WHO OWNS WHAT?

No, I’m not going to blog about who owns church property. It is known that I’ve opposed  TEC going to secular courts to enforce its own discipline. It is clear that Scripture deplores such action. It seems clear to me that to do so in the United States breaches the separation of church and state. In a sense it also weakens our own authority to keep order in our own household. Inevitably it leaves a legacy of ill feeling which will remain a smoldering reality and impede any future attempts to normalize relationships between Anglicans in America and it’s a shocking misuse of money contributed to dioceses and the national body by our parishes and missions, a majority of which struggle to survive let alone engage in mission and outreach. Our property disputes sully our reputation in the eyes and ears of unchurched and non-churched people.

 

What is on my mind today is another matter altogether. Who owns Word and Sacraments?  Anglicans recognize that Word and Sacraments, core doctrine and sacramental life belong to the whole Church. They are not owned by bits and pieces of the Church, “particular” churches and denominations. The Scriptures, essential doctrines enumerated in the Creeds, the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons and the sacraments exist as marks and evidences of the whole Church, the Church God called to himself and established by the Spirit in Christ.

 

It has often been remarked that Anglicanism has no doctrine of its own. We look to no particular human agent as a creator or founder of a theology or system. We honor many men and women whose insights have enriched the Church in history. Special honor has always been granted among us to the Fathers, the theologians of the undivided Church while we recognized that their “theology” was not a single-minded “take” on Christian faith, but reflects their historical context and the issues in play during their lifetimes, but whose thoughts continue to enlighten contemporary Christianity. Yet we always test their insights at the bar of Scripture and in the light of Tradition, the mind of the Church Universal in time, space and place. Valuing an Ignatius, an Origen, an Augustine, an Anselm, a Luther or a Calvin or even a Hooker, doesn’t make us their slavish disciples: we are mere Christians.

 

This understanding reminds us that in our particular moment in history we are no more children of a particular trend in modern theology and its commentators than we are of those who have gone before. This realization bids us distrust what I call “denominationalism”, the odd idea that the company we keep in families and groupings of Christian churches involves our subscription to a religious form of tribalism, one which has emerged as the tragic fragmentation of Christianity evolved and continues to evolve or indeed devolves. Being an Anglican or an Episcopalian isn’t a subscription to a discreet brand of Christianity, but rather a reflection of where we belong in family terms. We may and indeed should value the ambience and furniture of our part of the Christian whole, but these things must be tested and apprehended as gifts which reflect that which is given, the property of all Christians.

 

I value, for instance, the first sections of the Anglican Covenant. These sections enumerate the common faith Anglicans cherish as offerings to the whole Church, and not as evidences of our own exceptionalism or unique nature. We hold these truths as articulations of the revealed Faith given to God to his Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, the Bride and Body of Christ. They proclaim to all people our fidelity to that Church and our faithfulness to the mission of the whole Church until Jesus comes again.

 

I have never attended a baptism during which a child or adult is made an Episcopalian. I have never attended an ordination which made the ordinand an Anglican or Episcopalian bishop, priest or deacon. I have never read marked and inwardly digested an Anglican Scripture, or recited an Episcopalian Creed, or celebrated an Episcopalian Eucharist. Never.

 

Now this principle involves a certain trust. I must assume and trust that all these gifts to the whole Church are faithfully administered within the fragment of the One Church in which I have been called to serve. Were I to lose that assumption and trust two problems would arise. How would I resolve my doubts? How would I then proceed?  Implicit in being a catholic, a member of God’s Church Universal is the understanding that my private doubts are not issues I may resolve on my own terms. I must seek counsel and advice from other Christians and be guided by the counsel of my contemporaries and by the voices of the whole Church in what we call history or better, The Tradition. No action, even that of an individual Christian comes without consequences. Leaving one’s parish, or even ones “church” has consequences and the worst of those consequences is the rending of the Body. What matters is not my offense at the actions of other Christians, or of a particular church meeting, synod or convention, but what is taught and practiced in worship and doctrine, or one should say the doctrine reflected in that liturgy and worship.

 

At many moments in church history parts of the Church, sometimes large parts of the Church have tolerated and permitted teachings and practices at odds with that which the Church believes and should practice. As individuals we all from time to time live and express things which are not Christian or orthodox. So it is with the companies of Christians who share that which God has given to his Church. Yes in such times our duty is to be faithful to the “faith once delivered to the saints”. But every time we contribute to fragmentation, whether as particular parts of the Church or as individuals we ourselves deny the Church’s essential marks as One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

 

Living into this realization is an antidote to regionalism, sectarianism, particularism or denominationalism. It spurs us to pray for and seek unity and concord. It spurs us to greater visible unity among ourselves as Anglicans worldwide, it tempers our stressing our individualism as parts of “national churches” and makes us yearn to be one with our brothers and sisters across the globe. Further it drives us to seek the maximum measure of cooperation with Christians in other bodies.

 

Above all it prevents our apprehending for our own part of the Universal Church, the title of “church”, at least as something particular or peculiar, something  with the ability and right to do its own thing and go its own way. Yes we belong to “the Church”. Yes our own “brand’ possesses that which the Church is, but not as our property or declaration of independence but as a shared inheritance as members of the Church throughout time and space.

 

One hundred years ago there was hope that what we call the ecumenical movement would teach us all these truths and spur us under God to repent of our “unhappy divisions”. But nationalism, ecclesiastical nationalism has thwarted that movement and dimmed its vision. The “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity” is no longer observed significantly among us and even our own “Communion”, a word as strong as and synonymous with “Church” has experienced division and even schism. If we are to be faithful to our particular Anglican and Episcopal charism or grace, we must discover once again our mission to “speak peace to those who are far off and those who are near” , in short practice being the Church. God helps us.

THE TRIVIAL ROUND, THE COMMON TASK

 

For a few years now, Episcopalians have been offered a variety of extra liturgical texts and hymns with which to supplement the Prayer Book. I sometimes think that we are becoming more and more like denominations which do not enjoy the heritage of Common Prayer. Clergy seem to want to introduce new elements in weekly worship and to enjoy designing services which contain much which is not familiar and not normal.

 

I really don’t see how we are to be nurtured and grow in faith and love, from which comes all good works, unless we embrace our Prayer Book and permit its words sink in to become the bedrock of our “spirituality”. Common Prayer requires liturgical texts which are normal or at least that has been the source and foundation of the Anglican Way until now.

 

If clergy and worship committees now emulate non-liturgical churches and visit upon eucharistic communities constant change, we will lose that which I believe to be one of the gifts Anglicanism has enjoyed: to be a people rooted and grounded in the liturgical heritage of the Western Church within the Anglican tradition.

Twice in the last six years, if I may be personal, I have been gravely ill –   largely as a result of the cure rather than the disease – and it has been the spiritual foundation in which I have grown throughout my life, the words of the familiar liturgy, the psalms and prayers, the sacrament brought to me when I couldn’t be with the people of God, which has sustained me. I would commend the good habit of Daily Offices, of Word and Sacrament which form the treasury of corporate and personal devotion, and urge that we value and treasure the normality of a fixed liturgy to which we are heirs. I am not opposing liturgical flexibility or innovation, as long as it is remembered that it is familiarity in rite and ceremony which sticks in our consciousness and through which we grow “into the fulness of the stature of Christ.”

THE AMERICAN ORDINARIATE

Yesterday the Pope officially established an American Ordinariate. Yes it’s a wretched word, to which my spellcheck and ear take offense. A couple of people have written fairly negative blogs about this event which have made me examine my own reactions. For those of you who are not up on this news, or wonder what on earth an ordinariate might be, here’s my reflection. An ordinariate is a grouping of people into common purpose and identity within the Roman Catholic Church. In America it seems to have been used to identify that church’s ministry to the military thus far. Now it is being used in a rather different manner. The new Ordinariate is a “place” in which Episcopalians and other Anglicans may establish parishes within existing Roman Catholic dioceses which may use familiar liturgical texts based on the Books of Common Prayer and presumably the ceremonial and hymnody familiar to Anglicans. What portions of these texts will be permitted remains to be seen. One notes that the new website of this grouping exhibits some prayers which have been used by Anglicans for centuries.

Married Episcopal and Anglican clergy are to lead these new parishes after ordination to the Roman Catholic diaconate and priesthood. One former Episcopalian bishop, Fr. Jeffrey Steenson, formerly Bishop of the Rio Grande, received and ordained anew a few years ago heads the Ordinariate. His former episcopal status has not been recognized -this is true of a number of Church of England bishops who have recently converted to Rome. In that most are married, they are not eligible to be consecrated as Roman Catholic bishops, for while Rome has married priests, it follows, in common with Orthodoxy, the practice of confining the episcopate to celibate clergy. St. Peter would not have been acceptable. Thus priests appointed to head these Ordinariates will have a limited jurisdiction. Although they may wear episcopal regalia they cannot ordain or assist as bishops in the ordination of other bishops.

In that all, clergy and laity, who are incorporated into these groupings must accept all Roman Catholic teachings and renounce their former convictions about the catholicity of Anglicanism, this pastoral provision is perhaps rather nostalgic . They have moved “place” and renounced who they were, but may keep their baggage, or some of it. This may be viewed as an enormous act of charity on the part of Rome and should be viewed as such. In some manner it reflects a recognition given by the second Vatican Council, which detected in Anglicanism a shade or reflection of something “catholic” which may not be as apparent in other Western Christian separated ecclesial communities. Perhaps the full force of that recognition has now been dulled by the recent pronouncement of the Roman Curia which effectively unchurches most non-Roman Catholic bodies and praises Orthodoxy somewhat faintly by remarking that the great churches of the East, although “valid”, lack that fullness which it is claimed only unity under the papacy grants.

After some years of ecumenical hope, Rome seems now to have returned to a clearer articulation of its claims to be the one, true church. Fair enough. As far as Anglicanism is concerned, we haven’t made things easier for Rome. While engaging Rome in official discussions – and the documents forged by Anglicans and Roman Catholics in the ARCIC talks are substantive and important – we have gone our own merry way, particularly in the West, as we have admitted women to Holy Orders and in North America embraced the ordination of gay people and same-sex blessings of unions. We struggle with the problem of how we may react to what we may, or may not believe to be movements of the Holy Spirit while not isolating ourselves from other Christians and even those in our own family. Certainly in the United States we retain more than a tinge of our traditional fear of “popery”, readily lumping Roman Catholics into the same status as fundamentalists, and ignoring Rome’s often enlightened approach to the problems of poverty, and its opposition to indiscriminate abortion and the death penalty. The not inconsiderable presence of former Roman Catholic clergy and laity in our midst factors into the presence of anti-Roman Catholic prejudice.

Yet progress has been made. Anglicans no longer identify Rome with the Anti Christ, or fuel their imaginations with  polemics about the Marian martyrs, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer and many priests and lay people who were executed for their faith during the reign of “Bloody Mary”. We recognize each other’s baptisms: Anglicans may be unchurched but not unChristianed!  We now pray together, even worship together. Sixty years ago almost none of this was the practice. We continue to talk officially. I have some sympathy with the Roman view that official talks with Anglicans is rather like wrestling with an octopus. What one arm embraces, the other shuns. Our own growing confusion makes it almost impossible for us to talk with each other.

The Ordinariate is not a place where Anglicans may remain Anglican while embracing communion with Rome. Its membership must accept all Roman Catholic teachings. It is perhaps significant that almost all those who joined separated Anglican bodies, those whose leadership has worked for union with Rome, have opted to remain where they are. Joining the Ordinariate isn’t merely a matter of Rome recognizing rump Anglican jurisdictions. It is not a haven for disaffected Episcopalians. This being true, the creation of this “place” for converting Episcopalians and Anglicans should not disturb us. Rather we should rejoice that converts have found their home and be glad that they are to be permitted to live into elements of a tradition forged over these past centuries by men and women of faith, who while not to be commemorated as saints and divines, have lived and died in the faith enshrined in our Prayer Books, spirituality and tradition. And perhaps that reality poses a difficulty for Rome. How is it that such people have exhibited the fruits of the Spirit which stem from hearing and receiving the Gospel and the Sacraments of the Universal Church, and that in such abundance? This Anglican tradition of teaching and spirituality, of “formation” demonstrates formidably the Work of the Trinity even among “schismatics”.

That question poses another one. Setting aside the real tragedy of disunity which weakens and compromises all parts of the Universal Church in its work and mission, in what manner does our incorrigible refusal to accept Papal claims to universal sovereignty limit the grace of God among us? Cannot Rome imagine just how the clothes of Imperial Rome and the behavior of past occupants of the See of Rome alienate and obscure our ability to recognize in her communion, as it is in practice, those marks of the true Church we embrace in theory and would love to be restored?  Certainly we have our own historic and contemporary baggage, much of which clouds our own mission and vision in the communities we serve. There’s plenty of room for shame, and none for triumphalism. I am convinced that church unity will only emerge when all portions of the Divided Church get real about themselves and own up to our corporate sins. I am delighted that Rome appreciates much in our qualities of worship and spirituality. There is much about Roman Catholicism I cherish. I am glad that converts who also cherish their past are being given a home. I wish them godspeed.

A final word about the vexed question or “valid Orders”, or ministerial authenticity. In no area perhaps do we all collude in a process which seems to tell God his own business. How dare we question that which the Christian community does in ordination? Certainly there are ordinations which are “private”, that is not for a Christian community or for a Christian community. Such are obviously not actions of the Church. Certainly Anglicans are right to want to see the episcopate as what we used to term “the fount or Orders” for the simple reason that this emerged very early on indeed as the practice of the Church. It is also true and obvious that the ministries of all the ordained are limited and compromised by our divisions and that in very practical ways. But to state that God is not involved when Christians set aside those they believed to called by God to the ministry of Word and Sacrament, simply because certain laws or rites have not been employed, seems to me to be a frightful act of arrogance. This is an arrogance to which Anglicans may be as prone or complicit as members of the Church of Rome. I believe that re-ordination is normally as sinful as re-baptism. It should only be practiced in cases where clear evidence exists that the former action lacked an essential element. It should never be employed to make a point in a game of ecclesiastical politics.

MISSION and VISION

I would highly commend Bishop Daniel Martin’s new blog (http://cariocaconfessions.blogspot.com/) in which he sets forth for his diocese a vision for the future. What he proposes involves a fundamental reassessment of how we “do church” in the twenty-first century. Like all sound reassessments it involves us all in the uncomfortable process of leaving our safety zones, no easy task for gray-heads, those of us who have become the major group of survivors in the contemporary Episcopal Church.

 

As I have remarked before we have reached the end of a long period in the Western Church in which we have been secure in offering our brand or flavor of the Faith over the substance of the faith itself. American Christianity developed a free market system in which each faith group might offer its assets over against those of others, and managed to sustain “brand-loyalty” while recruiting floating Christians in search of something different. Brand loyalty was perhaps the first to go, and in the US, Episcopalians faired rather badly as they competed with groups which offered livelier youth groups or eligible partners for dating and marriage!  More and more our young people have married out, rather than marrying in.

 

Social mobility, the drift of young people to new places for work, or older people for work and retirement has left behind rump groups with dwindling resources. Faced with this we have continued to hope that our liturgy and good taste would continue to attract new people who would fit in. We’ve placed our hopes in programs based on business methods, which promise to train us to market what we have, where we are, to an unidentified market share. Certainly in fairly affluent communities, social causes or old-time religion have been attractive products particularly where a parish has the numerical strength and financial resources to effectively create or sustain programs and initiatives which draw like-minded people. Yet such systems are consumerist and play into the deadly danger of consumerism.

 

One of the side-effects of such initiatives has been the creation of parishes – well not really parishes but gathered groups – which have flavors heavily laced with “political” stances: conservative churches for conservatives, liberal churches for progressives. This espousal of contemporary cultural opinion has driven us into division and schism and weakened both groups. Countless people caught in the middle of idealogical warfare have left the church, wearied of idealogical struggles which neither speak to nor nourish their faith. A church which adopts an uncritical approach to political theories loses the capacity to stand apart from worldly “kingdoms” as it proclaims God’s rule and purpose in Jesus the Messiah through whom all is made new.

 

Thus a reassessment of mission and vision requires learning anew the purpose of the Church, why it exists, and the faith which it is called to proclaim. Renewal has to begin there and renewal requires us all to discover what it means to be “strangers and pilgrims” rather than comfortable embracers of such things as nationalism, a nationalism which threatens daily to submit to ideals and beliefs which may overcome the “otherness” of Christian discipleship and thus mission. I think this is particularly but not uniquely a problem for Americans brought up from childhood with the “myths’ of the national story and vocation. “Exceptionalism” colors our religious beliefs and compromises our understanding of the universality of the Church’s mission and purpose. No, I am not advocating disloyalty to hearth and home. Christians are called to good and active citizenship, but such a citizenship is temporary and always shared with our basic citizenship in God’s kingdom.

 

Leaving that factor aside, our major task is to grasp once again the purpose of our eucharistic communities, planted where they are in real communities, places where in worship and study, we are prepared and enabled to be witnesses to that which God has done and is doing in Jesus through the Spirit. We learn painfully that the church where we are isn’t primarily a staging point from and by which we grasp life after death. Rather the church, our church is the place, the visible place from which we engage the world in the wholeness of its need, spiritual and social. In short our local church isn’t a place to escape, a venue for self-preservation, in which our needs are addressed. Such a view is inherently selfish and it breeds the view that if we don’t get cared for we can always find some other place or no place except home where we can be the central factor. Consumerism is consumerism even of it is cloaked in piety. Clergy particularly have become the victims of people who think that a priest exists to make them content. Parishes are riven when those who want one thing, collide with those who want another. It’s all selfish and destructive.

 

In Baptism God has adopted us. Eternal life is God’s free gift. As long as we remain true to that “salvation” and live in God’s will, that’s a given. But, and it is a big “But”, that’s the start of discipleship and not its content. All of us, even the gray-heads, are able to work, give and pray for the Kingdom, as the old Prayer Book put it. And the Kingdom isn’t our local church, or our usual pew. Rather our church home is the Kingdom’s local franchise, the place from which mission begins and continues. While we remain content to receive without giving, maintaining and surviving without engaging the communities in which we are in contact with the world God loves and the people God yearns to bring to himself, we will be merely denominanationalists, and our love -self-love- will center on everything other than being the church.

 

Clergy and laity have to learn anew. Ordinands will have to be formed and shaped in radically new but thoroughly very old ways of leadership. Laity will have to be disturbed, challenged and trained. And perhaps we all need to become aware of Evil, of the presence of that which opposes God’s rule “on earth as it is in heaven”, an evil which clothes itself in our culture in the idea that faith is personal and private, something which has no place in the market place. We have all tried so hard to fit in, to accept, to collaborate, to be nicely Anglican that we no longer see evil around us, or if we do, we judge those caught upon in its seduction while being equally seduced ourselves. The Faith is a matter of life and death. Redemption is a rescue mission, not merely to pluck souls for heaven, but to redeem the whole creation. True God is the author of that purpose. We are God’s messengers, God’s lovers, God’s voice of justice and mercy. Jesus told his followers that they would receive power – we get the word dynamite from that Greek word – to be his witnesses -life-givers – to the ends of the world. For most of us that world and its “ends” are discovered in the communities our parishes embrace.

 

A simple way to begin is to make sure that the people and needs of the community in which we are placed, its families and lonely people are intentionally remembered in the Prayers of the People at the Eucharist. That’s a very small and simple start, but our intentional prayers are powerful and they nudge us to witness and service. Instead of simply praying for “our church” and ourselves, perhaps we should leave that to others and pray instead for all who live and work and play around our churches and homes?  Such a good habit will enable us to hear the Gospel as it is read and preached and spur us to renewed mission and vision.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER AND CHRISTMAS

I was particularly struck by this part of Archbishop Rowan’s sermon in Canterbury Cathedral at the Christmas Eucharist today:

“This coming year we celebrate the 350^th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer.  It has shaped the minds and hearts of millions; and it has done so partly because it has never been a book for individuals alone.  It is common prayer, prayer that is shared.  In its origins, it was meant to be – and we may well be startled by the ambition of this – a book that defined what a whole society said to God together.  If the question ‘where are you?’ or ‘who are you?’ were being asked, not only individual citizens of Britain but the whole social order could have replied, ‘Here we are, speaking together – to recognize our failures and our ideals, to recognize that the story of the Bible is our story, to ask together for strength to live and act together in faithfulness, fairness, pity and generosity.’  If you thumb through the Prayer Book, you may be surprised at how much there is that takes for granted a very clear picture of how we behave with each other.  Yes, of course, much of this language feels dated – we don’t live in the unselfconscious world of social hierarchy that we meet here.  But before we draw the easy and cynical conclusion that the Prayer Book is about social control by the ruling classes, we need to ponder the uncompromising way in which those same ruling classes are reminded of what their power is for, from the monarch downwards.  And the almost forgotten words of the Long Exhortation in the Communion Service, telling people what questions they should ask themselves before coming to the Sacrament, show a keen critical awareness of the new economic order that, in the mid sixteenth century, was piling up assets of land and property in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite.

 

The Prayer Book is a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith.  It gives us words that say where and who we are before God: ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’, ‘we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table’, but also, ‘we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of the everlasting kingdom’. It gives us words for God that hold on to the paradoxes we can’t avoid: ‘God… who art always more ready to hear than we to pray,’ ‘who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity, ‘whose property is always to have mercy.’  A treasury of words for God – but also a source of vision for an entire society: ‘Give us grace seriously to lay heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions’; ‘If ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are not only against God but also against your neighbours; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them; being ready to make restitution’

 

The world has changed, the very rhythms of our speech have changed, our society is irreversibly more plural, and we have – with varying degrees of reluctance – found other and usually less resonant ways of talking to God and identifying who we are in his presence.  If we used only the Prayer Book these days we’d risk confusing the strangeness of the mysteries of faith with the strangeness of antique and lovely language.  But we’re much the poorer for forgetting it and pushing it to the margins as much as we often do in the Church.  And it is crucial to remember the point about the Prayer Book as something for a whole society, binding together our obligations to God and to one another, in a dense interweaving of love and duty joyfully performed.

 

The Prayer Book was once the way our society found words to respond to the Word, to say who and where they were in answer to God’s question.  Those who prayed the Prayer Book, remember, included those who abolished the slave trade and put an end to child labour, because of what they had learned in this book and in their Bibles about the honour of God and of God’s children.  They knew their story; they knew how to give an answer for themselves, how to join up the muddle of their experience in a coherent pattern by relating it to the unchanging truth and grace of God.  That’s why the coming year’s celebration is not about a museum piece.”

 

Now those of you who know me will just say “It figures”. Now I’m not one of those who mutter that the “new” American Prayer Book, or Common Worship are heretical. I’ve used the new rites in parishes I have served and there’s much I think good. But I do think that they are in some ways inadequate.  Certainly, as +Rowan remarks the Prayer Book reflects a world and a society which is dead and gone, although not as throughly dead and gone than has been assumed. The rich and poor are with us still, and in the 16th Century a new class was already emerging, a class whose wealth was self-created, and whose power was emerging. There are powerful voices in our own society who champion wealth as a virtue and who look upon the poor as inadequate, people who should do better if only they had moral fibre. They don’t deserve our “charity”, let alone health care. Latimer’s sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, written as a class was dispossessing people from land and livelihood, speaks to us today. The poor man prays, “Give us this day our daily bread” and the rich benefit from the poor person’s prayer, and so we are to share that daily bread with him. His sermon caused fury. He went to the Tower of London as a prisoner because of his “class warfare”. Those who champion the poor and demand that the rich share their wealth were and still are derided for their “social engineering”.

 

Sin IS real. Yes the poor sin as well as the rich sin, yet their sin is not accompanied by power. The old familiar words of the Prayer Book, taken as serious prose and not merely old fashioned poetry, have the ability to bring us up short, to make us examine our lives, those of us who have been declared to be the children of God, heralds of that which God is about as he prepares for his coming again to renew heaven and earth, a new world in which wealth and poverty alike will be leveled and abolished, in which there will be but one “power”, the loving power of God, and God alone. Christmas in the old Prayer Book bids us let go of our idolatry of nation, political opinions or race, economic theory or class. Christmas tells us that in Jesus a new world is emerging and we who have been set apart in Baptism are its witnesses. We can’t create a new world, a just society, by our own deeds or philosophies, true. But God is about that new world, is doing his purpose to reverse Eden. That doesn’t mean that we are just called to a selfish grasping of eternal life above the bright blue sky. We are called not only to tell what God is about, but to show what God is about, “not only with our lips, but in our lives.”  We are to walk in God’s presence in God’s service, “in holiness and righteousness of life”, not so God will think us good, but by showing to our families, or work mates, our communities the very love and compassion which we see and experience in the life of Jesus, as he moves among us. God give us the grace to be reflections of “The Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us” as we “behold his glory, “full of grace and truth.”

 

IN SHORT 2

A missional strategy for the local parish involves change, and perhaps nothing is more unsettling than change. For centuries we’ve been used to the idea that parishioners belong to a church in order to get their needs served. In many parishes countless hours are spent talking about who wants what in worship, who doesn’t like what in worship and who gets to do what at parish socials and projects.

 

A priest is “hired” to meet these needs and must spend his/her time largely worrying about whether performance is gladly evaluated in a positive manner, putting out fires, and making people happy.

 

Some times, often the time exceeds the performance, is spent discussing how to attract like-minded people. After all, we’ve let our children become “free-thinkers” or to marry outside the church, and those of us left are getting closer and closer to the grave. We’ve always believed that our history, liturgy and good taste are attracted enough to draw people in through the red doors.

 

But now we have a new idea. The church is to be base camp. Those who are active believers are to be shaped into eucharistic communities charged with going into the local world to tell the Good News of Jesus.

 

Now of course not everyone is either talented to be an evangelist or called to be an evangelist. Among the core group will be those who support mission with prayer and even money. There will be those whose ministry surrounds worship, not as spectators or those to be satisfied, but as active offerers of the Eucharist for the life of the community; the Eucharist is for the baptized and the baptized are the priestly company through which Christ makes himself known in the shared Breaking of Bread.

 

Some will have talents in radical hospitality, providing practical care by feeding the hungry, teaching children, helping people with finance, healing the sick and a myriad of other services outside the church building to the community. But there must be a core group of people trained and empowered to speak about Jesus in housing estates, local neighborhoods, supermarkets, work, play. Certainly such evangelism will be deeper than handing out tracts and asking people whether they are saved. However it will be much more than merely “doing good” and hoping people will take the hint that we are Christians!

 

And all present church buildings may not be suitable to be “base camp” for the church’s working out of the Great Commission in the local community. Not all clergy will be able to lead Great Commission parishes. Buildings which swallow up the resources of the eucharistic community need to be abandoned. Far better to rent a store front in a strategic area than pour money into a Victorian faux gothic pile far from where people now live and work. Clergy whose talents are liturgical and pastoral need to be gathered into team ministries led by clergy who have the gift of evangelism and have been intentionally trained to teach and lead outreach.

 

The Episcopal Church needs to develop ways to pay clergy who transform parishes into eucharistic/great commission base camps. Mutual mission patterns and yolked parish models are old-fashioned and only compound the felony of preserving old and obsolete patterns of parish life and ministry. Dioceses need to take a hard look at population concentrations and revamp the parochial system to respond to such concentrations. Population concentrations don’t have to be large, but in smaller towns it is vital to make sure that the cost of maintaining an existing building and paying a priest doesn’t cripple outreach an mission.

 

All this needs to be fleshed out. We need clergy training centers devoted to equipping entrepreneurial clergy and lay leaders. Bishops and COMS must start to risk promoting extroverted ordinands, or introverts ready to conquer their introversion. Canons which permit parishes to resist the new model must be revised. Above all our outreach must be to all who respond, whatever their social or political views. While we remain “Progressives at Prayer” or “Conservatives at Prayer”, our religious faith shaped primarily by our politics, we will remain a sectarian, dwindling, hopelessly old-fashioned church. We will not deserve to survive.

 

 

IN SHORT

For centuries the model was a parish church drawing to it the surrounding community. It was assumed that all were Christians, but not all were active. The job of the parish was to seek out the lapsed and to offer pastoral care to all.

 

 

In the US, from colonial times, this morphed into a growing number of denominations in competition for the same pool of people who were mostly identified as Christian. A market economy emerged. Churches sought to make themselves attractive not only to their lapsed but to people shopping for a church who might be converted to one’s particular brand. The model remained one of seeking to attract people who would fit in. Recently this has developed into genre brands: conservative, liberal/progressive, moderate, socially involved, evangelical etc. The question remained, how may a church make itself welcoming to searchers?

That whole pattern is becoming defunct. Those stuck in this old pattern compete for a dwindling market of seekers. But like Europe, a growing and significant number of people have no attachment, even former attachment to Christianity. They were not formed as children with basic biblical/liturgical knowledge. These people see or think they see nothing done within church walls which impacts the reality of daily life. Another complication has been a growing separation of “religion” and “spirituality”, the latter something personal and often unconnected to corporate practice.

In a sense we are returning to a pre Christian culture, or rather one complicated by a post Christian folk law about “organized religion” its failures, corruptions, and irrelevance.

None of us, clergy or laity have adjusted to this new reality, nor are we trained to go beyond our dwindling and aging communities to tell our story or witness our faith. Stuck in our buildings and structures we have not the flexibility or the courage to break out into the world. We’ve tried new liturgy, inclusiveness, evangelism, conservatism, liberalism with little impact. We “thrive” still in urban and suburban settings where there’s still a pool of people attracted to our wares.

Until and unless we find ways and means to break out of our post Constantine model, we shall continue to dwindle and marginalize.

THANKFULNESS

Yesterday afternoon my splendid oncologist, Dr. Nathan, rang me up. She was obviously excited. She began by saying she had good news. Last week I had a bone marrow biopsy and PT and CT scans. These tests were ordered because I had reached the magical one hundred days after undergoing a stem cell transplant – my own cells – in an attempt to rid my body of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma. I’ve been battling the disease since being diagnosed in 2006, with a brief intermission. After the transplant matters were complicated by a stomach blockage and then later, after being sent home, I was returned to hospital with a blood infection. In short, the whole procedure was less than fun.

 

But yesterday all that changed. Dr. Nathan informed me that I am now in “complete remission”. There’s no trace of cancer in my body.

 

I keep wondering whether it is all a dream. I’ve become used to being ill, tired, run down. Now, all things being equal, I can concentrate on getting my strength and immune system back and living my life without the constant realization, often more subconscious than not, that I have cancer. And I am thankful. I’m thankful for everyone who has supported me with encouragement and prayer. Many, indeed most of you I’ve never met in the flesh. Some I’ve known for years. A few are my parishioners who have fed me, prayed for me and supported me during these past months during which I’ve been off work and in quarantine.

 

Thanksgiving isn’t a festival I grew up with, and to be honest, I’ve never had much sympathy for puritans, then or now. Turkey is a poor substitute for Bread and Wine, Christ’s present of his utter givingness to and for the Church and for me. But I do give thanks today “for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life. And above all for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and the hope of glory….that we may show forth thy grace, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves in thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days.” Book of Common Prayer.

 

Thank you God. Thank you all of you.

Bishop of Springfield’s Diocesan Address to Synod

http://cariocaconfessions.blogspot.com/2011/10/diocesan-synod-address-2011.html

GAMALIEL

Well like it or not, and I tend not to, most of the GAFCON leaders are members of our Communion. What are the bounds of dissent? Strangely enough this is the central question raised by the Anglican Covenant. Any competent historian will note that we have fought our doctrinal wars lustily and with little restraint other than that self-imposed by an occasional attack of charity.

 

 

So TEC struggles with the right and limit of self-expression, even for bishops and those who commend the Covenant do the same. That both seem to reach different conclusions is par for the course in our comprehension.

By the way, this isn’t the first time that the Diocese of South Carolina embraced a theology not generally received elsewhere in TEC. In the early 19th Century is was the center of a Calvinist revival which spread through the South and was largely responsible for the growth of TEC westward. The polemics indulged in by the factional journals and sermons of the time make our current conflict look wimpy. Because we have always been remarkable hospitable to new (or old) movements there has been a constant shift in opinions, always resisted by those who gained ascendancy the last time!  What seems “progressive” becomes “traditionalist” when threatened. And yet through our history this very ability and liberality has renewed and refreshed us. Gamaliel might be our patron saint.

More than once in our history as a distinct face in Christianity we have slipped into coercion in a fit of insecurity and fright. The results have never been pleasant or honoring to God. Our vocation is to be comprehensive, our practice from time to time is to be exclusive.

Now if TEC concludes that it must save its life by excluding those who dissent from its policies, it may well lose its life as Anglican. Knowing one is right is heady medicine and easily morphs into repression.

I have no idea who has reported the Bishop of South Carolina to the Disciplinary Board. I have read some of their supporters moan that their diocese has been taken away from them, reproducing the Low Church laments when states like Illinois were taken over by Anglo Catholics in the 19th Century. My advice would be to let well alone. If South Carolina can stay in TEC, despite cavils and dramatic language and canonical amendments, let it. We have so much see to do if we are to stem our Provincial decline.

Where Angels fear to tread

One expects a certain naiveté from Christians. On the whole most of us take an optimistic view about goodness and expect it to be a marked attribute of the baptized. Even the most convinced Calvinist, sure that many or most are bound for Below, expects the elect to be kind and good and true.

The problem remains that not all Christians are much better, and some are worse than non-believers. Nothing brings out the devil in us than when we are enmeshed in church politics. The urge to destroy one’s alleged enemies, to get even, to exact revenge becomes the more tempting, if we perceive that such people threaten our own position or our gains. Ample opportunity is given to indulge in such sin when a system is constructed which invites people to bring allegations to a tribunal, indeed which makes such reporting a solemn obligation. In totalitarian societies citizens are encouraged to identify the enemy, to spy, to elaborate, and the temptation to settle old scores becomes almost irresistible.

Certainly it is the duty of citizens in a free society to report abuse to the authorities. Yet the expectation remains that the authorities, with much training and experience, are able to sort out the genuine from the frivolous or the malicious. If such a sifting system breaks down, ordinary people live in insecurity.

In a Christian church which perceives itself in danger, the temptation is to adopt what I might describe as a post 9/11 posture. When such a church is dominated by those who have little or no sympathy for conscientious minorities, whose officials are amateurs, untrained in assessing credible evidence, the possibilities for abuse grow exponentially.

In recent elections and confirmations of bishops we have seen this danger in vivid colors. Persons thought to be rational have leveled frivolous and malicious charges and widely circulated them through the web. Now anonymous persons, obviously clerics, have brought allegations against the Bishop of South Carolina, many of which are plainly daft and desperate. It remains to be seen whether the Disciplinary Board established by the new Title IV canons will demonstrate impartiality and common sense and a modicum of charity. The bishop and diocese of South Carolina – a founding diocese of our church – remain within TEC. Their loss, under any circumstances would be a blow to any pretense that we remain an Anglican, and thus comprehensive church.

I read somewhere an email in which an opponent of Bishop Lawrence yearned for the old days before the diocese was “taken over” by conservatives. Dioceses and indeed the whole Episcopal Church have been “taken over” by Catholics, Evangelicals, Progressives in the past. It goes with the territory. South Carolina was the scene of the 19th Century Calvinist revival in PECUSA. It has also been Broad Church and variations on most of our themes. Yet in the past a toleration of dissent, of plain speaking, of inter-party conflict  has always been part of our scene, of our ethos. We must take enormous care to preserve such liberality. Using law to settle scores or to force division can only weaken our witness at a time in which are membership is dwindling, our influence at its lowest level since the end of the 18th. Century and our finances in jeopardy. The allegations presented against the Bishop of South Carolina are foolish. Perhaps some of the actions of the diocesan convention have been unnecessarily pointed, but express the views of many loyal Episcopalians across the  country. I trust the Disciplinary Board will show wisdom, and a mind to the stability of our church.

TRAGEDY

I was moved to read my friend Bishop Dan Martins’  latest blog in which he described his range of feelings and thoughts as an old and valued priest and friend submitted to the Roman Catholic Church. I largely share his expressions of grief and sorrow. I do understand how frightfully difficult it is for Catholic-minded Episcopalians to stay in and witness. I do understand how attractive the Ordinariate must seem to those who wish to retain some parts of their Anglican heritage while entering a sphere of new ministry in which priesthood may be exercised without apology.

 

+Dan’s blog emerged at about the time we were informed of Bishop Saul’s Powerpoint presentation to the House of Bishops meeting in Quito. The bishop, whose non-ecclesiastical title escapes me, now assists the Presiding Bishop. He calls for a radical restructuring of TEC, a leaner model for leaner times. For over a decade now brave souls have noted the steep decline in membership and finance TEC is experiencing. At first, as is common with institutions, the response was denial or platitudes that Christianity isn’t about numbers, an astounding and foolish reaction. Christianity began with the command to “Go tell and make disciples.” No time limit was attached to that commandment. When all is said and done, the primary reason for TEC’s decline is not defections to other churches or none, and certainly not structural inertia, although both are factors, but utter confusion about our identity and message. Tragically ecumenism has played its part in all this. Rather than offering to other churches the best we are, we have become embarrassed to advance our claims and heritage.

 

We have also become obsessed with a few “progressive” causes and adopted them wholesale from society without “baptism” or “conversion”. We seem to be a club for “progressive” Americans. Those who have left us often look like clubs for the Tea Party! In part this has happened because we have lost the ability to do our theology from the strengths of our tradition. In place of this method, we have constructed “theologies” based on specific causes, such as feminist theology, liberation theology, gay theology, which by definition narrow our broad thinking about God into narrow paths in which the cause describes and limits thought about God.

 

The vast majority of Americans, whatever their politics, struggling to survive in a frightful economy, are left out of the message we offer. It isn’t so much that this majority disagrees with us. It is that they find nothing in our message which is transforming, which brings them into a relationship with God in the community of the church. We resemble a store whose management constantly rearranges the interior and streamlines the staff without considering that loss of sales is all about unattractive merchandise and steep prices.

 

I do not suggest that a return to the message results in an old-fashioned conservative church. I am suggesting that zeal for the Gospel transforms and renews all our causes and theories.

 

One last point for now. The past forty years have been heady times for those who relish the role of prophetic reformer. Almost nothing has escaped their enthusiasm for change. Goodness knows how many babies have been ejected with gallons of bath water. There have been many moments in church history when enthusiasm has swept away heritage. Anglicanism as a separate face of Christianity emerged at such a moment at the Reformation. Yet these upheavals are usually followed by a period when that which has been lost is recaptured and appreciated. I pray we are approaching another such moment.

HOME AT LAST

I’m home complete with a new immune system. The transplant went very well, although there was a detour in ICU after a blockage in my stomach caused worrying complications. I’m twenty pounds lighter, and my hair is thinner but coming back. I can’t adequately praise enough the doctors, nurses and aides who lavished me with care.

 

So now I will gradually make contact with the outside world, carefully because I am defenseless against infection until my system completely reboots. Meanwhile nothing much seems to have changed. Our bishops are meeting in Quito, Ecuador, as insensitive an action as can be at a time of economic crisis, unemployment and an alarming growth in poverty. ENS seems to suggest that the House of Bishops redeems the location by espousing “liberation theology”. I doubt very much whether there is unanimity among the bishops on the subject. And the term is a slogan, begging the question as to which liberation theology, by whom and where. When will we quit using such terms as if we were a political party with a platform?  The poor don’t hear us. The rich don’t hear us and the government doesn’t hear us. We whistle in the wind. Meanwhile our church slides into invisibility as local parishes concentrate more and more on survival for now.

 

I pray for brave voices in the House of Bishops, challenging our church to re-birth, to real, tactile engagement with God’s poor, and to the work of evangelism and growth.

GETTING THROUGH 2

I was admitted to Rush University Hospital early this morning. This great sprawling place, buildings cobbled together linked by over street crossways, seems at first to be overwhelming. That impression is immediately militated by the sheer diversity of the people who seem to be in perpetual motion around its corridors. Faces of every race and clime, some serious and driven, some relaxed, seem ready to risk a smile to a passing parson. This is a serious place, about the business of healing, but it is also a friendly place. Nowhere more than in the admission office.

I’ve been to that office three times in the past two weeks or so. I was there to have a port/catheter implanted by a mild out-patient operation and again on subsequent days last week reporting to have my stem cells harvested, and finally today to be admitted for a stem cell transplant. Incredibly, after the first visit, I was recognized and greeted warmly by the admission staff. I haven’t worn clericals and thus it’s no deference to “the cloth”. The same must be said for the young nurses I met on a few days in the Cancer Floor infusion center. One obviously dedicated and gentle young woman told me she chose cancer nursing after her father died of the disease. She is doing him proud. My case nurse, Sheila Davies is a source of great cheer and exudes confidence.

And so finally here I am, in 1029 Kellog A. I’ve been weighed, measured, my medical history reviewed, pills and potions ordered and the first dose of chemotherapy administered. Each nurse has been about her business intentionally but with a ready smile and sincere words of encouragement.  If lunch is to be a guide, the food will be good. The hospital bed is wider than most and not too uncomfortable.  I hadn’t been here long before my Oxforshire parson son Mark “skyped” me to make sure that all is well. My sons are my delight. This afternoon I was visited by an eager young trainee chaplain, a member of the Christian Reformed Church who was awed because I have met and know +Tom Wright and whose faith and world view is being stretched by courses at Loyola. He was briefly joined by a young Kenyan pastor-chaplain and we prayed together, an instant moment of true ecumenism.

I am writing in a hospital recliner, somewhat hard on the fundamentals, but good enough. I hope to be able to get some reading done before chemo captures me for a period which shouldn’t last more than a few days in the first week or so of my long stay here.. Perhaps I will be fortunate in that respect and avoid some of the nastier side-effects. I know for certain that “God is my hope and strength; a very present help in time of trouble”

JOHN STOTT

I suppose I suprize no one when I confess that I am not an Evangelical. That is not to suggest that I am not evangelical. I am gobsmacked when I hear Episcopalians state that numbers aren’t important or that Christians shouldn’t seek to convert non believers. How do they think they have a church in which to worship or a faith to espouse? When Americans crossed the eastern mountains and began to spread across this vast landmass, it was the commitment of believers which Christianized new settlements. Granted the different name brands of Christianity or their adherents first sought their own and set up a church on every corner.  Yet many, even most of the pioneers which possessed the land, left behind them adherence to organized Christianity. The tale is told over and over again of families once “churched” whose children left behind the faith of their ancestors. True many read the Bible, but that was as far as it went. These people were evangelized by those who retained allegiance to “organized religion”. And so for generations the new America of the frontier became, at least for w period,  a Christian nation. Even those who embraced no church, like Abraham Lincoln, were haunted by and inspired by a biblical worldview.

 

The America of the early nineteenth century, only sporadically churched transformed into a land where the church in its baffling diverse “denominational”  structure swiftly established itself. Certainly this diversity contrasted sharply with European Christianity where national churches, Roman Catholic, Protestant or Anglican claimed the devotion of the many. Yet there was a certain vigor in such diversity. The downside was that evangelism often transformed itself into a method by which competing denominations grew, apart from the normal allegiance of families to their churches, into a process of a form of free market economy in which rival church memberships sought to evangelize each other. Episcopalians relied on this process, attracting those who sought its worship forms after leaving their own religious heritage behind. That evangelistic method grew to be  paramount in Episcopalian church growth and evangelism. Sheep stealing possessed the Episcopal imagination. It remains entrenched in our imagination. Our web sites predicate outreach in terms of locating and attracting floating people who might rather like the way we worship, or recently our espousal of progressive causes.

 

Our larger and growing parishes, liberal or traditional have grown by attracting those who discover in their midst something lacking in their former church homes. Secure in their numerical and economic success, many decry the old methods of sheep stealing while continuing to expand by that very process. Disaffected Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists discover a place where they feel secure and happy. Our national church peddles the wares of liberalism and suggests a churchly fortress available to the like-minded, while traditionalists peddle the wares of conservatism and suggest a churchly fortress available to the like-minded.

 

These methods are just nineteenth century free market approaches to Christianity tweaked to take into account the polarity of contemporary American life. The death of John Stott underlies this scenario. Stott emerged from an old fashioned Anglican Evangelical conversion to personal faith in Jesus into a prophet who realized that mere Christianity is much more than the preservation of a particular church party. He obviously remained an Anglican Evangelical, but he gradually became convinced that the Gospel was more than sheep-stealing or shoring up a particular brand of religious expression. For Stott the Gospel was not merely about saving souls or converting people to Evangelicalism. He became a churchman, and one who saw evangelism in great breadth, the telling of the Story which included Jesus’s commitment to economic and social justice, to “ecology”, to churchmanship, and to a lively and converting faith in Jesus as Lord. He distanced himself from schismatic alternatives while taking very seriously the plight of an Anglicanism shorn of biblical faith and practice. His quiet, kind, and open approach placed him above the fray of church politics and remarkably above the fanaticism of right and left, despite the fact that he decried the introversion of much Evangelical thought and the powerlessness of those who affirm “justice” while ignoring conversion to Jesus and His saving grace.

 

Stott’s evangelicalism was that of John Newton, William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, in an understanding that genuine Christianity champions the poor and the outcast and tackles both spiritual and social neediness not as separate dimensions but in the wholeness of both.

 

And the field of evangelism has taken a step backwards in time. In the West the mission field is not the supposed deficiencies of this or that denomination anymore, tackled by peddling sectarian wares to floating Christians. More and more, like the early 19th Century West, it is a field peopled by those who perhaps preserve some God-awareness, but for whom the churches are remote clubs practicing rites which, to them, the unchurched, have no earthly practical utility in living life. In such a scene, the churches are called to offer a Living Jesus and the claims he makes for himself as he who came to die and rise again to make all things new. John Stott’s voice was silenced as he listened to Handel’s Messiah. He then met the Messiah and now calls us all to own Jesus as Lord and Savior and to tell of his coming, dying, rising and ascending work, his care for the poor, the ill, the disadvantaged, the disowned to a needy, polarized, dysfunctional world. He calls us out of our holy clubs into the world which surrounds them. He calls us to holistic evangelism and to learn the means of winsome evangelism. I pray Stott’s vision will become that of the church.

VERY MINOR SURGERY

Up this morning at 4.00am. Fr. Frank drove me to Chicago. We arrived before the crowd and I was shortly in out patient surgery. After a couple of attempts an IV was established, something good infused and the next thing I knew I was waking up in recovery. The nurses were all very kind and in good humor.

 

I was then wheeled to the 10th floor cancer unit and taken to the place where people get chemotherapy. After a mix up about my date of birth on the meds -they made me twenty years younger; fine with me – the injections arrived. A swift jab in my tummy began the first of five injections. I was given syringes with four doses which my Junior Warden, an RN, will jab me with at 7.00am each morning. Frank and I then drove to an Italian eatery where I revived myself with soup and a lovely sandwich. We then drove back to La Porte avoiding the rush hour traffic. We made the journey in just over an hour. After a short nap I made tea and am now relaxing in my chair. My Senior Warden, Margie Bender has brought dinner for me. Hooray!

 

I am delighted with the attitude of the nurses and staff at Rush University Hospital, which began its life as St Luke’s Episcopal Hospital back in the days when our church was thriving and could afford to run such places.

 

The site where the port was inserted is a little sore but not too painful. Thanks to all who have responded to my blogs on Facebook. I feel surrounded by so many friends who are praying for me and cheering me on. Now i get myself ready to return to Chicago on Monday, to stay at the Holiday Inn near the hospital for a few days while they harvest my cells. Mercifully insurance will pay for the motel, meals and taxis to and from the hospital. I will be on my own for all that.

GETTING THROUGH

Part of my time at Rush University Hospital in Chicago on Monday was spent having a psycho-social evaluation. The young and delightful Ph.D who interviewed me asked how I would get through all that follows. I answered “my faith.” Now by that I did not suggest that I feel or think that God has singled me out for special treatment. Of course that might be true. Women and men have been so “elected” since the beginning of time. But rather like pretensions to the prophetic charism, the suggestion is best left alone except perhaps in the judgement of others! Rather, my faith enables me to suggest that God includes me in his love, despite myself, my sins and failings, and thus in the company of the faithful, who no one may number or identify. God knows. Whatever happens, God is and therefore I am. If I am wrong, when I draw my last breath I won’t even have the luxury of admitting my “foolishness”. But I am sure that I am not wrong.

Now I don’t base this conviction on such thoughts as regarding life itself as a cruel joke if there is nothing beyond. I’ve made my fair share of ridiculous decisions and wretched actions, but I’ve also experienced great beauty and the marvels of forgiving love from those I’ve hurt and disappointed. There’s beauty in that too, a beauty worth living for. Music, literature, architecture (some of it!), friendship, laughter make life worth living and worth the living. So even if the way we regard life is diminished terribly if we have no belief, it would be still worth it. Even people who experience lives the rest of us might regard as hopeless, dismal and tragic, recognize that living it is somehow important. True some give up, just can’t hang on anymore, and that is a state which should draw from us all our empathy.

So I have no time for sentimental piety which views this life as a vale of tears and the next as glory. There’s truth in both ideas of course. I believe that this life is as much in God’s purpose for us as the next. I like that line in Rite 2′s absolution of sin, which ends “and keep you in eternal life.” I believe strongly that we get it wrong when we draw a great distinction between life now and life then. After Baptism, there’s only one life, my life by the Spirit, through Christ, in the Father.

I’ve never thought that Heaven is a state of being far far away, or espoused Reformation ideas which cut us off from daily intimate relationship with the Church Eternal. This belief isn’t for me solely intellectual. When I pray and particularly at the Eucharist, I experience fellowship. There’s nothing spooky or esoteric about it. I just feel it.

Four years ago I was dying of pleural pneumonia. I began to smell Condor pipe tobacco in my hospital room. Condor isn’t sold in the US and I am not sure it is sold in England anymore. Only two people in my life who were close to me smoked that dark, strong tobacco, bought in a block, cut off and rubbed before inserting in the pipe. One was my maternal Grandfather, Walter Clarkson, a retired coal mine “deputy’ or foreman and the other his brother in law, Harry Graham, also a retired coal miner. They lived in a row of houses on New Street in Worsborough Dale, Yorkshire. They bought the houses in 1912 for five hundred pounds each. Both were gentle men and both loved me dearly. Their wives, sisters, were formidable little women with sharp tongues, best avoided when they were on the rampage. When I smelled that familiar tobacco in my hospital room in West Virginia I knew that these men still loved me although they both died when I was in my twenties. Like a majority of working class north Britons, these men were unchurched, except for baptisms, weddings and funerals, as were their forensically Roman Catholic wives. I know that God has forgiven that omission in their lives. Neither disbelieved. Church was for their “betters.”

Each evening, before going to sleep, I pray for those I have met during the day, and then for my family and relatives by name, my colleagues and friends come next and finally I get to the departed, for whom I pray and whose prayers I ask for. Included are my parents, uncles and aunts, a growing number of cousins, my grandparents, great uncles and aunts, and also some priests and one or two bishops who have helped me along the way. I tell you this not to blow my spiritual trumpet; far from it. But, you see, I’m not suggesting that these people need “saving”, but as they love me, I love them too. True I’ve known a few people, mostly church people but others notable atheists who did not seem to be able to flinch at hurting others. I can’t judge them although I can lament their actions. But the state and quality of their future, even if they elect to live apart from God willfully and cruelly, is God’s business. Love can’t abide unlovingness, that’s what judgement eventually means, but God is that love, that judge. Is there Hell? Here and Jesus taught “there” too. But a faith that delights in that distinction is a depleted one and I think God will eventually give harsh people, particularly harsh Christians, a taste of their own medicine, even if only for a terrible moment at their end/beginning.

Perhaps it is because I am now “old”, but those we number in the Communion of Saints are my companions, and that is not merely those who get in stained glass windows with dinner plates behind their heads, but all the faithful departed, those in whom God has faith, to whom was given faith, who lived faithfully as best they could and who touched others, often unconsciously, with a love beyond themselves and their capabilities. Because this is true for me and I hope for you, this life is worth living because ordinary beauty “in God” takes upon itself a quality which does not depend on our receptive mood, but which illuminates even our “down” periods.

So I face what now begins when the port is inserted in my vein tomorrow knowing that I have the thoughts and prayers of so many of you, for which I am so grateful and humbled, the prayers of the greater Church which surrounds me and as a penitent by grace in communion with God through the coming, passion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus my King.

MY TRANSPLANT

I hope, as energy permits, to blog about my stem cell transplant and its aftermath. I’m sure what I write won’t be as fascinating as church politics but merely writing it all down will help me even if it doesn’t do much for you gentle reader.

There is no cure for my rare form of cancer, but what now begins may give me a few more years before the disease returns. While I have no claim to immortality, at least on this planet, I have a few more things I would like to do before I “chuck in my clogs” as they say where I come from. The doctors seem to think that apart from my frail bones, I am a young 71 year old. Yesterday while at Rush University Hospital in Chicago for Dopler tests on kidneys and available veins to insert the device from which cells will be harvested and drugs inserted, the psychiatrist also informed me that I was “young” for my age. Perhaps she was suggesting that I’ve entered my second childhood.

My good friend Fr. Frank Endres will drive me back to Rush this Thursday. At 6.00am I will have surgery to implant the port catheter and then have an injection  to mobilize stem cells into the blood stream for collection. Then we travel back home. The other drug I will be given seems to be an early riser. On Friday and thereafter until the cell harvesting is complete at 7.00am I will be injected in my abdomen with Neupogen. Both drugs come with the usual list of possible side effects. Reading these lists is probably worse than what will actually transpire.

Next Monday afternoon, August 1,  I check in to the Holiday Inn, West Harrison, Chicago, just over a mile from the hospital. The next morning Harvesting begins. This process may take up to four days, but could be over in a day. Mercifully the insurance company pays for the motel, meals and taxis to and from Rush. Once enough of my stem cells are harvested I return home to rest. The main challenge will be keeping the catheter clean and covered when I shower.

On August 8th I return to Rush to be admitted to the transplant unit, a special area of rooms with their own air circulation and other precautions against infection. Then comes a rather drastic course of chemotherapy which effectively destroys my immune system and any remaining cancer proteins, after which, in a few days, my cleaned up stem cells will be returned to me and we wait for my immune system to begin the process of recovery. I’m told that the worst period is just after the stem cells are returned when the effects of the chemotherapy become most obvious. We shall see. I should be in hospital for three weeks or so and then in quarantine at home until the end of October.

I will keep you all posted. In the meantime, do keep me in your prayers!

SERMON FOR SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermons_that_work_128442_ENG_HTM.htm

PROGRESSIVE?

I must say that the term “progressive” bothers me. I won’t say it annoys me, because I find that when I get annoyed I shortly thereafter find something amusing and there goes my annoyance.

 

I’m bothered by the term on two counts. The first is obvious. It’s employment demonstrates a want of humility or even a sense of self-deprecation. The second is that it makes me “regressive” a term I reject. I dare say that in many areas I am as progressive as the next person. After all I have a Mac, an I Pad -wish I’d waited for the new improved version – and an I Phone. I am against capital punishment, am sensibly Green and if I had a vote would cast it to re-elect Mr Obama.

 

But when it comes to church matters, a subject which takes much of my time and energy, I am deemed regressive. For instance I don’t enjoy or find particularly effective new liturgies and rumperty tumperty religious songs. I do think that if the organized church survives, some bright things in the future will push the altar back against the wall and sing Healey Willan at Mass. But when it comes to “church growth and development” I am more than progressive. I’m positively Wesleyan. Wesley was driven from what he called his “commodious pulpit” by the authorities. Instead he organized house churches and group meetings, at first made up of church people and later of their converts. He bade them, in the end unsuccessfully, to go to the parish church to make their communions, but placed his revival squarely among the unchurched people he so loved.

 

If I had my way, I’d provide one church building in driving distance of most people, close and sell off the rest and use the retained buildings for eucharistic worship and get togethers while centering evangelistic and spiritual growth meetings in the homes of the faithful and from there among their converts. How is that for progressive? Even more I’d invite other denominations to share in the creation of these groups. They could go their separate way for the sacraments until they finally realized just how daft our divisions really are.

 

What about feeding the hungry? By including the hungry in our evangelism many would be fed, found jobs, given medical treatment simply because including them would drive Christians to be about their duty to God’s poor. “They held all things in common.”  Holding what we have in common doesn’t mean we stop having possessions. No one is going to fire us for being a Christian yet. But living in shared communion highlights our selfishness and spurs us to loving action.

 

What about sex?  We might well shift our attention from copulation to cooperation. No I don’t think two people of the same-sex may be married with the church’s formal blessing. Nor do i think we should compartmentalize people who have made life long commitments, or label them, let alone drive them away. If sin they do, their sins are pale in comparison with the disruptive people in church, the unforgiving, vicious gossips,  the passively aggressive, all of whom we now include, absolve and bless Sunday by Sunday at worship and tolerate at vestry meetings and coffee hour.  In fidelity many may teach heterosexual people a thing or two, surviving as many do in a culture of prejudice and suspicion. No doubt I have blessed many same-sex couples and their homes as a matter of routine. That my intention was not to marry them or use a form which looks in any manner like a marriage service does not lessen the blessing. For in many ways all blessings are anticipatory. They are not magic. A blessing requires a response, the proverbial proof of the pudding.

 

I am utterly convinced that our neglect of costly evangelism, something which thrusts us out of the safety of buildings and our fixation on sexual acts demonstrate just how regressive we have become as Episcopalians. But I do believe that the time is coming when, through sheer desperation, we may shed our traditions if only to survive. Hooray for progression.