Christianity, Non-Violence, and Parenting Faithfully -- Epiphany Bible Study with the Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
You can listen to our conversation with Ted, here.
In this episode, we are joined by the Rev. Dr. Ted Cole. Natalie met Ted when he became the minister at her local Episcopal Parish, St. John's Jamaica Plain. Natalie, James, and Ted were part of Praxis - an intentional community for faith leaders. Ted is an Episcopal priest, husband, and father of two boys. Ted especially reflects on the connection between the church and the home and the church and the world. He has extensive experience as a family and youth minister in his 20 year career as a priest. He is trained in dream work as a spiritual practice and provides training for forming church dream groups. He holds a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion from Boston University, with a focus on mystical experiences in cross-cultural perspective.
Key moments in our conversation include:
01:09 Introduction to the Rev. Dr. Ted Cold
03:33 The Political Context of Jesus's Entry into Jerusalem
06:37 Christianity, Non-Violence, Parenting
09:20 Christian Witness to Current Political Violence
10:37 Balancing the Values of Integrity and Unity
13:17 The Prophetic Responsibility of the Church
16:00 The Ultimate Sin of Hypocrisy
18:22 Ignatian Spirituality in the Home
22:02 Modeling Parental Authority After Jesus
25:30 Importance of Rest as Parents
You can read a complete transcript of this episode, here.
Things we talked about in this episode:
Godly Play ***
You can listen to our first conversation with the Rev. Dr. Ted Cole, here. And, if you’re in need of conversation about how the church can address the sin of systemic oppression – check out these episodes with Canon J. Sierra Reyes and the Rev. Gary Comins.
Stay connected to Ted+ on his church website: www.stjohns-jp.org. You can listen to his recorded sermons and services here: www.youtube.com/@stjohns-jp
Let’s stay connected!
Website: www.bedtimechapel.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bedtimechapel/
Facebook:Bedtime Chapel
00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly scripture study. I am Natalie Thomas.
00:00:05 James Thomas
And I am James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:09 Natalie Thomas
Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families who are trying to know, love and follow Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:18 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for the sixth week of Epiphany.
00:00:26 Natalie Thomas
And we are here today for our second week with the Reverend Dr. Ted Cole, who we know from our shared ministry and the Diocese of Massachusetts. And I had the pleasure of attending the parish where he ministers when I used to live in Jamaica Plain. So thank you so much, Ted, for being here with us.
00:00:45 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
So excited to be with you. James and Natalie, thank you for the invitation. Yeah.
00:00:50 Natalie Thomas
And if you haven't yet listened to our first conversation with Ted, we highly recommend it. You'll get to know a little bit about him and his faith journey. And as opposed to repeating that today, Ted, we're going to invite you to introduce yourself through a different question, which is to share a little bit about your experience forming children in the faith.
00:01:09 Natalie Thomas
You know, this podcast is not exclusively but is specifically directed towards people who are in their child and family forming years. How has forming children in the faith influenced your own relationship with the church and understanding of Jesus?
00:01:24 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I was given the privilege of serving a parish In Anchorage, Alaska, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. If you ever find yourself in Anchorage, Alaska, I commend that community to you for a visit. Extraordinary sanctuary, looking out on the Chugach Mountains. And they hired me to be their youth and family minister to develop those ministries.
00:01:44 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And the previous parish that I had served, I'd mostly worked with youth, just a little bit with children. So I went in to learn and what we focused on was godly play, that marvelous Episcopal curriculum for children that brings them in a Montessori style engagement with the core stories and aspects of our life as church community and create space for them to wonder, what do these things mean to me?
00:02:13 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Where do I find myself in them? And to then do their creative response to what they've heard and learned. So I partnered with an amazing lay woman who was a teacher and had the experience with kids and had a deep faith. And together we brought Gavi play to St. Mary's and what I learned in that was that the child in my own heart and soul was being profoundly fed by what I was learning about.
00:02:41 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And on occasion, sharing. I wasn't a regular teacher, but I did some Lessons with the kingdom. And it's the biblical truth, it's the gospel. It's really, this is a gospel truth. This is truth ever in the Bible. It's a gospel truth. We're called to be a child, to enter into the kingdom of God.
00:02:55 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I've done my best to bring that energy to St. John's whereas the rector I have. I don't have the freedom to focus on just families and kids. But I've had, had my opportunities to bring what I learned from godly play into my relationship with families and children. And it's made all the difference that I'm not trying to cram facts and ideas and Bible verses into kids hearts and minds.
00:03:21 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I'm trying to nurture a sense of wonder in them about where God is and how God is moving in and through their lives. And it's made a huge difference.
00:03:33 James Thomas
Thank you very much. So we begin the week, our last week with Mark with Jesus entry into Jerusalem. And it is rich with allusions to the Hebrew scriptures. On bedtime chapel we're using the common English Bible which is very helpful. It italicizes anytime that Mark is quoting the scriptures at a high level.
00:03:53 James Thomas
How would you begin to explain the political situation surrounding Jesus entry into Jerusalem? And how might a caregiver translate all that to a school age child? How would you want them to hear these events unfolding this week in light of who we know Jesus to be? Why is he knowingly going to die?
00:04:16 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I commend you both for turning to the common English Bible. I think it's a fabulous translation and it's renewed my engagement with scripture since it came out some 10 years ago or so. And this story of Jesus entering Jerusalem and being greeted by the people with poems is a really powerful political statement.
00:04:39 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
There's a lovely book of scholarship, high level scholarship, the last week by Crossan and Borg that I commend to parents to read and to kind of help us, help all of us get a good sense of what does this mean and what's happening here. And they help us see that Jesus by choosing to enter Jerusalem this way is setting up a contrast between himself and the Romans and how the Roman governor would have come in with full pomp and circumstance and the displays of power of the Roman soldiers in their legions and to make the clear impression on the people that we are here, we are in control and if you don't obey our rule, we will destroy you.
00:05:23 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
That's the message that the Romans are conveying to those whom they rule over. And as people Living in North America, living in the United States, perhaps until recently, that feeling if you're in a privileged community might be really hard to get. But if you're black and you're in the south, you might get it intuitively and immediately.
00:05:46 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
What it's like to have a display of the Klan marching and showing that they're going to exercise their power over you with violence. That's the kind of thing that Jesus is saying. That's not what's going to bring peace and bring victory to us. Finally it's the humbleness of the one who would be the ruler coming on a donkey and being greeted by enthusiasm by the people who need liberation.
00:06:15 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
That liberation is not going to come with a giant show of force, is going to come with loving service and humility. And so this, this at the heart I think of Jesus entering into Jerusalem, knowing that this is going to end with his dying on a Roman cross. It's Jesus witnessing to God's power to overcome evil with good.
00:06:37 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
We don't overcome power and violence by becoming more powerful and being more violent. We overcome power and violence by being people of profound integrity who can face violence down and not become violent in response to it. We are God's people acting in the world when we face down evil, but we do not become evil, we overcome it with good.
00:07:02 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And isn't that in the American story, the civil rights movement and the power of that that is there in the Gospels that also Martin Luther King Jr. Learned from Gandhi and what Gandhi had led and we know Gandhi was inspired by the Gospels. It's kind of a nice interaction, cross cultural thing around some of Jesus's truth and Jesus power going on in that way.
00:07:24 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And so what does that mean for school age children? I think it means we're inculcating the value of nonviolence in them and of always striving to be your best self and when someone treats you badly, do your best to respond to that bad behavior with good behavior. And I think kids get that and it's learned, right?
00:07:45 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I mean I think for some of us there's an innate sense of it, but for a lot of us we have to learn how to do that. Just like the civil rights protesters in the south had to learn, they had to train and learn how to respond to the horrific, violent, hurtful behavior that they received and to respond non violently.
00:08:03 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
They had to learn how to do that. Well, our kids have to learn how to do that and which means we have to learn how to do that because is the most powerful thing to Nurture this in our kids is that we ourselves manifest that power to overcome evil with good.
00:08:17 Natalie Thomas
Yeah. This is so resonant for us. In our household right now, we have 18 month old, almost 18 month old.
00:08:25 James Thomas
I was going to say the same thing.
00:08:26 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Yeah.
00:08:28 Natalie Thomas
Who hasn't completely developed his language to articulate his frustration, and so is often using his hands to show how frustrated he is, which means he's hitting and. And there is something so innate and tempting in you to overpower that right to yell or to scream or to hold his body tightly. And it takes so much work as a caregiver to respond by encouraging gentleness, to redirecting the hands, to being gentle with him.
00:09:02 Natalie Thomas
And, you know, it feels like a very real life experience of this truth that you're saying around. We know in God that force is not the answer. And fighting force with force will not work, but we are going to fight. I think these are the words of Dr. King. You know, hate cannot drive out hate.
00:09:20 Natalie Thomas
Only love can do that. And that in the face of unbearable pain, which in our current time, in our current political moment, we know these same people, group people that you are speaking of, black folks in the south, queer people across the country, immigrants, the unhoused, are feeling right now that what does it mean for the Christian community to stand up in bold acts of love and generosity and to offer a different way of being as opposed to getting entrenched in fighting with the power.
00:09:56 Natalie Thomas
Right. But to really offer a different witness of love in this moment. Which leads us to our next question, and that is about what does it mean to model unity in today's day and age? As a church, we know that this idea of being the body in Christ enables the church to act outside of its own denomination, outside of our own walls, to maybe do more than we could ask or imagine on our own, but to not mince words, just like Jesus called the people in the temple, there are Christians who have turned God's house into a hideout for crooks.
00:10:37 Natalie Thomas
So in your experience as a church leader today, how is the church called to respond to this? And how might parents and caregivers help children understand the complexities of the unity of the church? And both people being Christians in response to the heresy we're seeing today.
00:10:59 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
This is a really hard question. And I find myself thinking about a couple of things that I hope coalesces into something helpful for all of us. And one is we, as Episcopalians, we're known as a liberal church, but in point of fact, we hold some diversity of liturgical and theological stance. And our core value is to not seek conformity.
00:11:28 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Right. We seek unity without conformity. And when the Civil War unfolded, one of the shameful episodes in Episcopal history is that there were churches in the south who were pro slavery and churches in the north who were pro abolition. And rather than have that conflict manifest in the leadership body of the church General Convention, they elected not to meet.
00:11:53 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And the country, of course, went into civil war. And the Episcopal Church would have been split along those lines had it met. And rather than do the right thing, they just passed over having to address the conflict years later, centuries later, decades later, we did face our conflicts, you know, around the ordination of women, around the full inclusion of LGBTQ folk.
00:12:17 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And some churches left, and the majority, the vast majority, stayed. That's our particular story as Episcopateans. But I think there's a model for that in the wider. When we think about the wider body of the church, and right now, we have factions, and there are Christians who take the Bible literally but don't actually read it or its values or manifest it.
00:12:44 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I'm just going to be blunt. And then there are others. I would say the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the mainline Protestant churches, where we find ourselves the kind of Anabaptist reformed churches and all their various iterations. We have more of a common values and common cause and more of a sense of how God calls us to justice, compassion, and mercy at the core, rather than power and dominance, to show that our God is the God, which I think is what's animating Christians on the other side.
00:13:17 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I don't think there's a way to hold unity with those values that are so diametrically opposed. And I think we have to call out our reading of the core values in the Gospel and in the broad narrative of God and God's people. I think the Hebrew scriptures and the prophetic tradition and the Exodus tradition completely animated and inform who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing and what Jesus calls us to do as followers of him.
00:13:45 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And there's real power in that, and we have to name that power and act out of it. I think Bishop Budde did that a few weeks ago from when we're recording in the sermon that she offered in the National Cathedral to the newly inaugurated president, calling him to recognize those who are afraid and to have mercy for them.
00:14:07 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
That is a completely uncontroversial, very Christian, biblical thing to say. And what was the response from the other Christian side that tells us worlds about where we are and the impossibility of A clean unity. And instead we're in a place of prophetic witness and opposition. And sometimes that's where we need to be and we have to do it in a way that's non violent, that's true to our values, that's true to our faith that good overcomes evil by being good.
00:14:41 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Or that as you brought up Dr. King earlier, Natalie, that love overcomes hate by being loved. And that's, that's just where we are. And we need to own that and live into it and nurture our children and the values that it's love, it's truth, it's mercy, it's compassion. These are the things that matter.
00:14:57 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And when you recognize these people are not being any of those things, you don't give them any teaching authority over you. You witness to their failings, especially on behalf of those whom they're hurting.
00:15:11 James Thomas
Thank you. I think these last two questions that we have for the week are really related to this conversation point. We're going to be wrapping up a full and challenging reading of the first 12 chapters of the Gospel of Mark this week. And for all that's happened in Mark, stories that today's secular folks would probably describe as supernatural in their basic nature.
00:15:35 James Thomas
But Christians, as you said quite eloquently last week, Ted, as Christians understand it's just a radical in breaking of God in Christ. For all of that, we actually end the gospel at this point in the lectionary with a very practical teaching about hypocrisy. The people that Jesus tells us we should watch out for are the people who say one thing but do another.
00:16:00 James Thomas
So as we leave off from the Gospel of Mark for now, we'll be back in not too long. But as we leave off for now, how do we hold that very clear ethical teaching, which, as we're saying, has quite a bit of practical importance for all of us today? How do we hold the practicality of Mark in harmony with the more magical elements of Mark that we've heard?
00:16:26 James Thomas
And this seems especially important given that we are joined by people who are raising families and one of the most negatively impactful things on the development of childhood faith is hypocrisy. So what does it mean that Jesus leaves off at this point in the story with the injunction against hypocrisy, that.
00:16:47 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Point about how hypocrisy is so harmful to children? James was sealed in my own heart in my formation as a priest. I wish I could remember exactly where it was that this was shared with me. I can't. And maybe there's a lesson in that. But I was taught that the single most important influence on a child's faith formation is the faith and the integrity with which that faith is lived of their parents.
00:17:14 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
That's the single number one influence in whether a child will have the faith in their own, in their own life. Not just that their parents mouth it, but that their parents do it. And a correlation of that is that one of the most influential things that a family can do is acts of service together on behalf of those in need.
00:17:36 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
That correlates very strongly with children really taking the faith on in their own lives, in their own hearts, as they grow and mature and make their way out in the world. And that speaks to integrity, which is the opposite of hypocrisy, right? That you actually believe the values that you're articulating and you try to live them out.
00:17:57 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
The idea that the miraculous stories of Jesus need to be taken literally is not, I think, essential to living out the values that we learn from the Gospels and that are grounded in the prophetic writings and in the core story of Exodus. That's where Jesus values and teachings and ethical injunctions are coming from.
00:18:22 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And if anything, he's only deepening them. Right. And I know in my own heart, in life that what matters most is my experience in my own heart of how I'm living. I'm deeply influenced by Ignatian spirituality, which in a nutshell, which I'm having a professor suddenly rise up in my mind who said any philosophy that can be described in a nutshell probably belongs there.
00:18:52 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
It's of no value. But I'm going to resist that and carry on. To simplify the idea, Ignatian teaches us that in our own hearts God is with us and we experience our harmony or disharmony with God in feelings of what he calls consolation and desolation. Feelings of joy, peace, happiness, warmth, love. That's consolation.
00:19:17 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Feeling angry or sad or disconnected. Those are feelings of desolation. And when I'm acting with integrity and I'm living out my values, I'm experiencing consolation, I'm experiencing God's presence. And that's non miraculous, but it's remarkable. And it's a way for me in my life today without having to worry about the miraculousness of Jesus's presence back then, I can experience Jesus presence in my own heart today.
00:19:47 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And that animates me, that enlivens me, that gives me engagement to think about who Jesus was, to think about these stories and then to live it out in my own life. And so in the Cole household, faith formation of our children is halting at pesters. We've had some bumps and missteps along the way, but one thing we try to, you know, we try to have a weekly gathering, and we've tried to weave imperfectly an Ignatian reflection in.
00:20:14 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Where did you have your best experience today? And what was hardest today, which is an Ignatian practice called the Examen. Right. Where were you closest to God today? Where was God furthest from you today? And those things, they. That is such a powerful practice, and it opens up in so many ways our awareness of where God is present that I commend it here, you know, kind of in answer to this question, what, what do we do with the miraculous Jesus?
00:20:42 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And wanting to be people of integrity, I say we hold that very lightly and we find another way to weave God's presence into our lives today in designation ways, I. I commend you. There's another book I can't recommend enough. It's this amazingly simple but profoundly deep book called Sleeping with Bread, and it's written by two brothers and a spouse of one of the brothers, the Lynns.
00:21:10 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
It's two Jesuit priests who are brothers, and one of the brothers fell in love with Sheila, and as you can do in the Catholic Church, she left the priesthood and married her. They recognize that happens in human hearts and lives and compassionately and mercifully allow for it to happen. And the three of them carry on in a ministry of faith formation and teaching.
00:21:30 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And this is their book about the exam and Sleeping with Bread.
00:21:34 Natalie Thomas
Oh, that's great. You're a second person. Recently, another priest, I went to the Forma conference, and he recommends practice or an adaptive practice of the examine with children. So we'll definitely check that out. Well, we have one more question for you today, Ted, and that's about the relationship. We've been dancing around it already, the relationship with power and authority that Jesus offers.
00:22:02 Natalie Thomas
And as we spoke about earlier, as parents, it can be tempting to derive our authority or our presence in a home from a harmful term. Harmful. Harmful source of power. And we are curious if you have any words for parents and caregivers about how we can claim authority in the home in a way that models what Jesus offered to people in his day.
00:22:31 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
Boy, oh, boy. You know, I alluded to the struggles we're having in the Cole household, and there's deep integrity going on for me as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, as a parent with, wrestling with. How do I exercise my authority as a parent, which My boys need. Right. They're 10 and 8 and they do not know all things, despite their sense that they do.
00:22:59 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And they need limits and they need to hear no, and how do I do that? And face their resistance and opposition to that, and then practice servant leadership and practice love and care rather than the exercise of violence and power, verbal violence. And I'm going to say here's a place where I feel no capacity to provide advice other than encouragement on the difficulty of the journey.
00:23:27 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And it lies ahead of you all. Natalie and James, God bless you. Oh, for the halcyon days when they were 18 and nonverbal. 18 months of non verbal. And I'm going to share an example. And here's a moment that happened every so often. One of my boys just gets really resistant to the idea of going to church on Sunday morning.
00:23:50 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I'm not 100% certain what's in all of that. You know, we had a pretty vibrant kids ministry last spring, and we had. We just kind of reached the critical threshold where there was an engaging group of kids, kids for both of their age groups. And then a family left and that kind of broke down.
00:24:07 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And there's some events. They showed up and they were the only ones, and that was a huge turn off to them. But there was a Sunday where one of my boys just really was entrenched about not going to church. And I was ready to be reactive and try and exercise my authority with verbal violence.
00:24:27 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I had gotten to a somewhat more centered place the week before. I'd gotten some rest, and so I was like, all right, well, I'm going to take a shower and then we'll come back and we'll talk about it. And while I was in the shower, and here's a place where our liturgical tradition is so important and so powerful, right?
00:24:47 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And it's a little bit like the waters of remembering the waters of baptism and being refreshed in God's love for me. In that moment of being in the shower and getting ready to go to church, I realized I'm going to try and meet him with compassion and see can I. Can I find things that will meet what his need is so that we can do what we need to do, which is to get to church, because I'm on to preach.
00:25:11 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I come out of the shower and I name some things that could change how the morning might flow. And he says, all right, I'll go. We ended up late. I showed up right when the gospel ended, didn't have time to vest, and I went out and preached the sermon that I'd cooked and that spoke to that moment.
00:25:30 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I think that's all that we can do. And it's an ongoing process. And I know some days I get better at it, and some days I'm worse because of my. I'm rested, I'm not rested. I'm stressed, I'm energized. And somewhere in there, I try to remember God's holding all this, this, and God has compassion for me.
00:25:50 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I also remember. So my parents were divorced when I was around 18 months or so. So there was a period of time when my dad wasn't around. He was actually dealing with alcohol, which is part of our story. Alcoholism is part of our story. And then he got sober, and I would see him every weekend, and he was a great dad and gave me his full attention and his full love.
00:26:16 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
And I realize now he could do that because I wasn't there Monday through Friday. Right. He had a week to got to rest up and be energized and present. And I don't get that. And we need to find rest, fellow parents, as much as we can and to recognize how tired and exhausting this work is and be gentle with ourselves.
00:26:37 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
I find myself thinking about that a lot lately. My wife thinks about that too. Kind of how isolated we all are in our homes and our pockets, and we're not. We don't have the rest that living in a community or in a village might give us where some. Another parent could take your kids for a day and you could really decompress and relax.
00:26:55 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
It's essential for us to practice our best self, to be our best selves, to be servant authority figures rather than power authority figures. We need to be rested to do that, to follow Christ that way. And Jesus took time to rest. He didn't go to Jerusalem until he was ready. Right. And we should take that wisdom from that.
00:27:15 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
We started with the transfiguration. And an aspect of that story that I think we underplay is how much that empowered Jesus to be ready to go to Jerusalem. He had that moment of. It was like a mountaintop retreat experience, an infusion of God's love and God's power. And that gave him what he needed to walk the hard road ahead of him.
00:27:36 The Rev. Dr. Ted Cole
If we don't have that experience of rest and renewal and a sense of God's love in us, we can't go through the hard roads that lie ahead of us as parents.
00:27:45 James Thomas
Well, thank you so much, Ted, for all of that, for so much. So much wisdom in this week's. Episode Practical, Practical Tips and Some Esoterica for which we're very, very grateful. Natalie and I both. And we want to thank you for being with us. We have one week with Ted left, which is exciting for us.
00:28:03 James Thomas
We're going to be turning to the Beatitudes next week. Little sneak peek of our next week with Ted. And thank you also to Natalie for being on this journey with me. Thank you to the wider community of people praying with us. We want to stay in touch with you. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram as Bedtime Chapel.
00:28:20 James Thomas
Follow us, let us know what's working not working for you. You can email us bedtimechapelmail.com it's all on our website, which is also bedtimechapel.com and until next time, we will be praying with you.
