Bishops' Blog

Semi-Random Neural Firings About the State of the Church After the House of Bishops

1: A group called “Reveal” studies the spiritual vitality of congregations of various denominations, including our own.  The results were sobering, but the key point, and the more hopeful one, is that renewal of congregations may be correlated with the following:  beginning with salvation by grace, embedding scripture in parish life, encouraging small groups, and having a personal relationship with God. I am encouraged by an emerging desire to figure out what renewal looks like, and to consider these factors. But we do well to note:

• These factors summarize well the inheritance of Reformation themes in conjunction with the Wesleyan stream…
• We should recall that these themes are found in the Prayer Book, and our tradition has its own evangelical stream, in spite of the distortions with respect to that term.
• These elements are related one to another: a personal God actually speaks to us (Bible) and takes the initiative (grace) so as in the Holy Spirit to transform us individually and together (small groups, as congregations).
• Perhaps due to resistance to our Baptist neighbors, some resist the phrase “salvation by grace.” But what if you were to turn this around and say, “then are you happy with depending on your own efforts spiritually?” Some would prefer a phrase like “radical welcome” - but grace is the radical welcome to us by God, Who takes the initiative like the Father running toward his prodigal son!
• We as a denomination need more-than-ever our evangelical types (and for other reasons, traditional Anglo-Catholics)!

2: I want to reiterate a sense I have had throughout my ministry: that we need to reclaim the traditional language of faith, to dig deeper into rich veins of gold in the scriptures.  Maturity as leaving the old language behind was a modernist fallacy.  Hearing anew and with power, rediscovery, “back to the fount,” these express our calling better. An example of this anxiety is found in some contemporary liturgies (one from ‘Enriching our Worship’) is the exclusion of the word “Lord” as overly patriarchal or domineering.  But in fact, references to “Lord” are asserting that God, and not human powers or personalities, rules (a point the Presiding Bishop made in his opening sermon of the House of Bishops).  A second, is the version of the sentence from the Psalms in the Sanctus, which, revised, reads “blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  This also needs reclaiming and rehearing, since historically this referred to Jesus! 

3: One thing we need to recall is that we are a branch of a rich history of Anglicanism. We recall that we are a Church which was made up, in the time of my own memory, of Anglo-Catholics, evangelicals, charismatics, and “broad church,” in various configurations. I see this variety more in parishes themselves than in the Church’s self-explanation in recent times. In my days as a younger priest, a prevalent account of ourselves was from the 19^th century British theologian F.D. Maurice. He imagined that Anglicanism required the interaction of these groups, like flint on flint. This is what we might call a generously liberal view, but it would seem that sometimes our Church has in mind a more constricted account of “liberalism.”  At the very least, what if the Church reclaimed this sense of our need for one another? 

4: An earlier blog worried over a recent definition of evangelism, though it may be accurate of how many think about these things in the Church. More to the point is the following definition of William Temple’s which has already been approved by our General Convention: “To evangelize is to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of the church.”

Likewise, what evangelism requires is fairly clear:

a) in content the whole counsel of God,

b) making a weighty claim on people’s lives

c) shared by Christians day-to-day and face-to-face, and

d) calling them into a Church that is worshipping, serving

5: An underlying theological issue is the relationship between Christ and Church. The 19^th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher said that Protestants get to the Church through Christ, and Catholics get to Christ through the Church; it may be too simple but does tell us something. We as a properly catholic and reformed tradition have to wrestle with this question. I find the image Paul offers in II Corinthians, that the Church is the treasure in the breakable clay pot, the two being inseparable by God’s mysterious will. The Church is not the treasure, but the location where it is invariably found.

6: Uncertainty about the future is good insofar as it makes us depend more radically on the grace of God. In the nearer term I am optimistic about the preservation of our Prayer Book.  I believe this is key for our Church, for it must be mined so as to reclaim, and be renewed by the Holy Spirit.  No less a source than Bishop Griswold recently called for this. Likewise, my sense is that younger clergy, liberal and traditional, have equally no taste for a new BCP - as with many things, it’s the boomers who have an issue. We need patience, with longer and deeper attention paid to our own way of praying and hearing God’s Word than is currently held by a wide spectrum of Episcopalians today.  Ojala que sea en la providencia Dei!

Peace,

+GRS

Getting Old, Old, Getting Old

So begins the Paul Simon song which my cheeky, young adult children gave to me upon turning 60 a few years ago.  And if I didn’t have them to remind me, so many other things would such as the  losing hearing in my right ear, cataracts looming, memory down a notch, blood pressure up. Need I go on or do you have the picture?  In small but insistent ways we who are getting old experience dispossession, even as we hope that a touch of wisdom, on our better days, will fill in the gaps.  And of course coming in behind these opening bouts is the main event, the grim reaper, the marque character of all Lenten reflection.  So it is dispossession as a theme that I want you to think about with me. Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t it echo in so many areas of our life, individual, corporate, material, spiritual?  In our culture, the pace of change is breakneck, unprecedented in human history. Our perception of time is manic. We hear how technology promises to change the most basic of terms and conditions of human life, supposedly to our benefit, though we do well to wonder.  In our economy the sense of having our place removed and taken off-shore unsettles many, whether the feeling is accurate or not is beside the point, and this sense of dispossession has taken us bad places socially.  And lastly, let me add to my curmudgeon-list the changes in our church, leaving aside the most controversial ones, the forgetfulness about so much in church life, the ease with which we think of changing things basic, a thinning of our ranks, the strains shown in the structures literal and metaphoric.  Dispossession seems the theme of the day, which is odd given how remarkably blessed we actually are - imagine how so much of the rest of the world must feel!

Now this sense was of course a thing hardly unknown to the early Christians, and much of contemporary Christian reflection tries to navigate off this fact, to make a compact with it one way or another. Maybe being dispossessed can be flipped and become our entrée into spiritual insight.  Paul in the second epistle to the church in Corinth goes on about all the ways they have been abused and rejected, and how they remain undeterred, how the followers of the crucified ought not to be surprised nor complaining.  Our dispossession does not rise usually to this level, but we are trying to rediscover what life lived more in the provinces of loss might be like. Could it offer empathy with those who suffer routinely?  Could it make us humble? Like most spiritual lessons, we suspect it is good for us, but so is root canal.

But the Gospel tells us that in Jesus, God has entered what is already his world in the form, says Philippians 2, of disposession. This has made possible equally topsy turvy descriptions of our own situation. The outer man wasting away but the inner man renewed.  Our mere groaning the form of the triune God giving utterance within us. Painfully unclothed in death do as to await being reclothed. the struggles of the martyr church actually the triumphal procession behind king Jesus.

One such rearticulation is found in the third chapter of Paul's second letter to the Church in Corinth. In the wake of the resurrection, in the dawn of the new world, we are co-heirs with Christ. if you are promised eternity, then everything is yours. What could you lack? but....but....you inherit all this becuase your life is hid in Jesus' life. you are an inheritor because you count everything loss in comparison with the joy of knowing your Lord. you possess all so long as you empty your hands and lift them eucharistically to the Lord. as soon as possession is abandoned, all is yours. And all this is true, possible, necessary, because Jesus did just this, only perfectly, now eternally, surrendering all including himself to his Abba, and in so doing revealing to us the dizzying depths of the triune love.

All of this stands in the starkest contrast, in paradox, to whatever form of dispossession you happen to find yourself living in. Feeling the dispossession as you hear God's word reminds you who you really are, nevertheless, is the shape of our Christian discipleship which is being toward death and marching toward the celestial Zion all at once.  

Now the immediate implication of all this is that we are always hearing good news as we inhabit a sober season. Today is but a particular instance of this. And Lent serves the purpose of reminding us that the good news is not our possession, nor does it reside naturally within us.  Nor are we merely a victim of the sobering features of our time but contributors thereto.  Lent reminds us that i have actively contributed to my dispossession and do not merit the possession of all things. Lent asks,  "and can it be that I should boast an interest in the savior's dispossessing and repossessing blood?"

When I was a rector one of our acolytes was an eight-year-old girl named, Shannon, whom I asked what she was giving up for Lent, and Shannon, who resembled Pippy Longstockings, replied promptly, ‘combing my hair.’ I tried to explain that she hadn’t really gotten the hang of Lent yet, but she would hear none of it.  Well, I am not sure many of us, in this culture of ours, are significantly better off on this score than Shannon.  Lent is not really about giving up fish, or going on a diet, or not swearing, or even saying morning prayer every day, though each is a good thing to do.  It is about contrition, which means being sorry for our sins, which assumes we think we are sinners. And it is about asceticism, which means spiritual discipline. And this in turn means turning toward God with the last things in our mind, among them death which we as a culture are resolved to obscure. 

In other words, certainly in the larger culture, and to some extent in the Church too, the underpinnings of Lent being coherent can no longer be assumed.  What then are we to do? One answer is to recast it, hear about it anew, in light of a Biblical theme, so that we can approach it more readily.  And on such theme is that of being dispossessed, in the end ultimately dispossessed, in the midst of  which we are repossessed.  The struggle to take and keep things in ourselves is a loss, only to discover that life is really being possessed by God, so that not a few things grasped are ours, but everything, only in Christ, who doesn’t possess what we give of ourselves, but all of us, one way or another, already.  To lose everything, and receive it all back, only on condition that we lose even ourselves to Christ, whose we were already, that is what Lent is really about. And as such it is as much mystical as contrite, with joy overtaking regret by a power not our own.

We had a tradition at the seminary where I used to work, around Rose Sunday, the third one of Lent, to sing the French folk tune with the words (145) ‘so quit your care and anxious fears and worries, for schemes are vain, and fretting brings no gain, Lent calls to prayer to trust and dedication…’  This is not just Lent gone soft, but another way at the heart of the matter, maybe one that our anxious age can hear.  We who are dispossessed must let go, which seems to the anxious like yet more loss, but is in fact the opposite, when it is as the human says, ‘reply reply reply with love to love most high.’  Let the fish, or the diet, or a more prudent vocabulary, or the 15 minutes surrendered, be just this, a quasi sacrament of being repossessed, surprisingly, a new insight into loss, which is in fact a reply of love to love most high. Amen.