Bishops' Blog

Greetings From the Mountain

“Stir up your power O Lord, and with great might come among us:”

It’s hard to believe that the Third Sunday of Advent is upon us and Christmas is just around the corner. In years long since past the Third Sunday of Advent was referred to as “Stir up Sunday” as referenced in the Collect for the Day. The thinking behind this “Stir-up Sunday” was to give encouragement to those who where keeping a holy Advent and remind them of the destination.

The season has become so commercially driven that we are hard pressed on many levels to engage spiritually in our preparation. We become encumbered in our journey by the demands of the world; this pageant here, this office party here, this event here the list goes on and on. Is it no wonder we are both physically and emotionally tired by the time Christmas Day does arrive? The readings of the Advent Season are readings to get us back on the right track; to give us hope and to let us know that God will do a great thing and we need only to be patient and wait upon the Lord’s pleasure.

Yeah! Right! How can we even think that given the reading from the Gospel of St. Matthew where John the Baptist is uncertain about who Jesus is? Is Jesus really the Coming One? That is a question that is put to us each and every day. Compared with human hope, is what the gospel brought to the world really the fulfillment of our hopes? This may seem a bit offensive to some and it is not intended to be, but there is no proof that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the Coming One. All we have to go on is His activity-the blind see, the lame walk, the dumb speak, etc., but above all, the poor have the good news preached to them. For there, in the preaching of the gospel, is the real miracle. For where it is preached, lives are transformed. But that calls for a decision: Either Jesus is the Coming One or he is not.

There in lies the challenge for us. Do we believe that Jesus is who He says He is? Do we believe in his words and His works? Our answer to this question will have eternal significance.

Reading from Isaiah assures those who do believe, who have fought the good fight,  “A highway will be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; and the unclean will not be on it but shall be for God’s people: no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray” (Isaiah 35) This will be the reward. Joy and gladness will be ours. We will be on the “Holy Way”. 

But a few days remain in our journey. We must, as James reminds us have patience. Let us ponder our redemption, our ransomed lives knowing that we cannot redeem or ransom our own lives, but that God alone can and has in and through His son, Jesus Christ. Through God and only God can we become redeemed of God, and that transforms our lives in every way possible.

Have a blessed Advent and a transforming Christmastide. May God bless and keep you. 

Bp. Paul

Two Cheers for the Reformation!

On a recent Sunday, we Celebrated the Feast of Christ the King.  But for many of our Christian neighbors it is known as ‘Reformation Sunday.’  What would such a designation mean to us, and to what extent would it be of value to us?  I am referring to more than simply liturgical style, since some of our readers pray in a way that seems to compel the question, while others do not.  For what it is worth, throughout much of Anglican history, our Church as a child of the Reformation was self-evident, but it is not so today.  Can we in our week-to-week Christian lives reclaim this legacy?  I want to offer two ways we can, and one aspect which makes this more problematic.

It is surprising for us to hear what worship was like in Europe just before the Reformation in the 16^th  Century. The altars were hidden behind rood screens, the words of institution inaudible to most believers, the priests considered a breed apart (though people were aware, not least for satirists, that they didn’t deserve this!)  Worship accessible to all, the Scripture comprehensible in language:  all Churches nowadays, including the Romans, are children of the Reformation. Likewise the idea that we all have vocations, in church and the world, lay or ordained, derived too from the Reformation, is common currency.  An important aspect of our Book of Common Prayer is making the offices, Morning and Evening Prayer, available to all and not just to monks or priests.

I would call the second hurrah ‘seeing the forest for the trees.’  Luther and those who came after in the 16^th  Century believe that the Church had always to grasp the nettle, to put the first thing first once again, to recall what Jesus called ‘the one thing needful.’ They were not the first to do this; such is a feature of all movements of renewal, including those before the 16^th Century. The action of God ‘while we were yet sinners,’  called ‘grace’, which is alone sufficient to save us, is given the central place.  The Scriptures make this plain to anyone willing to listen, i.e. they are with respect to what matters most ‘clear.’  And the Church can have a good deal of latitude in ordering its life so long as it doesn’t lose sight of these (though it is always on the brink of doing just this).  This need to go ‘back to the source,’ to hear again the one thing needful is today shared by all Christians, however different their sense may be of how exactly to do the reclaiming.

 In these ways we should all rightly be sons and daughters of the Reformation. But in another we need to struggle against its legacy. We are too prone to settle into our own denominational ghetto, too prone to accept these differences as if they were competing franchises. We as Anglicans in particular, heedful of our divided history, have at our best made the search for the restoration to unity central to our identity.  In this way too, Reformation is our common legacy, but in this case as something to overcome (which incidentally the Reformers themselves realized).  May we bear all three features in this season.

Peace,

+GRS