product of some breakthrough in human insight, not a new philosophy of lifestyle, not even a set of time tested principles that will lead to a happy and fulfilled life.  At it’s heart and centre it is a historical claim about what God has done on a hill outside Jerusalem during the reign of Pontius Pilate, so trying to break it down into schools of thought or human wisdom misses the point.

Paul does not speculate on what God might or might not be doing through the cross. Instead he openly proclaims the cross as being the devise which both embarrasses and embraces humanity in an inclusive way.  Paul is not advocating for a particular doctrine of atonement, and certainly not that the cross is about satisfying the wrath of an angry father.  Paul seems to be more inclined to side with John’s gospel in the call to love.  “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  It is through us that the love of God might be made visible in the world.

In the process of the church learning how to be the church, the light continues to shine in the darkness, The power of God is revealed whenever the love of God becomes flesh.  Part of the Epiphany is that light continues to shine in places of darkness which are the paradoxes of the Sermon on the Mount.

Beatitudes were not a new thing in the world of Jesus.  Usually, they were common sense sayings that expressed what everyone already knew, the conventional wisdom of the day.  “Blessed are those who exercise regularly, for they will be fit and strong” or something along those lines.  When we read these verses through the lens of Western individualism, we end up with a collection of pious platitudes.  We do ourselves and the gospel a great disservice when we spiritualise the Beatitudes and assume they refer only to mind or soul states.  We end up reading the Beatitudes as something like the “Be-Happy Attitudes.”   Jesus is speaking to real people who are right in front of him, and he is talking to them about their actual current circumstance.

Sarah Dylan Breuer says  “These verses don’t show Jesus as pop psychologist, telling people how to be happy; they show Jesus giving honour to those pushed out to the margins of their culture.”  Those people were pushed to the margins by the very fact that they were followers.  In the New Testament world, if you were part of an important family, you were an important person and honoured. If you weren’t connected to others, if you didn’t have family, it made you a nobody, without honour, and without means to support yourself. Jesus gathers in all of these people who have are completely bereft, and he gives them two gifts which more than compensate for their very real losses.  Jesus gives them honour, in front of all the crowds, he blesses them. Then he makes them family, by calling them children of God.  They are not the least, last and lost, because they are part of a community that sees itself as family.

Another thing that is important to note is that they knew their need of God, they knew their struggle against the culture of the day.  In our comfortable North American lives it is easy to loose our need of God because of the affluent culture in which we are immersed, forgetting that all the conditions of human suffering that we pray to avoid are present around us, yet for those whose lives are shaped by suffering they are declared blessed and have access to the kingdom of God.

Roger who is heading back to Uganda today, speaks of how blessed he is with the meagre life he has in Uganda, and finds that God is closer in the wanting than in the having.  We who have whatever we want can easily miss the blessing of wanting.  Could it be that the blessings of the Kingdom of God are not consumer goods, found in the ‘stuff’ we buy or acquire, but are found only in the light which continues to shine into the darkness of human struggle and suffering?

Again Breuer asks, “What would happen if we stopped playing all of our culture’s games for status and power and privilege? What would it cost us if we lived more deeply into justice, and mercy, and humility? And more importantly, what blessings await us on that journey?  Those are great questions to think about as we like the Magi go back to our places, our Kingdoms of home, being aware of the gods of comfortableness that we are clutching to.  The light continues to shine into the darkness of our world, and has the capacity to change us from being at ease with the old dispensation, should we be wise enough to come and see.

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n the Anglican Journal this week there was an article about a debate between former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US journalist Christopher Hitchens.  It was the Munk Debate, they were chewing over whether faith is a force for good in the world.

Blair was suggesting that, “Religious faith has a major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world, and can and should be a force for progress.”  While Hitchens who is the author of a book called God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything suggests that organised religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant; allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry; invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” I take it he is not a fan, but concluding that “if religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”  This is a major argument, is faith a good thing or not?  Is it useful to the progress of the world.

There are two ways to hear this sermon:

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• click here to download the episode from iTunes

In our reading today from Corinthians, it seems that this is not their argument.  Their argument is more about which one they have more faith in, was it Apollo, was it Paul, was it Cephas, or was it Christ?  Who are you following?  We can update this passage to say, What I means is that each of you says I belong to Luther, or I belong to Menno Simons, or I belong to Thomas Cramner, though I have not heard that one very often.  Then when we do get inside a church, the argument changes yet again.  We hear, we follow the BCP, we have traditional music, we are not changing the colour of the carpet, we don’t have those kinds of people in our church.  It seems whether big or small, we can find an infinite number of things to argue about.

Paul is introducing a new concept, one that had not been common place before now.  He is attempting a community of diverse people, a church composed of rich and poor, Jew and Greek, slave and free.  He is attempting create a community where the normal bonds of ethnicity, culture or family are not there.  Teaching them that the bond that holds them together is Christ.  Paul seeks ways in which the divisions can be dealt with in a way that does not make people ‘up and leave’ because they are not happy. He reminds people that the saving grace does not come through any human leader, but through the gospel that manifests the saving love of God.  Paul is making it perfectly clear that God’s love is not through human wisdom but the foolishness of the cross.

Just as a side I love the way this letter is written, Paul gave a glowing praise filled opening to his letter to the folks in Corinth, then blasts them with “Chloe tells me you guys are fighting.  Now stop it!”  It seems they have been busted!

The foolishness of the cross is developed into a theology of the cross which is persistent in the letters of Paul.  It not only shapes our responses to the need of others, but equally shapes how we are not rushed to judgement, how we discern what we do, and in what spirit we make decisions and follow through with actions.  Tim Sedgewich suggests that as we engage the world through the lens of the cross, Christian faith becomes a way of life which leads to a theology of the church as a new covenant, a new people and a new society.

This is how the call to Peter and Andrew made it possible or even probable that they would just drop their nets and immediately follow Jesus.  I can easily imagine that at first meeting they were not particularly interested in a future salvation, but more of the contemporary action of fishing for human beings.  They had no idea what they were getting themselves into, they maybe saw adventure following this man.  Let’s face it the first thing he does is begin travel throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.  That is adventure if ever I heard it.

Now as you know last night there was an art show here for the Home Omuka Project.  That started off as an adventure, Lola who has been part of the saint benedict’s family from its inception had a choice.  She was going to either invest and buy a house in Winnipeg or she was going to do some kind of mission trip, maybe Mexico or Africa, she was not sure yet.  I told her about the school in Kampala that Mawejje, another priest in Winnipeg, was involved in.  Mawejje is from Uganda, and liked the Canadian system of education and so set about building a school for Ugandan children.

I suggested that she talk to him and see what he had to say.  She came back ready to set off on an adventure, she was going to spend one year working at the school.  She raised the funds and packed all kinds of amazing things, she was crazy to live with in the last few weeks before she went because she was heading off into the unknown.  By the time she came back she had a future plan to go back there and together with Roger they would care for teenage orphaned boys.  The call to adventure put her on a track that she never expected.  So to what is Jesus calling us to.  Some would say we are called to believe, some would say that we are called to service, some might even say called to church membership, while others such as Dietrich Bonhoffer said that the call to “follow me” was a call to absolute discipleship, and that only in surrendering ourselves to Jesus command could we, paradoxically, know our greatest joy.

Throughout the gospel, Matthew is not particularly gracious in the way he describes how the disciple don’t understand what Jesus is doing, or what the kingdom is about, however they do follow him.  Stanley Hauerwas contrasts the disciples with the crowds that are attracted to Jesus.  He says, “those in the crowds will often be in awe of Jesus, they will express amazement at his teaching, but at the end of the day they will shout “Let him be crucified!”  Matthew is teaching us what is required to be a follower rather then admirers of Jesus.

For Bonhoffer it cost him his life.  He was not in the slightest bit interested in the colour of the carpet, or which denominational affiliation was better than another, or even if faith was a good thing.  He was ready to follow in search of a new society, without the easy bonds of ethnicity or culture, he was more than just admirer, being ready to go wherever it took him.  Are we ready to be part of the adventure, that is the question and that is the call.

Winter is coming,  concerns about a possible H1N1 pandemic are filling the media and urgent questions seem to be everywhere. Apparently, more than half of Canadians won’t be getting their H1N1 flu shot – why? Are there any spiritual reasons for not getting vaccinated? Who can we trust – government? the medical community? the media?

Someone with lots of answers drawn from many years of working in the area of infectious disease is Dr. Pierre Plourde – Medical Officer of Health with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. Pierre has been involved with high level H1N1 discussions and is a member of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.

He is also a member of saint benedict’s table and recently worked with Jamie preparing a recommendation for the church on what to do in the face of H1N1.

At the end of October Pierre was interviewed by Drew Marshall, the host of a southern Ontario radio talk show focusing on spiritual issues, and we thought we would post the audio of that discussion as a timely reminder to us at St Ben’s that we’re still grappling with these pandemic issues ourselves.

There are three ways to hear this presentation (runs 21:51):

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Audio courtesy of the Drew Marshall Show.

This is the second installment of the Conversation Series audio, recorded in March 2007 (part one was posted here last week). In this final episode, Jamie Howison gives a summary of the opening session, Steve Bell offers a look into his own experience of the music world and Andrew Beaujon delivers a second presentation stemming from his written work.

There are three ways to hear this presentation (runs 38:57):

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In March 2007, saint benedict’s table collaborated with Winnipeg’s Booth College in presenting what was billed as a “conversation” on the intersection of faith and culture.  We invited the writer and journalist Andrew Beaujon – a self-described agnostic and the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: inside the phenomenon of Christian rock – to join a circle of musicians, students and interested church people in a series of conversations around his work on the Christian music subculture.  Among the musicians present were Larry Campbell, Jenny Moore-Koslowsky and Mike Koop, as well as Steve Bell, who was invited to offer a reflection on his own work as a musician of faith.

What we have preserved here in recorded form are the opening conversation-starters from two of the main sessions.  In the first installment John Berard – who organized the Conversation Series and who now works part-time with saint benedict’s table – offers an introductory framework.  Beaujon responds with an overview of his own work and Jamie Howison provides a reflection on the place of the church in the cultivation of the arts.

In the second installment – to be posted next week – Jamie Howison gives a summary of our opening session, Steve Bell offers a look into his own experience of the music world and Beaujon delivers a second presentation stemming from his written work.

There are three ways to hear this presentation (runs 40:22):

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On Sunday November 23, 2008, our community departed from the usual lectionary readings and offered up a somewhat unusual rendering of the very familiar parable of the Prodigal Son. Working with a series of poems by the monk-poet Kilian McDonnell, with music by an ensemble led by Gord Johnson, we unpacked this parable in a way that allowed people to hear anew some of its deeper, more challenging and ultimately liberating textures. We are grateful to have received both the author’s and the publisher’s permission to use this cycle, titled The Father Empties His Coffers, as the focus for this liturgy. While the recording presented here does not capture the congregational singing, it does at least give some sense of how the music and the poetry were woven in and through each other.

Kilian McDonnell’s three collections of poetry – Swift, Lord, You are Not, Yahweh’s Other Shoe (from which the Prodigal poems are drawn) and God Drops and Loses Things – are available from Liturgical Press.

There are two ways to hear this presentation (runs 28:19):

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In his bestselling book Velvet Elvis, the writer Rob Bell says of Robert Farrar Capon, “Go out and buy all his books and read them immediately.”  The journal The Living Church called Capon “a joyfully outrageous Christian teacher”, while of his work The New York Times Book Review said the following:  “Theology, Capon says, is a word game, the most serious word game of all, and he plays it very well indeed.”

In the fall of 2000, my wife Catherine and I visited Shelter Island, New York to spend two days with Robert and Valerie Capon, talking about life and faith, and sharing great food and a bottle or three of good wine.  What follows here is the one hour in those two days which we committed to tape… the interviewer is admittedly a bit stiff, but Robert is in fine form.

There are three ways to hear this interview (runs 44:58):

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On February 1, 2009, some 150 people gathered at Winnipeg’s Outworks Gallery to mark the formal closing of an exhibit of the work of artist Gerald Folkerts.  While exhibit openings are more or less the norm in the art world, a formal closing is a bit unusual.  In the case of Unfinished Business, it was all the more unusual, in that the closing was marked by prayer, music, and a meditative address built around readings from the Book of Psalms.

In September 2008 Gerald Folkerts was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and later in the fall a group of friends and supporters came together to begin work on mounting an exhibit of his work.  Defying all expectation, Gerald was sufficiently strong not only to attend the exhibit but also to speak at both the official opening and this recorded closing.

This recording includes prayers and a benediction by Jamie Howison, music by Steve Bell, and an address by Dr Calvin Seerveld, professor emeritus of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.

Visit this site for more information on the art of Gerald Folkerts.

There are four ways to hear this podcast (runs 30:19):

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