Theology for Breakfast: Fr. Adam Trambley in Forward Day by Day

After feeding the dog, birds and squirrels each morning, I sit with my coffee to do morning prayer ("Open my lips, O Lord" --sip--"and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise") and to read the meditation on the day's scripture from the quarterly publication Forward Day by Day. In August 2021, I especially looked forward to the insights of Adam Trambley, a priest in Pennsylvania.

Maybe because this was my first August in 40 years that I had no classes to plan for, I responded to his message that cultivating your inner life is a good and necessary thing but not the only thing. You have to get out of yourself, and our church has to get out of itself, too.

CalmOne message Trambley takes from scripture is calm down. The 5000, having just been fed, clamor for assurance that they'll always have bread (John 6); Trambley says they want a "silver bullet" to make everything fine forever, and that's not what Jesus offers. So calm down, and get on with life in Jesus.

Jesus takes the blind man away from the crowd in Bethsaida to restore his sight, then sends him away from town (Mark 8), because, as Trambley writes, "Our most profound experiences of God can initially feel quite fragile," so we need time alone to "process and appreciate what has happened."

For the Feast of Transfiguration, Trambley tells how disappointed he was to discover on a pilgrimage to Mt. Tabor that a modern church there has set aside three grottoes for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, just as Jesus forbade the disciples to do. But Trambley relents: how else can we "hold on to encounters with God that transcend what we can process?" (I call this blog my "word sanctuary" as I use it for that purpose.)

When Paul admonishes us to be "careful...how you live...making the most of the time" (Ephesians 5.15-16), Trambley says it's not about being more efficient in tackling our to-do lists:

A wise relationship to time means appreciating every moment and relishing it. Drunkenness and debauchery are shunned because they numb us to the beauty and wonder pregnant in every instant.

When we open our calendars, God would have us grateful instead of stressed.

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another (Mark 9.50) In these words from Jesus, Trambley sees instruction that we are responsible for nurturing our own souls, and we'll be "disappointed if we depend on others to make our lives complete." But when we do find "wholeness in ourselves," then "we can accept and love people for who they are" and be "at peace with one another."

"Silence" was Trambley's last word on this theme. Among myriad instructions for the building of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings 6, Trambley draws our attention to a detail in verse 7, that noisy cutting and hammering of materials for Solomon's temple were to happen off-site to hallow the site of the temple with silence. The reading was assigned for August 27, a day set aside to honor Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle, pioneering ministers to the deaf. Trambley challenged us to sit ten minutes in silence, eyes closed. (I tried all week and couldn't do it.)

Fun with ScriptureThen Trambling picks up on some fun things in scripture that I had not noticed or at least had not savored before.

• Psalm 136 is a litany of thanksgiving that gets weird in the middle where a slew of obscure kings get slain, each killing followed by the refrain "and [God's] mercy endures forever." Trambley takes comfort from the knowledge that "the geopolitical events of ancient Israel were as problematic as our own," and, God's mercy endures forever.
• Trambley compares Shimei, son of Gura, to a scrappy baseball manager leaving the dugout to scream at the umpire. I'm glad he picked up on this obscure episode in the 2 Samuel 16, where Shimei runs out of his home to curse David and his soldiers. With so much screaming, name-calling, and mockery in our media today, David's response is cool: either he really deserves it and God will let the curses rip, or David will earn credit for his restraint.
• "Wily" isn't a word we associate with Jesus and St. Paul, but Trambley does. He sees wiliness in the readings that go with Psalm 18.27, With the pure you show yourself pure, but with the crooked you are wily. For example, when Jesus tells the disciples to follow a man with a water jar to the unnamed place where he'll meet them for their Passover seder, "he ensures that his disciples receive the gift of the first eucharist since Judas cannot tell the authorities where to find him until after the meal." Then, Paul tells a centurion to "jettison the ship's lifeboats rather then let sailors sneak away and leave his party to their deaths." Then Solomon uses "a wily trick" to identify the infant's true mother. Trambley asks us to think when we were ever "wily for Jesus."

Prayer Walks I was so taken by his insights and easy writing style that I bought a book that he co-edited and contributed to. His collaborators take turns drawing lessons for the Episcopal church in this time of declining membership from the building up of the church in Acts 8. So, for example, in Philip's ministry to the city of Samaria, Trambley sees an apostle responsive to the needs he finds. "Loving, thriving churches see themselves as being called to give away their resources to meet the needs of the community," he writes in Acts to Action, compared to dying churches that keep trying to draw support from the community for what they've been doing for decades.

Trambley tells how his spiritual director pushed him to get involved with the city council soon after moving to his new church. Soon, he was offering the church to the council for some community needs, and then there was reciprocation and mutual gratitude.

Trambley also describes taking "prayer walks" sometimes alone, but more often with officials and parishioners. All that's required is

...to take a thirty- to sixty-minute walk in the community or neighborhood and to be in coversation with God about what you see. As you encounter places where things are going well, give thanks. Where you see problems, ask God to intervene. When you find the beginnings of new life, ask God's blessing. The more you walk and pray, the more you will see in the community and what you see will draw you deeper into prayer.

And prayer changes the person who does the praying, especially in growing their awareness.

He seems to be a wise and humble priest working with the Acts 8 Movement to find a way forward for our national church. I'll look for more. See acts8movement.org.