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

In Honor of an Illustrious Anglican Forebear

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Since most of my ancestors were stern Yankee cow farmers, I lay claim to a Sumner more distant on the family tree. Mary Sumner was the wife of the Bishop of Winchester and sister-in-law of an Archbishop of Canterbury. But that is not what I want to highlight. First of all, she was a lay woman of deep faith, a kind of matron saint of clergy spouses. She had a strong sense of her own distinctive vocation.

Secondly, like so many in the 19th century she founded a voluntary Christian society. The Victorians were joiners, and ministered together in groups which augmented official structures. In her case she mobilized mothers (and eventually all women) to serve in the Mothers’ Union. She could not have foreseen that it would come to be called the ‘fifth instrument’ of global Anglicanism.

Third, she was well ahead of her time. She had a burden for young women trafficked in Dickensian London, and made ministry on their behalf a centerpiece of the MU in her time. Her public speaking on their behalf unsettled the powers that be.

Mary doesn’t have a day in the Sanctoral. So much the better. She was folk like you or me, and we can mean to be such a saint too. +GRS

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Tale of Two Cities

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I recently read the title of a new book by Professor Alan Jacobs of Baylor, ‘the democracy of the dead,’ by which  G.K. Chesterton meant tradition as a conversation with the great Christian voices of the past.  It is a fitting description for an upcoming conference, sponsored by The Living Church, and sponsored by St. George’s, Nashville, which focuses on the understandings of Church and society of Augustine of Hippo and Benedict of Nursia. The first is the most influential theologian for most of our Anglican history, though he led and wrote in North Africa in the 5th Century while the second is the grandfather of the monastic movement, an abbot in Italy in the 6th Century. One thing they share is facing the challenge of the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the great forgetfulness of the Christian way which resulted, as well as social disruption.  Many in our time see around us an analogy to this era.

    Both writers believe that the Gospel requires a distance between Church and State.  For Augustine this meant his theology of the ‘two cities,’ the city of this world mixed into the city of God headed toward the Kingdom, like the wheat and chaff of Jesus’ parable.  They can be distinguished in theology, but not effectively separated in this ‘in-between’ age.  Benedict offered a different solution, namely communities of believers separated from the world.  Now Augustine and Benedict both thought that the Church had a mission to the world around them, to preach, to influence culture, to borrow what could be useful (what Augustine called ‘despoiling the Egyptians’).  But how in each case this mission was to be fulfilled differed, in one case a discipline of theology and leadership amidst the world, and in the other communities separate so as to be ‘cities on a hill.’ 

   If we assume that the culture of our time drifts unmoored away from Christian assumptions, how might we imagine the future of the Church? It is a debate, once again, between Augustine and Benedict.  It is then an either/or? And to what extent is our own Episcopal tradition competent for either? What might make us more so? This much we can agree on: these two figures represent what Barbara Tuchman called ‘distant mirrors’ for our own, otherwise unique, time.

+GRS

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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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