Pass it On
The picture accompanying this blog is a complex one, and I want to note its various strands.. It was taken at RADVO, the discernment conference held once more at Incarnation, Dallas. I have used a crozier on loan to me from Wycliffe College, where I was for many years the principal. It did not belong to me, but needed, when the time for retirement had come, to be handed on to the newest Wycliffe-related bishop. And so I am handing it to Ann Martha, an Inuk suffragan in the Arctic. Taking part is the new principal of the College, Kristen Johnson, whose installation I took part in just after the conclusion of the conference. But there was a particular appropriateness to giving the staff to Ann Martha, since the first bishop of the Arctic was a Wycliffe graduate, Archibald Fleming, who as a missionary envisioned just such a moment (the other woman in the picture is Annie Nepartuk, a student in my time and the first woman Inuk bishop)
Well you can see all the ‘handing on’, the ‘traditioning’, (since that it what the word literally means in Greek), going on. Now handing on is not just what institution do in times of transition, or just what human beings do when they get old, though it is these things too. It also had a deep meaning particularly for Christians. The word ‘handing on’ is the same word in Greek used for the ‘handing over’ of Jesus to His saving death. Every handing on is a grateful act of memory of that act, its wellspring. Tradition also implies the need for groups to change, here across generations, even as they remain the same in their identity, in who they are. The same through change- a mystery and a challenge. Again Jesus si the wellspring-He is the perpetually ‘new thing’ God is do, as we are told by in the prophet Isaiah.Now the being handed to in the Church implies that we will in good time hand on, for we do not own, but have the Gospel entrusted into our hands. This reminds us of the nature, as well as the failings of the Church, since we often grip the loan tightly as a possession. Here is the heart of the challenge of ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Church. Handing on also expressly succinctly the nature of mission, the handing of the Gospel the same in every place, and among every people, though it must gain expression uniquely in the new culture (think for example of the myriad words the Inuit have for ‘snow’, of which the Texan knows virtually nothing!). Finally we may note with thanksgiving a first female principal in a picture with the trailblazing female Arctic bishops: the Church changes so as to convey effectively the same Gospel in a new day. Finally this picture assumes a theological college, a seminary, one in various ways by all in the snapshot. Institutions such as a college are the means (though sometimes the impediment) to traditioning. They are essential to the life of the Church, for they hand on the formation to a new generation needed leaders to hand on the faith in their many locales, so that we can ‘tradition’ the saving ‘handing over’ of our Lord, each of us, where He has placed us, on loan, to live and work. Amen.
