Showing items filed under “The Rt. Rev. George Sumner”

Pre-game Analysis for the Primates' Bowl

Dear Brothers and Sisters, greetings in Christ.
 
This is an important week in the life of the Anglican Communion, the meeting of the primates of all the member churches to address our frayed relations. I am sure there will be more to say once we know the outcome, which at present is very murky.  There has been a great deal of speculation: will It be the beginning of a demotion of the status of TEC? Or conversely the renegotiating of the communion into more of a federation? What role will Canterbury choose to play in it all?
 
At this moment I want to assume more the role of one of those commentators before the big game - they suggest something to keep your eye on, the pass rush of one team or the running game of the other.
 
Here is an important question we might ask ourselves: what exactly do we mean by 'communion'? We might speak of 'impaired communion' or 'sharing communion.'  About what exactly are we speaking and about whom are we speaking? Somewhere along the way these will be important questions, and they have a bearing on ecclesiology itself, on what we imagine the Church to be.
 
While 'communion' might refer to various things, here at least are three.  First there is the relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. This was key in the historical development of the sister national and regional churches we now find. It was the ABC after all who first gathered all the bishops of the Anglican world to Lambeth in the face of controversy in 1867.  (It is worth noting that this relation has constitutional weight in our church).  Secondly there are the means of taking council together as a communion which have grown up over the years. These 'instruments of unity' comprise different means by which they can consider discipline and participation.  Who can go to the Conference or to the Anglican Consultative Council are questions which have been debated over the past decade.  Thirdly, there is the question, more literally of who may have communion among whom.  Now we as a church take an easier approach to who may take communion than who may preside at communion- we give Methodists communion but don't let their ministers celebrate. So this sense of 'communion' involves more local, case-by-case judgments. For example the church in the South Sudan recently stated that it considered itself out of communion with TEC, but still in communion with a diocese like Dallas.
    
My point is simply this: since 'communion' means several things, it might be that there could be multiple effects of the present deliberations. One could, for example, be at once 'in communion' with Canterbury, separated from the councils of the church, and yet locally still 'in communion' with a variegated group of churches of various stripes. What boxing calls a 'split decision' is quite possible. We shall have to wait and see.
    
All of this is a working out of what the late bishop Stephen Sykes called 'dispersed authority.' Whom we answer to and how is varied. This is at once our strength and our weakness. Authority is also, by no accident, the Achilles heel of postmodern Western culture.
      
In the midst of it all it is good to remember that in normative, 'mere' Christianity, authority is ultimately lodged with Jesus Christ himself, witnessed to by the canonical Scriptures and read in keeping with the creeds. Ecclesial struggles matter. But on this rock even frayed communion can be rewoven.
 
Peace
 
+GRS
Posted by The Rt. Rev. George Sumner with

Le Anglicane Gentilhomme

A short, incisive, eminently helpful book for the preacher is Raymond Brown’s An Adult Christ for Christmas.   In it he hones in on points in the familiar stories we might well have otherwise missed. For example, Brown focuses on the fact that the magi, traditional healers or holy men, manage by their traditional divining to get themselves in the vicinity of the Holy One, but can’t find the spot that requires knowledge of the law and the prophets of Israel. In other words, there is a kind of natural theology-in-miniature at work here: the kind of knowledge planted in the human heart, albeit distorted, is not nothing, but it cannot reach the saving place either. And of course we must also reckon on the violent madness of the king’s heart as well. Of both we who are Gentiles, are capable, prior to saving grace.

Epiphany is the time to think about the Gentiles, who we ourselves, for the most part, are.   We receive from our culture the affirmation of cultural diversity, which is itself a thread in Scripture - in our case mediated by the romantic tradition in modern thought. The nations of the earth, after all, exist prior to Babel, though that disaster adds the blight of misapprehension one to another, which only begins to be healed at Pentecost. Finally, at the close of Revelation, we read that the nations and their kings process into the new Jerusalem in splendor. But prior to this, the nations rage (Psalm 2) and demand of the imprisoned people of God an alien’s song (Psalm 137). As Gentiles in Christ we need think about this status as a significant factor in our mission and spiritual life.

It is at this point let me wade-in for the New Year where angels fear to tread. The global nature of our Anglican faith is in many respects the product of accidental factors: colonialism and globalism of an earlier age, the courage of missionary orders, the interaction of Gospel and local cultures and the resilience of the Prayer Book. At the same time these accidents cannot help but appear providential to us. What a gift to us, that we find ourselves part of a fragile, tensive, yet enduring communion of our fellow Anglicans throughout the world, in the Arctic, Melanesia, the new Churches of southeast Asia, the vast numbers in Nigeria, post-apartheid South Africa, the bravery of fellow believers in Pakistan, and on and on. Of course all this has come to be embroiled in the cultural debates of our time. But deeper than all of that is the significance of the nations to the catholicity of the Church, the very intimation of the nations entering in splendor. And there is no way to skirt the importance in our understanding of Church to real accountability one to another, to the hard but essential calling to sit in council together.

As you know, soon the primates of our communion (including our own Presiding Bishop we pray) will be called together by the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose see is the symbol of our ancient roots and our unity. It is my prayer that this occasion will mark the restoration of a more robust ‘walking together,’ as the Windsor report and the resulting covenant process spoke of. We are not, Epiphany reminds us, islands to ourselves, and this pertains not only when there is an easy peace, but when there is hard disagreement. Gathering in such time, as family beholden in a costly way to one another, prefigures the coming gathering of us Gentiles around the throne of the wounded Lamb. Please pray for that gathering, and give thanks that we of the nations, once far off, are now brought near in Christ (Ephesians 2:12).

Posted by The Rt. Rev. George Sumner with

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Complete the Race (II Timothy 4:17)

At the end of our vacation we find ourselves in Chicago for its Marathon weekend (the fastest, I have read this morning, perhaps because it is cool and relatively level). Marathons offer many good things. You can see world-class athletes from places like Ethiopia and Kenya. There is a feel of fiesta with signs by family members, getups by some for-fun runners, and food for sale.

But as I looked out my hotel window at 7:30 a.m., I watched the race of competitors who have lost legs or their use. Wheeling vehicles by arm for 26 miles means serious fitness and determination.

Those competitors were to me, this morning, a symbol of the Church too. For each is wounded. The larger family cheers them on. Each by grace has risen up to run the race. Ahead is the goal, the prize, the welcome home. We find the companionship of Jesus the Lord, there, and along the route too.

Amen.

GRS

 

   

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